The "Who's Bob Brown in each fed" question led to me this when I saw the Nash comments, particularly about Starrcade 1998.

 

If everything is the same up to and during Starrcade, same ending with Nash winning after Goldberg gets shocked by returning Hall, walks into a powerbomb and loses...BUT afterward, starting the next night, the booking is done different with Goldberg still the main focus and the booking at the top being about Goldberg trying to get back to Nash, with Nash (now heel again) putting stuff in his way and watching it get knocked down....

 

Would there be soo much hatred toward the end of the Starrcade show?

 

The fans popped when Nash won and honestly, the streak was going long enough, if you are gonna end it, why not at the show of the year in the main event with an ending that allows you to go into 1999 with things changing, but your main player still the man but chasing....

El P details this pretty well in his death of WCW megathread. The face/heel demographic flipped back and forth so many times in 1999 its hard to say. From a fantasy booking standpoint, it wouldn't be as simple as Goldberg chasing Nash for a few months, you would have to literally rebook the entire promotion from the ground up. I think when Goldberg finally got his revenge on Nash most fans didn't even remember what the issue was in the first place, and the feud was kept far away from the title. It's amazing in retrospect that Goldberg only had one title reign.

Honestly, I think the issue is that they gave Goldberg the belt in 98 at all. He had only gotten the US title a little while before and he could have held that for a year as sort of a special attraction.

 

Wait a sec, this isn't in the fantasy booking section. EDIT: Or I guess it is.

Id like to find the newsgroups from the day and week after Starrcade 98 as I am curious what people were saying at that time..

Goldberg wasn't the main focus of the company going into the match, so really losing the streak didn't make all that much difference (although I think it was clearly a stupid thing to do at that time in those circumstances). The bigger crime was really how he was booked in general since winning the belt.

Yeah, very good point...but I think after Havoc 98, they finally started to focus on Goldberg and of course Nash as the two guys...just needed more focus on Goldberg.....

 

But post Starrcade to me was a perfect time to stop, change things up and get moving again...they were still getting good ratings and the fall hadnt begun yet...