10 WCW Stars Who Were Fired For Unprofessional Conduct

First things first - we’re clearly laying ourselves wide open to a few hilariously pithy rejoinders with this headline, so let’s get them out of the way now.

Yes, contrary to WWE’s prevailing narrative, WCW actually did have its own stars, and no, WCW isn’t itself an amusing synonym for ‘unprofessional conduct’. Vince McMahon, WWE and the writers of Wrestlecrap’s Death Of WCW book like to paint a picture of World Championship Wrestling as a horrendous car crash of a promotion, bursting into flames as it merrily tumbled off the cliff into the sea.

While it’s true that WCW was a hot mess in its dying years, this is the promotion that introduced the format of wrestling on free television that you’re watching on WWE today, and the promotion that popularised cruiserweight wrestling and lucha libre for a worldwide audience. The WWF was only able to begin competing with WCW once they adopted much of their rival’s style and content: in turn, WCW found itself unable to match the WWF’s more racy programming, hamstrung by Turner Broadcasting’s standards and practices.

Finally: yes, many more WCW wrestlers probably deserved to be sacked for unprofessional conduct than are included on this list. Were we to write an article on WCW wrestlers who deserved to be fired for unprofessional conduct, it’d be a longer article than anyone wants to read, and every other paragraph would start with the words ‘Scott Steiner’. 

That being said, let’s concentrate on those that were let go, and why…

The future WWF/E superstar known as Goldust went by a more familiar name in his first WCW run from February 1991 to March 1995: Dustin Rhodes, nicknamed ‘The Natural’.

Rhodes’ first WCW run was notable for a short-lived tag team championship run with his partner Barry Windham, a notorious member of the legendary Four Horsemen stable, and for his epic feud with Ravishing Rick Rude over the United States Championship. It’d be an otherwise forgettable gimmick match with the Blacktop Bully (Barry Darsow, later Smash of Demolition and the Repo Man with the WWF) at 1995’s Uncensored pay-per-view that’d cut short his promising run at that time. A strange pre-taped scrap on board the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler truck, the match’s layout specifically required the two to blade – at a time when the WCW edict from way on high was for no blood, under any circumstances.

Rhodes was a good company man and queried the agent in charge of the match, but was told that permission had been obtained from the powers that be for the participants to show a little colour. The next day it became apparent that this wasn’t the case: the Blacktop Bully and the Natural were let go for violating the blood embargo, along with the agent himself, Mike Graham, son of the great Eddie Graham.

To this day, Rhodes reckons that he and Darsow were cut rather than fired: WCW had expensive performers coming in, and he considers that the incident was staged to give Bischoff a legitimate reason to dump the two and free up some cash. Oddly, six years earlier Dustin Rhodes legendary father, the late Dusty Rhodes, The American Dream, was sacked from the same company for violating an order not to show colour on television. The Dream did it deliberately, though: he considered blood a vital storytelling tool, and was making a point.