Separating the NWA and WCW World Titles

[sek69]

A thread I'm posting in over at Smarkschoice reminded me of all the confusion surrounding the Big Gold Belt and how despite what a lot of people think, the NWA and WCW World Titles are actually two separate entities.

 

I thought I'd make a thread explaining the admittedly messy lineage of the two titles for easy reference the next time you run across someone who thinks they're the same thing.

 

First off, the backstory. Turner bought Jim Crockett Promotions in 1988 and soon started rebranding it as World Championship Wrestling. At this time WCW was still a member of the National Wrestling Alliance, albeit pretty much the only member of any substance left at that point.

 

1991 is where the mess starts, when Ric Flair faced off with Tatsumi Fujinami in the WCW/NJPW Supershow in Tokyo. Fujinami wins the match and the NWA title, but Flair was still the WCW champion. This marked the first time there was separate champions. Flair would reunify the belts two months later, but it was a sign of things to come.

 

When Ric Flair left for the WWF, he was stripped of the WCW title on 7/1/91, but he wasn't stripped of the NWA title until 9/8/91 (which was a mere 2 days before his WWF debut).

 

On 7/14/91 Lex Luger beat Barry Windham in the infamous Bash 91 fiasco to win the WCW World title, while the NWA World title remained vacant until Masahiro Chono won a tournament in Japan on 8/12/92.

 

Offically, the WCW World title started a new line at this point. What caused the confusion that exists to this day is that in 1993, the NWA and WCW started to work together again, with the NWA World and tag titles being defended on WCW TV.

 

WCW Champion Ric Flair beat NWA Champion Barry Windham on 7/18/93 unifying, for the moment, both belts. The NWA and WCW tag titles were also unified at this point too.

 

Then it happened. WCW quit the NWA in September of 93, vacating NWA titles held by WCW wrestlers. WCW couldn't bill the holder of the Big Gold Belt as the NWA World Champion anymore so we instead got the nonsense of the WCW International Heavyweight Title. While that was going on, the NWA had a tournament to name a new champion, which ended up being Shane Douglas who famously threw down the belt and created ECW.

 

WCW finally "unified" the WCW World and WCW International titles, allowing them to use the Big Gold Belt as the WCW World title again.

 

The NWA ended up finding a champion who wouldn't throw down the belt in Chris Candido, and then gave Dan Severn a 4 year reign as champ that actually saw the NWA grow and add more members than any point in its history. After a year or two of bouncing around the indy circuit, the NWA Board of Directors gave TNA control of the World and tag titles in 2002 and the rest is history.

 

So, to sum things up:

 

1. The WCW title only existed from 1991 to 2001, unless you want to count the time it was being defended in WWE.

2. The NWA title was the main title in JCP/WCW up until Ric Flair left for the WWF in 1991.

3. The "WCW International Title" was pretty much the boneheaded way WCW came up with to get the Big Gold Belt back as the belt for the WCW Title.

4. None of the above have any link to the current WWE Smackdown World Championship, in fact the whole idea of the WWE using the Big Gold Belt to give it credibility is the same thing WCW did with its world championship (using its prestige as the symbol of the NWA World title).

 

Hopefully that makes things slightly more clear in a topic muddled by typical wrestling politics and carny BS.

[Bix]

WCW Champion Ric Flair beat NWA Champion Barry Windham on 7/18/93 unifying, for the moment, both belts. The NWA and WCW tag titles were also unified at this point too.

Flair wasn't WCW Champion then, Vader was. Flair would then lose the Big Gold Belt to Rude and go on to win the WCW belt from Vader at Starrcade.

[sek69]

Indeed he did. Illustrates how confusing that time period was.