10 WCW Stars Who Were Fired For Unprofessional Conduct

In early 1998, Darren Matthews was wrestling for WCW as Lord Steven Regal. Sadly, the man who would become William Regal in the WWF was a lost soul: a victim of drug addiction who was beginning to become the liability for WCW that he’d been for some time at home with his long-suffering wife.

WCW finally let him go in early 1998, when it became clear that his issues weren’t being resolved. It would take an enforced stay in a rehabilitation facility while under contract with the WWF some time later for Matthews to truly hit rock bottom. Funnily enough, fans continue to believe something entirely different was the reason for Regal’s sacking: namely, that he’d exposed the promotion’s great white hope, Goldberg, in a match on Nitro in February of that year, and embarrassed everyone.

Regal contends that he was told by the match’s agent that he was to give Goldberg a competitive six minutes before lying down to become the undefeated goliath’s thirty-fifth victim. As the veteran and the heel, it was his job to call the match on behalf of the upstart rookie: what followed wasn’t pretty, as Goldberg was used to working the same three-minute squash match, and appeared confused and uncoordinated throughout the bout.

Regal claims that he was chewed out good and proper backstage after the match for making Goldberg look stupid, and that the agent who’d laid out the match pretended he wasn’t there and allowed him to take the fall… nonetheless, he also claims that this was nothing to do with his sacking weeks later, and that it was his substance abuse issues that led to his dismissal. The truth is probably somewhere in-between.