10 Wrestling Legends WCW Buried

WCW pulled off some amazing feats during the Monday Night Wars. The nWo remains one of the greatest angles in history, regardless of how frivolous it got in later years. They also introduced lucha libre and a sterling cruiserweight division to US wrestling, impressing audiences while the commentators harped on about the main event instead.

Ted Turner's promotion kicked off in response to the Black Saturday disaster. Miffed by McMahon's antics and dead-on-arrival ratings, Turner bought JCP and formed WCW in 1988. With new booker Eric Bischoff on the rise by the mid-90s, the company started poaching WWE stars with giant contracts.

While the money was mind-blowing, many stars found themselves in poor creative spots or, worse still, no spot at all. A bad case of letting the inmates run the asylum, WCW's status as no.1 soon gave way to topsy turvy booking, chaotic backstage politics and botched angles. There was also the key issue of older, more established stars refusing to open the main event scene to fresher figures, a problem that plagued it even at the best of times.

WCW becoming a thing of the past was even quicker than its rise to the top. Dragging a boatload of star power down with it, countless workers suffered the setbacks of a promotion that ultimately had no idea what the hell it was doing...

Scott Levy's misanthropic sociopath was a smash hit with the ECW faithful. An effective heel cashing in on the 90s grunge craze, Raven became a dependable heat magnet for the land of extreme. When he arrived in WCW in late 97, it didn't take long for him to get under fans' skin there either.

Sadly for Raven, Eric Bischoff and co. were not into grunge (or nu metal, an aesthetic Raven would later adopt to keep the persona hip) and found his dark persona depressing. Despite the high quality of his promos and psychology, Raven found himself looking up at the lights far too often to be a credible threat. Even the interference of the Flock, a WCW take on his old Raven's Nest faction, wasn't enough to realign his win-loss ratio adequately. A US Title win during his feud with perennial fan favourite Diamond Dallas Page offered a glimmer of hope. Unfortunately, he was demolished by Goldberg in a notorious squash match the next night.

The decision to reveal Raven as secretly a spoilt, rich kid brat in 98 provided some funny segments but ultimately became character assassination. Now devoid of the menace and dramatic flair he had in ECW, Raven understandably ditched WCW soon after.