^{Click here to see WCW's 1999-2001 logo.}

"Here we are 15 years later and I can honestly say that [WCW's closure in 2001] was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of wrestling."

— Dave Meltzer on the Lapsed Fan

World Championship Wrestling was an American Professional Wrestling company which, as Eric Bischoff famously put it, beat the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) at their own game for 83 weeks. Naturally, this success didn't come right away.

Historically based out of Atlanta, it began as a regional NWA territory, first as Georgia Championship Wrestling and later Jim Crockett Promotions. From its inception, JCP had big names like Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, and Ricky Steamboat carrying the company, along with up-and-comers like Sting and Lex Luger. At this iteration, the company attempted to compete on a national level. Unfortunately, in spite of their TV deals and name recognition in the States, the company was very careless with money. In 1988, after a string of financial and creative mishaps, it was sold to cable TV pioneer Ted Turner and re-named World Championship Wrestling.

Its first flagship show was WCW Saturday Night, a continuation of the same Saturday night wrestling show that had emanated out of Atlanta since 1971. It was two hours long and had more than a few squash matches, just like every other show at the time. However, there were times where they'd let a young unknown get a shot at perennial world champion Flair and actually give him a run for his money. It also served as a springboard for wrestlers who would go on to achieve fame in later years, with Dustin Rhodes, Cactus Jack, and The Hollywood Blonds ("Stunning" Steve Austin and Brian Pillman) appearing for the first time on national television.

Saturday Night would eventually cede its flagship status to Nitro in 1995, a long-shot idea by Bischoff to compete with Raw in their own timeslot, in what would later become known as the Monday Night Wars. He had the perfect blueprint for a wrestling show: make sure there is variety, showcasing different styles of wrestling (often with interesting stipulations); Live TV in an age when viewers had their attention divided; and most importantly, have a mega-angle going on with the New World Order. Pro wrestling was forever changed by the nWo in some ways, with each show ending on a cliffhanger. Think WrestleMania hype, but weekly. Saturday Night would then decline in status to the C-show with the 1998 launch of Thunder, eventually being ended in 2000.

Nitro was seen as the superior product for years, until it hit a creative wall. Bischoff, as it was judged later, measured everything by the ratings, so when Raw eventually rebounded, he had no plan or faith in his own product. While Ring Oldies were given most of the screentime, up-and-comers like Chris Jericho, Diamond Dallas Page, Raven, and Booker T either 1) didn't get elevated like they should have, or 2) it was handled poorly and came about too late. The Cruiserweight Division went from being "the future of wrestling" (as Bischoff touted them as on his show) to being "vanilla midgets" who "couldn't draw"; the over-reliance on one storyline, with most of the babyfaces forming an nWo offshoot; and, most notorious of all, PPV-worthy events like Goldberg vs. Hulk Hogan being relegated to episodes of Nitro instead for the sake of winning the ratings war.

As quick as the rise of WCW to the top was between the debut of Nitro in 1995, the nWo's emergence at Bash at the Beach 1996, and the culmination of the Sting/nWo feud in 1997, so too was its fall from grace. The aforementioned over-reliance on the nWo started to grate viewers at a time where WWF rapidly catching up with its own Attitude Era, and talent like Sting, Nash, Hogan, and Goldberg became replaced in the public consciousness by the likes of The Rock, The Undertaker, Triple H and Steve Austin. The turning point came on January 4, 1999, where the infamous Fingerpoke Of Doom took place. In front of 40,000 fans at the Georgia Dome, Nash laid down for Hogan to reunite the nWo and put the Big Gold Belt back around the Hulkster's waist. To add insult to injury, Bischoff ordered commentator Tony Schiavone to spoil that night's (pre-taped) Raw and tell viewers not to switch channels to see Mick Foley finally win the WWF Championship, at which point half a million viewers did exactly that.

WCW never recovered from that night, and the following two years led to Bischoff chasing "quick fixes" to the ratings that never worked. By the end of 1999, Bischoff managed to snag controversial writer Vince Russo from WWF, who promptly started to institute his own "crash TV" style of presentation upon the product, which didn't work as well as it did in WWF. Over the next two years, questionable booking became incomprehensible – including infamous occasions where both Russo and actor David Arquette would both hold the world championship – and revenues and ratings declined. By 2000, with roster contracts ballooning, WCW was in a massive financial black hole, but there was one further road-bump that forced WCW off the road for good: AOL.

Ted Turner was a massive wrestling fan, and he saw WCW as the crown jewel of the TBS Superstation; he was more than willing to see his own company absorb the financial losses of WCW. But the AOL–Time Warner merger in 2000 saw Ted Kicked Upstairs, and the new accountants decided to rein in WCW's excesses. But it was too late to correct the nose-dive the product was in, and alongside a desire to cater to more "high-brow" tastes and despite Bischoff's best efforts, Nitro and Thunder were cancelled, effective April 1, 2001. With no TV time-slot and massive debts, WCW's assets were sold to Vince McMahon on March 23, 2001 for $2.5 million, a far cry from WCW making $500 million just two years prior. The name of WCW would live on for a few more months as part of the invasion storyline (with ECW joining Team WCW that summer), but the name of WCW would finally be put to rest at WWF's Survivor Series on November 18, 2001, with WWF reigning supreme.

The downfall of WCW (and also, for that matter, ECW) has been a mixed bag. In the aftermath of them going under, a whole host of new independent promotions raced to fill the void left by the organization, most notably TNA and Ring of Honor. But over the next two decades, no promotion could even come close to competing with WWE for the affection or attention of most wrestling fans, and WWE would go through its own rollercoaster of quality, albeit with none of the highest highs or the lowest lows that both companies experienced in the 1990s. The only wrestling promotion to arguably come close to going toe-to-toe with WWE like WCW did since has been All Elite Wrestling, which launched in 2019 and has firmly rooted itself as a solid #2 promotion. WCW itself has become a cautionary tale of what happens in the industry when you fly too close to the sun, and most promotions since often look back to see what they can learn from WCW without replicating its mistakes.

By the year WCW disbanded, 2001, they recognized the following championships:

• WCW World Heavyweight Championship - Established in 1991;^note WCW used to – and WWE still does – try to say that this title dates back to 1948, 1904, or even the 1800s due to a completely false claim that it shares the same lineage with the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship. Exactly how far back that title's lineage goes is a subject for a different page, but make no mistake about it, the WCW and NWA belts have always been two separate titles that really have no connection to each other outside of the fact that the guy that held the NWA title at the time was awarded the WCW title by default. WCW and the NWA completely severed ties in 1993 and the NWA title has been active ever since, as of January 2024 EC3 is the champion. As a further note, when WCW and the NWA divorced, WCW got custody of the physical Big Gold Belt, then NWA-champion Ric Flair stayed in WCW (even if he was for all purposes now the champion of nothing), and the prestige of the BGB arguably followed too. WCW eventually created the "International Heavyweight Championship" so the physical belt would have something to represent; this would be unified with the real WCW title in 1994. The WCW International Championship is generally not considered a "real" world title, for example Flair held the title twice but those are not counted as part of his 16 world title reigns. it was defended on WWF programming until it was unified with the WWF Championship (established in 1963) to become the Undisputed WWF Championship on December 9, 2001.
• WCW Cruiserweight Championship - "Cruiserweight" here means a weight limit of 225 lbs. It was defended in WWE until its retirement in 2008; it was supposed to be unified with WWF's Light Heavyweight Championship in November 2001 before then-Light Heavyweight Champion X-Pac got injured. WCW previously had the WCW Light Heavyweight Championship that only lasted about 10 months from 1991-92^note Mainly as a vehicle to help get Brian Pillman over. With a weight limit of 235 lbs both Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart would have been eligible had they been in WCW (according to their billed weights), and Randy Savage would have only needed to cut two pounds to make it, these titles do not share a lineage.
• WCW United States Heavyweight Championship - Established in 1975 under Jim Crockett Promotions; is currently one of WWE's two mid-card titles as the WWE United States Championship.
• WCW World Tag Team Championship - Defended on WWF programming, then unified with the WWF Tag Team Titles on November 18, 2001.
• WCW Cruiserweight Tag Team Championship - After WWF's purchase of WCW, it was the only title to be abandoned and never mentioned again on WWE programming. Understandable, as the first champions were crowned eight days before the buyout.^note The WWF might have kept this title if the second (and last) champions joined the company after the buyout, but while Billy Kidman was part of the Invasion angle Vince didn't even want Rey Mysterio Jr. without his mask, once Rey was able to convince the Box y Lucha commission in Mexico to let him have his mask back a year later he was immediately signed by WWE. Elix Skipper and Kid Romeo were the first (and only other) title holders, if you were curious.
• WCW Hardcore Championship - It was actually quietly retired a couple of months before WCW was dissolved.^note The final proper champion was Meng, who won the title at Sin on January 14, 2001, only for Meng to leave the company to return to the WWF at Royal Rumble 2001. Meng presented the championship to The Barbarian as a gift at an independent wrestling event on January 21, 2001 (the same day as the Royal Rumble), which was taked by some to mean that The Barbarian was the final champion, but in reality the belt was not defended again nor was it featured on the final episode of Nitro.
• For most of their lifespan WCW had the WCW Television Championship, which ranked below the United States Championship in the singles title hierarchy. This title dated back to 1974 and its primary purpose was to put a spotlight on up and coming talent; the list of former title holders is a who's who of names in wrestling. As the name indicates, it was defended on television much more regularly than the other titles. Like the belts mentioned above, it took a serious hit to its prestige towards the end of WCW's life (the last title change was "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan winning it after retrieving it from a trash can), and was quietly deactivated during WCW's "relaunch" in April of 2000. WWE rarely if ever acknowledges this title's existence.
• WCW also formerly had the WCW United States Tag Team Championship, which carried over from the NWA as a secondary tag title and was deactivated in 1992, and the WCW World Six-Man Tag Team Championship, which was introduced in February 1991 and quietly abandoned that December.
• WCW also had two Women's Championships, though they were rarely showcased on television and almost exclusively defended outside of the United States, mostly in Japan (just like in the WSL AWA); so most viewers just saw the Nitro Girls and nWo Girls, who were mostly there to dance for the crowd during the commercial break.

Tropes associated with WCW: