Though World Championship Wrestling (WCW) has been dead for the better part of the past quarter century, the blame game surrounding who’s ultimately responsible for its demise seems to never stop. With the June 2024 premiere of Vice TV's Who Killed WCW? series once again picking at the scab of a wound that has never properly healed, everyone is stepping in to point the finger and play the blame game. Now it appears that wrestling legend Ric Flair is pointing that finger.
In a blistering diatribe on X (formerly known as Twitter), “The Nature Boy” took a scorched Earth approach to the seemingly unanswerable question of “Who killed WCW?” and specifically named several former high-ranking WCW officials – Jim Herd, Eric Bischoff, and Vince Russo – who he referred to as “A Three-Headed Monster:”
I’ve tried to lay low on this but let’s face it- who killed WCW? It’s a three-headed monster! Jim herd, @ebischoff, and @thevincerusso!!! There’s no individual wrestler or faction that caused anything to kill WCW. It was the people in charge that created dysfunction, animosity, and tried to divide and conquer by lying to everyone and involving themselves in the promotion which was the ultimate failure! God, I could give you a thousand more examples. I am one to live through all three nightmares and to be saved by the @wwe! thank you to the WWE for bringing someone who was dead in the water as a result of these three people back to life!
Flair, who "retired" from wrestling in 2022, had beef with all three men named in the above quote throughout different portions of his run in WCW during much of the promotion’s existence. It didn’t stop when WCW was purchased by WWE (known as WWF at the time) in March 2001. In fact, it looks like these grudges won’t be coming to an end anytime soon.
Jim Herd and Flair butted heads throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s when the former was named Executive Vice President of WCW. Herd famously stripped Flair of his WCW World Heavyweight Championship and fired the NWA mainstay in July 1991, which led to Flair showing up on WWF programming with the “Big Gold” belt and ultimately winning the WWF Championship at the 1992 Royal Rumble.
Flair pointing out Herd felt a little random, especially since the executive wasn’t part of the company when it took its death spiral just after the turn of the 21st century. Still, hos comments about Eric Bischoff and Vince Russo are pretty standard among wrestlers and wrestling fans, as both men have been the scapegoats for the company’s shuttering in 2001. I previously wrote that while it makes sense for Bischoff and Russo to be blamed for WCW’s downfall, the AOL Time Warner merger did just as much damage to the company, if not more.
If you want to know more about World Championship Wrestling and everything that led to its downfall, check out Who Killed WCW? Tuesday nights on Vice TV, one of the most exciting and enlightening wrestling shows on the 2024 TV calendar.
