1. Letting Steve Austin Go
"Stunning" Steve Austin was a very serviceable midcard worker for WCW in the early-1990s. A two-time WCW Television Champion, two-time WCW United States Champion, one-time NWA Tag Team Champion (with Brian Pillman), and a one-time WCW Tag Team Champion (also with Pillman), Austin could be counted on to get in the ring and have entertaining matches on a nightly basis. Unfortunately for Austin, he suffered a bit of the injury bug in the mid-90s, dealing with a knee injury and a triceps injury in the same year. WCW didn't think he was worth keeping around anymore, so Eric Bischoff fired him over the phone. The excuse was that Austin wasn't seen as someone who could ever "break the glass ceiling" and become anything more than a midcard guy that couldn't be marketed as anything special. Whoops. The rest is history, as Austin would eventually go on to help take the wrestling business to heights never thought possible, and will go down as, at the very worst, the third-biggest star in history, and at best,
the biggest star wrestling has ever seen. His meteoric rise in popularity helped to change the Monday Night War completely, ultimately giving the WWF the lead that it would not let go of. Just think about how different things could have been if WCW didn't fire him. Even if Austin had remained a midcard worker for the rest of his career and didn't become the megastar that he would eventually be, he wouldn't have been able to give the WWF any sort of success whatsoever. No "Austin 3:16", no Beer Trucks, no Stone Cold Stunners, no Austin VS McMahon, no Austin VS Rock WrestleMania trilogy, no "gimme a hell yeah", no bird flipping... all of it, gone. You could say that Mr. McMahon (hell, Vince McMahon, too) wouldn't be where he is today if not for Steve Austin. You could say The Rock wouldn't be where he is today if not for Steve Austin. You could say that Triple H wouldn't be where he is today if not for Steve Austin. There's a long list of people you could make that argument for, and if Austin had remained with WCW, how dramatic a landscape shift would we have seen for the WWF/WWE through the years? Would there even
be a WWE today? Who's to say the lack of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, mixed with the success of people like Goldberg and the nWo (even with the bad booking and decisions), wouldn't have ended with the WWF losing the Monday Night War and going out of business themselves? People forget just how close the WWF was to having that happen to them, but then Austin and others turned all of that around. That's an insane scenario to think about.