10 Things Everybody Gets Wrong About WCW
3. Girls, Girls, Girls
Depending on which of them has less heat internally at the time, WWE will ordinarily credit Sunny or Sable with the reinvention of female performers as sex symbols in the late-1990s, but WCW were quicker off the mark with the crowd-pleasing choreography of the Nitro Girls in 1997.
As innovative then as it is dated now, the dance troupe were employed effectively as cheerleaders to keep audiences hyped during commercials and lend glitz to the dynamic broadcast making a play for Monday Night dominance.
Whilst Sunny shone as a manager in 1996 and Sable drew main event-level reactions between 1998 and 1999, the very notion of employing women to perform beyond the realms of the traditional valet/wrestler role was unheard-of before Eric Bischoff and Kimberley Page collaborated in creating the group.
Competition winner Stacy Keibler joined the gang in 1999 and went on to have one of the more successful careers of all active females at the time following WWE's buyout of WCW in 2001. Rebecca Curci and Sharmell Sullivan would go on to marry Shawn Michaels and Booker T respectively, with Sullivan achieving additional fame as Booker's valet and 'Queen' between 2005 and 2009.