Kevin Sullivan believes that the nWo could have benefited from being booked in a similar way to The Bloodline.
Professional wrestling changed forever on May 27th, 1996 as Scott Hall made his way to the ring on WCW Nitro. As far as fans were aware, Hall was still with the WWF, and in a short promo, he promised that a war was coming. This led to the arrival of Kevin Nash just two weeks later, and the original nWo was formed at Bash At The Beach when Hulk Hogan turned heel to join the Outsiders.
However, over the next two years, the group grew incredibly and eventually splintered off into multiple factions. To this day, some fans feel this rapid unchecked growth of the group was the beginning of the end for WCW as the storyline was eventually completely out of control.
One of the men behind the booking of the group was Kevin Sullivan who had been a regular fixture in wrestling since the 1970s. Although Sullivan remained on television into the mid-1990s he retired from in-ring action in 1997 and focused his attention on his role as a booker.
During an exclusive new interview with Nick Hausman for Inside The Ropes, Sullivan compared the nWo with the more recent success of The Bloodline in WWE. The former World Tag Team Champion suggested that the nWo should have been kept much smaller, only including four or five stars, joking they were handing out t-shirts just expecting those involved to get over.
“The Bloodline has done this, they’ve kept it within their family. We were starting to throw t-shirts at guys and think they were gonna get over with a t-shirt.
We had four — it went from, it was Hogan, Nash, Hall and Syxx. That’s all it should have been. And maybe Steiner. We were throwing t-shirts at everybody. And then we had, you know, the black and white and Wolf Pack. I mean, we got to everybody, I expected the milkman to show up in the morning with a shirt.”
The Bloodline Has Surpassed The nWo
Discussing The Bloodline more specifically, Kevin Sullivan claimed that the storyline was the best that wrestling had ever seen. The veteran pointed to the success of WWE SmackDown at Madison Square Garden and the increased popularity of a number of stars thanks to the rise of Roman Reigns.
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