He debuted in WCW in 1989 as a babyface fresh out of college football from Florida State University, where he was a legit star. He didn't really take off with the fans, so they repackaged him as a member of "Doom" a masked, heel tag team with Butch Reed, who had recently departed from WWE. Woman was their manager. It wasn't long before they lost the masks in a match with the Steiner Brothers and revealed to be (to the shock of no one with working eyes who could see their eyes through the huge eyeholes) Simmons and Reed. Woman dumped them after losing the masks, but were then managed by current WWE referee Teddy Long. In May 1990, Doom rose to prominence in WCW as they defeated The Steiner Brothers for the NWA World Tag Team Titles. During their reign as champions, a situation erupted where WCW ended their association with the NWA in January 1991 and WCW became their own promotion with their own titles, so Doom is recognized as the first WCW World Tag Team Champions. They enjoyed a nice 9-month reign as champs until February 1991, where they lost the titles to the Fabulous Freebirds (Michael Hayes and Jimmy Garvin). If you want to know how far WCW taped shows ahead of time back in 1991, they had already taped a match of the Freebirds losing the tag titles to the Steiner Brothers before Doom even lost the titles on television! No way anyone could get away with that now in the era of the Internet. After they lost the straps to the Freebirds, they began feuding with each other. Ron was turned babyface while Long sided with Reed. Simmons won the blowoff of the feud in the "Thunder Doom" cage match (which was just a regular cage match) at the first SuperBrawl in May 1991. Reed disappeared from the promotion after the loss.
Ron quickly shot up the ranks, and the WCW braintrust went to Ron when they faced a huge problem in the fall of 1991. You see, the original main event for Halloween Havoc 1991 was originally going to be Lex Luger defending the WCW World Heavyweight Title against Jerry The King Lawler in a 2-out-of-3-falls match. Lawler was not signed to a WCW contract and wasn't expected to work with them past Havoc. But the PPV was in Chattanooga, Tennessee (all of TN at that time was Lawler's backyard) and they were already facing a huge backlash from crowds after firing Ric Flair. The main event from their last PPV (Luger vs. Barry Windham in a Cage Match at Great American Bash '91 for the vacant WCW World Title) was ruined by all the fans in the arena chanting "We Want Flair" during the ENTIRE match. So the idea to keep that from happening again was to have Tennessee hero, Lawler, challenge Luger to get the crowd to forget about Flair. However, on an unidentified radio show months prior to this, Paul E. Dangerously spilled the beans and things had to be changed. Dangerously was suspended by the company and Lawler refused to work with WCW after botching the surprise so far in advance. Instead, they decided to use Simmons in the contest and built up to a Simmons vs. Luger main event. The build-up to the match was chillingly phenomenal, with Dusty Rhodes personally training Simmons for the match, Simmons talking about how important the match was, and comments from Florida State head coach Bobby Bowden about how he knew Simmons was ready for Luger and had everything it took to take him down. The match was one of Lugers best during his entire initial WCW run.