10 Biggest Promotion Killers In Wrestling History
8. Jim Herd
Jim Herd was a moderate-level Pizza Hut executive who, in 1989, was entrusted with the role of WCW's Executive Vice President.
The man knew nothing about professional wrestling. In 1989, the NWA was at its artistic peak. The main event scene was stacked with established, money-drawing talent - but Herd soon decimated it by alienating the likes of Ricky Steamboat and Ric Flair with pay cuts and, in the case of the latter, a proposed new gimmick: Spartacus! Flair was out, even though he remained WCW's biggest draw by some distance. Herd wanted to move with the times and beyond the 1980s - by refashioning Flair as the hero of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 epic.
Herd didn't kill WCW (though he came close) - but he killed its straight-laced identity, implementing a raft of gimmicks, like the Ding Dongs, that even Vince McMahon would have sniffed at. It would only flourish after his reign as a result of its weirdly symbiotic relationship with the WWF. WCW became WWF-lite in 1994 and 1995 - only supplanting the WWF by presenting a cracked funhouse mirror version of it between 1996 and 1998 - before copying it almost verbatim once more, in 1999.
The dying horse was then sent to the glue factory in 2001 by...