The 10 Best WCW Women’s Rivalries

Over the years, WCW featured its share of female talents, ranging from versatile talents like Madusa and Sherri, to women who’d cross over to WWE fame like Stacy Keibler and Torrie Wilson, to the memorable Nitro Girls dance troupe.

Related: WCW Nitro Girls: Should This Concept Be Copied By More Wrestling Promotions?

Despite having a range of memorable women on the payroll at one time or another, the company wasn’t exactly known for women’s wrestling. Their Women’s Championship was only held by one woman—Akira Hokuto—who didn’t defend the title often, and for most of the promotion’s history, women focused managerial duties over wrestling. Just the same, there were a number of feuds between the women of WCW worth remembering.

10 Major Gunns Vs. Miss Hancock

Before she started going by her real name, Stacy Keibler, Miss Hancock was a breakout female star for WCW, clad in business suits and largely defined by her tendency to let her hair down and dance provocatively. For most of this stretch, she was linked to David Flair, for a run that included them feuding with the Misfits in Action stable. Hancock engaged with Major Gunns in particular, culminating in provocative match at the New Blood Rising PPV, contested under ROTC (Rip Off The Camo) rules.

9 Asya Vs. Torrie Wilson

Torrie Wilson got over in WCW for her beauty, but wasn’t properly trained to wrestle. So it was that she had a bit of an oddball feud with Asya, a powerhouse WCW marketed as something like their answer to Chyna.

Related: Eddie Guerrero And Chyna & 9 More Wrestling Couples That Made No Sense (But Totally Worked)

Asya was part of the Revolution faction that worked a kidnapping angle against Wilson when she was allied with The Filthy Animals that surely should have gotten them arrested. Asya and Wilson later worked on opposite sides of different mixed tag team situations.

8 Madusa Vs. Sister Sherri

After Madusa returned to WCW, infamously dropping her WWE Women’s Championship in a trash can, she wasted little time instigating a feud with Sister Sherri by interrupting her on-screen wedding to Col. Rob Parker. Though the two had clashed years back in WCW, the feud still felt a bit like a dream scenario between two of the most iconic female talents of the era, and particularly after Sherri had had so few opportunities to actually wrestle in recent years.

Unfortunately, the feud didn’t last long, as they only wrestled one, three-minute match on Nitro in which Sherri picked up the pin. The encounter is, unfortunately, most remembered for its aftermath where Madusa got her heat back with a beatdown, but in doing so there was a botched German suplex that knocked out Sherri on live TV.

7 Woman Vs. Debra

Woman and Debra feuded with one in another in an entertaining bit of in-fighting among The Four Horsemen faction. The woman co-existed peacefully enough until Debra declared herself The Queen of WCW and started dressing down Woman and others on the mic.

The war of words created a layer of intrigue unlike anything the iconic Horsemen faction had encountered before. While it may have been anticlimactic for them never to actually come to blows, WCW actually may have shown some of its best restraint in this issue, knowing the feud was more provocative as a promo feud that didn’t expose the grappling limitations of Debra in particular.

6 Kimberly Page Vs. Miss Elizabeth

Neither Kimberly Page, nor Miss Elizabeth were proper professional wrestlers, but there was a certain poeticism to them being rivals as they represented two sides of the same coin, in a sense. Liz was an iconic valet for WWE backing her real life spouse Randy Savage; Page played an equivalent, if lower profile role in WCW, standing in the corner of her real life husband Diamond Dallas Page. These two feuded in 1997, each backing their male counterpart, and reprised the issue more head on for a brief rivalry in 2000.

5 Daffney vs. Miss Hancock

David Flair found himself in an enviable position in 2000 when both in storylines and real life he wound up dating Miss Hancock. In kayfabe, Hancock stole him away from Daffney which set up a natural reason for the two to feud. Their issue peaked with a Wedding Gown Match at Bash at the Beach. Consistent with WCW’s efforts to sell Hancock’s sex appeal at the time, she lost when she stripped her own dress away.

4 Madusa Vs. Luna Vachon

After their WWE rivalry mostly played out on house shows, Madusa and Luna Vachon revisited their feud in a WCW ring. Vachon cost Madusa her opportunity to win the Women’s Championship against Akira Hokuto, leading to a good, if short match between the two at Slamboree 1997. Vachon controlled most of the action but Madusa pulled out the win in the end.

3 Missy Hyatt Vs. Madusa

Madusa had an outstanding run as the femme fatale for Paul Heyman's influential Dangerous Alliance faction in the early 1990s, but her remarkable abilities as a wrestler were squandered at the time. Case in point, her key rivalry during this time was opposite non-wrestler Missy Hyatt. The two never had a match, but did get some real buzz behind a war of words, and the blow off bikini contest for whom would be known as The First Lady of WCW at Beach Blast 1992.

2 Madusa Vs. Bull Nakano

Madusa and Bull Nakano had an excellent mid-1990s feud in WWE, well ahead of its time in showing women could deliver a hard-hitting, technically sound match in an era when American fans simply weren’t accustomed to seeing it. WCW recaptured a bit of that magic in 1996 when it booked these two to collide at the Hog Wild PPV.

Related: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Alundra Blayze/Madusa

Their match was short and not as impressive as their WWE encounters, but still on the short list of the best women’s matches ever staged in WCW. Per a pre-match stipulation befitting the PPV’s theme, Madusa destroyed Nakano’s motorcycle after the match.

1 Madusa Vs. Akira Hokuto

Akira Hokuto was the only woman to ever hold the WCW Women’s Championship. Her feud with Madusa revolved around the title, and wound up far and away the best in-ring women’s rivalry the company ever had with two solid PPV matches at Starrcade 1996 and Great American Bash 1997. Madusa actually beat Hokuto in the first round of the tournament to crown the Women’s Champion, when Hokuta wrestled under the name Reina Jabuki.

As Hokuto, she’d beat Madusa in the finals, though, and then won a rematch that not only allowed her to retain the title, but cost Madusa her career (a stipulation WCW actually did honor for over a year and a half). While the feud wasn’t exactly epic, and there’s a real case to be made Madusa should have been champion, the quality of ring work and effort at telling a story between two serious women wrestlers readily placed this feud as the best feud between women in WCW.