History
The relationship between WCW and Master P was supposed to be a symbiotic one, with WCW getting exposure with fans of hip hop music, and Master P getting his cousin Swoll a break in the wrestling business on top of getting paid.
Although the Soldiers were packaged as a face stable, they failed to connect with the mostly Southern WCW audience. In Master P's first and only appearance on WCW Television, (against the suggestion of the bookers and other wrestlers) he bullied heel wrestler Curt Hennig by rejecting a present he gave to Silkk The Shocker (a custom made cowboy hat) and then assaulting him with a birthday cake. This was perceived as a heel action by the fans and produced a lack of reaction due to confusion because Hennig was a hated heel, but being bullied by a group of people promoted as faces. Master P himself was disappointed with the reaction and blamed it on the racial makeup of the WCW audiences, claiming he would have gotten a bigger reaction from the crowd if more of "his people" were in attendance. P wouldn't be seen on TV to support the angle after the segment. It is reported that P received $200,000 per appearance for his short participation in WCW.
Hennig himself would put together his own small stable of "rap haters" called the West Texas Rednecks. Even with backup, the Soldiers outnumbered Hennig's group by nearly 2-1. Another setback for the Soldiers was that they consisted mainly of unestablished rookies and repackaged veterans, with very few members who connected with the fans. On the other end, the Rednecks played to the crowds with songs like "Rap is Crap" and winning matches against the odds. All these factors made the Rednecks the faces in the feud by the fans' estimation, especially in the South where WCW's core audience came from.
Read more about this topic: No Limit Soldiers
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (18871948)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (18911960)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)