8 Wrestlers That Visibly Hated Working For WCW
For 83 weeks and change, WCW replaced WWE as pro-wrestling's market leader. Nobody told this lot...
Ric Flair was something of a "break glass in case of emergency" wrestler for World Championship Wrestling, and it's sad that the company's long and painful decline did such a number on his confidence and self-belief as a result.
Far from the dramatic out-of-nowhere fall-off many WWE-branded documentaries boil it down to, the end of the promotion was a protracted, messy and unworkable grinding down of a failing business. Time in wrestling moved at warp speed back then but a year is still a year, and WCW spent about two of them collapsing around the talent, creatively and commercially.
Rooted in his love of his time as the touring NWA Champion and fleeting moments of real magic in the 1990s, the company had Flair's heart even when it when it was only too happy to break it. When he opened the final edition of Monday Nitro with an impassioned speech about the abridged history, the uncertain future, and a promo for one last match with (who else?) Sting, he did so with such emotion that it didn't even scan as him fighting through the various stages of grief for its demise.
Down to the very bitter end, 'The Nature Boy' couldn't have looked more like he was fighting for the cause, long after that very same cause had stopped fighting for him. The same couldn't really be said for...
8. Bobby Heenan
Visibly, aurally; it's was clear for anybody tuning in and Bobby Heenan was the first to admit it - he was there for the paycheque rather than the product when it came to calling the action in WCW.
A fantastic manager, wrestler and "broadcast journalist" in the 1970s, 80s and early-90s, Heenan moved many to consider him the best all-rounder in wrestling history, and the evidence is stacked so high it's little wonder he was viewed as quite a coup for WCW when he left WWE at the very end of 1993 to rejoin Mean Gene Okerlund on the other side of the mainstream wrestling divide.
But, by his own review and the sentiment of the vast majority of the viewing audience, WCW just didn't get the best of 'The Brain' during the six years he was on the call.
From some middling first impressions, Heenan sensed the outfit wasn't going to be the sort he was used to, and rationalised that he might as well earn good money even if only passable work was expected out of him. Far removed from the locked in legend that sat alongside Gorilla Monsoon and Vince McMahon and brought the best out everybody around him, Heenan merely played the generic and disinterested sidekick to Tony Schiavone, and - when the nWo blew up - coward WCW staffer and situational babyface.
The 1992 Royal Rumble is beloved as much for Bobby's call as Ric Flair's work, and it was only when covering matches for 'The Nature Boy' and a select few others did it feel like that legendary spark was still there.