By Pat McNeill, Torch columnist

As promised, part two of today's Double-Sized Salute to the New Bischoff-Russo Era!

Remembering Russo: When Jerry Jarrett was asked why he hired Vince Russo for his NWA-TNA promotion, his response was that Russo was a success with the WWF, and there's no way anyone could have turned around WCW by the time Russo took over.

That would have been fine, if NWA-TNA and Vince Russo had left well enough alone. But Russo couldn't let it go. He gave an interview to 1wrestling.com, a website owned by an NWA-TNA employee, where Russo made the same claims about his first WCW run as he did two years ago when he returned to WCW. And, like he did two years ago, he humbly left out some of the facts that went with story. Fortunately, I saved the same copy I wrote about it two years ago. So here goes.

Russo: "If you go back and look at the shows, that I wrote, you will see the number far increased when I was hired to book in WCW. I came in and the rating was a 2.6. The first time I went home, the rating was a 3.4, after three months, and anyone can look that up, because it is on the record."

McNeill: Not exactly. Vince Russo jumped to WCW in the first weekend of October 1999. The September 27, 1999 episode of Nitro, written by a lame-duck pre-Russo booking committee, drew a 3.0. Still, 3.4 is a big increase over 3.0, right?

Again, not exactly. The comparison between Nitro in September 1999 and January 2000 isn't exactly apples to apples. Why? Because in September, Eric Bischoff was producing three-hour episodes of Nitro. Russo had Nitro cut back to two hours in January 2000 before he was fired. If you remove the third hour of Nitro, it gives greater weight to the first (unopposed) hour of Nitro. The average of the ratings for the first two hours of the 9/27/99 Nitro was a 3.3. But 3.4 is still a better rating than 3.3, so WCW was doing better, right?

Well, not exactly. You see, thanks to taking Nitro back to two hours, WCW lost a whole hour's worth of prime time television ad revenue for Nitro. Every week. And let's not forget that the pay-per-view buyrates dropped from a 0.35 for Fall Brawl 1999 to a 0.23 for Starrcade 1999, under Vince Russo's watch.

Russo: "One of the lowest ratings periods when I was in WCW was from January 2000 through April 2000. (Other newsletter writer) gave me credit for those three months, when the ratings were somewhere around a 2.5."

McNeill: This time, Russo is correct. The rating for the final WCW Nitro before Russo took over again (the 3/26/00 edition) was a 2.5. Vince Russo surely deserves credit for any increase during his second run in WCW. After all, by the time of his last show as WCW booker, the October 2, 2000 episode of Nitro, Russo had bumped the rating all the way up to, uh, 2.6.

But hey! The pay-per-view buyrates in Russo's second run moved all the way from 0.13 for WCW Uncensored 2000 to 0.16 for WCW Fall Brawl 2000. So that's another positive.

Russo (on David Arquette winning the WCW Title): "The next day we were on the cover of USA Today, which we would never have been on in a million years, if somebody other than David Arquette had won the title. And basically, that's what it was all about. People can pick it apart, and people can read into it, and people can say whatever they want to say, but at that time, it achieved what I wanted it to achieve, and that's the name of that tune."

McNeill: After Arquette won the WCW Title on the 4/26/00 edition of WCW Thunder, ratings for Nitro the next week dropped from a 3.0 to a 2.5. The buyrate for Slamboree 2000, where Arquette had his first and last pay-per-view title defense, was a 0.14, down from a 0.25 buy for the previous WCW pay-per-view. But I have to give Russo the benefit of the doubt there, since I still have no idea what he wanted to achieve.

Pat McNeill of Fairfax, Va. has been a Torch columnist since February 2001. He loves it when they call him Big Poppa. His PWTorch.com column appears about three times a week. His longer, feature-length columns appear exclusively in the Torch Newsletter about once a month. Pat McNeill's first book, "The Tables All Were Broken", is available from many fine booksellers.

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To read McNeill's pre"ious Torch website commentary, click here: McNeill's Take Archi"es.

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