Exposing The Myth: Pre-nWo WCW Was Trash

Extreme Championship Wrestling is rightly credited with giving the wrestling business an added sense of violence during its heyday in the late '90s, yet the early part of that decade saw WCW serving up a product with a vastly different sense of physicality to what the masses were at that point used to seeing in the World Wrestling Federation.

The WWF had some all-time great workers under contract during those early '90s years, with names like Bret Hart, Curt Hennig, Shawn Michaels, and Randy Savage all able to put on classics when afforded the opportunity. In WCW though, the matches had a snugness and heavy hitting nature that was rare to see on a mainstream platform.

AJPW and NJPW audiences were used to seeing that stiffer style, but those promotions weren't widely available at that point in time. But for WCW, those pre-nWo years saw the in-ring action being a mixture of the classic NWA style and the smashmouth style seen in Japan, with the clubbing, heavy hitting work of the likes of Big Van Vader, Rick and Scott Steiner, Terry Gordy, and 'Dr. Death' Steve Williams being on display alongside the more brutal antics of names such as Cactus Jack, Maxx Payne, and The Nasty Boys.

For its time, that period of WCW programming was serving up a level of violence that most wrestling fans had yet to discover.