25 biggest pro wrestling ‘what ifs’ of the past 25 years

12. What if Scott Hall and Kevin Nash don’t leave WWE for WCW

This is a big one right here because the game changed when Scott Hall and Kevin Nash defected from WWE to WCW. Wrestling fans all over the world, including myself, like to discuss exactly when the Attitude Era started in WWE but without Hall and Nash jumping ship, the Attitude Era doesn’t really exist the way we know it today.

After finding success in WWE, Hall and Nash made the decision to take a ton of guaranteed money to work less dates in WCW and who can blame them? Pro wrestling is a tough gig. These guys are on the road 250 to 300 nights a year and back then, unless you were a big name, there wasn’t a guarantee that you were going to make a ton of money. The guaranteed money to Hall and Nash changed a lot of that.

Money aside, watching Hall and Nash come into WCW was awesome. Seeing Hall in the crowd at Monday Nitro was a shock and that first in-ring promo with the “you know who I am but you don’t know why I’m here” line was fantastic. I wasn’t privy to the info from The Curtain Call back then so the whole thing floored me. So when Kevin Nash showed up a short time later, the shock level went through the roof. Dubbed The Outsiders coming in from WWE to take over WCW (which also involved a lawsuit from WWE), Hall and Nash began an invasion storyline that eventually led to Hulk Hogan joining them to form the nWo, which began one of the biggest stories in wrestling history.

But what if Hall and Nash had never left WWE? Well, the outcome could have been catastrophic to the industry. The Monday Night War officially began when Eric Bischoff brought Nitro to Monday nights to take on RAW but things really began with this. The nWo became the coolest thing in wrestling and WCW became the coolest wrestling company in the world, beating WWE in the ratings for nearly two years. This was more of real life and not some of the cartoonish characters that WWE was doing at the time (okay, go ahead and get your Glacier jokes out of the way).

Had Hall and Nash stayed in WWE, Hulk Hogan probably never turns heel and if he does, it doesn’t have nearly the impact it did with the nWo. While WCW may have been able to survive for a while, it would never gotten as big as it did. As far as WWE is concerned, they had to step up their game to combat what WCW was doing and that’s how we got the Attitude Era. Without their departure, Vince likely would have just continued to do what he was doing and things would have been okay but the wrestling industry certainly wouldn’t have gotten as big as it did and wouldn’t be what it is today. The Curtain Call would have never happened if they stayed, meaning Triple H still wins that King of the Ring and the scenario I described on the previous page plays out. This was a game changer.