25 Crazy WCW Facts (That Get Progressively More Ridiculous)

2. The Original Names For Kevin Nash And Scott Hall

Eric Bischoff makes his side cash these days by bigging himself up as a super genius ahead of the curve whose brilliance was ultimately thwarted by Time Warner’s systemic mismanagement. It’s not exactly credible, but people aren’t looking for credibility when they hunt out AEW burial content. They just want to hear the slander. 

Bischoff has a point, though. He did revolutionise pro wrestling, albeit by drawing heavily from Paul Heyman’s ECW. Wrestlers were no longer caricatures, the action was futuristic, the general vibe was actually cool and disruptive. But, according to the incredibly well-researched book ‘Nitro’ by Guy Evans, this cutting edge approach almost didn’t happen. 

Scott Hall and Kevin Nash famously jumped ship from the WWF in mid-1996. That they performed under their real names, as extensions of themselves, depicted WCW as the more real, less insulting promotion in contrast to the Fed. They actually almost went by catastrophically bad gimmick names, however. 

Hall was originally going to go by ‘The Bad Guy’, which was his WWF nickname. That rules, actually, but it gets worse. In WCW, it always gets worse. In some Nitro format sheets, he was listed as Razor Ramone. That is wonderfully terrible, the most LOLWCW means imaginable of attempting to circumvent copyright laws. the Ultimate Warrior’s WCW debut was delayed over a similar matter. They should have just called him the Ultimate Warriore. Sorted! 

WCW initially opted for the usual route when renaming Kevin Nash. Where Earthquake became Avalanche, Nash’s original moniker was ‘Axel’ or ‘Axcel’ - as in, vehicles run on diesel, and those names are a ‘90s-style misspelling of axle, a vehicle part. It’s better than ‘Unleaded’, which is what you’d probably have expected of WCW’s braintrust.