I remember seeing beyond the mat at the theatres, my mother took us at the time and was disgusted how evil Vince Mcmahon is in real life when he had droz puke in a bucket. Mcmahon definitely isn't a moral person, and ever since he bought WCW, things have been pretty crappy.
He bought both WCW and ECW and turned ECW into watered down. As far as WCW goes, its start of falling apart was when Bischoff fired at the time the 2 Hollywood Blondes, one of them was the late Brian Pillman, the other was Steve Austin, which was the worst thing WCW did cause that boosted Austin to what he is now, also WCW shaddy deals cost them Malenko, Perry Saturn, Benoit, Eddie, Rey Mysterio. And Vince Ruzzo took over and just self destruct WCW and Vince just pwned all he pwned Paul Heyman and ECW couldn't compete with Vince's bank account
I can't say I ever really liked WCW, I switched during the monday night wars to segments when the NWO first came in, used to watch lucha libre, and went to a live Nitro at rosemont in Illinois around 1996. Other than that, the wrestling was always kind of "stiff" with their heavyweights, it looked very fake and I hated the announcers. Also the entrance music was horrendous with their generic fast beats.
I watched WWF even when it was doing piss poor in 96 and 97.
WCW turned into a joke around 99-2000. By 2001, after DDP left with no explanation after his match with Scott Steiner, knew the company was already dead and WWF was way ahead in ratings with the whole stephanie mcmahon-helmsley thing. I remember when Vince bought WCW and he showed up on Monday Nitro on TNT, I was like WTF? They aired their last show right in Panama city (right near where I live) and Vince Mcmahon saying it was "suitable" for WCW to air their last show in some redneck joint on the panhandle of Florida (Thanks Vince
). WCW was the southern company, WWF was the northern company.
ECW didn't last much longer, they cancelled their payperview March 11th but they still had a few more shows (not on tv) that were filmed by fancam, the company was in such bad shape that they went from airing their shows in a bingo hall to very small warehouses with chairs setup and some disco balls to make up the special effects.
After that, we all know about the invasion storyline which sucked more than anything, it was exciting to see Lance Storm invade, but after I found out that Vince Mcmahon wasn't going to copromote two brands, that was the start of the downfall right there. When Hogan came in with the NWO storyline at Wrestlemania X-8, I thought we would finally see some improvement but after that, WWE became like a lightbulb, sometimes the light was on, most of the time it was off.
When TNA started up, I was hoping for some competition, when Christian Cage and Kurt Angle jumped over, I thought maybe we'd see another monday night war, nope, TNA is still the small company it is and doesn't look like fans want anything to do with it, niche market.
Personally I can't even get into wrestling anymore, there's virtually no competition, it's like Windows vs MAC, yes theres other OS'es (like Linux) but Windows dominates the majority of the home market. The same applies for wrestling which is why we get stale garbage on tv, because Vince knows it's the only option to the average wrestling fan.
Of course it doesn't help either that Vince Mcmahon launched Tough Enough and publically stated "I'm not in the rassling business, i'm in the entertainment business", this is probably why so many former wrestling fans are starting to watch UFC/MMA because wrestling isn't using the old formulas that worked, but UFC is using the formulas wrestling used (like the promos/etc to get people interested in a fight) and it's working for them.