For all its miracles, the internet has had some drawbacks. Before the internet, people generally had more friends, and more lasting relationships; they went outside more, and were more physically active; the fighting weight of the average cultural product was a little higher. I don't really care about all that unimportant stuff, though. The thing that was most obviously more enjoyable before the internet could tell you everything about everything was pro wrestling.
I know some people enjoy the backstage stuff as its own soap opera, and more power to them. In what is no way a pathetic nostalgic yearning for the simplicity of childhood, I preferred when angles didn't carry a second, meta element, when watching wrestling didn't require knowing all about the workplace politics that went into its booking. I miss not knowing who a guy was, because then he could be anything. If the current industry is better in many ways, it could never give us a push like Bill Goldberg's.
Goldberg was a fringe NFLer at the end of his football career when he was identified by WCW as a guy who looked like a star. He certainly did: huge and bald and intense. He was obviously athletic, but the full-contact pantomime that allows someone to tell a story in a wrestling ring is an entirely different sort of physical intelligence than what football requires, and Goldberg didn't really have it. If Goldberg had an arc, it couldn't be give and take, and it couldn't require vulnerabilities. He'd have to be an unstoppable monster, which is a gimmick tried before and since, but never with so much commitment or success. The only thing you needed to know about Goldberg was that he looked like that, and he didn't lose.
The wrestling internet was in its infancy, and there was as much bad information as good, so when Goldberg made his televised debut in September 1997, it was effectively without warning. (He had wrestled his first-ever professional match just three months earlier. I'd say "it showed," but he never really got much better at it.)
His first match was against Hugh Morrus, whose gimmick was that he laughed. Morrus was a jobber, but a slightly higher class of jobber; against an unknown, especially with the mensch-y, very unwrestlerlike name of Bill Goldberg, the new guy was not the favorite. But in a nifty piece of storytelling, they made clear right away that they were launching a superstar.
In three efficient minutes, WCW was able to establish everything we needed to know.
- They do not show his entrance, because you don't waste TV time on nobodies. So we are conditioned to expect nothing from Goldberg.
- "We know absolutely nothing about" him, says Tony Schiavone. "I don't have any information on Bill Goldberg," says Mike Tenay. These are funny things to say about a man who played in the NFL wrestling under his real name. Now, you would just search him online (hell, you'd have heard about his upcoming debut well before it happened), but back then, we didn't yet have a computer in my home, and I'm not sure how useful Lycos or whatever even was. But by establishing that he is an unknown even to "The Professor," here, we are being warned, is a true X factor.
- Goldberg kicks out of Hugh Morrus's finisher (the "No Laughing Matter," ha ha). OK, now we're paying attention. Especially in the more conservative, Southern-territorial tradition of WCW, finishers are mostly sacrosanct unless you've got a damn good reason. The shock on Morrus's face and in the voices of the announcers convey that we might have something special on our hands.
- After a match spent displaying more technical maneuvers like holds, a revitalized Goldberg suddenly starts doing backflips and breaking out the power moves, including his Jackhammer finisher, which is a genuine feat of strength. "Bill Goldberg, out of obscurity!" Schiavone yelps.
And so completed was the only introduction Goldberg would ever really need to start getting over like few wrestlers had gotten over before. His results told the story instead: A man from nowhere, who couldn't be beaten. Over the next 15 months, Goldberg won a purported 173 consecutive matches. The Streak became the second brilliant angle, after the NWO takeover the year before, which briefly made WCW the most popular promotion on earth.
Listen to how hot the crowd was by the next summer as Goldberg squashed "the Chairman," the delightful La Parka. The match was literally seconds long—as with most of his matches, much shorter than his bombastic, pyroclastic entrance—but it told just as clear a story as his debut about Goldberg's role in the company ecosystem.
The Streak brought me back to wrestling. I had watched WWF as a younger kid, rooting hard for the Real American Hero Hulk Hogan (and not knowing that 30 years later he'd be directly responsible for costing me the best job I'd ever had, ha ha ... ha) but had fallen away from it. Now a middle schooler, I was sucked back in by the NWO's rise and reign and Goldberg's ascendance. Would I have been severely disappointed to learn, as I now know, that Goldberg's streak was comically inflated—that he never actually wrestled, let alone won, as many matches as they claimed he did? Would I have been heartbroken to find out from the dirt sheets that he had lost a dark match, to someone named "Chad Fortune," even before he made his television debut? Maybe not. But I was surely able to enjoy it more without knowing that stuff.
To be clear, those dirt sheets did exist, in nascent form. But discerning the trustworthy stuff from the chaff was an art that we tweens hadn't yet mastered, which resulted in most rumors arriving in person, in the schoolyard, via a who-knows-how-many-steps game of telephone. I distinctly remember being told that Goldberg was regularly losing non-televised matches, to make house show audiences believe they had seen something special. This wasn't true. Neither was the rumor I heard that his true win streak was actually around 500, but they were only counting the twice-a-week TV matches. If anyone ever mentioned the name Chad Fortune to me, I don't recall it.
The uncertainty was part of the fun. All wrestling fandom requires suspending some disbelief. That was much easier to do without authoritative skepticism being available. The Streak, as it rose and rose, was unfalsifiable, so we just kind of had to go with it. Now, we know it was a running joke: WCW adding a phantom win here, five phantom wins there, according to management's unknowable whims. "One week he'd be 42-0 and seven days later he'd be 58-0," Chris Jericho wrote in his autobiography a decade later.
The Streak ended up eating itself, a victim of its own success. (Draw your own parallels to WCW at large here.) Eventually, "we were just running out of guys for Goldberg to go through," Eric Bischoff said, and they had no other way to get the title belt off him and back in circulation. They settled for his first loss coming to Kevin Nash, a believable challenger, but with the outside interference of a cattle prod, presumably to keep Goldberg from losing cleanly and thus losing his shine. It was an outcome that satisfied no one.
WCW poked along another couple of years, bereft of anything quite so gripping as The Streak, or a hero as popular with the fans as Goldberg, before being bought by the competition in 2001. That's around when my wrestling fandom ended. Goldberg has had an admirable but part-time career since then, with sporadic appearances in Japan and with WWE. He wrestled his ostensible retirement match this past weekend, where, in a nice bit of career symmetry, Goldberg's opponent kicked out of the Jackhammer before taking the win. Various promotions have tried the streak gimmick with other up-and-coming wrestlers in recent decades, but with everyone's career details available at a keystroke, they've never been nearly as believable as Goldberg's rapid rise from nowhere. They can't recapture the mystery of a true unknown, or the wonder of their rampage, no matter how fake or inflated it was. WCW knew that had a superstar on their hands, but it had to burn quickly to shine that bright.
