When was the last time anyone cared about a title?
 

Gertner made a great point about how nobody has given a shit about the NWA title for 30 years.

I know people cared about the WCW and WWF titles during the 90s, but they're meaningless now. When did this happen?

The last thing I remember caring about was Undertaker's Streak, Daniel Bryan's underdog run, and The Miz. All of which were relatively recent phenoms.

When did the audience stop giving a shit about titles? Or am I wrong?

It's because of the Monday Night War. Before that you'd have to pay to see the NWA/WCW or WWF Championship defended. When WCW and WWF started running Saturday Night's Main Event and Clash of the Champions we started to get major matches for free, but still there was something special about it. You usually didn't get a huge blowoff, that was still reserved for PPV (ideally anyway). When the Monday Night War happened they used the titles as pawns to steal viewers from the other show. WCW was severely guilty of this. WCW lost the art of selling PPV and was soley focused on stealing Raw's viewers. How many meaningless WCW World Heavyweight Championship matches happened on Nitro, and how many title changes? The hot potato booking of the WCW Championship rubbed off on WWE when they started to lose ratings after the WCW Invasion went poorly. The brand split further diluted what was the "real" champion to the point that 15 years later we really don't care about THE BELT. We care about our "guy" having a good run that might give us nostalgia for the Hogan or Flair years.

As for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, it was lost in the shuffle once WCW and WWF were the obvious main promotions in the US. It's true prestige died the day Shane Douglas threw it to the mat and rejected the NWA. I don't blame him, it was a great moment and it built ECW as something important. TNA attempted to maintain the imaginary prestige of the 10lbs of Gold by pretending that guys like Mike Rapada didn't have a run. The TNA years while better than the post WCW years, still mean't nothing, TNA was a crap promotion then and hot potatoed the belt to oblivikree.

I feel that the WWE Championship and the NWA World Heavyweight Championship are worth saving, and I do believe that can actually happen. You could argue that the WWE have done a decent job with building the importance of their main championships, but I don't feel they are at a point where a title match means "interest".

To me the brand split was wretched for the prestige of the WWE Championship. I was game for the Undisputed Champion running both shows, I still wish that was the direction.

I cared about the interstate title in CHW. That was good stuff

If you are a fan I guess you care. I've never looked at it that way though. I look at the history a title has and that how I judge them. The NWA Worlds Heaveyweight Championship is one of top titles in all of wrestling. I care more about it than I do the WWE Universal Championship anyway.

NWA title was good back in the day. Now its a joke.

Probably the late 90's when the title went from being the focal point of the show to just a piece of a storyline

The NWA being a giant mess for years didn't help

I will say that the current champ is probably the biggest actual star to hold it since either Jarrett or Severn (who was, IMO, the last truly great NWA Champion).

Is Cody the guy to bring prestige back to a title that hasn't really mattered since TNA?

I honestly like the idea of the NWA champ being billed as a big deal and having long reigns with matches all over the country.

Cody's as good of a guy as any to do it. He's not amazing as a performer but you've gotta give credit to the guy for what he's done in spite of that fact.

To answer the original question, I think title prestige officially died with the idea of multiple "world" champions within a single company. Which is just fucking stupid. It was on life support before that but that killed it.

There are people who like to preach the Russo-sque "Who cares about a fake title? It's just a prop. As long as stories are being told, fuck the title." idea. The problem with that thought process is, you can always still tell stories without shitting on the title. But once you shit on the title, you can't go back and use it as a valuable prop within a story. For decades, wrestling always had at their disposal the simple story of a man challenging for a title and a bunch of other men fighting to work their way up to eventually challenge for a title. Then they fucked that up and now it's like "Okay. So that doesn't work anymore. What else you got?" And for the past 20 years or so, it's gotten more and more obvious that the answer is "Not much..."

Personally, I care about all the titles on Smackdown right now, except for maybe the US Title.

They could have done something with Colt Cabana, but some of the promoters back then didn't want a comedy guy as their champion.....because you know it's 1970 to those hicks.

Lol, they "didn't want a comedy guy", as opposed to the guy with the Adam West-era Riddler mannerisms who does schtick with a bear mascot I guess.

https://78.media.tumblr.com/5f7e8c48...ad0lo2_400.gif

http://slam.canoe.com/Slam/Wrestling...4/DSC_0581.jpg

:lol:

Off the top of my head, Mania 30 and Bryan's title victory was probably the last time I personally cared about a title in the WWE not counting NXT.

In general, WWE's first brand split era did a lot of damage to the prestige of the belts. Between WWE's terrible booking and bloated roster, they made it a lot harder to actual care about the belts having any special feel to them.

NJPW does a really good job making their top belts feel very special but their lower tier belts are mostly worthless in terms of importance. ROH and TNA/Impact have been hit-or-miss with their belts prestige.

I never understood how anyone thought double-belts was a good idea.

When the business lost kayfabe belts stopped mattering. It's more about getting a turn than using them as tools to wring drama and tension out of situations.

The thing is, if you're still going to have matches, it only makes sense for the title to mean something to your character.

If we stop caring about the title, why even have matches? Why not go the whole nine yards and replace matches with action vignettes or just create some elaborate live show with explosions and shitty acting?

I want a realistic, down to Earth show that's completely off the wall and crawling with magic robots.

You want Kevin Nash then

Anyone who says they don't want Kevin Nash is a lying liar and their mother is a whore.

Guys.....less than two months till Nashvember!

I celebrate Nashvember year 'round.

That's exactly it. If your belts don't matter, what is the point of any of it?

It is a good idea *if* the company holds to the original intent. They never do.

The point of having two rosters was running each show as a separate entity. It would make more sense if the idea of WWE/wCw was both executed better and not been a victim of Vince's ego. But we now have one company with two divisions (not counting 205 for this) instead of "two companies".

Repeatedly splitting, combining, splitting, combining, and splitting again takes away from that. Then you add in that someone like Cena can go wherever the fuck he pleases (which makes no sense if they're separate entities... it would be like an MLB player on two rosters simultaneously).

It also doesn't help that, like with most other things, the company can only focus on so many things at a time. As much intrigue and storytelling and the feeling of "what's gonna happen?" around Smackdown's champion, all roads on RAW was leading to the shoehorning of Reigns. They telegraphed that shit since he was put on RAW. This is par for the course. By the time they make some moves to potentially make the Universal Championship mean something, the World Championship will likely have suffered some grave detriment.

[QUOTE=#BrotherVito DELETED;5168688]I want a realistic, down to Earth show that's completely off the wall and crawling with magic robots.[/QUOTE so Lucha Underground

Greatest month of the year.

Kevin Nash won a World title this year. Nashvember will be JUST TOO SWEEET!!!!!!!

what

Yeah, what World title has Nash won this year?

Your Mom's World Title

Can we please stop pretending Vince just wrecked the Invasion for funsies instead of that whole situation being a fundamentally unmanagable treainwreck?

It was totally managable. As was the idea of making Smackdown WCW. Possibly even that initial idea for ECW (the first time, when Shane was supposedly going to pony up for it, not WWECW) But it was the prototype of the brand split. See my earlier point about said brand split being inconsistent. Vince treating it like an unwanted stepchild was a factor, but a bigger one was him being super involved to begin with.

Everything needing to be molded in his singular image countermands trying to foster two separate ecosystems. One of the reasons why NXT is as good as it is would be the immense lack of Vince having to "put his stamp" on the product. When Heyman was in charge of Smackdown during that iteration of the brand split, he took advantage of not having to make it "RAW lite" and making people care about talent that was underappreciated and it ended up being the superior show compared to "the flagship". Instead of RAW reciprocating and stepping up, they just started plucking the popular guys for RAW and eventually putting everyone* on both shows again, landing them back in the spot they started in.

IWGP Heavyweight Championship means more than anything else has in years.

They wanted to make one of the shows WCW branded, but the networks weren't keen on that, because it was a dead brand. The top guys from WCW weren't going to come over when they were getting paid out the ass. The angle was doomed from the start. But, with that being said, Vince didn't help matters.

They could have just not hotshotted it, subtly integrated some of the lower level guys into WWE and built them up and then waited a year until they got Flair, Hogan, Nash, Hall, etc to actually reveal that they'd been planning a takeover since the buyout and start the invasion then.

Yeah, the "it was fundamentally flawed" is a WWE excuse. Obviously the stars weren't there yet, but the WWE has the ability to make stars. Funnily enough, booking people like a bunch of jobbers doesn't really help create stars.

Also, even though it started rockily, it was truly dead in the water once Steph was running ECW in cahoots with Shane's WCW. They revived then destroyed it all on one RAW. Wrestling was so hot at the time (even though the Austin heel turn caused a cool-off) and if you just booked people strong, the crowd would have bought it.

Yeah. The big Invasion storyline should have either been held off for a while or as a 2 wave phase.

Between WWE quickly panicking over their WCW brand plans not starting off hot and botching the Invasion storyline, that costed them something like a third of the audience from the Attitude Era.

I care about my title of Destroyer of my Girlfriend mouth, does that count?

No it doesn't.

Next time you want to destroy your girlfriend's mouth why not try

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