8 Best WCW Cruiserweight Championship Matches

Two years earlier at WCW's biggest pay-per-view, Dean Malenko and Ultimo Dragon were thrilling an audience who were getting used to this relatively new division and style.

What made WCW's cruiserweight division so great is exactly what made New Japan Pro Wrestling's early 90s Junior Heavyweight scene and WWE's current Cruiserweight Classic series great, too. Namely, the blending of different styles from around the world, from lucha libre, to European technical, to Japanese puro style and traditional American.

Two of the most distinctive styles belonged to Messrs Dragon and Malenko, the former favouring a 'lucharesu' blend of Japanese and Mexican techniques, with lots of strikes and aerials and the latter focused more on ground-based submission holds and methodically wearing down an opponents limb.

The two gelled wonderfully well and had many superb matches in WCW, but their showdown at Starrcade '96 sticks out as being the best. 'The Iceman' spent the majority of the contest controlling the flow, wearing Dragon down suplexes and working the leg while the masked man intermittently made comeback attempts to no avail.

Malenko drilled Dragon with a vicious Tombstone pildriver and brainbuster for two great near falls, which had the crowd on the edge of their seats towards the end, but Dragon wouldn't stay down. Ultimo managed to rally late on, hitting an Asai moonsault but missing a regular moonsault in the ring, leaving him exposed to Malenko's attack.

In the end it came down to a game of reversals, with Dragon ending a sequence by hitting the match-winning Tiger suplex, unifying the WCW Cruiserweight and NJPW J-Crown (at least temporarily).