I have two WCW questions I couldn't readily find answers too:
1: how did Goldberg rise up and become a main eventer when Hogan/Bischoff/Sullivan were in control of the booking and didn't want to promote new talent?
2: I get Time Warner/AOL wanted to just dump the company because of the mismanagement of Bischoff and Russo, but why not change the schedule for Nitro Tuesday or any other day? Was this just not an option because of advertisers? Was it a hubris issue and would admit that WWF won the war? Etcetera.
Also, here's maybe a hot take: I think Russo was fully justified shooting on Hogan.
Russo is a complete idiot. I won't deny that. But I think he accidentally had some good ideas. But I thought the shoot was great and needed to be done. Cunts complain "B-b-but the business!" Hogan was part of the reason WCW died, he was killing the business. And why did the cunt decide to leave and file his frivolous lawsuit over "Muh creative control!" Because why? Russo called him bald? Fuck Hogan. That cunt should have died instead of Owen Hart.
For the first one, you are confusing Kevin Sullivan with Kevin Nash. Nash DESPISED Golberg, whereas Sullivan was one of the few who championed Goldberg when he started out in the company.
As for how Goldberg got so big? It was a literal black swan event.
No one really had any expectations for Goldberg, who was a big ex-football player that was a slightly more fuckable looking clone of Steve Austin minus the personality. To compensate for Goldberg's lack of mic skills, they basically decided to play to his strengths (no promos, just had him go out and clobber his opponent) and gave him an undefeated streak in lieu of an actual storyline because, at the time, unless you were Raven, Jericho, or Malenko, WCW rarely gave undercard guys storylines in favor of pushing the NWO storyline.
Goldberg slowly but surely became a big hit with fans as months passed to the point that WCW realized they had a hit on their hand that none of them expected. They gave him the US title after a feud with Raven, at which point other shit happened to aid him up the card faster and faster:
1. Starcade 97 burnt a LOT of good will Hogan had going on with the way he undermined Sting winning the belt and ending his reign of terror, combined with Hogan fucking off for the first couple of months of 1998 and allowing Sting to flounder so he could reclaim the belt and resume said reign of terror.
2. WWE started to get their shit together and by the spring of 1998, Austin was on top and was kicking WCW's ass. Bischoff had completely changed the company to be TV ratings driven over all other metrics, so he desperately needed SOMETHING to score a quick win to keep his corporate masters off his back.
So fate was aligned that Hogan decided he had to do something/put someone over to deal with the bad PR of how he fucked Sting over and Bischoff needed a big match on free TV to stop the bleeding of Nitro's falling ratings. Goldberg happened to be one of the biggest undercard guys at the time, someone who managed to organically get over, was young, and pretty much free from the taint of two years worth of NWO circle jerking. Hogan told Bischoff "I tell you what, I'll drop the belt to this Goldberg guy, clean as a whistle and put the fucker over as the new top guy and do it on live TV as well so that everyone sees his coronation at this upcoming Nitro taping at a big stadium!" and Bischoff, who had been struggling to find a main event worthy of said stadium show episode of Nitro and who knew that Hogan was a fickle, selfish lout who might change his mind, moved heaven and Earth to get the match set up and forgo all build-up one might normally have let alone doing it on a PPV, because he needed a big rating and more to the point, to get Hogan to do the clean job ASAP before he changed his mind or worse, Kevin Nash convinced him to change his mind.
As for moving Nitro, it was off the table partly because of ego and partly because by the time the show was in free fall, Turner executives were not willing to move the show or even demote it to TBS. TNT executives in particular, were already pissy they lost the prime time hours on Monday night to wrestling and by 2000, they were angling to revamp TNT into a more classy version of USA Network with original programming and high end reruns of stuff like Law and Order, having already secured the rerun rights to the Abby Carmichael seasons and were in the process of stealing the first 8-9 seasons of the show from A&E.
