The World Championship Wrestling (WCW) World Television Championship was a professional wrestling championship in World Championship Wrestling.
The title was created in 1974 by Mid-Atlantic Wrestling as a secondary title. It was known as the Mid-Atlantic TV Championship and then simply the NWA TV Championship a few years later. As Mid-Atlantic (later known as Jim Crockett Promotions) grew, the Title became known as the NWA World TV Championship. And upon what was then WCW's withdrawal from the NWA, the title became known as the WCW World TV Championship until its final deactivation on April 10, 2000.
The title was often defended in matches with a time limit of ten or fifteen minutes. More often than with other championships, title matches resulted in time limit draws and the champion retaining the belt. This was often used as a heat-building device to allow a heel champion to retain his title.
Tully Blanchard had the longest NWA TV Championship reign, holding the title for 353 days. Arn Anderson had the longest NWA World TV Championship reign (336 days). The shortest known title reign belongs to Rick Martel, who held the WCW World TV Championship for six days. (Masked Superstar and Sweet Ebony Diamond have reigns listed at zero days but there is no record of when they vacated their championships.) Booker T had the most reigns as World Television Champion, with six. Arn Anderson holds the record for most days as champion, with 870 over four title reigns. The last champion was Hacksaw Jim Duggan, who claimed the title after Scott Hall threw it in the garbage and he found it in a dumpster. The title was retired after the 2000 Vince Russo-Eric Bischoff WCW reboot.
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or television:
“In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)