One Debut, One Return, One Night

August 1999 was a great time to be a wrestling fan. In the WWF, life was good. The company was about to return to broadcast television with Smackdown. Ratings have never been higher. And they're crushing their competition. However, storyline-wise, the WWF was in a bit of a strange spot: the one that turned the company's fortunes around, the Austin-McMahon saga, had just ended, and there were questions as to whether Triple H can really handle the mantle of being the top heel. In addition, behind the scenes, there was about to be a major change: Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara, two members of the creative team partially credited for getting the WWF out of the gutter, were heading for WCW.

That soon-to-be-exit was an outlier in the transfer of talent happening in the major wrestling organizations at the time. After the WWF saw the majority of their big names from the 1980s leave for greener pastures and bigger money in WCW during the mid-90s, those in WCW looking for upward mobility had to come to the WWF. Of note, Steve Austin, Mick Foley, Vader, and Paul Levesque (aka Triple H), under various circumstances, found themselves in the WWF and flourished. 

In 1999, the WWF got their hands on hot free agent Chris Jericho. Frustrated with the working environment in WCW, Jericho came to the WWF with quite a bit of fanfare. Instead of vignettes for the debuting talent, a "countdown to the millennium" clock appeared throughout their WWF programs for weeks. The countdown would end not at the actual turn of the millennium, but around 10pm ET on August 9. Then, magic.

On the same night, after some convincing from his son to ditch the nWo black and white colors, Hulk Hogan for the first time in three years wore the red and yellow that made him famous. He would keep the colors until the New Blood-Millionaires Club angle in the spring of 2000, when he would remain "Hollywood" Hogan until the end of his WCW run. Magic there too.

While Hogan going back to the red and yellow was somewhat unexpected, Jericho's WWF debut was (even though Jericho didn't look back on it too fondly in his autobiography) as about as good a debut as there was in wrestling history.

So how did it work out for USA and TNT? RAW crushed Nitro by a 2-to-1 margin (6.4 for RAW to 3.1 for Nitro).