Trivia / WCW

A-D

• Actor Allusion: David Arquette parodying the "Wasaaaaap" ads during his heel rant. The ad was also referenced in Scary Movie, which itself is a parody of Scream (1996), which made Arquette famous.
• Christmas Rushed: WCW Backstage Assault was intended to be a spinoff game whilst EA worked on WCW Mayhem 2, but it ended up being the last (and worst) WCW game ever. The roster captures the many personalities/gimmicks WCW had on their side in 2000-'01, such as: Tank Abbott, The Harris Twins, David Flair, Vampiro, Crowbar, Daffney, 3 Count, Kronik, Misfits in Action and even Vince Russo. Most of them would not be hired by WWF when it bought out WCW (though some would later turn up in TNA), making Backstage their sole video game appearance. The game showed signs of cost-cutting and rushing, with wrestlers only being able to fight "backstage", whilst the competing WWF SmackDown 2: Know Your Role featured numerous arenas (all of which contained A RING, a critical element in a wrestling video game), more backstage areas, more moves and better graphics. What makes this sad is, the preceding game WCW Mayhem had been regarded as better than its competitor WWF Attitude (though that's not a high bar to clear), and THQ proceeded to copy and refine its simplified style for its own WWF games whilst WCW actually managed to produce a worse game due to time constraints.
• Contractual Obligation Project: David Arquette's stint as WCW Champion was a contractual obligation derived from the promotion of Ready to Rumble. He tried, and failed, to get out of it knowing that it wouldn't go over well.
• Corpsing:
  • Halloween Havoc '97: Diamond Dallas Page vs. "Macho Man" Randy Savage. DDP smashes Savage over the head with a glass plate, and Dusty Rhodes, doing color commentary, can't stop laughing.
  • Aside from the botch itself, the Shockmaster segment is one of the best pieces of unintentional comedy ever created. Davey Boy Smith and Sid Vicious have their backs to the hard camera while the others cut the promo (which consists of insane shouting), but they leave the mic on so you hear them ripping on Fred as soon as he falls. It's made hilarious due to the off-camera comments of Ric Flair ("I told you...oh God..."), Stevie Ray ("Who is this motherfucker?"), and best of all, Davey Boy Smith ("He fell on his arse! He fell flat on his fucking arse!"). Ole Anderson, who provided the voice of the Shockmaster, snickered into the mic before composing himself.
  • When "The Cat" (Ernest Miller) fought The Dog (Al Green), even Tony Schiavone couldn't keep from laughing.
  • The infamous clip of Torrie Wilson getting slapped by the Macho Man for laughing during a backstage segment. Wilson didn't know Savage was going to smack her, so it wasn't planned. Eric Bischoff in particular got a lot of heat for it since it was at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta and a lot of the Time Warner higher-ups were there to see it. Nowadays, it's mostly remembered for being a Botchamania meme ("SEND FOR THE MAN!").
• Creative Differences:
  • Some of the first signs that WCW was in trouble were several noticeable wrestlers jumping ship to other promotions due to, as those wrestlers would reveal later, their dissatisfaction at their creative direction, like The Giant and Chris Jericho jumping to the WWF, and even Raven leaving to return to ECW^note Reportedly Bischoff told several disgruntled wrestlers "If you don't want to be here there's the door." When Raven asked if that meant he would be given his release and Bischoff answered in the affirmative he simply stood up and got in his car and drove off without saying another word, which he had left in the first place because in WCW the paycheck was bigger^note And it didn't bounce.
  • Eric Bischoff's promotion from announcer to Executive Vice President led his co-announcer, Jim Ross, to quit in protest. He jumped ship to the WWF, a decision which very few would question these days. This happened way back in 1993.
  • As a wrestling mark himself, David Arquette fought the idea of becoming the World Champion. He donated the money he made for the angle to the families of deceased wrestlers Brian Pillman and Owen Hart and to Darren Drozdov, who was rendered a quadriplegic in the ring. He was the only person involved in the angle to walk out with a good reputation.
  • Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan were battling each other behind the scenes and it often played out on screen. Hogan pitched the concept of Scott Hall turning on Nash (which would have given nWo Hollywood a higher hip quotient compared to nWo Wolfpac). Hall and Nash were vehemently against splitting up their act, but Bischoff pushed hard enough that Hall & Nash were in danger of breaching their contracts. Rather than end up where Ric Flair was, in the middle of a lawsuit with no paychecks coming & no option to join the WWF until the suit was settled, they went along with the storyline. Bischoff sold the idea to Hall & Nash by saying that they needed to shock viewers to get some momentum. Immediately after he turned Hall took time off to get treatment for his alcohol issues, so when he and Nash finally had their match everyone had forgotten all about it, rendering the whole thing pointless.
  • Politics brought an end to Bischoff's relations with New Japan, especially after WCW tried to negotiate a talent exchange with All Japan.
  • WCW's partnership with SMW was stillborn due to Eric Bischoff having personal issues with Jim Cornette and Ole Anderson. People on the management side of WCW were offended by the things Cornette said about WCW in a promo which was supposed to kick off the angle. The arc was conceived by Cornette and Bill Watts, Bischoff's predecessor (who had maintained a good relationship with Cornette). A regime change saw Anderson fired, and Cornette taking his invasion angle idea to the WWF, which he parlayed into a long-term gig with the company.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Eddie Guerrero hated that ladder match at Souled Out (see below): he was trying to get over as a heel. But the finish to this match, in which he managed to snatch victory (literally) from the jaws of defeat by grabbing the belt and hitting Syxx with it, made it seem like he was a face. The referee was powerless because Syxx was sent tumbling off the ladder into unconsciousness. However, Eddie went back to being a heel the following night. WWE must hate it, too: in the Countdown episode about ladder matches, they completely ignore it and cite Eddie vs. RVD as Eddie's first-ever ladder match.
  • Tony Schiavone all but distanced himself from wrestling after WCW folded, barring a brief appearance in TNA, until he joined All Elite Wrestling as an announcer and interviewer, 18 years after Nitro's final broadcast. He also admits that yes, he would have changed the channel to see Mick Foley win, too.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Erik Watts. Known for the worst dropkick of all time. His father is legendary booker "Cowboy" Bill Watts, and he was pushed far beyond his ability and popularity. After some racist remarks of Bill's resurfaced in a '93 interview, Bill was let go from WCW—and that was pretty much the end of Erik's career on a national scale, besides a brief spell in the WWF (when Cowboy Bill had the book in Stamford for about 2 weeks) as half of Tekkno Team 2000 (widely considered one of the worst tag teams to ever step in a ring), and a stint as a midcarder in the early days of TNA.
  • Marc Mero a.k.a. Johnny B. Badd, who got a heavy push, an undefeated streak, title shots for the world title, and became Television Champion three times. If you're not familiar with Johnny B. Badd, here's what you need to know: WCW gave a former boxer with almost no wrestling training a Little Richard gimmick and put him over everybody for five years. His finish was a punch. A Little Richard impersonator who could beat you by punching you once. Also, he had a confetti gun.
  • Hulk Hogan. Once he turned up in WCW, instantly made Vader and Flair look like helpless chumps, and filled the roster with his friends. Hogan matches (where the outcome was never in doubt) were usually saved for the main event^note Which makes sense when he was by far and away the highest paid guy in the company.
  • Steve "Mongo" McMichael. Bobby Heenan mentions in his book that Bischoff is a huge football nut, so he hired Mongo without any real training off the back of his appearance at Wrestlemania XI, where he (along with future WCW PPV main eventer Reggie White) was part of Lawrence Taylor's entourage. And yet he became a member of The Four Horsemen and won the United States title, placing him among the weirdest recipients of both accolades.
  • David Flair, who even won the U.S. title. Fans liked his father, but not David. Arn Anderson has gone on record saying that David wasn't really into pro wrestling and was basically pushed into it by people behind the scenes in WCW. He was never given a fair shot to become an actual wrestler, he was just shot right into the mix in one of WCW's countless bad ideas to boost ratings. Perhaps the most memorable thing about him was his theme, simply called "David Flair's Theme", and his infamous Titantron^note That and being able to truthfully say that he slept with a 21 year old Stacy Keibler.
  • Nash's entrance right before that Hogan match. It is a perfect representation of WCW at its peak, for better or worse.
  • Diamond Dallas Page. The only reason he even cracked that glass ceiling was because he and Bischoff were practically neighbors at one point. Which isn't to say he didn't deserve it, Page worked hard and was one of WCW's biggest home-grown success stories.
• Defictionalization: Russo and Bischoff were looking to branch WCW off into new avenues since the downturn was being felt economically. David Arquette was doing a wrestling movie (Ready to Rumble) and offered WCW some parts for their stars in the movie. In return, he'd appear on the show. Once he and Russo and Bischoff became friends, they invited him to some shows, and eventually had him become an onscreen character in the lead up to the movie's release. Russo and Bischoff then had the grand idea to put the title on Arquette, since he was the star of the movie, and it'd be the ultimate PR move. We'll have press for MONTHS! Unfortunately, despite David's pleas to not win the title, they wrote it in one night while he was backstage, and put it on him anyway.
• Dueling Works: Eric Bischoff famously pitted Nitro against Raw, leading to the Monday Night Wars, actually winning in the ratings for 83 weeks straight^note "83 Weeks" is also the name of his podcast. That's like Dan Quinn and Matt Ryan starting a podcast and calling it "28-3". WWF later mounted a famous comeback, however, and WCW later cut the final hour of Nitro, meaning Nitro and Raw only went head-to-head for an hour on Mondays. It was pretty clear WWF was the "winner" by that point.

E-Q

• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Starting in the late '90s, WCW management decided to not allow the commentators to see the pre-taped segments, thinking that this would make their commentary "more spontaneous". What it ended up doing was making sure the commentators had no idea how to sell the angles that were taking place.
  • Bischoff was constantly working the wrestlers; to the point where, when asked about Benoit's relationship with Nancy Sullivan, Sherri Martel recalled that everyone assumed their extramarital affair was also a work.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Jim Herd was president of WCW during the early part of the 1990s. He had no previous experience with wrestling, and despite Ric Flair being a world-famous World Champion, was convinced that Flair was too old to draw. First he tried to retool Flair with a Roman gladiator gimmick named Spartacus (to which Kevin Sullivan famously replied "while we're doing this, why don't we go down to Yankee Stadium and change Mickey Mantle's number?"). Then he simply fired Flair. The problem? Flair was WCW World Heavyweight Champion at the time. And since he had put down a $25,000 deposit on the belt, which WCW did not refund to him after he was fired, Flair decided he owned the physical title belt. He then showed up on WWF television with the WCW belt. Flair went on to be promoted as "The Real World Champion" by heel manager Bobby Heenan and work a critically and financially successful feud with Hulk Hogan. WCW, on the other hand, was devastated by the loss of their top draw and their inability to find anyone to replace him. At the nadir, fans were ignoring the actual matches and chanting "We Want Flair". Herd would eventually resign in disgrace.^note Type "Jim Cornette shoots on Jim Herd" into the ol' YouTube search bar if you want to hear an in-depth analysis on how Herd took a thriving (critically, at least) wrestling company and ran it into the ground. Make sure any young children or people offended by explicit language have left the room before hitting play.
  • The popularity of Nitro inspired Turner Broadcasting to order the creation of another show, Thunder, which aired on Thursdays on TBS. Bischoff was not happy about the announcement, as he was still neck deep in the Monday Night Wars and barely had enough budget and material to fill three hours a week, let alone five^note Kevin Nash explains here why everyone besides the Turner execs absolutely HATED the idea of another 2 hour show each week. But the show went ahead in '98. Thunder was eventually shortened and moved to Monday nights, effectively expanding Nitro to 4 hours 45 minutes, most of which consisted of the announcers talking, plus another 45 minutes of Hogan/Steiner vignettes. The filler became so prevalent, in fact, that the finishes would sometimes get cut on account of time (some of the local companies which hosted the PPVs had an automatic cut-off time of 11 pm). This even happened to a few of Hogan's matches.
  • In the 90s, Schiavone was an adequate, if not great, commentator with a habit of irrational exuberance and calling just about every move he didn't know a "sidewalk slam" or a "face jam". But as WCW began to fall apart, so did his commentary. He proclaimed every episode of Nitro to be "the greatest (moment/night/event) in the history of our sport!". He also proclaimed just about everything "the most shocking SWERVE ever" after Russo came in, which eventually became a former trope of its own. Part of it was an edict from WCW to make the commentary "more spontaneous": they never allowed them to see the pre-taped segments, so they would then not know how to sell them. Sometimes he wasn't even allowed to call a match.
  • Jamie Kellner. Initially, Ted Turner had been in a position to tell anyone who suggested closing or selling WCW to stuff it, but after the AOL-Time Warner merger, he was placed in a figurehead position with no real power, which resulted in Kellner assigning a Standards and Practices person to sit in on all Creative meetings. As ratings continued to slide, JK's solution was to show Bischoff the door and replace him with more Standards and Practices guys. Side note: Kellner is also the man responsible for killing off a slew of awesome cartoons, and he's also probably the man who cancelled your childhood: He's the only who cancelled Animaniacs, and retooled Pinky and the Brain into Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Jim Herd attempted to make WCW into a product similar to the WWF. His efforts led to several horrible gimmicks with short shelf lives, including: the bell-ringing tag team known as the Ding Dongs, lumberjack Big Josh (the late Matt Bourne, known as the original Doink the Clown), and attempting to retool Ric Flair with a Roman gladiator gimmick named Spartacus.
  • It wasn't too long after Goldberg's streak died that Hogan went back to wearing the red and gold. It was '99 and WCW felt the only way to get back up in the ratings was Hulkamania. Raw had their own veteran stable in D-Generation X, sure, but they also experimented with new and unusual characters like The Rock, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, and Mankind—something WCW would not experiment with. They lost a lot of their novelty and with it their once-mighty audience.
• Follow-Up Failure:
  • nWo Souled Out was supposed to result in a brand split long before SmackDown. It gets a lot of flack because it signalled the decline of the nWo storyline, and it didn't really make any sense from a perspective of a paying customer to have the heels controlling everything. It didn't help that every match used the exact same formula except for the ladder match: WCW guy gets advantage, crooked nWo referee screws him somehow, and nWo guy wins. Everyone either walks out to nWo music, or none at all. The nWo's theme is badass, but not for every match. The heel commentators are what really threw it out of whack. They also had a disembodied voice over the loudspeaker in the arena berating the faces during their matches. It did 170,000 buys, which is the lowest WCW would do until 1999, and not really a shock when you don't have a full card going into the show^note The Royal Rumble taking place the week before probably didn't help either, there's a reason WCW tried to avoid doing PPV's in January, March, August, and November before they started doing them monthly. (Also not surprising that Eddie and Syxx can't be bothered killing themselves in a ladder match for 5,000 people in Cedar Rapids.)
    Dave Meltzer: Bischoff spent more time trying to get over that he knows karate and Scott Hall invented ladder matches than build drama into a damn good match [...] the show was about as much fun to watch as three hours of somebody masturbating. In fact, I'm not sure that isn't what we were watching.
  • Nitro on TNT was a television success, but Thunder on TBS ended up being a more middling affair.
• God Does Not Own This World: After several failed attempts to cross-promote with KISS, The Misfits and the rap group No Limit Soldiers which was led by Master P, Time Warner said goodbye to Bischoff and brought in two former WWF writers: Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara. Less than three months later, Russo and Ferrara were shown the door, as well, and the Kevins (Nash and Sullivan) were put in charge on Nitro.
• Hostility on the Set: Despite Kevin Sullivan's repeated denials, everyone who was there near-universally agrees he had this with Chris Benoit. See, Sullivan booked a storyline where his wife Woman (a.k.a. Nancy) had an affair with Benoit and invoked Enforced Method Acting to make it seem real. This included having them share motel rooms, holding hands, and even occasionally kissing — all of which eventually led to Nancy and Benoit falling in love for real and Nancy legitimately leaving Sullivan for her new beau. The bad blood that resulted from this was so great that it's universally agreed upon that one of the reasons Benoit left WCW for the WWF with the rest of the Radicalz was because WCW had elected to make Sullivan head booker again^note In an attempt to get Benoit to stay, and to convince him that he wouldn't be buried, Sullivan had him win the WCW world title. Benoit was still given his release the next day, without losing the belt in the ring, both Benoit and Sullivan said in interviews later that he would have happily put someone over on his way out, but Turner didn't want to risk him getting injured and having to pay for treatment for a guy that was leaving. Fortunately for them he didn't take the belt with him, though WWE would get it a little over a year later anyway.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While Nitro and Thunder became more easily available with the inception of the WWE Network, it has yet to show other WCW tertiary programming such Saturday Night, Main Event, Worldwide^note The first two and part of the third seasons of WCW Saturday Night are on the network, but nothing after mid-1994. Outside of the quarterly Clash of the Champions specials there's no WCW TV at all from 1990 or 1991 on the network, and there's also a pretty big gap from early 1994 to the premiere of WCW Monday Nitro in September 1995... not to mention the Mid South/UWF stuff, old JCP episodes and anything else WWE still has in their libraries.
• Lying Creator: WCW rigged the polls on their website so that if fans voted for a "Match of the Night" that made someone they didn't want to push/look good, they would instead officially count it towards a more preferable choice.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.":
  • People forget that Sean Waltman was doing crotch chops in WCW months before DX even existed.^note He was actually doing them even before that, you can see him crotch chopping towards the end of his run as the 1-2-3 Kid in the WWF
  • Before his WWE career, The Undertaker appeared in WCW as "Mean" Mark Callous. Reportedly, it was Hogan himself who brought Undertaker to Vince McMahon's attention, after they got acquainted when both appeared on Suburban Commando. The rest is history.
  • WCW had just started a cruiserweight tag team division at the time of their closing, complete with a tournament which concluded at Greed, the final pay per view. One of the teams in the tournament was called Air Raid, a couple of flight suit-wearing guys named Air Paris and Air Styles. Air Paris never hit the big-time after the sale; Air Styles became AJ Styles and, well, let's say that he went on to have a rather phenomenal career.
• Money, Dear Boy:
  • At the time of Hall and Nash's departure from the then-WWF, there was something in the industry called "Sting Money". Basically, WCW top guy Sting made more money than anyone else did ($750,000). If you could get Sting Money, or close to it, you were among the highest paid guys in the business. But when Turner bought WCW, the talent budget exploded. There was also a "Favored Nations" clause in Hall's contract (and pretty much every top talent in WCW) which stated his pay would get bumped up to match whoever came in after him. So when Nash came in, Hall got a raise. Hall also said that when he was with WWF, he had to chase every penny from Accounting, whereas in WCW they gave him multiple checks per week, sometimes for reasons they couldn't explain, and the checks were always for more than he was expecting. The executives at AOL must have crapped their pants when they opened WCW's books.
  • It wasn't the best use of Bret Hart (and he agreed it wasn't a great debut), but Bret always looked like he was just visiting. He never seemed comfortable at all in WCW. On the execution of it, he wrote,
    I was bedazzled enough by that sold-out Nitro that for the first time I felt that WCW might actually work out for me... Personally, I thought that appearing as a referee would be a lackluster debut, but what did I know? What did I care? I wanted to comply, to do whatever they asked to the best of my ability—win, lose or draw—then pick up my check and come home safe. Nobody would accuse me of taking this business too seriously ever again.
• Network to the Rescue: WCW Saturday Night and Worldwide were cheap and easy programs for TBS, drawing even better ratings than TNA ever did. Wrestling's ratings also really helped TBS in those early days, and it's believed that Ted Turner felt he had a debt of gratitude to "the wrasslin'’ business." The narrative of the Monday Night Wars being a personal vendetta between Ted Turner and Vince McMahon is false, as well. There was some animosity there, mostly on Vince's end, but Turner had very little input on WCW (short of giving them prime time and putting Bischoff in charge). Turner had no desire to put WWE out of business.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • Do not confuse World Championship Wrestling (WCW) with World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW). It was a totally different promotion based in Texas and run by Fritz Von Erich.
  • Australia's major wrestling promotion in the '60s and '70s was called World Championship Wrestling. It was owned by American promoter Jim Barnett, who had a stake in Georgia Championship Wrestling before Black Saturday; he named their television program after said promotion, which in turn led Ted Turner to rename the promotion after said program after he brought it. He was also a consultant for the Ted Turner-owned promotion.
• Word of God: Bischoff never considered Starrcade the biggest show of the year; that was an old-school NWA thing. Bischoff always said December PPVs didn't draw as well^note The 1997 and 1998 editions of Starrcade were the highest and 4th highest grossing PPVs in WCW history, respectively., and that he considered SuperBrawl the biggest show of the year. With that in mind, the endings to Starrcade '96 and '97 make a bit more sense. For instance: Roddy Piper vs. Hulk Hogan was never advertised as a title match, but pretty much everyone assumed that it was.

R-Z

• Real-Life Relative:
  • The Steiner Brothers and Harlem Heat were real-life siblings. A nice subversion of "Unrelated Brothers".
  • The Shockmaster is Dusty Rhodes's brother-in-law. Dusty would later recall his son Cody recognizing him even despite being under a helmet: "I THINK THATH UNCLE FWED!"
  • Horace Hogan (real name Michael Allan Bollea) is mostly remembered for his lackluster WCW run alongside his uncle. Though he had a better-received stint in FMW, participating mostly in tag team and six-man street fights^note Usually either teaming with or wrestling against his cousin Mike Awesome, who would later show up in WCW himself.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • For his debut, Dennis Rodman used Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" as his entrance, after Hulk Hogan.
  • Meanwhile, David Arquette used a cover of Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It", ripped directly from the soundtrack of Ready to Rumble.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • Scott Hall's alcoholism. Their initial response was to keep him off TV and get him to sober up. But for some reason, allowing a guy to sit at home with no work to do doesn't do much to discourage his drinking. WCW sent him home in early 2000 but hadn't released him yet, so he was able to hit the indie circuit. He did a couple house shows with ECW.
  • Both Dustin Rhodes and Barry Darsow (known at the time as the Blacktop Bully) lost their jobs after the "King of the Road" match at WCW Uncensored '95 (along with Mike Graham, the agent for the match) due to the double blade job they pulled during it, violating WCW's strict no blood policy in place at the time.
  • During the show, "Mean" Gene Okerlund would air deliberately misleading teasers in order to dupe people into calling his 900 Number. As soon as WCW's legal team caught on, they fired him because he was exposing the company to a potential fraud charge. (Hence the WWF making fun of him with those "Scheme Gene" skits.) In one "report", Gene gave the distinct impression that Ric Flair had died ("a 45-year old blond, charismatic world champion has recently passed away, and the wrestling world is stunned. Call now for details"), and it turned out to be some carnival wrestler from Eastern Europe that nobody had ever heard of. WCW rehired him at a sharply-reduced pay rate, and they put him on a tight leash never again allowing him to do any of those crazy-dishonest teasers.
• Romance on the Set:
  • Benoit was caught carrying on with Nancy Sullivan, who was then-married to Chris' boss. Then again, his boss is also the one that booked his wife and Benoit to share a hotel room every night.
  • Bischoff wanted to cordon off the Nitro Girls from the male wrestlers, but most of the girls ended up with the men anyway: Sharmell married Booker T. Stacy Keibler dated David Flair (which was the inspiration for the Daffney vs. Miss Hancock feud) and were engaged for a while. Spice dated Rey Mysterio Jr.—allegedly (according to an old Power Slam UK magazine). Whisper ended up marrying Shawn Michaels^note Michaels never even worked for WCW. Jericho mentions in his first book that he dated a few of them. Violent J from Insane Clown Posse tried to sleep with Spice, she stayed at his house but remained faithful to her chiropractor husband, with J later declaring, "I could say Nitro Girl Spice spent the night at my house and I wouldn't be lying about it." Most notorious of all, Kevin Nash announced on-air that he was leaving to go "eat a little Korean", to which Scott Steiner exclaimed, "I got that!" The "Korean" referred to Nitro Girl Chae (who was Korean-American), with whom Nash was cheating on his wife. So Nash was gloating about his infidelity on live national TV.
  • Steve Austin also met his future wife, Jeannie Clark, in WCW back when she was a valet.
  • Torrie Wilson was seeing Billy Kidman at the time, which was why they were both written into a New Blood angle. They married in 2003 but divorced five years later.
  • The KISS Demon (Dale Torborg) was dating Christie "Asya" Wolf. On air, Asya had been associated with the Radicalz before they jumped ship to WWF; after which Russo just stuck Asya with the Demon without bothering to write a reason for it, assuming fans would know about the relationship.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Vince didn't actually 'buy' WCW; he bought the video library, logos, names, pretty much anything that had to do with WCW IP, but not the actual company. Omitted from those purchases were a few ironclad contracts (such as Nash's and Hogan's) that were signed under Time Warner's name. They needed to legally keep the company in some way to pay out the contracts that were still left over, which is why WCW was renamed to Universal Wrestling Corporation (UWC), which was actually the original name of the subsidiary when it was first legally formed to buy the assets of Jim Crocket Promotions, from which Turner acquired the WCW name. This is one of the reasons why the InVasion crossover event kind of fell flat: WWF couldn't get all the superstars, just a few of them. The others were stuck in legal limbo. Another thing that was left over were lawsuits. Most notable was Eudy vs. UWC, which was filed against AOL-Time Warner after Sid broke his leg (it's on video) and his contract was terminated. Problem was, he was signed to a three-year contract in 1991, which was terminated in 2001...the same year Vince bought WCW.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • Turner execs assumed WCW would be a cash cow, but it wasn't. They assumed that Ted would bring in people who knew the business, but he appointed cronies like Jim Herd instead. Still, they always had the Turner safety net, at least until the AOL merger. (Turner's shares were so diluted that he was no longer in a position to protect them.) The buyers then discovered that WCW had become little more than a money pit, so they immediately started cutting budgets. Remember, WWE only bought the name, copyrights and video library; AOLTW was still on the hook for the bloated contracts and continued debts. It's true AOLTW wasn't fond of wrestling at that point, but a stronger product might have survived.
  • Kellner himself was a great example of incompetence, and was forced out of his AOL Time Warner job in 2003. Selling the WCW library was one of the dumbest business decisions ever. WWE made their money back and more from The Ultimate Ric Flair Collection. Time-Warner could have aired the "Best of WCW" in the AM hours and put out a DVD set every few months, and the only additional cost would be an editor. Conveniently, the executive who set the price (Kellner) and screwed his investors had worked for this small upstart in Connecticut prior to taking the position...
  • For that matter, AOL Time Warner wasn't exactly not incompetent. As The Death of WCW phrased it, "Sure, WCW may have lost $62 million in one year, but did they ever lose $54 billion in one quarter?"
• Sleeper Hit: The reveal of the "Third Man". The show itself only got a pathetic 0.71 buyrate and drew 8,300 people for a gate of $72,000, the lowest for Bash at the Beach where WCW charged admission. The year before, it had been held at Huntington Beach, CA, where the "audience" was whoever happened to have been at the beach at the time.
• Throw It In!:
  • Ah, The Shockmaster. What was supposed to be a Big Damn Entrance turned into the ultimate farce when Fred Ottman (formerly known as Tugboat/Typhoon in WWE) instantly tripped and faceplanted on the floor, scrambling to get his helmet back on after it fell off. His entrance was hamstrung long before that, since Dusty disapproved of the segment and allegedly nailed a 2x4 at shin-height against the breakaway wall. The pop for the pyro which went off just before he broke through the wall immediately deflated as soon as he tripped. And almost nobody on-set had any idea how to react. Sid Vicious tried to tell anyone who would listen before showtime that the guy was going to trip and humiliate himself in some way. (Ironically, he was the one guy out of those present who tried his damnedest to salvage the situation.)
  • According to Jericho, they literally let him do what he wanted because they didn't care. There's a reason he was wanted by WWF at the time: he knocked it out of the park during his time in WCW. He even maintained a feud with Goldberg without Goldberg being involved. (To this day, Jericho is not considered main-event material by Eric Bischoff.)
  • Hall was dismissive of Benoit ("Nobody came to see you guys, so be quick out there") and told Jericho that he would "end [Jericho's] little Terry Taylor push," but there were times when he showed better business sense than the others. Hall himself made the call to let Jericho win during their match, and got a lot of heat backstage for that; Bischoff was pissed. But Hall figured that, since Jericho was going to be on the receiving end of a post-match beatdown anyway, Hall might as well have a motive for it; his reasoning being, I’m gonna be over regardless of this match, so we might as well get someone else over, too.
  • Kevin Nash is a powerful personality; complex & polarizing. He's the type who seizes power, the inmate running the asylum. Perhaps Nash is too shrewd a character for WWE writers to get a handle on, hence why they made him the angry guy who yells because he's tall. One of the reasons why Nash was successful in WCW is because his promos were off-the-cuff and had an element of danger. Nash is also one of the wittiest people in the business as any fan who watched him in WCW & TNA will attest. During his last WWE run, Nash was forced to read verbatim, scripted PG dialog written by someone who didn't watch his Diesel or nWo runs; the one time he veered off-script was when he verbally humiliated CM Punk with his "Waffle House" line.
    Nash [IGN March 26, 2004 interview]: "I wasn't allowed to talk. I wasn't allowed to be sarcastic. I wasn't allowed to be the persona that I was. I was this person that screamed and was angry all the time, and I did, like, wrestling promos. I never did wrestling promos—I just used to speak. I used to have conversations."
• Troubled Production:
  • There are so many examples that it could fill its own page. Or a book.
  • Neglect and incompetence at the front desk is why The Iron Sheik technically had a job from 1989 to 1991, he somehow even scored a $150k contract like Poffo, but was simply sent home because he was washed up, coked out of his mind and added nothing to the shows. At the time, WCW contracts had a clause where they would automatically renew if neither side gave notice within 90 days out, WCW forgot he was under contract and were forced to pay him for another year. Someone finally realized this and tried bringing him back to just job to other up can coming talent, and he couldn't even do THAT without it looking like a complete embarrassment. So they just sent him back home.
  • The MTV Ultimate Video Bash event in 1998. The entire event took place in the rain, and had to be cut short. That's the trouble with these outdoor events, in the Gulf Coast, no less.
  • The live feed of Halloween Havoc '98 getting cut. Not everyone was affected, but everybody felt the backlash of what came next. They had to air the main event, Goldberg vs DDP (following the appalling Hogan vs. Warrior match), for free on TV because so many people had missed it.
  • Nitro and Thunder didn't communicate that well, either. The 6.21.99 episode of Thunder was supposed to feature a lumberjack match between Flair and Benoit. However, WCW forgot to tell Flair he was booked. When they saw he wasn't there at 6pm, they panicked and told him to get his ass to Syracuse. At the cost of thousands of dollars, they chartered a flight from Charlotte to get him to the arena on-time. The show was structured around Ric's promos which built to the Benoit match; as a time-filling measure, the decision was made to turn the Chris Kanyon-Perry Saturn singles match into a tag title match. However, Kanyon's partner (Bam Bam Bigelow) wasn't there either. So Kanyon defended the titles with DDP. Ric finally arrived at 9:55 pm, but they had run out the clock by then, so they told him he wasn't needed and to go back home.
  • Dennis Rodman showed up drunk as a hell for his second match, fell asleep on the ring apron, then sued the company for $550,000. The suit was settled out of court with WCW granting him a new contract for five new dates, the first of which he no-showed. (Between Hollywood Hogan and Kim Jong-un, he really seems to dig complete jerks.◊)
  • The entirety of Hog Wild/Road Wild was this for Bischoff. He was a huge Harley fan and so chose the giant Sturgis rally as the place for a new PPV. But this meant there was no live gate proceeds (typically several hundred thousand dollars for a PPV) and the ring was surrounded by a bunch of drunk, racist bikers who didn't really give a damn about wrestling.
• Wag the Director: This was back when a wrestler could threaten to defect to the other team to score a big pay day, demand almost anything they wanted, or just feed their big ego. The advantage WWF had is that the boss is also the owner and commands respect from his employees. WCW's ownership was not around and, as Paul Heyman pointed out in 1995, Bischoff was the opposite of a locker room leader.
  • Watch early Nitros and be amazed at how "Macho Man" Randy Savage would spend a match getting absolutely crushed by relative unknowns like Scott Norton, Chris Benoit, Kurasawa, "The Laughing Man" Hugh Morrus, and Craig Pittman, while Hulk Hogan was busy having the entire Four Horsemen beg off from him and beating up EIGHT members of the Dungeon of Doom by himself.
  • One of the best line items on the WCW balance sheet is Lanny Poffo (Randy Savage's brother) — $150,000. Originally, WCW had bought the rights to the name "Gorgeous George" (named after the legendary wrestler from the 50's) so that Lanny could use it. Though still collecting a 6-figure salary, Lanny never did wrestle for WCW, so they gave the moniker to Randy’s then-girlfriend (Stephanie Bellars) instead of his brother. They paid Savage's brother $150k a year, every year, and he didn't have to do anything. No travel, no wrestling. He wasn't even a backstage consultant. He just pocketed $150k a year for existing until WCW closed its doors.
  • Tony was also a producer aside from his commentator duties and—according to Heenan at least—used his clout to hog the broadcast while Heenan and Mike Tenay sat on their hands and barely got a word in.
  • Warrior went off-script during his first Nitro appearance and turned what was supposed to be a 7-minute segment into a nearly 30-minute rambling tangent. He also had considerable creative control over his character in WCW, which led to the stupid mirror segment in which everyone could clearly see Warrior haunting Hogan through his dressing room mirror...but not Bischoff, who had to pretend he didn't see anything.
• What Could Have Been: Enough for it own page.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Russo has admitted this. Vince McMahon would ask "why" before it made it to TV, but Eric would ask "why" after. He just let the booking committee handle everything except the main event guys.
  Gene Okerlund: I confronted Eric on a number of occasions. "What the hell are we doing tonight?" He said, "LEAVE ME ALONE, I DON'T KNOW YET!" And I says, "My God. We're 10 minutes before showtime here. Ya better figure it out pretty quick, because we've got a show that starts at 8:00 and we don't even have a run sheet yet!"
• Written-In Infirmity:
  • When Buff Bagwell suffered a devastating neck injury in the ring, the show was put on hold while he was tended to. The Bagwell match was meant to be followed by Benoit vs Psychosis; both top-drawer wrestlers and smark favorites who were allotted 15 minutes. But that match was cancelled. It would have been the only time the pair ever faced each other.
  • When Russo and Ferrara tried to turn the image of the company around, they were met with several setbacks, including Bret Hart's career-ending injury at the hands or, more accurately, boot of Goldberg — who then accidentally injured himself during a backstage segment two weeks later. (See below.)
  • Prior to Souled Out, Bret Hart and Jeff Jarrett phoned the office to tell them they can't work, as they both had concussions^note Jarrett got his from a match with Jimmy Snuka on Nitro. Remarkably, this was Jarrett's only major injury of his 30+ year in-ring career. This took FOUR matches off the card. Jeff Jarrett's spot in Triple Threat was instead given to Billy Kidman, and Sid Vicious vs. Bret Hart for the World Title was replaced with Sid v. Benoit for the title, which was declared null and void the next night when Benoit quit.
  • Goldberg punching through a limosine window, cutting the hell out of his arm. WCW lost their biggest star at a pivotal moment in the Monday Night Wars for several months. WCW had just revived the nWo into nWo 2000 and had no one to run through it.

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