Like we said at the start, not every match on this list is going to be an absolute classic like Flair and Steamboat’s series from 1989, but in the history of WCW, there might not be a more historically significant match than the main event of the 1996 Bash at the Beach pay-per-view.

In the lead up to this event, both Razor Ramon and Diesel had left WWE, dropped their former names, and invaded WCW as Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. The two men were portrayed as WWE outsiders, leading to their tag team name being The Outsiders, who were looking to take over WCW and burn it down from the inside. Hall and Nash challenged Eric Bischoff to find the three best wrestlers that WCW had to offer for a match that would be labelled as a “Hostile Takeover” match in the main event of Bash at the Beach, a challenge that Bischoff accepted, leading to Sting, Lex Luger, and Randy Savage being selected as “Team WCW.” However, Hall and Nash decided to keep the identity of their third man a mystery, which would lead to turmoil in WCW as no one knew who to trust.

When the match eventually started, it was actually a Handicap match as Hall and Nash opted to start the bout without their partner, who they promised was in the building but they were more than happy to get the job done without him. As time went on, Sting, Luger, and Savage would gain the upper hand, and for the first time since their debuts, Hall and Nash were in real danger. With that said, The Outsiders distracted the referee and gained the advantage, leading to none other than Hulk Hogan coming to the ring to swing the favor of the match back towards the WCW contingent, or so we thought.

Out of nowhere, Hogan dropped a leg drop on Savage, leading to an eruption from the crowd that could have probably registered on the Richter scale. Hulk Hogan was the third man. Fans filled the ring with trash, one fan even made the bold decision to try and get in the ring but was flattened by security and Scott Hall himself, and the match was thrown out, but it didn’t matter. The landscape of professional wrestling had changed on the spot, Hulk Hogan was a heel, and told everyone that after years of being treated with disrespect by the WCW fans, he wanted people like The Outsiders as his friends.

As far as what they would like to be called, Hogan simply stated that you could call them the New World Order of wrestling, and that they were going to destroy everything in their path. This moment changed the course of the Monday Night Wars over night, and WCW’s reign of dominance in the wrestling industry truly started with the main event of Bash at the Beach 1996.