WCW 2025 - Back in Business

[Loochblade]

WCW 2025
Back in Business

F O R E W O R D

Spoiler

Right now there is a draft going on for a TEW simulation project by Hoss. I'm part of that draft in which I draft a roster for Ring of Honor
and I got the idea stuck in my head to use that roster for a BTB project of my own, which is this one you're at right now. Instead of ROH
though, I decided to bring World Championship Wrestling back to life with January 1st, 2025 as the starting point.

Couple of points before we get into the thick of things. When it comes to the active in-ring talent portion of the roster I will use my drafted,
pre-trades roster and since the draft is still going there will be a couple more people added over the upcoming days or weeks. The Staff
corner though, I will take some liberties with. I'm going to use the ones I drafted, of course, but will add some who were snatched by other
promotions as well. Since it's *just* the staff, it doesn't really matter, I think.

The trades I have made so far (and those who I might do) will also be incorporated in some way or form into this BTB over time and the three
companies I have traded with are considered to have working agreements with WCW, which means there could be a time, where some of
their talent will show up as guests. For that I will also take only the drafted rosters of those promotions into account.

Finally, Hoss simulates the world of Wrestling through that TEW project. Depending on things, you might end up seeing things that did
happen in Hoss' project, also being incorporated in this BTB.

In case you want to take a look at the draft I'm talking about:

The Smarks Reboot Wrestling (Discussion)

THE SMARKS REBOOT WRESTLING A project that is just for fun, where we use the RWC mod in TEW IX to reboot the wrestling world with new rosters and company identities, and see how the game evolves from there. This thread is for discussing the project. If folks want to reply to this and reserve...

wrestlingsmarks.com

The Smarks Reboot Wrestling (Draft Thread)

THE SMARKS REBOOT WRESTLING A project that is just for fun, where we use the RWC mod in TEW IX to reboot the wrestling world with new rosters and company identities, and see how the game evolves from there. This will be the draft thread. I don't really want to make any rigid rules regarding...

wrestlingsmarks.com

B A C K S T O R Y

Spoiler

The WWE did not buy the WCW assets in 2001. Instead a group of investors did, which tried to make something out of it throughout
the 2000s with moderate success. By 2009 and overall quite a lot of lost money, this group of investors decided to sell the company.
After a couple of years the new owner decided, when they struck a new, promising looking TV deal to rename the company by 2012.
Just like the previous owners, the company had some moderate success throughout the 2010s. Some good years, some bad years and
some absolute horrible last years in that decade, including some not that minor scandals. Then 2020 came and with it the COVID
pandemic, which held the world captive for a long time. Companies in the world of Wrestling began to struggle and between 2020 and
2022 there was an unbelievable amount of movement of talent between the promotions, with the big three in the US losing a lot
of bigger names, while some smaller indie companies started to gain a lot of momentum. This company though, was struggling.

The scandals and the bad product they produced before the pandemic hit made it virtually impossible to get back to the level they
were at around the mid-2010s and after another year of problems, the owner decided to put the company up for sale again. A new
owner was found in T.L. Bearson, who immediately started to make big changes to the roster and the production in January of 2024.
By the summer of that year, thanks to a lot of invested money and the vast improvement of quality within and around the ring, the
company was hot once again. It also helped that they were able to surprisingly secure some very big names around that time and with
new, very profitable TV deals being attained for the start of 2025, the owner T.L. Bearson had one more huge announcement to make.

After 13 long years, coming January 1st, 2025... this company will once again be known as World Championship Wrestling.

R O S T E R

S T A F F
Chris Hero (Producer)
Christopher Daniels (Commissioner)
Eddie Orengo (Referee)
Emily Parker (Referee)
Fit Finlay (Producer)
Jamie Noble (Producer)
Joe Galli (Play-by-play Commentator)
John Cone (Referee)
Lexy Nair (Interviewer)
Stokely Hathaway (Manager)
Taz (Color Commentator)

TAG TEAMS & FACTIONS
TBA

C H A M P I O N S
WCW World Heavyweight Championship
Vacant

WCW United States Championship
Vacant

WCW World Tag Team Championship
Vacant

WCW Cruiserweight Championship
Vacant

WCW World Television Championship
Vacant

WCW Women's World Championship
Vacant

WCW Women's Tag Team Championship
Vacant

WCW Women's National Championship
Vacant

WEEKLY SHOWS
Mondays

WCW Monday Nitro on TNT

Thursdays

WCW Thunder on TBS

PPV SCHEDULE
TBA

PROMOTIONS WITH WORKING AGREEMENTS
(See the 'Foreword' spoiler at the beginning)
Progress Wrestling
Pro Wrestling Guerrilla
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling​

 

[Loochblade]

Placeholder #1

 

[Loochblade]

Placeholder #2

 

[Stojy]

Starting with WCW 2025 means you can basically do anything with this. It's a blank canvas with your roster really which is exciting. I like the premise of making a spin off from the stuff happening in that other thread to.

Wishing you best of luck with this, Looch.

 

[BattleTank]

I'll echo Stoj on this basically being a blank canvas for you, filled with some of the greatest PPV names and themes ever known. I'm familiar with about half of your roster, as I'm stuck in a mid-2000's time warp when it comes to wrestling. The format is great, the graphics are top-notch, too.

Best of luck with this, as I am looking forward to the first show!

 

[Just Juice]

I am being honest when I say I really hope this is a project that keeps on going for quite a while Looch. This has a lot of potential.

 

[Loochblade]

OOC:
BEHIND THE LORE
- Part 1 -
The Return of WCW

So... this is not what I had originally planned as my first update, but here we go.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is "Behind the Lore"?
These Behind the Lore updates will be sprinkled in at random points throughout this BTB journey. They will be posted
as OOC (Out of Character) posts and they are supposed to bring some extra seasoning to everything, as well as function
as a direct connection between me as the writer and you as the reader in some way. These BTL parts can be about me
just fleshing out the backstory more, as in writing about something that has happened in this company or the Wrestling
world between 2001 and 2025, since this is an alternate universe after all and I do have plans on changing things around.
Sometimes these updates might be just me talking about booking/creative decisions, or other things pertaining to this
project. I don't have a schedule or plan set in stone for these though, so these will be pretty much freestyle, so to speak.

Also, Behind the Lore, obviously, isn't important for the rest of the BTB itself. So you don't have to worry to miss out on
anything extremely important, if you want to skip these. Of course, in some situations with writing backstories this way,
there will be connections here and there to certain storylines or character histories etc... but I will never have an
important part of a storyline being mentioned in, or worked into it, through BTL parts.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The First Retcon Job...
I did write up a short summary of the backstory up in the opening post. After some consideration, I've decided to retcon
part of that, since I feel the new idea makes more sense. The original version was this:​

Then 2020 came and with it the COVID pandemic, which held the world captive for a long time. Companies in the world of
Wrestling began to struggle and between 2020 and 2022 there was an unbelievable amount of movement of talent between
the promotions, with the big three in the US losing a lot of bigger names, while some smaller indie companies started to gain
a lot of momentum. This company though, was struggling.

The scandals and the bad product they produced before the pandemic hit made it virtually impossible to get back to the level
they were at around the mid-2010s and after another year of problems, the owner decided to put the company up for sale
again. A new owner was found in T.L. Bearson, who immediately started to make big changes to the roster and the production
in January of 2024. By the summer of that year, thanks to a lot of invested money and the vast improvement of quality within
and around the ring, the company was hot once again. It also helped that they were able to surprisingly secure some very big
names around that time and with new, very profitable TV deals being attained for the start of 2025, the owner T.L. Bearson
had one more huge announcement to make.​

That bit will be different now, with T.L. Bearson taking over this company as early as mid-2021. He then worked the product
and production back up over the next couple of years, until they pulled the trigger on reverting this company back to WCW
with the start of 2025, after it was already rumored about all through 2024. Yes... not quite unlike what we've seen with TNA
in real life, which is my inspiration for the whole reverting in the first place. I think this version makes more sense though, since
the new owner had more time to build the company back up from pretty much being in shambles due to bad management and
the pandemic.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Global Force Wrestling and Championship Lineages
And while we're on the subject of the mysterious name change... let's just pin that down now and say, just for shits and giggles
that this company operated between 2012 and the end of 2024 under the name Global Force Wrestling. When it comes to
the Titles though, I'll keep it relatively simple and say that even with the change to GFW, most of the Championships we know
from WCW survived in their, mostly, original form. Sure, the owners of the company may have added, changed or even took
some Title away (for a time), but when I, for example, talk about the GFW TV Title somewhere, then it will be (most likely) be
just within the WCW TV Title lineage etc. This is gonna be a puzzle already, to be honest, I don't wanna make it way more
confusing by adding convoluted Title lineages to it, with a ton of different names and/or unifications and so on...

Speaking of Titles and lineages... The idea is that all Titles have been vacated directly after the last show under the GFW
name, which happened at some point in December 2024. The Titles then were officially rebranded back to their old WCW
names, to underline the "clean slate" philosophy the company is going for with the new TV deals starting in January 2025
and the whole going back to WCW in general.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in Business: The First Show of 2025
Now... the OCD-riddled part of my brain wanted me to make the re-start of WCW happening with January 1st, 2025,
including those new TV deals. Then I decided to take a look at a calendar and... well, 2025 started on a Wednesday, which
means that technically Thursday Thunder would've been the first show date. Of course, I could've just ignored that, or just
made a special Thursday Nitro out of it, or maybe even make a PPV the first show, but all those ideas were just... meh to me.
I want to start with Monday Nitro as the first official Wrestling show back under the WCW name, but also kept the idea
of doing something special and different with that first Thursday of 2025. (I also wanted to have Nitro being the first
in-character written show, which is why I'm putting this short summary at the end of this first BTL part)

So TBS showed a 4-hours long special under the name WCW Back in Business on Thursday, January 2nd, 2025. The
first 90 minutes were dedicated to the beginnings of the promotion, with Joe Galli leading the viewers through
a historical crash course on Jim Crockett Promotions, Georgia Championship Wrestling and, of course, the NWA
years as well as the later 90s. Throughout this part Galli also talked with former WCW legends Ricky Steamboat,
Sting and Diamond Dallas Page about those times in a roundtable kinda setup.

The second part of the TV special was all about the time between 2001 and 2020. Again about 90 minutes long, this
time Joe Galli welcomed Christopher Daniels, Taz and Jay Lethal to talk about those almost twenty years of a
rollercoaster between the aftermath of pretty much becoming a slayed giant and multiple rebuilding periods,
which disappointingly never exceeded a certain level.

The final, one-hour long part was presented by Lexy Nair and owner T.L. Bearson. This part was all about the rebuild
since 2021 and the way back to becoming World Championship Wrestling once again. They went through some
highlights, especially of the last two years, where the company really started booming again and talked about the
bigger signings like Kevin Owens in 2022 and Kazuchika Okada in early 2024, which also played a huge part in the
decision to bring the WCW back, according to Bearson.

The last ten minutes were dedicated to hyping up the upcoming first Nitro and Thunder shows (I will make some
preview posts for those) and Nair and Bearson talked a bit about how the Championships are going to be handled.
Additionally, Bearson confirmed what people were already rumoring about on social media, which is that they
will bring back all the cornerstone PPVs of the old WCW show schedule, including the biggest one, Starrcade.
Then, to close the show, T.L. Bearson had a big announcement ready. The first PPV back under the WCW banner,
WCW SuperBrawl 2025, happens on Saturday, February 1st and it will be held in "WCW's home" Atlanta, Georgia.

​

Starting with WCW 2025 means you can basically do anything with this. It's a blank canvas with your roster really which is exciting. I like the premise of making a spin off from the stuff happening in that other thread to.

Wishing you best of luck with this, Looch.

I'll echo Stoj on this basically being a blank canvas for you, filled with some of the greatest PPV names and themes ever known. I'm familiar with about half of your roster, as I'm stuck in a mid-2000's time warp when it comes to wrestling. The format is great, the graphics are top-notch, too.

Best of luck with this, as I am looking forward to the first show!

I am being honest when I say I really hope this is a project that keeps on going for quite a while Looch. This has a lot of potential.

Thank you all for the positive vibes. I truly appreciate it.

 

[Brett]

ALL IN FOR BACK IN BIZ

 

[Stojy]

The changes to the backstory make a lot of sense and I definitely think are an improvement. Upon first look, I didn't really think to much of it, but one year wasn't a long time for the new owner to completely turn things around. Giving that a few more years definitely makes more sense.

I also can't fault you for wanting to keep the title lineages somewhat simple.

With all this out the way, I'm really looking forward to seeing some shows in here

 

[Loochblade]

WCW MONDAY NITRO
January 6th, 2025
Preview

The fans had to wait for a very long time to experience this moment, but it is finally here. For the first time in
over twenty years we'll see a WCW Monday Nitro show happening and the promotion is certainly going to try
to make the best out of this return. Over the last couple of weeks they had already announced a handful of
Matches for the show, that will be held at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The very first match that was announced will also be the Opener of the show, according to T.L. Bearson, who
said that in his mind, there "couldn't be a more fitting first Match" for this historic occasion and he is not wrong.
Both these men have played such important roles in the company over the last two decades and therefore met
again and again in the Ring. Especially Jay Lethal, who is seen as the heart of the promotion by many fans, as
he's been with it since the mid-2000s.

When it comes to the WCW Tag Team scene, we will see the comeback of The Outrunners, who had been out of
action for the second half of 2024 due to Turbo Floyd's injury. On the other side will be Cruz Del Toro and Joaquin
Wilde, who only debuted for the company last August. They immediately started pursuing Tag Team Championship
gold, but weren't successful in the end. Now with the Titles being vacant and everything had been reset, a victory
on the first Nitro show can put either team into the frontrunner position for a shot at the belts.

A debut three months in the making. The star of the British independent scene Rhio was supposed to make her
debut back in October, but then because of some unfortunate circumstances, as well as the creative changes due
to the rebranding, the company decided to delay it. Now though the time is right to finally let Rhio loose onto
the Women's Division, where her first challenger will be Jody Threat.

Then there is the first match with actual stakes attached to it. After the final GFW show, where the legendary
Mickie James finished off her career by retaining the Women's World Title in a Fatal 4-Way match and then
leaving the company at the end of the year, the WCW decided that the best option would be to have another
Fatal 4-Way match for the now WCW Women's World Championship as the Main Event of the return episode
of Thunder this week. One spot in that Title Match is open for the winner of this Triple Threat Match. LeRae
and Deeb, who both have been with the companie for years now will take on Thekla, who is still undefeated
in the company, since joining last September.

And then we have the supposed Main Event of WCW Monday Nitro, in which we will see the crowning of
the new WCW Television Champion. A lot of rumors have been going around about the participants of this
20-Men Battle Royal, but nobody knows for sure, who will show up for it. The WCW also announced that
TNT will show Nitro for as long as it takes for anyone to win this Match and that the Match will start with
four instead of the usual two participants. On top of that the company also stated that from the moment
where only four participants are left in the Match, eliminations can also occur via Pin or Submissions.

Besides all those matches, there is also this. During the TBS special T.L. Bearson talked about how the
original plan was to have four qualification matches for a Fatal 4-Way Match at SuperBrawl for the WCW
World Heavyweight Championship, but due to "certain developments" behind the scenes, these plans had
to be changed. He then announced that WCW Commissioner Christopher Daniels will be addressing
this situation, especially regarding Kazuchika Okada, who was the final holder of the GFW World
Heavyweight Title.

​