Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
In 1991, World Championship Wrestling was in a serious state of change. Ric Flair had turned his back and walked away from the company…taking the world title (aka The Big Gold Belt) with him to the WWF. With Flair and the title gone, WCW executive Jim Herd made Lex Luger “the chosen one” and crowned him the new WCW world champion at the Great American Bash that year. With a new champion and new title belt to go along with it….Herd wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to make sure wrestling fans knew he had THE world champion in all of pro wrestling.
Rumors began to swirl that Herd and WCW were negotiating with the National Wrestling Alliance to once again use their name and championship belt. A tournament was tentatively planned to crown a new NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion. The planned tourney would supposedly have some of the top names in wrestling (Not contracted by the WWF) to participate.
The biggest name that WCW wanted for the tournament was not a part of the company. Jim Herd negotiated with Memphis promoter Jerry Jarrett to bring in the USWA Unified World champion Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler to compete in the aforementioned tournament. For years, Lawler was a huge fish in a relatively small pond by wrestling in the Tennessee area for most of his career. Despite that, Lawler was a big star during the territorial days and wrestled all the biggest names that traveled through Memphis.
The plan ws simple, Lawler was going to be booked to win the tournament and capture the NWA world title at the famed Mid South Coliseum in his hometown of Memphis. Lawler would then go on to challenge Lex Luger for the WCW title in a unification match on pay per view. Lawler started to tease this program on USWA television claiming to be the one and only real world champion.
Ultimately, the result would be the WCW world champion in Luger defeating Lawler and unifying the WCW and NWA world titles. It would help build the credibility of Lex as a true world champion. Also, as a part of that deal….WCW/NWA talent would be sent to the USWA to compete on a working agreement.
It all seemed like a solid deal for both promotions. Jerry Lawler could add being an NWA champion to his long list of accomplishments, Lex Luger would get the “rub” by beating a legend like Lawler and the USWA would benefit by having more mainstream wrestlers from WCW appear in Memphis. As good as that deal may have sounded…..we all know it never happened. That raises the question of why not?
Unfortunately, the answer is not quite clear…it all depends who you ask. Most say that the reason the Luger/Lawler deal fell through was due to ‘Hot Stuff’ Eddie Gilbert. At the time, Gilbert was wrestling for the USWA and other smaller promotions. It was believed that Gilbert leaked the news out of bitterness and jealousy. The other reason seemed a bit more straight forward…Jerry Lawler nixed the entire deal due to having second thoughts jobbing to Lex and WCW not having concrete plans for him after dropping the belt.
Whatever the case is and was…it never came to fruition. A couple of years later, Lawler ended up in the WWF and that led to a working agreement between those two organizations.