Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
There is no question that Eddie Guerrero had a hall of fame wrestling career. From his successful excursions to places like Mexico and Japan and to his runs in ECW, WCW and of course his biggest push coming in WWE. Today’s piece focuses in on Eddie’s time in WCW…more specifically the year 1996. This could have been the year that perhaps changed the trajectory of his already legendary career. At least if WCW had paid close attention to what people were saying about the future ‘Latino Heat.’
Looking back, overall, Eddie Guerrero had a pretty solid career while competing for World Championship Wrestling. Not only was he having classic matches with the likes of Rey Mysterio Jr, Ultimo Dragon, Dean Malenko, Chris Jericho…etc…he was also winning a host of secondary championships such as the United States and Cruiserweight titles. He had formed his own faction called the Latino World Order aka LWO. No question, while wrestling for WCW, Guerrero was a top mid carder. On the surface, there seemed to be a natural progression that Eddie would graduate from the cruiserweight ranks to the heavyweight ranks and also move higher and higher on the card. Of course, it never really happened and eventually Eddie would walk away from WCW in 2000.
Despite some starts and then stops to pushes and inconsistent booking on his career…there was a brief time in 1996 when things could have been radically different. It was during this time that WCW held a focus group and the main objective was to gauge peoples interest on the various wrestlers that competed for the company. In other words, who did people find to be the most likable. The focus group would view different matches and promos from a wide variety of WCW wrestlers. The natural expectancy was that the biggest stars of the company such as Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Sting, Lex Luger etc…would score the highest in terms of favorability.
To the surprise or rather shock of many in WCW management…the top stars actually scored the lowest scores. The exception was Sting, who while not scoring particularly high…was still ranked the most favorable of all the top names. Instead, members of the focus group gave the best marks to the wrestlers on WCW programming who had high level work rates. Wrestlers such as Fit Finlay and Chris Benoit did strong numbers. Das Wunderkind Alex Wright was another who showed a strong liking by the focus group. They all, however, were blown out of the water by Eddie Guerrero was was absolutely loved by the focus group.
His favorability by the group, was the highest among every other wrestler that was showcased and it wasn’t even close. This result, naturally led the WCW booking committee to “experiment” with giving Guerrero a very strong push to main event status. Eddie began a feud with the top heel faction at that time…the Four Horsemen. There were discussions of possibly putting the WCW world title on Guerrero based on all the positive feedback he had received.
Alas, it never materialized past the talking stage. The same stars that were ranked a lot lower than Eddie began complaining about Guerrero’s supposed push to the top. The argument was made and ultimately agreed on that Eddie was simply too small to invest in as a main eventer and potential world champion. So focus group results be damned….the experiment was cut short and Guerrero returned to the mid card. There are some who believe that Eddie simply wasn’t ready for the spotlight at that point in his career. Others feel that Eddie being as talented as he was both in the ring and on the microphone would have excelled regardless of timing. Regardless….Eddie eventually proved many in WCW completely wrong.