WCW Born: Right after the Crocketts and Dusty pumped every ounce of life out of the NWA territory known in the magazines as "The Mid-Atlantic Region". Under the Crocketts, it benefited from its NWA alliance, but even during its prime, it wasn't as good as, say, the Florida-Georgia axis. Anyway, the Crocketts had pissed away enough money and were going to fold their tent. But they knew something -- their brand of wrestling and their tradition was over huge in Atlanta and had been a staple of TBS' programming since long before anybody ever heard of TBS. 

In fact, when Vince McMahon purchased the time slot from Turner during his power grab of the mid-80s, TBS was barraged by outraged callers who didn't appreciate seeing the WWF "Superstars" instead of Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes. So Vince left, and the world was never the same.  Anyway, it was cheap programming so TBS bought it and spent over a decade trying to run it and mostly running it straight into the ground. They became WCW after the name of their big Saturday show, World Championship Wrestling.

It had a brief two-year run in the sun in the late '90s but, as always with WCW, fate, egos and incompetence conspired to doom it, bringing it lower than ever. The fall followed a bit of hubris worthy of Greek Tragedy. Eric Bischoff was being interviewed by a national magazine about the ratings war he had dominated for two years and he said something like: "I almost wish it would get competitive again. It used to be exciting, waiting to see who won. But now..."

Within a month, the WWF was advancing on him, and would soon overtake and bury him.
  
It's dead because it didn't deserve to live. Wrestling is especially Darwinian in that way.

  --Potshot Bill Kunkel, Las Vegas, 3/29/01
 

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