10 Secrets Nobody Has Told You About WCW
Why 'Stunning' Steve Austin was absolutely better than 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin.
Somehow, it's 22 years since the then-WWF purchased its greatest competition, World Championship Wrestling.
To us more seasoned (see: old) wrestling fans, it seems like only yesterday that Big Van Vader was terrifying audiences and babyfaces alike, that Sting reinvented himself as the Crow, that Goldberg's streak was building steam, that the nWo were dominating TV time, that Jeff Jarrett lay down for Hulk Hogan, or that Booker T won his first World Championship. In reality, some of those things bafflingly took place over 25 years ago.
When WCW was great, it was fantastic. When WCW was bad... man, we had poor Judy Bagwell on a forklift, Viagra on a pole, Tank Abbott running around with a knife, Ric Flair locked up in a mental asylum, and Rick Steiner calling out Chucky of Child's Play fame. Ah, the good old days.
Across the years since WCW closed its doors, there's been plentiful time for reflection and similarly plentiful time for certain facts and slices of trivia to come to the fore. And that's what we're shining a spotlight on here.
With that in mind, then, here are ten secrets about WCW that you may well be unaware of or that have simply been lost in the annuls of time.
10. The Bite That Changed The Course Of Wrestling History?
Sure, the Austin Era and the wider energy and electricity of the Attitude Era is what drove the World Wrestling Federation on its way to finally toppling WCW in the famed Monday Night Wars, but one other key figure in WWF's success back than was Mike Tyson.
Iron Mike was brought in as the Shawn Michaels-biased enforcer for the Heartbreak Kid's WrestleMania XIV match against the rising Austin. As such, the build to this 'Mania contest had Tyson and the Texas Redneck butting heads as the Showcase of the Immortals loomed large.
The appearances of the legendary boxer brought a whole slew of fresh, mainstream eyes to the WWF product of the time, and the magnetism between Tyson and Austin likewise showcased Stone Cold in an impressive light to those new eyes.
Oh, how things could've been so different...
While Eric Bischoff has cited Mike Tyson as a major influence in turning the Monday Night Wars in WWF's favour, it's also been revealed that WCW had at one point planned to bring Tyson in.
As detailed by Bruce Pritchard and Conrad Thompson on a Royal Rumble 1998-centric episode of Something to Wrestle, Tyson was supposed to appear on the 30 June 1997 episode of WCW Nitro; an episode of Nitro that took place just two days after Mike Tyson took on Evander Holyfield for a second time.
Of course, this was the fight were Tyson bit part of one of Holyfield's ears off, which subsequently saw his planned WCW appearance cancelled.