Did The Undertaker almost jump top WCW during the Attitude Era?
By Jack Crosby
According to Kevin Nash, there was indeed a chance at one time that The Undertaker could have been another guy to make the jump to WCW
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Aside from his amazing longevity in the professional wrestling business, one of the topics that people discuss the most when they talk about The Undertaker is how he never made the jump from WWE to WCW in the mid-1990s when seemingly everyone was bolting for Atlanta, leaving Vince McMahon in the process. Actually, there has never really been a rumor that Undertaker even thought about leaving the man that has been his boss since 1990.
Well, until now.
Three of the men that did leave Vince to help make WCW so popular during that time, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Sean Waltman, recently sat down with Sports Illustrated to talk a myriad of topics, and that is where Nash dropped the bomb that the jump almost did happen.
According to Nash, Taker had at least discussed a WCW jump with him, and he even explained that had it happened, we would have seen the “American Badass” biker character sooner than we did.
"“We had ‘Taker close. All of a sudden he wasn’t the Deadman. He became the American Badass for a reason. That Deadman wasn’t going to f*ckin’ come to WCW. He would have been the biker character and gone by Mark Calaway.All along, I was trying to get guys money, I was trying to get guys paid. And what happened was Vince started giving huge guarantees to the Shawns and Undertakers and those guys and said, ‘I can’t lose my core guys.’”"
Now is it a possibility that this was indeed the case during the time that WWE was nearly bankrupt? Of course it is. However, you also have to take into account the validity of the three guys that sat down to talk about their experiences.
At the same time, though, every wrestling fan at one point or another has wondered what things would have been like if The Undertaker did make the jump. While he was never on the level of a Hulk Hogan and Steve Austin in terms of popularity, during the time that WCW was ruling the wrestling world, The Undertaker put the company on his back whenever he needed to to help keep them afloat. That is one of the reasons that Vince McMahon is dangerously loyal to that man to this day.
I guess we’ll never know whether or not it could have happened, but it’s interesting to ponder.
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