7 Wrestlers WCW Gave Up On

At the height of their 1998 excess, the long-departed Atlanta promotion WCW had something like 700,000 wrestlers on their active roster, not including loanees from Japan and those sent on exchange programmes in the other direction.

So it's only natural - similar to the problem WWE have today owing to their gratuitously large talent pool - that not everybody could be pushed to the top of the card. In fact, the fat contracts and creative control of an elite, black-and-white wearing cartel virtually guaranteed that all but half a dozen or so veterans occupied the sharp end of PPVs for all of WCW's brief time on top.

That's not to say the company didn't try to make new stars. It's just that they when they did, they'd more often than not fall foul of the Hogan test. WCW turned the boat around on a handful of potential new draws in the pre-nWo years of Nitro, nearly all of them owing to a yellow and red intervention. After the faction's emergence, routes to the top became basically impassable.

And that's when WCW clearly stopped even trying in earnest. They can't have been serious about Berlyn, right?

WCW were so convinced of snagging The Ultimate Warrior's signature ahead of Uncensored '95 that they started hyping the debut at the show of "The Ultimate Surprise!".

Only, they didn't get big Jim to sign on the dotted line - yet continued to promote him anyway.

Come the pay-per-view, out ran a man something almost but not entirely unlike the Warrior, replete with slightly off facepaint and slightly off Jimmy Hart theme music. Given some fans aren't willing to believe to this very day that the actual Ultimate Warrior who appeared at WrestleMania VIII was the real deal, absolutely nobody was falling for WCW's scam.

'The Renegade', as he was known, looked like Warrior - if you squinted your brain - and he moved like Warrior. He was even pushed like Warrior, almost immediately beating Arn Anderson for the Television Championship. But this wasn't Warrior, and WCW's fans rightly rejected the lame gimmick.

When the real McCoy contacted several magazines to dispel any suggestion that this significantly smaller and significantly crapper copy was him, the game was up. Their scheme exposed, WCW quickly took the TV title off Renegade and sent him plummeting down the pecking order.