5 Best Shirts In WCW History (& 5 Worst)
WCW spent most of the 1990s locked into the position of the number two wrestling promotion in the US. WWE had bigger exposure and the biggest stars up to the Monday Night War era. Then WCW pulled even and arguably moved ahead of WWE for a couple-year period, before falling back behind.
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Even at WCW’s peak, the company struggled with merchandise. Eric Bischoff has discussed the topic quite a few times on his 83 Weeks podcast, citing that the company lacked the same merchandising infrastructure that WWE had established, so when the company got hot, they still struggled to fully capitalize. Still, WCW had its moments with a few truly iconic t-shirt designs, even amidst a larger body of less inspired apparel.
10 Best: NWO
The New World Order was one of the most successful stables in wrestling history. Though the iconic heel turn of Hulk Hogan, the cool heel sensibilities of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, and a series of dramatic twists and turns put the group on the map, there’s also the t-shirt to consider.
Related: 10 First New World Order Members, Ranked
The nWo shirt—plain black and stylized to look like the group’s initials had been spray painted over its chest—was an instant hit. Yes, it represented the popular faction, but also legitimately looked like a cool shirt for its time, and passed the crucial test of being wearable in mixed company. In other words, it didn’t sport a bare-chested man flexing on the face of it, but rather focused on an aesthetically pleasing promotion of three letters that wrestling fans would all know, but that could also fly under the radar to non-fans.
9 Worst: Four Horsemen
The Four Horsemen were a truly legendary faction, but peaked in an era before the NWA or WCW took merchandise all that seriously. The versions featured in the mid-to-late 1990s were far weaker. Unfortunately, that's the era their most famous shirt emerged, with a big roman numeral four and a picture of a horse emblazoned on it.
Nothing about the Horsemen shirt looked overtly cool, or captured the jet-flying, kiss-stealing sensibilities of the stable. By contrast the design looked immediately outdated, and like it might suggest Ric Flair and company were cowboys or animal lovers.
8 Best: Monday Jericho
One of the ways in which Chris Jericho carved out an identity in WCW was to act like he was as big of a star as he would become in the years to follow. His most famous WCW t-shirt design played into that branding well. At a quick glance, it looked like a shirt advertising the company’s flagship Monday Nitro show, but Jericho’s name was substituted in for the word Nitro.
So, the design put over Jericho, established his brand as synonymous with Nitro itself, and all of that within a reasonably cool, simple design that featured the logo over an otherwise plain black t-shirt.
7 Worst: Goldberg Who’s Next
While Goldberg was extraordinarily over in the late 1990s, a key part of his aesthetic was simplicity. Throughout his iconic undefeated streak, he wrestled in plain black trunks and boots, and was a bald-headed, muscle-bound guy who looked more or less like the prototype of a professional wrestler.
His most famous t-shirt from WCW is a cluttered mess that undermines the Goldberg aesthetic. It features not one, but two images of him—one illustrating his physique, the other a close-up of him snarling in black and white, the words “Who’s next” punctuated with an exclamation mark that really should have been a question mark. Overall, it’s a shirt that reinforces stereotypes of what wrestling fans might like, with little that’s visually appealing to enhance the presentation.
6 Best: Red Wolfpac
In hindsight, opinions vary about the nWo Wolfpac—a splinter face faction led by Kevin Nash, Randy Savage, and Sting. On the downside, their emergence did signal WCW over-exposing the New World Order concept, with not one, but two heavily featured, big stables operating under the same acronym. On the plus side, the face group really was quite popular with some of the company’s most-loved stars, cool theme music for its time, and a cool t-shirt design.
While there was a more straightforward red and black nWo t-shirt that paralleled the original black and white one, a more celebrated version was a bright red shirt with a picture of a wolf’s head on the front, the nWo logo on the back. While not necessarily quite as cool as the shirt before it, the shirt nonetheless sold the group’s identity with a big pop of color to distinguish it from the landscape of mostly black shirts sold at the time.
5 Worst: Halloween Havoc 1998
Halloween Havoc 1998 is a PPV that went down in infamy out of a combination of an abomination between Hollywood Hogan and Warrior, and the show running long and its PPV feed cutting out just as the main event was getting underway in many markets. It is perhaps fitting, then, that it also featured a ludicrous t-shirt design to promote the event.
The Halloween Havoc 1998 t-shirt features a deranged looking cartoon pumpkin—not a jack-o-lantern, but rather drawn with mismatched cartoon eyes and full set of teeth, against a backdrop of flames. Card suit symbols seem present only to reflect that the event occurred in Las Vegas for shirt that is, on the whole, busy, unattractive, and terribly loud.
4 Best: 1995 Surfer Sting
The 1995 white t-shirt featuring Sting in his “surfer” persona, with green tights and pink lettering of his name isn’t exactly fashionable. It is, however, emblematic of its time and the talent at hand, representing the last gasp of a simpler era in wrestling when the product was more explicitly geared toward kids and there wasn’t so much as a cursory effort to make it “cool.”
The Surfer Sting shirt is clearly geared toward kids and suits them well with bright colors, a clear image, and one of the most family friendly talents of the day front and center.
3 Worst: Rodzilla
By the time Dennis Rodman got involved with WCW, the partnership was mutually telling about the athlete and the company. Rodman was one of the hippest characters in popular culture at that moment for his outlandish look and antics while starring as a power forward for the NBA Champion Chicago Bulls. WCW was at their peak not only as a wrestling company but a mainstream entertainment enterprise.
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For as cool as Rodman and WCW may have been, the Rodzilla t-shirt was anything but. The white t-shirt unartistically featured an oversized image of Rodman’s head, with “Rodzilla” printed in a comic book style overhead. That the shirt more generically advertised Monday Nitro on the back spoke further to a lack of creative inspiration, and how directly the product was geared at explicitly reminding fans of the link between the company and the star basketball player.
2 Best: LWO
Critics have suggested that the Latino World Order was an example of WCW taking the nWo concept another step past reasonable exposure. Nonetheless, it’s hard to fault WCW for carrying that successful concept forward and more specifically targeting a budding Latino fanbase.
The LWO shirt was particularly eye-catching for the turning the black and white design on its head with green, white, and red colors meant to represent the Mexican flag. As such, the shirt not only represented the stable but was a decent enough stab at offering a shirt Latino fans might flock to with pride.
1 Worst: Big Poppa Pump And Taz
The idea of WCW hooking up with the Looney Tunes brand made some sense given the mainstream appeal of the latter. Moreover, featuring the popular Tasmanian Devil character, Taz, on merchandise made sense in marketing toward children given that particular entity’s popularity at the time.
However, a t-shirt featuring Scott Steiner and Taz feels like something that might have fit the early 1990s and severely missed the mark by 1998. Wrestling had entered an edgier period. Additionally, Steiner having broken out with his foul-mouthed heel Big Poppa Pump persona, selling t-shirts of him with a kids’ cartoon character undermined the credibility of the wrestler and WCW.
NEXT: Scott Steiner: The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) Title Reigns Of His Career
