Stevie Ray Believes This Is What Watered Down The NWO

To this day, the NWO is regarded as one of the most dominant factions in the history of professional wrestling. At the time of the NWO's initial rise in WCW in 1996, the infiltrating faction was the talk of the wrestling world and a major reason for WCW surging ahead of WWE in the Monday Night War.

However, as "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash's stable began adding members, the group's aura was diluted and fans' excitement waned over time.

In an interview with The Grue Rume Show on YouTube, former WCW star Stevie Ray offered his thoughts on how the group's momentum began to fade. Ray, who eventually joined the NWO, called the faction "fresh and new and something that had never been done before," referring to its "hostile takeover" of WCW.

"I think that's what made it so good, but you had people behind the scenes who didn't purvey it like it should've been," he said. "Because you had so many people running their own gimmicks within the gimmicks."

Ray said the NWO was "exciting for a while, but "it "started to taper off" as the group ballooned. Over its history, the NWO had 62 members, a staggering number for a pro wrestling faction. Ray, who was a member of Harlem Heat with his brother Booker T, joined the NWO in 1998. Other members, he said, began to "water down" the stable's intimidation factor. "One thing about it, they didn't keep it as serious as they should've kept it," he said. "We shouldn't have had p****** [in the group]. People like Marcus Bagwell, who's scared of him? That's when you start to water down things."