When WCW announced plans to put on a Live Monday Night show to go head to head with Raw, pundits and internet fans alike killed the federation, calling it professional suicide. So when Nitro went on the air on September 4, 1995, everyone expected the worst.

How could TV support another wrestling show in prime time, against Monday Night Football? Nothing better to prove Nitro was a contender but to steal away one of the WWF’s top stars. When Lex Luger emerged from the crowd and declared that he was in WCW to be “Where The Big Boys Play” it was the event WCW needed to put Nitro on the map.

Only a week earlier, Lex Luger appeared at WWF’s SummerSlam 1995 PPV, starting a major angle with the British Bulldog due to the breakup of the Allied Powers tag team. To fans everywhere, including everyone on the internet, the jump was a total and complete surprise. WCW was playing for keeps on Monday Night.

Raw, after being live for some time since its birth in early 1993, had began taping its show and had grown boring after the initial excitement in the Manhattan Center, And the always Live Nitro seemed to have a new energy. The debut of Luger and the angle that followed generated a massive amount of interest in WCW’s product, and ignited the Monday Night Wars that exist today. At the time, total ratings of Monday Night Wrestling was about 3.0-4.0. Now they are 9.0-10.0.

The debut of Nitro was the first real battle of WCW and WWF in the modern sense. It led to bigger and better from both federations. However the sheer shock and excitement generated by Lex Luger can never be repeated in the current state of wrestling, and the battleground created by Nitro has changed wrestling forever.