SirSmUgly

Thunder Interlude – show number thirty-four – 1 October 1998 "The WCW Gang puts the spotlight on DDP and Goldberg (and it pays off)” I would love to get through 1998 already…Even with 1999 beckoning as a roundly shitty year, at least the showrunner shakeups should add a bit of entertainment to the proceedings…Goldberg’s defending the World Championship against Raven under Raven’s Rules…Hell yeah…I feel better already about watching some ’98 WCW… Diamond Dallas Page works the opener against Lodi…Lodi is mad at Page for hassling Raven a few months back…Lodi thinks he’s going to beat Page tonight, take Page's title shot, and then beat Goldberg…I like the little guy’s confidence…Page hits a plancha and then beats up Lodi as Lodi jabbers on at ringside…Lodi jumps Page as Page gets back in the ring, but his control segment doesn’t last long…Page fires back with rights, hits a huge gutbuster, then rips off a rebound Diamond Cutter for three…Fun little squash… Jerry Flynn faces Mike Enos next…I’m just waiting for Enos to get control and do some fun offense…He does a little of it, but there’s too much Flynn offense in this thing for my tastes…Enos does a much better version of Rick Steiner’s leapfrog-catch powerslam than Steiner does…Just as Mike Enos is about to rip off a belly-to-belly, a sauced Scott Hall wanders out with a drink…Enos is incredulous that once again, Scott Hall has barged in on his jobber match…The poor bastard… The crowd eggs Hall on as Hall tries to cut a survey…Flynn tries to remonstrate with Hall, so Hall beans him with the mic and then starts laughing…Enos challenges Hall to a fight for fucking up his spotlight once again…Enos shoves Hall, so Hall tosses his drink in Enos’s face, boots Enos and hits him with a Razor’s Edge, then does the same to Flynn…Aw, the story of Mike Enos, TV title contender has unfortunately gone off the rails…Hall does his survey and WCW gets booed in fucking Virginia, wow…Hall whines about everyone telling him what to do, especially Kevin Nash…He says he’ll only fight Nash on his terms…Vincent gives Hall a Long Island iced tea as a reward for his in-ring success…That’s some enabling-ass shit right there… The former Flock EXPLODES as Kanyon faces Riggs…Kanyon hits his catchphrases before the match and runs down Riggs…He calls Riggs these names: Cyclops, Popeye, and this last verbal jab isn't a name, but he asks where Riggs's parrot and pegleg are…Kanyon talks and talks and talks and talks and talks…I miss Mortis…That guy didn’t talk…Finally, Riggs attacks Kanyon with an overhand right…He snaps off a pretty sweet dropkick that earns a two-count...Riggs dumps Kanyon outside and posts him…He continues to target Kanyon’s arm and shoulder, using the post to inflict damage…Riggs lands a high knee… Finally, Kanyon gets an offensive move in by killing a series of punches in the corner with a Snake Eyes…Kanyon hits a second-rope Rocker Dropper and starts to assert himself…Kanyon cuts off a Riggs hip toss and turns it into a swinging neckbreaker for two…Kanyon gets two off a snap suplex/corkscrew elbowdrop combo…Kanyon lands two off a facebuster…He tries another second-rope Rocker Dropper and that gets countered into a powerbomb…Riggs makes his comeback…Riggs tries a Cross-Faced Chickenwing, but Kanyon escapes it by using his momentum to fall forward and slam Riggs’s head off the buckles…Kanyon follows with a Flatliner for three…That was a pretty good televised wrestling bout… In an outro promo…Raven notes that his parents told him at the age of six that nothing lasts forever…Raven suggests that, harsh as that lesson may be, Goldberg might want to learn from it w/r/t his World Championship run coming to an end tonight… Ciclope does jumping jacks in the aisle…Don’t ask me why…Heenan pretends to confuse Ciclope for Riggs, and I kinda chuckled…Wrath didn’t get a squash in on the previous Nitro, but he’s here on Thunder to make it happen tonight…Tony S. says that there are 24 more days between this show and Havoc…Three weeks of Nitro until then?...This is going to be a brutal run-in to Havoc…In this match, we get a nice side slam and a solid flying elbow…We get Ciclope getting tossed and sliding on his stomach across the mat and into a face-first bump on the floor, which is sort of wild…And of course, we get a Meltdown for three… Chavo Guerrero Jr. rides Pepe to the ring; the former gets a shot at Billy Kidman’s Cruiserweight Championship…Chavo hasn’t exactly looked strong against Disco twice in the past two weeks, so the outcome isn’t exactly in doubt…Chavo hits a shoulderblock and cabbage patches in celebration…Kidman fires back with a headscissors and a pescado…Back in the ring, Chavo takes control with a facebuster…They block each other’s arm drags before Chavo dumps Kidman onto the floor with an arm drag…Chavo follows up with a springboard crossbody, then rolls Kidman in the ring and gets two…Chavo works a headlock…Kidman fights out, gets two on a roll-up, and then nails a dropkick…Lots of good dropkicks on this show…Chavo gets a shot to the gut, hits his springboard bulldog, and gets two…Chavo locks in a headscissors…Chavo hits an elbowdrop and transitions to a headlock, but Kidman fights out of it…Kidman tries to land a springboard bulldog of his own, but Chavo blocks it by crotching him as we go to break… Back from break, Chavo hits an awkward rana-ish sort of deal to a seated Kidman on the ropes…That gets two, so Chavo goes back on the attack with a clothesline…Chavo rides Pepe…It’s sort of an obscene ride…No one should act like that while seated on a horse…Chavo tries a chinlock, but Kidman counters that with a jawbreaker…Kidman tries to pick up the pace and gets two on a sunset flip, but Chavo ends all that with a leg lariat that gets two…Chavo pounds the mat in frustration, then tries a back bodydrop and gets counter-clotheslined instead…Kidman tries to run again, but Chavo sidesteps a dropkick and hits a nice back suplex for two…Chavo goes back to working a hold, this time a Camel Clutch…Chavo pulls back on Kidman’s nose and lets the hold go before he can get disqualified…Chavo stomps a mudhole into Kidman, but badly whiffs on a Superman Punch and gets slammed…Kidman goes up for the SSP, but Chavo is quickly up and crotches Kidman… Chavo goes up and throws Kidman halfway across the ring on a superplex…That only gets two, but it was a heck of a superplex…Chavo tries to shoot Kidman into the ropes, but gets reversed and sit-out slammed, then quickly SSP’d for three…I enjoyed the match quite a lot…Maybe Kidman should have gotten more offense as the champ, though… Lenny Lane faces off with weird hippie Van Hammer…Van is the second Hammer (along with Greg Valentine) to use the Hollywood Blondes’s theme in the Nitro era…Hammer gets an early two on a rollup, then gets another two off a keylock slam…Lane keeps trying to match power with Hammer and losing…Lane isn’t very good, but he will drop himself on his head…Hammer hits a spinning back suplex for two…Though Lane survives momentarily and lands a jawbreaker, Hammer hits a pretty sweet stalling superplex, then hits his Flashback, which is kind of an Alabama Slam, for three…He should use the stalling superplex as his finisher instead… In another short promo, Raven opines on his chances against Goldberg…He thinks that only Saturn and himself have stretched Goldberg at all…Kinda, if you go by “time survived in the match”… Damian 666 tries to take down fellow cruiserweight Disco Inferno…This counts as a WCW-ass WCW matchup in my opinion…Disco takes it a little easy and almost eats a three-count when Damian hits a crossbody on a rope run…Disco dances some more and eats boot on a corner charge, then a lariat for two…Damian, who hasn’t learned anything from Disco’s failures, mocks Disco’s dancing for so long that he badly misses a second-rope elbow…VINTAGE DISCO (™ Michael Cole) from Damian on that whiff…A minute later, Disco dances and actually hits his second-rope elbow…He might have figured that move out considering that he’s two for his last two in attempts…Damian shoves Disco away as Disco tries a top-rope move, but he dives and eats boot…Disco hits the jumping piledriver for three, then beats down Damian post-match until Juvi runs in for the save…Juvi completely out-quicks Disco and runs him off with an array of aerial maneuvers… Stevie Ray (w/Vincent) faces Konnan…Hey, they can’t all be winners…This has been a quite good wrestling show…Pre-match, Konnan hits his catchphrase roulette to a whole lot of pops…This match isn’t good, but I didn’t hate it…Heenan says that Konnan’s a loyal guy…Uh, I remember him leaping from the Dungeon of Doom to the nWo and then to the Wolfpac in the span of, like, ten months…The issue in this match is that these guys have kinda shitty timing and the telegraphs for counters are just too obvious…Konnan hits the sit-out facebuster, which is when Vincent tries to run a distraction…Stevie conks Konnan with the slapjack right in front of Nick Patrick for the DQ, but Kevin Nash runs down for the save…The crowd is super into Nash…Especially when he Jackknifes Vincent…Hall wobbles to the top of the ramp, but refuses to wobble any farther… DDP comes back out to observe Goldberg/Raven…Michael Buffer slums it on Thunder for a paycheck…Raven (w/Kanyon, table) is out first…The crowd seems hot for this…Like, I know they probably juiced the noise on this taped show, but the crowd actually looks fired up…Goldberg (w/quite a few cops) quickly wins his first lockup with Raven…Raven tries a shoulderblock for some dumb reason…Page, Heenan, and Tenay sell the idea that Page discovers a few flaws in Goldberg’s arsenal every time he scouts him…Goldberg whiffs on a flying knee in the corner and tumbles outside…Raven is quickly on Goldberg, using the post and stairs and exhorting Kanyon to set the table up…They dump Goldberg on the table, but Kanyon can’t hold him down and Raven crashes and burns on a dive through the table…Ernie Ladd gets a shout-out and a comparison to Goldberg on commentary…Goldberg scores a superkick, but spears both Raven and the ref when Raven pulls Billy Silverman in the way….Kanyon interferes with a steel chair, so DDP runs in…Raven hits Goldberg with an Evenflow, but Page Diamond Cuts Kanyon…That distracts Raven, who takes a few seconds before he goes for another Evenflow and gets countered into a Jackhammer for three…Fun little main event sprint…Goldberg and Page face off post-match, and it’s pretty intense… Wow, what a fun show…Lots of wrestling, a couple of very enjoyable longer matches, lots of neat matchups, and Goldberg/DDP, the best feud they have going that isn’t the one-sided Goldberg/Jericho feud, got center stage with no Hogan/Warrior or Bischoff/Horsemen stuff to get in the way…They need to give Page and Goldberg more time to sell the idea that Page sees an opportunity to hit his death move on Goldberg...They even mentioned Page shoot watching tapes of his own matches to talk about how intensely he scouts everyone...That was a very neat touch...I really enjoyed my time with this Thunder...WOOOOO…

Show #159 – 28 September 1998 "The one that defies one’s sense of time by being an interminable hellscape of shitty promos, bad angles, and terrible baits and switches" As I click on this show, I see what is an egregious screencap that spoils what would, I suppose, be considered a turn. I mean, it’s a turn that I guessed would happen anyway, but still, the people screencapping each episode need to do better. We start with a video recap of this incredibly stupid Warrior/Hogan feud. And it will only get more stupid! That’s a guarantee! Chavo Guerrero Jr. and Billy Kidman hit the ring to start us off with some pacey and fun wrestling tonight! “Rockhouse” plays as Hogan and Bischoff come out to talk us to death at the beginning of this show. Sorry, my bad, I just reflexively wrote something that everyone seems to remember as true, but which was actually consistently false. Oh, Hall and Crush are also here for some reason. Hogan talks about taking WCW, a small southern hayseed promotion, to the top, and filling southern hayseed buildings like the one he’s in tonight. The building is in…um…let’s see…Rochester. Well, in fairness to Hogan, Upstate New York does have a shocking amount of Confederate flags waving in the air. Then Hogan says this, and let me go back over it word for word because it is somehow the most batshit thing to happen/be said during this whole Hogan/Warrior feud: I WENT DOWN TO THE HOOD, AND WHEN I WENT TO THE HOOD, ALL THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS SAID “HOLLYWOOD, WHY DON’T YA TAKE BACK OVER? WHY DON’T YA SLAUGHTER THE LAMBS THAT YOU’VE LED TO SLA-SLAUGHTER?” AND AS I SAID “BROTHERS, YOU’RE RIGHT,” THEY SAID “'WOOD, DO IT FOR US. ‘WOOD, TAKE ‘EM OUT ONE AT A TIME.” He said that! I swear! I replayed it to make sure that I got the whole thing down! Then he claims that the bandana he's wearing is “’Wood’s War Bonnet” and challenges Sting and Bret Hart to a one-on-two handicap match (Editor's note: Or two separate singles matches? It's not clear) in what is the most obvious fucking turn coming, like you wouldn’t even need to see a spoiler-filled screencap to guess what would happen after Hogan makes that challenge. He claims that everyone should call him “Woody,” like Harrelson or Buzz Lightyear’s chum, I guess. Look, this was the worst promo of the calendar year. I defy you to convince me that Warrior had a worse promo than this in his short run. It was the epitome of cringe comedy, this white guy from Florida in his mid-40s desperately trying to be cool while cutting a heel promo straight out of 1984 WWF in 1998 WCW. Holy shit. La Parka! This is a guy who is intentionally funny. He also rules in general. Super Calo is his opponent. Calo kicks Parka’s chair away; they shove one another, and then Parka dances, so Calo runs into him. Parka badly misses a back kick that is meant to be a low-blow as Calo leaps over him - and not just once, but twice - so he just turns around and punts Calo in the balls in full view of the ref, haha. This show hasn’t been what you’d call “good” so far, but it’s certainly been perversely entertaining. Despite that immersion-breaking spot, this match is fun for what it is. Parka wipes himself out on a shoulder charge and gets body-pressed into the rail by crazy-ass Calo in my favorite spot of the match. Parka comes back with a dropkick that catches a diving Calo and then hangs Calo in the Tree of Woe position and hits a wheel kick in another neat spot. Both guys fight over control on the top rope, and though Parka knocks Calo onto the floor, Calo jumps back up on the apron, grabs Park’s leg and trips him into a seated position, and then hits a top-rope rana. Calo tries to keep control, but when he tries another leapover, Parka catches him and snaps him with a slam, then nails a twisting bodypress from the top that gets three and appreciative applause from the crowd. Post-match, Calo grabs Parka’s chair and beats holy hell out of him with it. That was a fun way to get a show going! It brought a lot of energy! If only it opened the show! Bret Hart “limps” into the aisle to be interviewed by Gene Okerlund. This sucks, man. Anyway, Bret accepts Hogan’s challenge, and I guess it’ll be one-on-one. Bret’s still the United States Champion, which never gets defended anymore since he’s been working an injury angle. The Hitman lays on the “I’m a babyface now!” schtick a little too thickly, but his quickie-turn is obvious anyway. I’m especially salty because these bums on commentary are acting like we’re really getting a proper Hart/Hogan match, which is one of the things I desperately wanted out of this extremely frustrating company in 1998. The Disciple comes to the ring with “Rockhouse” playing for some reason even though he’s got the oWn vest on. Shouldn’t Warrior’s music be playing instead? They’re going to feed Sick Boy to Leslie, which, whatever, but the guy no sells all Sick Boy’s offense – and I’m supposed to buy that, I guess – and then visibly misses on a big boot. This match sucks. Why is it so long? Disciple finally hits a Stone Cold Stunner for three. Ed Leslie made a lot of money and got a lot of TV time he shouldn’t have made or gotten. That’s a skill, I guess. We get an unnecessary retrospective of the worst long-term feud in the company. The Steiner Brothers have been exploding damn near the whole year, since like February, and let me tell you, none of the resulting angles or matches have been good except for the ones where Buff cut stirring babyface promos that meant nothing because he was just pretending to turn babyface, much like Bret Hart is doing. The Fall Brawl match was an abomination and will be on the list that I’m building under the "dumpster fire" section. Break. Nitro Girls routine. Where is Chae? Kimberly is a total dork. “Rockhouse” plays for the seventy-fifth time tonight. Buff Bagwell squires Scott Steiner to the ring. Buff’s hat has his face on it. Scotty speaks before the match. He cuts his “all men are/are not created equal” line for the first time that I recall. I sure wish WHEN YOU LOOK AT ME AND YOU LOOK AT SAMOA JOE was the next thing he said, but it unfortunately was not. Scotty squashes Nick Dinsmore and Lenny Lane in a handicap match, finishing them with a double Steiner Recliner that gets a stereo submission. I do like the double-underhook suplex one guy on top of the other guy spot, I have to say. They do another fake injury spot after the bell because everyone just loved it the last three hundred times that they did it. We’re only at the beginning of hour number two? Fuck! That was the longest ~38 minutes of wrestling show I’ve seen in a long time. The opening to the Warrior’s music is incredibly dumb. It’s not quite as dumb as the opening to Rick Steiner’s music, but it’s a close second. Warrior runs saunters to the ring. Again, this is upstate New York, so the Warrior is actually reasonably over. Anyway, in what turns out to be a “what the actual fuck are you talking about?!” promo battle for the ages, Warrior says this to open his promo: HOGAN, ARE YOU WHO YOU ARE? AND I KNOW WHO I AM. AND THESE WARRIORS KNOW WHAT THEY WANT TO SEEEEEEEEEE! That is some strong Pete Weber WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?! I AM! energy right there. Pete was also a pro wrestling fan who’d hit crotch chops and do the RVD thumb point after striking, so maybe WCW should have brought him in to tag with DDP against Hogan in a PPV main event, too. Warrior cuts an awful promo, but it somehow isn’t as bad as the promo Hogan cut. And I mean, Warrior tries to lower the bar even more with lines like AT HALLOWEEN HAVOC, I WILL BECOME FULL-BLOWN, but I can’t understate just how shitty Hogan’s promo was earlier tonight. Aw man, Buff Bagwell is back out here to give a Scott Steiner “injury” update to Gene Okerlund. It sucks. I’m not going to bother recapping most of this. I do note that while Buff is talking, Chucky starts laughing over the PA. Can you believe that right now, the WWF is building toward what is the greatest one-night tournament in American pro wrestling history (that was caught completely on tape, at least), and WCW is adding Chucky to this deep-freeze, ice cold Steiner Brothers feud? What the fuck?! Psicosis! Thank goodness. Oops, I was wrong to get excited: Ernest Miller is his opponent. Yeah, let’s just waste Psicosis on this garbage push, why not? Miller does his whole “got ‘til five” schtick, but Psicosis is like NO COMPRENDE, YOU STUPID FUCK, so Miller just kicks him. Psicosis wisely fires off a couple low dropkicks to the Cat’s knee, then hits a sweet crossbody from the top to the floor. He follows up with a missile dropkick back in the ring, but it only gets two. There’s a weird spot where Mickey Jay stops Psicosis from doing a top rope move in one corner of the ring, so I guess this is a “we have a spot planned for this part of the ring later” thing because Psicosis just lets Miller down so he can put him in a headscissors (Editor's note: They did not, so IDK what the deal was). Psicosis eventually whiffs on a guillotine legdrop on the other side of the ring, and Miller quickly lands a Feliner for three. This show has been diabolical so far. Kevin Sullivan was serious in all his promos about being the face of true evil considering how he’s contributed to the booking of this show. Gene Okerlund wants to hassle Alex Wright about Wright speaking German, but Wright rips the mic away and insults Gene for being barely literate and also old and short (and uses some unfortunate language for the latter insult). Then, he insults Rochester while the crowd chants U-S-A, and is this hell? Yeah, it is. Finally, Wright challenges the British Bulldog and calls him “spineless,” which is probably literally accurate at this point! Chavo Guerrero Jr. gets another match against Disco Inferno, who may or may not have made weight. I don’t like this “make weight” stuff. Disco is a talented character who can’t pull it off. Matt Hardy was also really talented at making dumb midcard shit work, but he couldn’t pull it off, either. Anyway, this is a solid little bout. Hilariously, Disco threatens to break Pepe, and Chavo begs him not to, but also, Mark Curtis is like DON’T YOU DO IT, and that makes me laugh. Mark Curtis is hilarious, man. Chavo is fired up by the threat to Pepe’s existence and hits a Thesz Press, some punches, and a tope before riding Pepe around the ring in celebration. Disco tries to come back, but eats a facebuster, an atomic drop, and a clothesline for two. Disco is able to back elbow his way out of trouble and then lands a couple of body slams, then he badly misses actually hits his second-rope elbow! Holy shit. No one in Rochester cares, but I do. That elbow only gets two. Chavo turns it around, lands the best Superman punch in the business, and then hits a springboard bulldog. Chavo’s offense rules, man. Chavo stays on top of Disco, but as Curtis tries to break things up, Disco grabs Pepe and hits Chavo in the throat with the hobby horse, then gets a quick three. Juvi comes down to narc on Disco again and beats Disco up to boot, but when Juvi goes over to check on Chavo, Disco jumps Juvi and drills him with a jumping piledriver, then yells DON’T STOOGE ME OFF AGAIN…JUVENSTOOGE. The weight thing sucks, but it wasn’t mentioned tonight. If that angle gets dropped in favor of a Juvi/Disco feud, that’d be cool as hell. Gene Okerlund tries to interview the Four Horsemen in the ring. Eric Bischoff and Stevie Ray come to the ring almost immediately, along with the fuzz and that chump Doug Dellinger. Bisch does some awful heeling and demands that fuzz clear the ring. He also kicks Dellinger out of the arena, which is fair, actually. Anyway, we’re in WWF country, so Rochester reflexively starts a barely warranted ASSHOLE chant. This segment gave me hives. Oh thank goodness, it’s Chris Jericho. That’s a sentence nobody has typed in at least a decade. Anyway, his personal security leads him out to the ring as he offers Goldberg a chance to win his WCW World Television Championship. He cuts a funny little promo into the camera and actually finds his way to the ring on the first try. Goldberg’s theme hits and…oh shit, Goldberg jumped the little person Goldberg impostor in the back and is carrying him to the ring like a sack of potatoes! I can’t believe it, a good angle! Jericho’s not even looking, and when he turns around, he freaks out, shoves his two security guys at Goldberg, and hightails it outta there. Goldberg hits a double spear on the security guys and Jackhammers not-Ralphus. Just let Jericho book the whole show at this point, sweet fuck. Gene Okerlund interviews DDP in the ring. We’ve reached a new level of chant-along in 1998 because Page can get crowds to chant HOLLYWOOD SCUM HOGAN without the crowd feeling like the bunch of assholes that they are for chanting that. Page cuts another subpar babyface promo. Imagine the sort of stuff that babyface Page normally says and does. Vincent caddies that dipsomaniac Scott Hall to the ring for more of this fucking angle with Scott Hall. Hall asks a survey question about the best qualities of a light beer. Because he’s a drunk, you see. Kidman’s funk porno riff, which hit about a minute too early, hits again and brings him down to the ring. Hall toothpicks Kidman. Kidman signals that Hall’s got the delirium tremens. Hall beats Kidman up. Then, Hall tries to get a little sippy-sip, but Vincent won’t give him the cup, and Kidman gets a couple of flash two counts before Hall turns him inside-out on a lariat. Hall controls for a bit, tries to get the cup, doesn’t get the cup, and who does this serve? If a half-sauced Scott Hall can work over the Cruiserweight Champ with almost no issue, have the bookers not just devalued the whole cruiserweight division? Hall hits a chokeslam and then mocks the Giant with the Frankenstein taunt even though they’re on the same side. Hall gets his brew and drinks while Kidman sneaks up from behind, takes out Vincent, and punches Hall (who spews beer all over the spectators in the front row). Kidman gets two off a crossbody, but jumps himself into a fallaway slam. Hall tries a Razor’s Edge, but that’s damn near like a powerbomb, so Kidman reverses with a face crusher. Vincent has to jump in and distract Kidman so that Hall can again try, and hit, the Edge. I don’t like that they booked this match and worked it in this way. If you’re going to have an upper-midcard gatekeeper come to the ring drunk, your Cruiserweight champ should probably win that match and take slightly more of it than Kidman did. Maybe just don’t book this specific matchup at all? They could have gotten the same effect from Hall beating any given midcarder who isn’t a champion. I’m surprised that the British Bulldog is still wrestling even though he was hurt a couple weeks ago. He looks rough, honestly. The back injury, the steroids, and the rampant crack use have really caught up to the guy. Bulldog/Alex Wright is up next. Before the match starts, Bulldog says his son Harry is a better wrestler than Wright is (NOPE), then tells Wright to fellate him in German. The match is surprisingly decent considering that Bulldog is washed. There is a surfboard, and it rules, man. It gets a pop, and it should get a pop. Bulldog working more WoS spots into his matches as he got older would have been the best. Bulldog does land a walking powerslam, but Wright’s boots hit Billy Silverman as Bulldog swung Wright around, so it doesn’t get a pinfall count at all. Then, in what is a confusingly convoluted finish, Wright hits a back suplex from behind and both a revived Silverman and Charles Robinson, the latter of whom came down when Silverman was out, make a count, but both guys have shoulders on the mat, and both refs declare a different winner. Did we need a controversial finish leading to a rematch? Just feed Bulldog to Wright the first time around! Man, it’s Crush. Shit. He’s facing Kevin Nash, who is insanely over in this part of the country. Some kid leaps the guardrail to celebrate with him. I love that Tony S. points out that Dellinger has been kicked out of the building, so there are these lapses in security that are bound to happen. Dude, Dellinger was a fuck-up and we got lapses of security when he was in the building. Diesel/Crush seems like it should be a bore-fest, but this is actually okay. Nash hits almost all of his crowd-pleasers, Crush dropkicks Nash over the top rope in a nice spot, and really, this could have been worse. It’s perfectly cromulent as it is. The only problem is that Stevie Ray runs out and hits Nash with a slapjack (not a Slapjack) before Nash can hit a Jackknife, which is what we all wanted to see. Scott Hall comes out and hammers Nash with punches instead of getting hammered on the sauce before Konnan and Luger run out for the very late save. I have a whole rant coming about how WCW’s booking of the Wolfpac is even worse than its booking of Goldberg, but maybe I’ll wait until the Fingerpoke of Doom to uncork it. Konnan and Luger come right back out here to tag up against Hugh Morrus and Barry Darsow. We are short for time somehow even though so much of it has been wasted; I know this because Konnan does the speed run version of his catchphrase roulette. Haha, Darsow jiggles his pecs at Luger. Darsow’s got normal burly strong guy pecs and not poured-out-of-a-bottle pecs, so the contrast is funny. Anyway, this Nitro has been exhausting – I miss one-hour Nitros so much and I miss two-hour Nitros even more than that – and this match is just sort of here. Jimmy Hart gets on the apron. It doesn’t help his charges take control of the match. Konnan tries a Tequila Sunrise, but it gets broken up, so Konnan tags Luger in and Luger puts Darsow in the Torture Rack for the win. Thank goodness, it’s main event time. Hulk Hogan is out first, which blatantly signals a bait-and-switch. Bischoff is so bad at swerves. He pulled one off turning Hogan heel in the first place, so everyone ignores how shitty he is at the rest of the swerves he’s tried to pull. Bret limps out while Buffer slightly botches the Hitman’s catchphrase. Someone asked way back if Buffer was terrible at his job yet. I haven’t noted this until just now, but he’s been slightly botching stuff like catchphrases and signature moves of the wrestlers that he’s announcing the last couple of weeks. What we get of Hogan/Hitman is actually interesting. Hogan does some solid chain wrestling with the Hitman. See, there was a good match somewhere in here they could have had in a main event. Hogan finds his way out of an armlock and transitions into a cross arm-breaker (!) that sends Hart into the ropes. I’m telling you, as a kid, I wondered about Hogan/Hart as a unique matchup all the time. Could Hogan hang with Hart’s mat wrestling? Would Hart be able to get Hogan to submit? So, this ends up being a taste of that, which only makes me more infuriated that we never got this match in a true main event. Hart dodges two Hogan elbowdrops, but Hogan suckers Hart in, dumps him outside, and then drapes Hart’s knee over the guardrail twice. Hogan targets the knee, wrapping it around the post. Hogan tries to lock on a standing kneebar, and Sting runs down for some reason. The crowd is hot for this. Luger and Konnan come down to check on the Hitman. I guess this match is over, though Hart tries to get back in the ring. Some med techs come down with a gurney. Sting gets in the ring and faces off with Hogan, which I guess since Hogan agreed to fight either or both of them, makes the barest of narrative sense. We get a split screen of Hart being wheeled to the back by Luger and Konnan as Hogan dominates Sting in the ring. Sting makes a comeback while two med techs in masks jump Luger and Konnan. It’s Scotty Steiner and Buff Bagwell, who are known for their ambulance attacks at this point. Hart limps back to the ring, where…Hogan is dominating Sting again. Someone holds up an OTHER CHANNEL, JACKASS sign. That person is correct. Sting makes another comeback, hits a Stinger Splash, locks on the Scorpion Death Lock, and is immediately DDT’d by Bret in the least surprising swerve, non-Russo edition. Bret locks on the Sharpshooter. I stare into space, wondering why this wrestling company that I love deserves any of this sort of shitty booking. I loved WCW, and I loved JCP, and I really dug all the Georgia Championship I saw a few years back, too. And look what Bischoff is doing to it. Look how they massacred my boy! Anyway, Sting gets destroyed by Hart and Hogan while I think about what a new low in quality Nitro has sunk to. Konnan and Luger make it back out for what can’t even be considered a save. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, there’s a character named Dunbar. Dunbar is trying to extend his life by being bored, as he claims that it makes time seem like it’s passing more slowly. There is neurological science out that having a new experience has much the same effect. Whenever I travel, especially if it’s somewhere new, I have that experience. A week in, say, Amsterdam feels like two weeks of time passed for me because of all the new stuff I’m seeing and experiencing. Then, there’s a third time-dilation option – torture. Not necessarily physical torture, not necessarily outwardly cruel torture of any type. Just the most mundane types of the mildest psychological torture. You know, the experience of genuinely disliking almost every second of some experience; that definitely extends one’s sense of time. We’ve all been there: A hour-and-a-half crapfest of a movie that feels like it has the runtime of a three-and-a-half hour David Lean epic, or a work meeting that mentally makes thirty minutes into ninety. This three-hour Nitro felt like five or six hours. I can’t believe it’s actually over. The one good thing I can say about it is that from a mental standpoint, I feel like I’ve squeezed a couple extra hours out of my Sunday that didn’t actually exist. -2.5 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

Thunder Interlude – show number thirty-three – 24 September 1998 "The WCW Gang showcases Goldberg for once” We’re on the road to Halloween Havoc…We’re metaphorically driving that road in a hoopty, no matter how promising Goldberg/Page is… The crowd chants GOLDBERG and then WE WANT FLAIR…Hey, what if WCW had Goldberg wrestle Ric Flair for the title on PPV?...I bet that would be a pretty popular matchup… Jimmy Hart is here with the least of his charges, Hugh Morrus…Ew, it’s Rick Steiner’s music…I’m sure these two will be wrestling for the second-most prestigious gold belt in the company in three years…That sounds like hell, but I’ve got some time to steel myself for something like this…Morrus has a crew cut now in preparation for joining the service during the Russo era…Steiner clears out Morrus and an apron-bound Jimmy Hart…Finally, Morrus jumps Steiner from behind while Steiner considers clocking Hart again…Morrus goes for a top-rope elbow, misses after a lot of stalling and then gets up and slowly wanders into position to get bulldogged, like OH WOW…I’m even going to use the “f” word…That was the fakest shit I’ve seen in a match in awhile…Morrus should be ashamed of himself for slowly walking forward, turning his back slowly, and then looking behind him to see when Steiner was leaping so that he could time his forward bump…I can’t believe they ended up pushing this guy so hard… Nick Dinsmore is out to do another job…This time, he's laying down for Ernest Miller…I wonder if I’m going to enjoy Cat’s James Brown gimmick as much as I did when it originally aired…You’d never guess that this guy had it in him to be entertaining at this point in 1998…The Cat does his YOU GOT ‘TIL FIVE gimmick…Dinsmore jumps Cat after the count…He hits a nice Northern Lights Suplex with a bridge for two…Then he tries to fire up the crowd and gets kicked in the chest…Oops…The Cat hits a bunch of kicks…The Cat hits a bunch of taunts…The Cat gets flash pinned on a Sunset Flip, but it only gets two…Shortly after, the Cat hits a Feliner for three…Inoffensive stuff… Maybe Psicosis will get a push…Or maybe he’ll be stuck in the lWo gimmick because no one can figure out how to push a guy who is an elite cocky, mean heel in the ring…Ooh, and Saturn is his opponent…This is going to be good…Saturn got over as a result of the Raven feud…I know better than to hope they have something good for him…His ceiling is the U.S. Championship, but he’s perfect as a babyface or heel gatekeeper…WCW is lousy with guys who do, or could, make great gatekeepers to the main event…Saturn, Benoit, Meng, Wrath, a healthy Scott Hall… Saturn grounds Psicosis early and actually, these two have some exchanges that aren’t very clean…Saturn eventually scores with an overhead belly-to-belly, then hits a leg sweep and locks on a cross arm breaker...Psicosis gets to the ropes and then, when shot to the ropes after he’s brought to his feet, eventually finds a lariat that gives him control…Not for long, though, and Saturn hits a few punches and chops, then lands a superkick… Lodi comes out holding some signs about how much he hates Saturn…Saturn confronts Lodi on the outside and gets body splashed by Psicosis…Psicosis lands a missile dropkick to the back of Saturn’s head inside the ring…They trade strikes until Psicosis hits a dropkick…Psicosis ducks down on a rope run, though, and immediately gets front suplexed onto the top rope…Saturn is slow to capitalize, gets dropkicked in the leg, and then gets dumped outside…Psicosis does his one crazy bump he does in every match and whiffs on a guillotine legdrop to Saturn on the floor…Saturn makes his comeback inside the ring…Capture suplex, lariat, body slam, awkward celebration, frog splash for…Um…Uh…Well, they just ring the bell and Silverman raises Saturn’s arm, but Psicosis kicked out at two…Whatever, who needs Penzer to know what the finish is going to be?...Makes it more interesting…Anyway, this wasn’t bad, but it was disappointing considering the talent in the ring…And that's before even considering the dumb finish... Goldberg promo in which he Jackhammers a lot of dudes…He’s even reported to be showing up later tonight on this very show… Tony S. interviews Alex Wright on the ramp…Wright’s trying to establish ACHTUNG, ACHTUNG, HIER IST ALEX WRIGHT as a catchphrase…He grabs the mic and tells Tony S. to bug off, and quickly…SCHNELL, MAN, SCHNELL…Huh, I guess taking two years of German actually helped me understand the most basic of German words and phrases…That and watching Run Lola Run about fifty-eleven times…Wright conducts his own interview in which he shits on every other European wrestler in the company…Wright calls out Bulldog for spending too much time living with lazy Americans and falling off badly from his earlier days of greatness…WTF, Bulldog spends most of his time in Canada...Blame Canada…We already get enough heat in the U.S. that we don’t need to take on other countries’ heat… Jimmy Hart has recovered from having to fend off that idiot Rick Steiner…He walks out with a much higher quality of client than Hugh Morrus…Barbarian is in the ring to face Fit Finlay…This match actually starts out pretty hard-hitting, so someone in the back decided that it was time to send Scott Hall out to act completely sauced…Hall kicks Lee Marshall off the desk and drunkenly pours his heart out about Kevin Nash and how everyone is trying to control his life…He leaves while in the ring, Finlay ignores the rules of race and wrestling and tries to headbutt a Fijian man…Oops…This match was better when both guys were standing and striking one another because they’re real good at clubbering…Finlay gets to his feet and tries a flying knee, then another, but he gets caught and dumped…Barb hits a cool press slam into a gutbuster…Finlay dodges a corner charge and gets control…Jimmy Hart gets on the apron again and goes oh-for-two as Finlay dodges an attack from behind and Hart gets hit instead…Finlay snaps off a Tombstone for three immediately after…The best part of the match was interrupted by Scott Hall stumbling to the desk, unfortunately… Tony S. cuts an interview with Diamond Dallas Page…Man, I think it’s really bad…I can’t wait for Page to turn heel again…I do love his in-ring persona as a babyface…He’s great at selling, selling, firing up, and outsmarting a heel and locking on the Diamond Cutter…His promos are so bad, though, I just can’t stand them…He makes multiple verbal errors and calls attention to them by pausing for a little bit before correcting himself…Get this dude a cigar and a garish vest again if you’re going to let him talk…Anyway, he respects Goldberg more than Hollywood SCUM Hogan and embraces his underdog status at Havoc…That’s the long and short of his shitty promo… Why are they showing Villano IV getting spiked in slow motion like five times in a row?...I don’t want to see that shit…Anyway, Mike T. lets us know that Villano IV didn’t miss neck-and-shoulders day at the gym and will be back into action soon rather than out with a long-term neck injury because of it…Thank goodness…Whereas Buff’s neck injury was almost surreptitious, the Villano IV injury was visually nasty…And yet IV walked away from his, but not Buff…Raven (w/Kanyon) faces Villano IV next…Hey, Kanyon grabs a mic and announces that he’s jobbing to beating Goldberg later tonight…Raven talks next and laments being a part of the forgotten generation…Raven promises to hurt Villano V like he hurt IV…I can’t buy it because I saw the guy immediately help IV the other night…I think if Raven had said that even he underestimated his capacity to hurt people until he did what he did to IV, that would have worked better…But pretending that he did it on purpose doesn’t work because he rightly stopped the match to help IV after the spike…Oh yeah, this match…It’s worked at a nice pace, which contrasts with every other match tonight…Villano V comes out hot…Raven eventually hits a drop toehold into a chair and follows up with an Evenflow DDT for the win, though…That match was the equivalent of a bag of Flamin’ Hot Funyuns…Really enjoyable empty calories that I liked, but that I won’t remember I consumed tomorrow… Disco Inferno faces Chavo Guerrero Jr. (w/Pepe) in another match with lots of potential…When we get aggressive Disco, that signals a fun match, and Disco immediately tosses Chavo out of the ring right at the bell…Disco tries to follow, but Chavo jumps inside the ring, meets Disco with a dropkick, and hits a tope before riding Pepe around the ring to cheers…I love Saturn as a worker, but you look at how Saturn worked the Moppy thing and it sucked and compare it to Chavo killing it with Pepe…Chavo is just so gifted in whatever role you give him…Chavo gets two off a headscissors takeover…The announcers debate just how out of touch with reality Chavo actually is…Mike T. announces that Scott Norton is the new IWGP Champ…I vaguely remember that he was IWGP champ once or twice now that Tenay mentions it… Disco hits a hotshot as we go to break…When we come back, Tenay hypes Norton’s win as only the third win of that title by an American…He mentions Hogan…The third person was not mentioned, so you can guess that that person isn’t in the company right now…Actually, I have seen a lot of Vader’s New Japan stuff, inclduing his two short runs as IWGP champ and enjoyed the hell out of it all…How many American IWGP champs did we get before the belt was deactivated?...Bob Sapp (I remember nothing about this)…Brock Lesnar (saw the initial triple threat where he won it, and it sucked, but nothing else about this registers)…and A.J. Styles (his run was fine, but I was not a fan of that era of New Japan and really don’t rate a lot of the stuff I saw from that time)…So, six of them…Not a bad number, actually…More than I would have guessed... Anyway, the match…Disco has never hit that second-rope elbow and should take it out of his arsenal…Chavo Jr. hits a SWEET springboard bulldog for two…Chavo fucking rules man, this guy is the best…Chavo unloads, then grabs Pepe and does a weird horse dance…He then drops down on a rope run and gets elbowed and hit with a swinging neckbreaker for two…Disco tries a back suplex, but Chavo flips out, hits a dropkick, and lands a springboard sunset flip for two…Chavo tries to follow up with a dropkick, but Disco sidesteps it and drills Chavo with a piledriver for three…Good little match even with the break, especially when we came back from break…The desk does a good job of pointing out that Disco didn’t waste time to dance and when he's intense, he is successful… Post-match, Juvi Guerrera comes out in street clothes and hands Billy Silverman a note…Then Nick Patrick comes out with a scale…What the hell?...Oh, I see, we’re doing a “Disco is too fat to be a cruiserweight” gimmick…Apparently, Juvi’s a narc…He grabbed Disco’s (apparently doctored) weigh-in form and tattled on him…So, this was a cruiserweight division match specifically, which no one even fucking announced before the match to try and get over the angle…The crowd is confused about this angle, and hell, I am even though I can hear the desk trying to sell the angle…Cruisers fight heavyweights all the time, so why was this match specifically a match for cruisers if it wasn’t for the gold?...Fuck off, WCW…Anyway, Chavo wins by DQ since Disco is over the weight limit… Norman Smiley!...He was one of the guys Alex Wright insulted earlier for being a crappy European wrestler…He’s facing Wright next…Hey, another potentially good match…Wright tries to make up with Smiley before the match, but it’s a sucker job…Smiley shakes hands and gets booted, but he comes back with a clothesline and body slam…Wright bails…In the ring, we get some solid chain wrestling and a little stalling…Some guy in the crowd is bored, but that’s on him…As Harvey Danger once sung, “If you’re bored, then you’re boring”…Actually, that’s not always true when it comes to WCW, but in this case, it applies… Both men trade offense at a pretty good pace…Wright gets two off a backbreaker, then dumps Smiley outside, where Smiley sells a knee injury on landing…They trade chops outside to WOOs…Back in the ring, Wright lands a back elbow and stomps a mudhole…Wright hangs himself on a diving lariat attempt…Smiley makes a comeback to unfortunate crickets…We get a number of go behinds that end in Wright snagging a reverse neckbreaker that gets three…Decent match… Stevie Ray, a guy who Bischoff thought wasn’t any good on the mic but was a compelling in-ring worker, walks out and cuts a solid heel promo in which he tells everyone that Eric Bischoff called him from Japan and tasked him with keeping Ric Flair and the Horsemen off Thunder…Doug Dellinger doesn’t do his job, of course, and he lets the Horsemen walk past him and go to the ring…Stevie was relying on that doofus Dellinger to actually do his job…Not the smartest plan there…Stevie walks off rather than lose a numbers game…He’s nWo Hollywood, so he can actually count…Stevie heads through the curtains and gets clocked with a tire iron by Arn Anderson… The Horsemen cut a promo in the ring…Arn declares that the Horsemen are going to take WCW back and be the ones who run the whole show like it’s 1987…I appreciate that Arn lets everyone in WCW know that they’re not going to share that shit when they’re done, either…He does self-censor the word “damn,” I have to note…Someone said “hell” earlier and Tony S. reacted like they might get kicked off the air…Turner S&P must be wilding at this point…Dean Malenko starts talking…It sucks…Benoit speaks next…It sucks…Mongo talks…It’s enjoyable because he does it in his inimitable meathead ath-a-lete style…Flair speaks last…We’re in Virginia, so everyone creams their jeans…You know Flair’s going to go off the rails when he starts by calling Tony S. “Antonio” for some reason…Flair promises to burn all his money (spoiler alert: he did, in fact, do this) and then promises that Dean Malenko, a married man with a child, will fuck Liz at the Hilton later tonight…I don’t know, is Malenko ethically non-monogamous, or like, was this just an unfortunate part of your unhinged promo, Flair?...Wait, did Liz consent to being at the Hilton in the first place?...Oops, I’m thinking too hard about a 1998 Flair promo from a 2024 perspective, aren’t I?... Goldberg/Kanyon is the main event…Raven takes Heenan’s spot on commentary…I’m glad that Goldberg is killing off a guy who has actually won something recently for once…Raven is really bummed about what he sees as his subpar treatment by society in general and WCW specifically…Raven is upset that Goldberg gets an armed security force to follow him throughout the building…Tony S. tries to point out that Raven had the exact same thing a few months ago, but Raven and Heenan, the latter of whom standing next to Raven and still able to talk, plow right over him, haha…Raven is upset about Page and Goldberg getting a package full of their finishers, but there now being an Evenflow DDT package…Tony S. is like, But you did get video packages, and they were mostly you complaining about your treatment…Raven redirects to agreeing that he is profoundly mistreated…Kanyon, who was cut off in asking WHO’S BETTA THAN KANYON by Goldberg’s music, grabs the mic to pose the question again…Spear, Jackhammer, and three, and that would be your answer, I suppose…Raven grumbles about getting a second shot at Goldberg as the show ends… That show was alright, man, an island in the sea of bad angles and too much talking that is Nitro…WOOO…

Show #158 – 21 September 1998 "The one that demonstrates the difference between being laughed WITH and being laughed AT" Drunk Scott Hall wrecked his own car and wants Doug Dellinger to find out who did it. Man, starting off hot, huh? And I do mean *hot* because after the Nitro Girls get done with a routine and Tony S. gets done talking, smoke fills the ring area. When it dissipates, the Disciple is face down in the ring, traumatized from being (take it away, Mike T.) “held captive by the leader of the oWn.” Hogan, Bischoff, Giant, and a couple nWo Hollywood ham ‘n eggers come to the ring, at which point smoke fills the ring again and *poof*, the Disciple is gone. Scott Steiner is here, too. He poses. Then, for some reason, Warrior yells UP HERE, SPEED RACER over the PA system. I mean, this is some dreadful fucking television, but again, it’s so bad that I’m sort of giggling over here. We’re in Boston, which is WWF territory and therefore is open to this sort of stupidity. So, Warrior stands next to what is CLEARLY a rubber dummy dressed kinda like the Disciple and cuts a nonsensical promo after Hogan and Bischoff take damn near three hours just to figure out where in the hell Warrior is positioned on the catwalk. This is some batshit stuff, man, just completely batshit, who in the world would watch this over Steve Austin kicking Vinnie Mac in the gut and hitting him with a Stunner? Also, why does Warrior think that I HAVE BEEN RUNNING TO RE-APPEAR is a good retort to Hogan’s claims that Warrior is running from him? He says it twice! That’s two too many times! I wonder if I should just put in a -1 score on the Stinger Splash scoreline now and adjust as necessary or if I should give this show a chance to come back from the death. Barry Darsow would appreciate it if you get that stinkin’ camera out of his face, and also he’s planning to beat that stinkin’ Fit Finlay, who hasn’t been on TV since he dropped the TV title or nearabout. Finlay’s been out with injury and in Europe for a bit, but he’s back to have a mediocre TV match with Darsow. Mickey Jay, who I just found out passed away a couple years back, is your ref. Finlay avoids a piledriver with a back bodydrop and hits a Tombstone for the win. It was a match that happened. Flair promo recap, Warrior recap from his nonsense segment earlier tonight, Wrath squash: All are next in this order. Wrath squashes Nick Dinsmore in a couple of minutes with the Meltdown, which actually gets a small reaction when Wrath grabs the pumphandle to set it up. Dinsmore tries really hard, but his offense barely scratches the big guy. Solid squash. I almost forgot that Goldberg was WCW World Champ, or still in this company for that matter, so the Goldberg/DDP promo video they ran here was really useful! It’s a good video, too, especially the comparison of the Jackhammer versus the Diamond Cutter as the two biggest death moves in the company. They play Tony S. saying this over a series of Diamond Cutters: “It doesn’t matter who you are or how tough you are: You’re always a Diamond Cutter away from losing.” Wow, WCW figuring out how to successfully set up the psychology of a big match for the first time all year was not something that I had on my bingo card. In a battle of the Ricks, Steiner faces Fuller. Boy that WELCOME…TO THA...DOGGGGG POUND *woof woof* opening to Steiner’s theme has to be the worst opening to a theme of the whole Monday Night War era. It gets me downright anti-hyped when it hits. Rick Fuller is on every damn show. Can we not put Psicosis on every damn show instead? Steiner wins with the top-rope bulldog inside of maybe a minute. Then, unfortunately, he talks for another minute that seems to last way longer than the minute of squash match. In what is a case of using the absolute worst insult you could possibly use against someone, Steiner calls Buff a “girl" twice, and Chucky responds over the PA system with the laughter of a tiny possessed doll who is incredulous that they let Rick Steiner cut such a shitty promo. Oh great, it’s been about thirty minutes since Hogan and Bischoff were out here making some bad television. That’s obviously way too long to keep these two off our screens, so they come back to do it again. Hogan calls Warrior out. Warrior walks out and unfortunately responds. He tells Hogan to follow him to the back, so Hogan does. Some smoke rises in the entryway. We unfortunately follow the “action” to the backstage area. Hogan and Bisch find, um, some sparklers and a Warrior logo on the wall in Hogan’s dressing room (IT’S ON FIRE says Tony S. about the sparkler-lit logo in a voice that I can only describe as “filled with childlike wonder”). They also find Disciple knocked out in the bathroom, which is when smoke fills the bathroom and the Disciple disappears again. Hogan grabs a restroom mirror, looks into it, yells GOD, WHERE’D HE GO?!, and reader, I laughed. At Hogan, not with him, because he wasn't trying to be funny. Shit, if I were Jamie Kellner, I might have canceled Nitro after seeing the first half-hour of this show. Villanos IV and V are next up. They face Raven and Kanyon in tag team action. Raven slumps in the corner and laments how crappy it is that the Flock ditched him. He’s pretty heated about it and plans to work out his anger on the Villanos. Then, he punches a Villano with a mic-loaded fist. This is a tornado tag – Raven’s Rules – and Raven and Kanyon absolutely fucking MURDER a Villano with a powerbomb/neckbreaker combo that they badly mistimed and seriously hurt, let’s see, Villano IV with. Raven immediately stops wrestling, stabilizes IV’s neck, and calls for help. GODDAM, that was a disgusting botch. They show it like three times on replay and the crowd, which went OHHHHHHHHH when it happened IRL, go AHWEHAHAOHWWWWW in sympathetic pain when they see it in slow-mo. Goddam, that spot was a mess. The Villano sits up, though, and the crowd applauds that he’s able to move and eventually (just barely) walk away from the ring. Glad to see that he was okay. Disco Inferno’s doing a weight-cutting thing to try and make his Cruiserweight Championship match against Billy Kidman tonight. Alex Wright, sans music, says DANGER DANGER, HERE COMES ALEX WRIGHT over the mic, but some of that is in German. He says some other stuff in German. Basically, he thinks Americans are stupid because most of us are monolingual. Then he says that “Even [English], you can’t speak correct.” Without missing a beat, Tony S. says, “It’s correct-ly.” You tell him, Tony! Learn how to use an adverb, Wright! Anyway, Alex Wright is sick of the whole fucking company and the country in which it resides, especially that Jersey Shore scumbag Diamond Dallas Page. Wright challenges Page to a match right here and now, and Page accepts. Page comes out, finishes taping up his hands, and gets in the ring, where Wright unloads with a ton of offense, capping off with a missile dropkick. Wright celebrates instead of making a cover, which is a mistake as Page shoots Wright into the corner. Wright rebounds into a back suplex attempt and flips out, but Page catches him as he lands and pops off a Diamond Cutter for three. Oh yeah, we’re getting a month of DDP hitting Diamond Cutters from every position in the ring at any point in the match to build the move for the Havoc match, aren’t we? Hell yeah! Post-match, Page cuts an okay babyface promo to build both his opponent and his own abilities to become champ, but I’m really just here for Page murdering dudes with Diamond Cutters all month. We don’t need a bunch of Ernest Miller recap, but we get some! Just have Goldberg kill this guy in thirty seconds and let’s move on from it. But no, we’re getting a Cat/Lenny Lane match instead. The conversation in the main thread about WCW and its status as a workrate promotion was a good one. I think WCW deserved that label, but only because what it did up through about April or May of 1998. At this point, WCW Nitro is basically 1995 WWF RAW. hokey promos, bad interviews, bleh matches a lot of the time. The only difference is that WCW has the in-ring talent to not be like this! Anyway, Miller gives Lenny Lane five seconds to leave, so Lane takes it, and Miller stops Lane, thanks Lane for recognizing his kickboxing prowess, and then kicks Lane to start the match anyway. Aw, do we have to? Then, after Lane gets a flash rollup for two, Miller unloads on Lane and get this – GET THIS – a drunken Scott Hall stumbles out here while Miller works a chinlock. Am I in hell?! Hall gets on the apron, so Dusty Rhodes comes out and pulls him down. Hall takes a cartoonish bump to the floor and then gets lectured by Dusty about being a drunk fuck. Well, at least we’re not really missing anything in the ring. We get back just in time for Miller to hit a Feliner. Miller then talks about how great he is some more after the match is over. That segment was the goddam devil. Disco is on a treadmill trying to shave off every last ounce. He weighs himself. He’s made weight, everyone! I repeat, he’s made weight! Chucky likes things that are bad and evil and terrible and so he is laughing cacophonously once again at this fucking Nitro. Chris Jericho finally gets an appearance on this show, but only after Chucky has had two separate (vocal) appearances. We get some footage of Jericho on Backstage Blast cutting a promo. Jericho mockingly calls Goldberg a fighting champion for daring to face *checks notes* Al Green and Scott Putski. I mean, he’s not wrong! Jericho is wearing a "Jericho – 1, Goldberg – 0" shirt. Oh man. Jericho pretends he’s now a dual champion after beating ersatz Goldberg at Fall Brawl and pretty much is one of the few reasons to tune in to this show anymore. Saturn gets a nice hometown pop on his way to the ring to face Jerry Flynn. Saturn gets two off a springboard forearm shiver, then catches a roundhouse and turns it into an ankle lock. He follows up by hitting a Thesz Press into a keylock choke. Huh, I don’t think this match is conventionally good, but Saturn’s offense is pretty interesting. Saturn lands a few superkicks, then takes a table from Penzer and sets it up at ringside. Flynn nails a couple kicks to fend Saturn off and then hits a pescado. Flynn picks up steam, hits a lariat, and tries another Irish whip. Saturn reverses it and hits an overhead belly-to-belly, but Flynn hits a leg sweep and re-takes control. Flynn lands a juji gatame and then tries to transition into a Fujiwara armbar, but Saturn survives the attempt, gets back to standing, and scores a number of strikes. The match spills outside near the table; Flynn tries to kick Saturn, but only gets post. There’s an awkward sequence centered around the table before Saturn smashes Flynn into the post a couple of times. Saturn lays Flynn on the table and hits him with a splash from the top, then tosses him back inside and lands a DVD(no VR) for three. Flynn got a little too much of that match, but it was definitely an enjoyable watch if only because it felt a little unconventional. Next up is a fucking DUMB (in the best of ways) Monday Night Jericho t-shirt promo in which Jericho sits in shadow and has his voice distorted while he talks about how Jerichoholism has overtaken his life before the mic falls over, bumps the switch on the lamp, and sends a now-revealed Jericho into conniptions. I cannot believe that Bischoff just let this guy leave. I am astonished at how bummed I am to see Scott Steiner and Buff Bagwell. Boy, my memory of late-WCW Scott Steiner went straight from Steiner Brothers to calling Booker T. ‘white trash’ as Midajah and maybe also a live chained tiger stand next to him and look on approvingly without any of this garbage character work or crappy feuding that happened to transition him between these two points. Scott shouts out Bill Buckner’s bad knees and Larry Bird continuing his coaching career in Indiana instead of Boston before yelling BOSTON SUCKS. Cheap heat or not, Scotty’s getting closer to being enjoyable, at least. Scott calls out Bret Hart and wants to find out Bret’s intentions w/r/t the nWo, and I actually am way into the idea of a Hitman/Scotty Steiner feud. The Hitman limps out to a small pop. He gets in the ring for some dumbass reason and immediately gets attacked. This brings out Sting, who makes the save. I assume this is all some sort of stupid-ass ruse so that I can go back to doing the thing I don’t really want to do: boo Bret Hart. Scotty and Buff bail, and Rick Steiner comes out and attacks his bro while Buff heads for the hills. We haven’t had one really good match on this show so far. I’m hopeful that Disco Inferno/Billy Kidman can fill that role. I did like Page/Wright and Saturn/Flynn for what they were, but they haven’t really filled that “man, what a satisfying match” role. Disco didn’t dance out here, though, and he’s looking like he desperately needs some water, so of course we’re going to get Disco working like he’s a dehydrated mess instead of having a good match, which I wouldn’t complain about except that we haven’t had any good matches yet on Nitro. I am fine with matches that are worked around angles or character development or whatever, but they need to be mixed in with enough straight-up, high-quality wrestling matches that I’m not sitting here complaining about not getting enough of the latter. There’s a reasonably funny comedy spot where they do a bunch of leapovers and dropdowns on a rope run until Disco runs out of energy and slowly topples over, I’ll give them that. The match is good for what it is; it’s not what I wanted, but I can’t hate on it too much for that. Kidman hits some decent offense at half-pace, and we even get a commercial break in the middle of this thing for some reason. Kidman ran into a boot going into the break, but he comes out of the break hitting a splash for two. Lodi wanders out with a sad sign about missing his buddy Raven. He walks toward the ring and holds up a KIDMAN LET’S GO FIND RAVEN sign, which distracts Kidman and gives Disco a chance to sneak up from behind and drill Kidman with a piledriver. Disco is slow to cover, only gets two, and Lodi is actually funny here. He stops, looks at the downed Kidman, and says, “Maybe I’ll come back later.” Genuinely hilarious. Disco is feeling good enough to dance a little. He hits an elbow, gets two, tries a second-rope elbow, misses it as he always does, and gets rebound bulldogged for two. The finishing run is solid, as they trade counters and 2.9s. Kidman is the last to win the counter game, as he hits Disco with a facebuster when Disco tries a powerbomb, then drops Disco with a sitout spinebuster when Disco misses wildly with a lariat. Kidman drops a SSP and, three seconds later, retains his title. Decent match, but the commercial break and Disco having to work being exhausted by the weight cut hampered it. Chucky cackles at poor Disco post-match. I was waiting for Chavo Guerrero Jr. to show up after previous comments telling me that he’d be back on Nitro soon. He comes out riding Pepe and, oh look at this, gets a nice little pop. People in the crowd are holding up their own stick horses. Why in the world has Chavo not been on Nitro very much lately? Then, get this – GET THIS – I learn that they sent him out here to job to Konnan. Man, fuck that. Konnan hits his catchphrase roulette. Chavo retorts with a mimicry of Konnan's catchphrase roulette and it kind of works, so clearly the crowd just wants to chant stuff. Chavo tries to join the Wolfpac, which Konnan isn’t into, but Chavo says he’ll just go over Konnan’s head. Konnan beats him up in response. Chavo gets a little offense in the middle of this thing, but he stops to ride Pepe to another pop, then threatens Mickey Jay with the stick horse. Almost immediately after that, Chavo loses control of the match on a rope run, gets press slammed, and ends up in a seated abdominal stretch. Chavo turns it around once more and hits a sweet Superman punch. That move looks great whenever he does it. Chavo works a chinlock, and um, we get another commercial break as Konnan hits a sunset flip for two. What’s up with this show formatting? Back from break, Chavo hits a wheel kick and shouts out Booker T. into the camera, then locks on a surfboard. He gets back to standing, whiffs badly on a shoulder charge in the corner, eats post, and gets his ass whipped at ringside. Mickey Jay just lets Konnan hit Chavo with a chair without calling for the bell. I guess it’s outside the ring, which is a thing they were trying to establish at one point for regular matches. This is a longer match, which I wanted to see, and Chavo is great, but he’s limited by how good his opponent is. Konnan hits a back kick and gets two off a sit-out facebuster. He drops Chavo with a cradle piledriver – glad to see him bust that one out again – and then wraps on a Tequila Sunrise for the victory. This match wasn’t particularly good, but I was glad to see Chavo on television again. Speaking of Guerreros, Eddy is too busy cutting bad shooty-shoot promos to be out here having good matches in fun angles anymore. We see video of Eddy and Bisch beefing backstage from a week ago. There’s a Dean Malenko t-shirt promo. It is, let’s say, not as good as the Jericho t-shirt promo. Eric Bischoff and Liz come to the ring, I guess so we can pile heat onto this Bischoff/Flair shooty-shoot angle that at least has a guy in Ric Flair who can pull off the talking. I love Eddy, but he’s all wrong for this role in 1998, and probably isn’t exactly right for it even in 2004 or 2005. Bischoff talks about the empire that he’s built. It’s crumbling because he’s inept, but he did a good job there for two or three years! He talks about how good he is at building a company and disses JCP and Frye-, Herd-, and Watts-era WCW. He claims that Flair is going to be forced to sit the rest of his WCW contract out rather than being allowed on television again. The issue is that Bisch is making fun off Southern Fried WCW and the Four Horsemen in Boston, which doesn’t react at all to these jibes considering that they are WWF territory and decidedly not Southern! The Four Horsemen hit the ring to respond. No, wait, they’re stopped in the aisle by Dellinger and the Kops. Bisch insults Charlotte, so Dellinger steps aside and lets his fellow Charlotte-ite (Charlottian? Charlotterie?) pass. Flair grabs a mic and tries to save this segment. Flair introduces Mongo, who gets booed by the Pats fans in the crowd for that 46-3 in the Super Bowl a few years back. Flair introduces Malenko, and on cue, a fan in the crowd holds up a “STINKO” DEAN MALENKO sign directly in the shot. Hilarious. Flair gets warmed up, takes off his jacket, and avoids the temptation to punch Bisch in the face. Then he dances. The crowd is delighted. Flair riffs on skipping a show to see Reid win a wrestling tournament and tells Bisch to SUCK IT. You tell someone to SUCK IT in 1998, you get a big pop. This promo battle stinks because it’s shoot-bang garbage and Bischoff keeps responding, but I don’t blame Flair. He’s really trying to carry this thing. I’m just over wrestlers talking about DA BIZ in promos. Flair’s still entertaining, though. I just wish he was released from his contract and got to go to WWF and cut a bunch of promos against the Rock and Steve Austin in 1998. That shit would have been WILD. Instead, he’s here talking inside baseball with Eric fucking Bischoff. You get the point about this promo, though. Flair promises to show up on Thunder. Sure, but please no more shooty-shoot promo battles with Bisch. Michael Buffer introduces our main event, which is…Stevie Ray (filling in for Scott Hall) and the Giant against Lex Luger and Kevin Nash. Is this for the tag titles? Who knows? Luger is growing a villainous mustache, which I guess is foreshadowing for the Wolfpac/Hollywood merger in a couple months. Scott Hall stumbles out to join commentary. This doesn’t exactly make watching Stevie and Luger do some standard clubbering any better. Hall pours his wasted little heart out about Nash, then resolves to get involved in the main event tonight *sigh*. Hall comes down and the match grinds to a halt. Hall dumps Nick Patrick from the ring and taunts Nash, who tags in. Stevie leaves the ring while Hall stumbles around. Hall tries a punch and misses; Nash goes to check on him and Giant jumps Nash as Stevie comes back and jumps Luger. Luger wins that exchange and grabs a chair. That clears the ring of Giant and Stevie. Hall gets to his feet and toothpicks Nash, then charges his old running buddy and gets tossed outside. This fucking STINKS. Nash grabs a mic to lament how fucked up Hall is and holds an intervention/challenges Hall to a one-on-one match at Havoc. I have no desire to see this. Two minutes left and “Rockhouse” hits so we can get another goofy Hogan/Warrior skit. Hogan hits the ring, calls Warrior out, and gets Warrior to walk out with Disciple behind him. Disciple turns his back and shows a oWn logo on his vest while Hogan freaks out. This show started at a -1 Stinger Splash score, briefly climbed out of the hole to 0.5, and then dipped right back into the negatives once Bischoff decided that we wanted to hear him talk. -1 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

Not surprising. Though I remember enjoying TTP and Totally Buff from a character work standpoint, at least. But when Lex isn't engaged or, in the case of '99-'01 Luger, is both cooked physically and not being asked to do a whole lot in the ring, he's pretty bad! At least TTP cutting promos with Liz and Buff has potential, unlike '92 or '94-'95 Luger having zero worth in watching at all.

That is a big disagree for me, with a handful of caveats. I think they had a bunch of main eventers who could go. And that goes for some of the guys who weren't known as great workers - Lex Luger in 1996 is legitimately great on PPV as far as I'm concerned, and his Starrcade match with the Giant is excellently worked on both their parts. But in 1996 and 1997, they had Hall, Nash, Giant, Luger, Page, Flair and Savage doing good-to-great work, Goldberg doing solid stuff, and later Sting getting in the ring again and even the Hitman, who was going at three-quarters speed, putting together solid work. You add a bunch of guys positioned below them who are doing athletic, explosive work (Benoit, Rey, Eddy, Booker, etc.), and a few low-carders who are good fun (Mike Enos is consistently enjoyable whenever he pops up), and the work is really enjoyable when the booking moves out of the way. We can criticize Hulk Hogan all day, and he's one of the caveats. He's actually putting in decent work in 1996, but by mid-1997 a) he's fallen well off a cliff in athleticism and b) he's stopped working most matches like a cowardly heel, which he was doing right after the heel turn, and is taking way too much of these matches. Roddy Piper is another caveat as he was washed almost immediately after dropping the Intercontinental Championship to the Hitman and is in way too many main event spots over this time. One final caveat is that the undercard is often a mess. WCW shows rarely start with hot cruiserweight action, especially the Nitros, even though they somehow got a rep for doing that. I think WCW was absolutely a workrate promotion, though. They'd give Eddy and Chavo sixteen minutes on PPV or let Jericho and Juvi have fifteen minutes on PPV regularly. I actually think in 1998, both companies were workrate promotions. There were consistently excellently-worked 10+ minute matches on PPV in both those companies. I think WCW was more likely to give you compelling in-ring work on weekly television, but PPVs generally produced at least one or two matches with awesome work, if not more. And my hot take is that Austin was pretty boring on PPV in 1998. It's not his fault that he had to work Kane and 'Taker (who I think he has awful chemistry with) for a lot of it, but meh, Austin had a better '99 and a way better '01 in the main event spot. I think the big problem for WCW in the Bischoff era was the finishes. WCW couldn't book a finish to save their lives, specifically in the main event, and WWF could. WCW never had the strength of booking screwy finishes that were somehow satisfying, but that was well within Vinnie Jr.'s skillset. As swerves and screwjobs became more important features of wrestling matches, particularly once the calendar ticked to 1999, WCW was never going to do well. The other issue is that they tried to match WCW with shorter match times and more angles and talking, and again, WWF had the far better and more talented roster when the focus shifted to angles and talking and away from medium-length or long matches. One specific thing about late-stage WCW that I've been considering: I'm coming around to the idea that losing Chris Jericho to the competition was more shattering for WCW than I ever figured. I think it both signaled something about how WCW was fucking lame and WWF was the place to be, and it deprived WCW of arguably their best talker for the then-modern style of jokes, catchphrases, and creative skits. I digress, though. I think WCW's rep as the workrate promotion is fairly given, but is obscured by bad finishes, an undercard that was inconsistently booked, a move toward less work and more yapping that came to a peak in 1999, and the fact that Hogan and Piper spent a lot of time in main events.

I think it's both. w/r/t "the unwritten code of [...] promotion," he was in business with a bunch of other assholes who defended regional monopolies. I have a hard time squeezing tears out for those promoters (though I do believe that territory-era wrestling is probably the healthiest and most interesting from a creative standpoint, but that's another story). But he did bust up those regional monopolies and eventually make his company synonymous with pro wrestling in America, so he's not any better. I don't think anyone can deny that Vince was a promotional genius in the pro wrestling business, though. The most obvious example of this is his vision of what Hulk Hogan could be compared to Verne Gagne's comparatively very limited vision. And correct me if I'm wrong, but even then, when Hogan showed back up in WWF, Vince pushed him as though he were already a star without ever mentioning the AWA. I think in Hogan's return in '83, they just pretended that he'd fallen into a hole for a year or so and focused on him ditching Freddie Blassie and being a good guy now. Vince has always had the "nothing you did before this matters" perspective, which makes sense when he was a "going national" mindset and everyone else was still in a territorial mindset where you would refer to what a guy did elsewhere to build him in your area.

Surfer Sting was a complete goof. A lovable goof, but a goof. I'm not sure he was a viable character after about 1995.

While I don't totally line up with this list, I line up with it enough that I would like to submit it as evidence that Vader was Sting's best opponent, and it's not even close. If Flair is second, it's a distant second.

Thunder Interlude – show number thirty-two – 17 September 1998 "The WCW Gang adds unnecessary twists and turns to the saga of Ric Flair's WCW return” I’m once again oddly relieved to be watching Thunder instead of Nitro…I don’t know how much longer this feeling of relief will last… I don’t buy any sense of kayfabe danger that Eric fucking Bischoff has a chance to beat Arn Anderson in an arm wrestling match…Lee Marshall tries, but nah…The only danger in that specific matchup is a run-in that knocks Arn out, and even then, I’d still think unconscious Arn had a chance… Huh, a random Bobby Eaton appearance!...Wrath is going to devour him metaphorically, and maybe literally if the big guy is hungry…Wrath hits a diving lariat to Eaton as Eaton is standing way the hell across the ring, which is pretty impressive…The Meltdown ends it in only a minute or two…I personally want Wrath/Meng ASAP…I know Nash is going to beat Wrath in the lead up to Starrcade, so I hope they get Wrath/Meng onto a card by about mid-November…(Editor's note: As I refreshed the page, I saw caley's point about Scott Norton...I don't entirely disagree, but I would put Meng and Wrath ahead of Norton as guys who come off as borderline main-eventers when they're mowing dudes down...Either of the first two would be in line for that kind of push before Norton if I were booking this company...YMMV...) The Halloween Havoc CGI graphic is charming due to its very '90s style... Mike Enos faces Lenny Lane…Lane doesn’t do anything for me, but if they’re going to do something with them, maybe they should give him a win here…Or maybe Enos will beal Lane into about the fifteenth row…That beal toss ruled…Enos hits a press slam…It’s too bad that this company doesn’t care about tag teams because there is room on these shows for the Destruction Crew…They can at least put on solid WCWSN and Worldwide matches that make those shows more worth tuning in to…Enos has really enjoyable offense, and he unloads a lot of it on Lane…He launches the guy in an inverted crucifix toss for three…Yeah, that was way more fun than boring old Lenny Lane getting a victory…This was one of the more entertaining squashes I’ve seen on WCW television in awhile… Gene Okerlund interviews Buff Bagwell and Scott Steiner…It only serves to remind me that the Steiner boys are still feuding with one another…Which is, as you may know from reading these reviews, kind of a bummer to me… We get a little recap of Chris Jericho’s one-sided feud with Bill Goldberg…There are a handful of Flair career retrospective videos scattered throughout the show, and we get one of those here as well…I won’t stop to point all of them out, but they’re pretty cool little video packages… Mike Jones (WHO?!) just passed, so I won’t complain about getting a Vincent match in 1998 on Thunder…Actually, Virgil wrestling jobber matches on Superstars and Prime Time in 1992 and 1993 can be pretty fun, so I’m not entirely against the guy…And I did root hard for him as a kid in the Ted DiBiase feud…Yeah, I have some good memories of him in WWF…Anyway, this upcoming Thunder match might be alright, as he’s killing one of the Armstrong Boys…Virgil leaves his nWo cap on his head so that said Armstrong boy can pull it down over his face and punch him…That was a decent spot in a nothing match...Vincent quickly gets control, hits Armstrong with a diving clothesline from the apron, and lands a weak double-axehandle from the top after tossing Armstrong back into the ring…He does hit a nice armdrag, though…Huh, Vincent finishes with a keylock drop that he transitions into an armbar for the submission…I was pleasantly surprised at some of the offense that Vincent pulled out in this one… Chucky cackles over the PA once again…I’m excited about him shitting on Rick Steiner in a promo battle, and I mean, you can’t even believe how excited I am about it… If Thunder were being booked in EWR, we’d already be at the point where the “you overused Ernest Miller at the last show” message would pop up…Recap of Miller getting arrested on Nitro, which I think went on too long when it originally aired…Then we get an Ernest Miller/Rick Fuller match…Woof…They let Miller talk before the match…Again, I do enjoy Commissioner Cat, or I did when I saw it on its original run, but Ernest Miller, annoying karate champion is not a draw…Miller does the “I’ll turn around and count to three, and you’d better be out of here before I turn back around” thing…Fuller just stops the count at two…He gets kicked a lot after that…Miller flings the guy around at ringside for awhile…Fuller finally makes a tiny comeback…He misses a splash, though, and Miller rings him up with a springboard Feliner for three…The Cat hypes himself on the mic after the match… Curt Hennig/Norman Smiley is next…Aw, man, let’s get a few wins for Smiley…Smiley leverages the arm to outwrestle Hennig…Hennig slides out of the ring, annoyed and rattled…Hennig finally lands a drop toehold and then targets Smiley’s knee and quad…Smiley tries to fight out of the corner and manages an Irish whip, but Hennig catches him as he ducks down and applies a Perfect Plex for three… Scott Hall and Stevie Ray (w/victorious Vincent) are a makeshift tag team tonight…Hall is too sauced to do an efficient survey…He gets it done eventually, to less-than-ideal results (for him and for nWo Hollywood)…Kevin Nash and Konnan are their opponents…Hall falls over before the match even starts…This match is centered around two things…First, Hall being an incompetent drunk…Second, whether or not Nash will get his hands on Hall and maybe finally Jacknnife him…Unfortunately, the first one makes for shitty television…The crowd starts chanting for Nash to tag in about four minutes into the match because they at least want the promise of the second one to be honored…Instead, Konnan wrestles this whole match…Hall drnukenly hangs himself in the ropes, falls outside the ring, and gets counted out as Stevie Ray vents about having to tag up with a dude who can't hold his liquor…I can’t express to you how awful this segment was on multiple levels… Video recap of Flair’s return on Nitro…they play a large chunk of the segment…Then, it’s on to the main event of Arn Anderson versus Eric Bischoff in an arm wrestling contest…Ric Flair’s ability to return to WCW for good is on the line…It’s entirely anticlimactic as a stip because there’s no way they’re bringing Flair back just to sideline him immediately…I have no problem with them showing Flair cutting this promo again and then ranting at Bischoff because man, is it entertaining…Bisch bait-and-switches before the arm wrestling match happens and says that he never said he’d be the guy arm wrestling Arn…He subs in Buff, who says that they both have had catastrophic neck injuries, so it’s pretty much fair…I suppose this raises the stakes somewhat, but eh…Buff wins the thing in a second…Well, that was pointless since we know Flair’s coming back and wrestling anyway…I think I vaguely recall Bischoff booking himself in his second straight Starrcade match in 1998, this time against Flair, now that I consider things... There were some fun squashes in here, but nWo Hollywood generally drags things down up and down the card…Vincent and Hennig were unobjectionable tonight, but everything else from that stable’s members stunk...Going with an OWW grade for this show because, while I did enjoy the first thirty-five or forty minutes of Thunder, the last two live segments were the epitome of bad television, and there wasn’t enough elsewhere on the card to make me feel good about this show.

He can be both! Human beings are multitudes, after all.

I am going to wait to see Curt's posted clip because his commentary on it and the reaction to the post have given me something to anticipate about 1999 WCW.

Huh, I interpreted your paraphrase as Sting being self-serving. WWF wasn't interested in doing anything with Sting's career and had no ideas for how to use him right because they just wanted to take a WCW centerpiece. And considering how they did use him once he finally got there, he wasn't wrong! The HHH match is especially egregious for many reasons.

I don't believe Nintendo hasn't ever done a mass layoff. They have cash reserves and I think - I'm not a Japanese labor lawyer - are somewhat constrained from doing so at their Japanese studios by Japanese law. I agree about the definition of AA vs. AAA, but for me, I'm focused on games lower in budget and scope. I'll play anything that looks good, but trying to hit on big budget games with lots of scope creep is simply unsustainable financially. Sony lives off of those games and has multiple 10M+ and a few 20M+ sellers and can't even do it.

I just saw the Rock cook Seth Rollins in a Twitter promo. He did some "God speaks to Billy Gunn" level shit to him, goddam.

Show #157 – 14 September 1998 "The one in which Ric Flair drives home Eric Bischoff’s unsuitability as the leader of a major organization on accounting for his ABUSE OF POWER and that he’s an OVERBEARING ASSHOLE and such" As the Nitro Girls dance, I realize that I’m feeling like I ran off a cliff and, much like Wile E. Coyote, have only just looked downward to see that I’m about to plummet into space. Sure, I’ve given low scores to Nitro and Thunder. Yes, I’ve handed out negative numbers and OW grades in the past. But I’ve only now realized, looking ahead to the next few months of shows, that I think we’re in the part where WCW is abjectly bad until late 2000. Uh oh. At least I get joy out of reliving the ‘90s and writing about wrestling! Tony S. teases a Four Horsemen reformation as the Carolinas crowd, on cue, chants WE WANT FLAIR. Tony S. continues talking, and the crowd chants GOLDBERG. Maybe they should put those two fellas on TV and give them a lot of TV time, huh? Mike T. harasses some people who are sitting in a limo at a South Carolina airport. Then he harasses a guy just trying to clean a jet. Now that’s some good reportin’. For the third straight show, we see Ernest Miller kick a couple of them good ol’ Armstrong boys and have a pull-apart with Norman Smiley on Thunder, and then he has another pull-apart with Smiley which happened at Fall Brawl. This Ernest Miller push is poorly executed, let’s put it that way. Alex Wright deserves better than what he’s been given in 1998. Tonight, he’s been given a chance to maybe lose to a Hendrix-quoting Van Hammer, who, might I add, is dressed like That ‘70s Guy Mike Awesome. Look, I like Van Hammer more than most, but this is not how you use him. You use him as the big man and hot tag in a big man/little man tag team. We were forever robbed of a long-term Van Hammer/Juventud Guerrera tag team. Larry Z. makes me laugh by mentioning that he saw members of the now-disbanded Flock wandering around before the show: “It looked like 4 AM at the Greyhound station.” Ah, I see why Ernest Miller was mentioned before this match; he comes to ringside and hits Hammer with a jumping kick. He gets in the ring, and Alex Wright just leaves after dancing for a bit. Miller grabs a mic and says no one can beat him and then, while Dellinger and the fuzz prepare to haul him off, he yells SOMEBODY CALL MY MOMMA – a catchphrase is born – and then yells YOU CAN’T STOP ME while a bunch of cops do, in fact, stop him. In fact, we follow all the way to the back to see Miller get stuffed into a cop car. I don’t know why we needed to see that. War Games stills. It was the worst War Games ever by a wide amount. Gene Okerlund misses his cue, but finally hustles to the ring to introduce Bret Hart for an interview. The Hitman limps out. Maybe he’s working an injury or maybe he’s covering for a real injury. I don’t care enough to look it up. Bret apologizes to the fans and pulls an abrupt face turn. Or maybe it’ll be a swerve down the road. What a stupid heel turn in the first place. He dumps the U.S. Championship on the mat – he didn’t earn it anyway, he says – and then he gets me all fired up for an eventual Hogan match that is never going to happen via a series of vociferous threats he makes toward that bald son of a bitch. Do we get Hogan showing up to respond? No. Fucking Roddy Piper comes out here. Piper reads the Hitman the riot act while Bret reacts like a puppy who got admonished for destroying a pair of Jimmy Choos. Piper eventually forgives Bret and tells him to “soar with the eagles.” Yeah, maybe Bret should join the notable Philadelphia wrestling team the BIRDS OF WAR *caw* *caw* *caw*. Then Piper makes a requisite Bill Clinton reference, which of course gets booed in South Carolina. Man, Roddy Piper sucks. Anyway, this whole segment was complete ass. Saturn comes to the ring after a brief review of his big Fall Brawl win. Kendall Windham is the newest guy to have his name misspelled on the chyron. I am not happy to see him, as he signals that some of the worst things about late-‘90s WCW are fast upon us. Saturn gets on track after Windham gets an early advantage, but loses that advantage when Windham bails, then re-enters the ring and suckers Saturn in. This is a little too back and forth; Saturn shouldn’t be struggling with Kendall fucking Windham. Actually, you could say that Windham beats Saturn’s ass in this thing. Come on, now. It’s a pretty dull and overlong affair that finally ends when Saturn reverses an Irish Whip and catches Windham in a DVD. Even if you argue that Saturn had a tough match the previous night, as Larry Z. does, that’s not enough from a wrestling psychology standpoint to explain the looooooooooong beatdown Saturn takes in the middle of the match from Kendall fucking Windham. After the match, former Flock members come to the ring. Horace, Sick Boy, Riggs, lodi, and Kidman come to the ring. Raven and Kanyon are in the stands; Raven exhorts the former Flock members to rejoin him, but dammit, a stip’s a stip. Saturn and Raven do an angel/devil sort of thing. Saturn gives everyone compliments and encouragement except for Lodi, who he completely dismisses, haha. Lodi tries to join Raven, but Kidman stops him. Everyone else rolls the fuck out. I mean, yeah, that was the stip, you bums. Then Saturn tries to get over his bad “mind over matter” catchphrase. He should stop trying to do that. Since they brought Renegade in to be a duplicate Warrior at Fall Brawl, they figured why not throw him out there to get destroyed by Wrath the next night? Sure, why not. Wrath wins a squash with the Meltdown. He continues to look like a fun midcard gatekeeper. It took over forty minutes for “Rockhouse” to hit. Acceptable. Liz looks cute tonight. Bisch, Hogan, and Disciple do not. Bisch celebrates that Flair isn’t in the building right now. Then, he lets Hogan speak for some fucking reason. Hogan insults a bunch of his opponents, you know how it is. He’s a complete cornball. He eventually challenges Warrior to a match. Cue smoke. When the Undertaker does dopey parlor tricks, it rules so hard. Warrior does it, and I am immediately checked out. So, the smoke dissipates, and Warrior has kidnapped Disciple to, um, “reprogram” him. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how that off-screen reprogramming happens. Hogan yells WARRIORRRRRRRR. When Sid yells GOLDBERRRRRRRG, it rules so hard. Hogan yells WARRIORRRRRRRR, and I am immediately checked out. Tony S. hyped a Juventud Guerrera/Kaz Hayashi match for the WCW Cruiserweight Championship at the start of the show, but he now telegraphs a title change by telling us that Kaz is injured and that Kidman will be his injury replacement. Good, let’s get this belt onto someone with a bit of momentum. This Juvi title run wasn’t exactly as counter-productive as the Sting or Goldberg WCW World Championship runs of 1998, but it was pretty counter-productive! Juvi and Kidman have excellent chemistry together, so I expect something quite good. After a chop exchange, Juvi runs Kidman right into the mat, capping a series of pacey moves with a missile dropkick that sends Kidman for safety outside the ring. Kidman does get control when he re-enters the ring and gets two off a nice floatover powerslam counter to a Juvi leapfrog. Kidman works a chinlock for a bit and then stuffs a Juvi comeback, but he summarily eats double-boots to the face and then is crossbodied over the top rope and to the floor. We get a break. We come back to Mike T. yammering on about Flair’s Lear jet and Kidman trying to put Juvi away. Kidman goes back to a chinlock and a single guy yells BOOOOOORING. He’s not wrong. Kidman’s chinlocks are boring. Work the damned things. He bails out of the move quickly, at least, and gets 2.9 on a sit-out spinebuster. He gets another two, maybe 2.5, on a wheelbarrow slam. This is not one of their better matches, unfortunately. Actually, I'd go so far as to call it "not very good." Kidman seems completely out of ideas for what to do in between the big spots. Juvi makes one more comeback and gets two off a rana that he leaps from the top to hit. Juvi moves out of the way of a charging Kidman and tries a Juvi Driver, but Kidman flips out of it and gets another 2.5 off a gourdbuster. Kidman hits a front slam and goes up for the SSP, but Juvi crotches him in desperation. Juvi follows up with a top-rope Frankensteiner and positions him for the 450, but Kidman is up and catches a diving Juvi with another sit-out spinebuster, followed by the SSP for three. It was solid at the big false finishes, during the opening Juvi blitz of offense, and during the finishing run; it was subpar at every other point. Saturn walks out and applauds Kidman for his success. The crowd is surprisingly jazzed about Billy Kidman, let me tell you! Gene Okerlund chases down J.J. Dillon and tries to get the scoop on Ric Flair. It doesn’t work. Okerlund tries to call in favors, but the brave, the proud, the Doug Dellinger says, “Not tonight.” What an authority this man is! Jackie Chan says hello to Larry Z. from a studio somewhere even though we all know that Jackie Chan doesn’t know who Larry Z. is; then, Chan promotes a TNT special after Nitro and also the movie Rush Hour. The first one. Man, I’m old. I do get a chuckle out of Larry Z. claiming to have taught martial arts to Jackie Chan. Larry Z. is second only to Stan Lane in the “terrible pseudo-martial arts kicks” rankings. Eddy Guerrero and Eric Bischoff fight about Eddy’s contract status in the backstage area. Bisch banishes Eddy to Japan. Did he actually tour with New Japan at this point? Davey Boy Smith faces off against Barbarian in a rematch from the Battle Royal at Royal Albert Hall show. Davey also faces off against that damned trap door again. He was hurt by landing on it at Fall Brawl, so I’m surprised to see him out here for a match. I enjoy Barbarian, but he’s not particularly scintillating on offense tonight, and Davey is injured and, well, it’s not 1991 anymore. Jimmy Hart helps block a Bulldog running powerslam right in front of the ref, who doesn’t bother to DQ Barb, but Bulldog ends up ducking a Kick of Fear and hitting a weak powerslam for three anyway. Then he sells his back, and it’s not hard for him to do effectively; he looks in some pretty bad pain! Gene Okerlund grills J.J. Dillon in the ring. Dillon comments on this Steiner Brothers feud that won’t…fucking…END. Will this end at Halloween Havoc? I can only dream of it. Oh no, just as I was going to type a question about the Child’s Play promotion with Chucky and when that happened since Havoc is coming up, the lights flicker and the little murderous doll cackles over the PA system. I can't wait for a fictional doll to outsmart Rick Steiner on the mic, not gonna lie. Not that it's hard to do that. Why is Jim Neidhart being booked so much? At the very least, leave this guy on Pro. There is no excuse for a company with this much talent to run Neidhart out here every three days. “Rockhouse” plays, but smoke fills the ring before anyone even makes it out here, and Warrior pops out of the smoke with the Disciple kneeling behind him, and look, uh, it’s suggestive. As Hogan and a bunch of A-Teamers come to the ring, I think to myself, well, at least I didn’t have to watch Jim Neidhart wrestle tonight. Warrior looks like a doofus in his garish longcoat, jeans with a big-ass belt buckle, tassels, and boots. Warrior, um, straddles a kneeling Disciple and says a bunch of stuff. Let's just say that if we shot this promo in a dingy apartment somewhere, we could sell video of it to closeted conservative senators for a tidy profit. Warrior accepts Hogan’s challenge for Havoc. Then he disappears in a puff of smoke. It’s real, real, real dumb. The nWo members enter the ring and try to figure out what just happened. Warrior’s kidnapped a man and is going to fuck the defiance out of him, that’s what’s just happened, duh. Silver King and Norman Smiley are a tag team tonight, and they are very entertaining as they make their way to the ring. They’re probably going to job to Scott Steiner and Buff Bagwell, but I’m just glad to get more Norman Smiley. Wait, no, it’s a handicap match. Even worse. Dammit, show Norman Smiley some respect! Steiner, with a little helpful interference from Buff on the outside, tosses these dudes around, double-underhook powerbombs one guy onto the other, and then does a stacked Steiner Recliner on both guys for the win. He also immediately sells a back injury because we’re probably going to do a bunch of bullshit injury angles for the next month in this Steiners feud. The Giant vs. Meng? I’m into it. Meng hits a hundred hand slap, they chop each other, there’s clubbering. This is my kind of wrestling. Meng is out here giving zero fucks. He hits a side kick which wobbles Giant, who recovers, pulls down a strap, and gets serious. Yo, this fucking RULES. They just throw fists, Giant lets loose with a headbutt that does nothing, and Meng walks through a couple strikes before the Giant’s reach wins out; Meng and Giant go for finisher-enabling goozles at the same time, but Meng’s arms are too short to hotbox with the Giant. Chokeslam, three, and that was the best match I’ve seen on Nitro in awhile. Drunken Scott Hall (w/Vincent) is out next, and I think I’m good with having Hall on television anymore. He had a heck of a run from his early ‘90s Diamond Studd days through about early 1998. Razor Ramon is a legendary character. But yeah, the guy is cooked as a wrestler because he’s an alcoholic. He needed to go get treated for alcoholism and maybe get therapy for his guilt over killing a man, then do something other than be in the wrestling business. Hall surveys the crowd and it goes Wolfpac > WCW > Hollywood, as usual. After the break, Lex Luger enters the ring as Hall’s opponent. Hall does a lot of goofy drunken frat-boy stalling. It’s not amusing. Hall trips over the bottom rope after stepping out of the ring for a second. The crowd laughs. Tony S. is very upset by Hall being in this condition and thinks that the match should be stopped. This is some vile television. Not entirely because I’m offended that they took Hall’s IRL illness and made it part of his character, even though that’s dumb and shitty. But also because it’s terrible fucking television. I mean, this goes on and fucking on, with Hall flopping and wobbling around and stepping out to take sips from his cup. Luger shoves Hall into the corner and lectures him about being a drunken wreck. Bischoff storms out to try and convince Hall to head to the back. Hall is like I’M FINE, BOSSH *hic*. Nash and Konnan walk down and try to stage an intervention. This is truly some of the worst television I’ve seen in awhile. It might be worse than the nWo Tonight sketches because Hall is an actual fucking alcoholic who they’re having be in denial that he’s an alcoholic as a character. They have the guy spew all over Bischoff, he’s so drunk. When your character and the IRL person both already share the same name, I don’t know, maybe it’s not good to continue to erase the line between them so much. I also don’t think that WCW and its cast of characters, no matter how talented many of them are, are in the space to have a thoughtful and serious angle centered around an alcoholic wrestler. J.J. Dillon introduces Arn Anderson. Dillon apologizes to Arn for ambushing him a couple weeks ago, but Arn agrees with me that it was the real talk he needed. Yeah, sometimes your boys just have to check you. That is the value of having male friends, at least as a male. Arn tries to cut an epic promo, but the crowd is just like WE WANT FLAIR after about a couple minutes. Arn reassures them that Flair is coming, just let him get through this promo, geez, come on, now. Arn introduces the newest version of the Four Horsemen, who all join him in the ring: Mongo McMichael, Chris Benoit (a worker whom this show has sorely missed from the standpoint of consistent good matches; he and Booker both being off TV at the same time has been especially noticeable to Nitro’s undercard match quality, let’s just say), Dean Malenko, and finally RIC FLAIR, GET ON DOWN HERE. Arn really gets over the mystique of the Horsemen while he introduces everyone and apologizes to Malenko for not calling him Horsemen material. This show has also missed Flair. I’ve written before that I could go without seeing him in the ring ever again, but you know, I think I take that back. He’s well into his post-peak, but he’s consistently churned out fun TV matches since Nitro began. Flair cuts a teary-eyed promo that the crowd loves. Well, for a few seconds. Then, he focuses his ire on Eric Bischoff. Bischoff, who is in love with worked shoots right now considering the Eddy, Hall, and now Flair angles, should fall out of love with them. The vast majority of worked shoots are terrible. Bischoff comes out to ringside so that Flair can, in a legendary fit of pique, state this to Bischoff: YOU’RE AN OVERBEARING ASSHOLE, YOU’RE AN OBNOXIOUS OVERBEARING ASS. ABUSE OF POWER, ABUSE OF POWER, CUT ME OFF, IT’S CALLED ABUSE OF POWER. YOU, I HATE YOUR GUTS. YOU SUCK, CUT ME OFF. YOU ARE A LIAR, YOU ARE A CHEAT, YOU ARE A SCAM, YOU ARE A NO-GOOD SON OF A BITCH. FIRE ME, I’M ALREADY FIRED. FIRE ME, I’M ALREADY FIRED. We all know the above rant was amazing, but I still feel that I should say this: That rant was fucking amazing. To jump back, this show has missed Benoit and Booker. Trust me, I’m not saying they’re equally as good in-ring, but they consistently had good television matches for the last year on a weekly basis. Rey can’t get right health-wise either, which is a problem. The show has missed Flair. And even though I was down on Savage as a character, he’s another guy who would come out every week and fill time with solid TV matches up and down and across the card. I think Bischoff wasn’t aggressive enough in pushing guys with clear charisma and in-ring talent like Psicosis, but also, Chavo has just disappeared from television, and he was a weekly highlight of these shows. Is he hurt, or does creative just have nothing for him? Also, why doesn't Jericho, the hottest midcarder on the roster, show up every week? Will he even show up tonight? (Editor's note: He did not). Then, Bisch has taken Eddy and basically ended his weekly in-ring shows of excellence to get over a bad angle. Bisch can’t control injuries, but he’s made things worse with his bad booking. Diamond Dallas Page joins commentary to observe the Sting/Goldberg World Championship match which will determine Page's opponent for Halloween Havoc. I am staggered that Sting’s first match against Goldberg is on a Nitro after a PPV upon which Goldberg did not appear. At the risk of repeating myself, people incorrectly emphasize giving Hogan/Goldberg away on the Georgia Dome Nitro as a mistake when actually, giving it away for free should have been a teaser for Goldberg defending the title against all the other main eventers + a potential Hogan rematch on PPV. I am convinced that Bischoff is in utter denial when he claims that he didn’t panic about the WWF catching up and then dominating the ratings battle. If that’s true, explain all this worked shoot desperation edgelord angle shit? Explain giving away fresh Goldberg matchups on TV more than once? I’d love to be Sam Beckett so that I could leap into Eric Bischoff's body the day after the Georgia Dome Nitro and book all the way through the Fingerpoke of Doom Nitro in January. I’d save Nitro's ratings enough that it would be too viable to cancel in 2001. I’d alter the course of history so that WCW would still exist today. Al would congratulate me on a job well done. I’d jump out, end up seeing that I jumped into the body of a Klan member whom I need to put on a path to decency and goodness, and say OH BOY while the credits roll. Wait, what was I writing about? Goldberg straight dominates Sting to start and hits him with a sick powerslam. Sting dodges a corner charge, kicks Goldberg, and rams him into the corner with an Oklahoma Stampede. Sting follows up with a vertical suplex, but Goldberg no-sells it, and Sting wisely bails to reconsider his strategy. See, this rules. They should have made the viewer pay fifty bucks to see it. Back in the ring, Sting can’t compete with Goldberg’s power. He uses his greater agility to leapfrog Goldberg and hit a dropkick, but Goldberg pretty much no-sells it again and captures sting in a legbar that Sting quickly escapes by grabbing the ropes. Sting is selling frustration and bewilderment in his posture, and it’s really good. Sting is an underrated worker, IMO, even though he does get quite a few flowers. He doesn’t get enough of them. Sting puts on a headlock and hangs on for dear life, even when Goldberg tries to back suplex his way out of it. Goldberg finally breaks the headlock and just looks at Sting like it was nothing to him at all. This is a compelling matchup, but there are only five minutes left, which is a shame. Goldberg uncharacteristically tries a Tombstone, but Sting reverses it and hits one himself. Goldberg gets up, but more slowly than before; he stands up and eats two Stinger Splashes. Sting tries to finish him, but Goldberg blocks a beal toss. Sting decides that he’s got to go for more heavy damage and hits another Stinger Splash, then tries another, but Goldberg follows him out of the corner for a flash spear. Sting barely dodges it, chop blocks Goldberg, and tries to turn him over in the Scorpion Death Lock. After a fight, he gets it on, but Goldberg just pushes up off the mat and damned near breaks the hold entirely. Sting can’t quite get it cinched in as a result, and we are having a hell of a finish, just a hell of a finish, there’s so much struggle in this…and Hogan comes into the ring, boots Sting in the head, and leaves him ripe for a spear and Jackhammer. Hogan immediately jumps Goldberg at the bell, and Bret comes out and chases Hogan off. Goldberg helps Sting up as the show fades to black. Look, there is zero excuse for putting that match on free TV and then even less excuse for making Hogan the focal point of the finish. It’s a shame because this matchup was excellent and deserved a clean finish in the main event slot of a PPV. I enjoyed most of it, but the end, when Goldberg and Sting were selling this great struggle over the Scorpion Death Lock, was just marred by what happened after that. This show went from one extreme (drunken Hall, Warrior kidnapping the Disciple, Hogan interfering in Sting/Goldberg) to the other (Flair ranting, most of Sting/Goldberg). There was so much good and so much bad all jumbled up together that I think it averages out almost exactly? 3 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

That Rumble match made me finally "get" the appeal of Greg Valentine.

I personally seek raw catharsis from pro wrestling stories compared to stories in books, movies, or shows. I don't have any issues with a show or book narrative that lacks closure, but a pro wrestling story that lacks closure blocks me from catharsis and drives me up a wall. That's why pro wrestling stories are so important to me; something about them induces, for me, purer emotional reaction (in some ways) than if I read a great fictional book or see a great fictional film.

Turning Bret heel was a catastrophic error, as was making his first feud against Ric Flair, who the WCW crowd would obviously support in a "who's really the man?" feud. If you bring him in and have him go after the remnants of the nWo, maybe you've got something there. And I don't mean Curt Hennig or Crush, either. Hart/Hall hadn't been done since 1993 and would have been extremely fresh in 1998. He beats Hall, beats Nash, and then gets that Hogan matchup after that. And hey, you still can turn him heel after that so Sting can beat him in a battle of the extremely cool submission finishers. Bischoff contends that Waltman leaving hurt the most because when he jumped back, it had a "WCW is lame, everyone wants to come back to the WWF" impact, which I do understand, but I think it hurt even more that Chris Jericho had an insane 1998 and his reward is to be an instant upper midcarder on a hotter show in 1999 WWF. Waltman is one thing, but "hot star who got over organically leaving for the competitor and being positioned like the hot star that he is" is a whole other thing.

I saw part of that arc. I'm trying to remember when I stopped watching weekly AEW. It was pretty early. I think I stopped somewhere during the meandering. Do you think, Technico, that this story advanced Hangman as a character in the long term in some noticeable way? Does it feel like his character has evolved from where it was before? As a side, note, I love a good segue. Shawn Michaels careening from feud to feud directly because of the result of the Ric Flair match at WrestleMania was not the greatest example of that, but it stood out in the midst of the boring crap that was on WWE television at that time.

Hollywood abandoning the mid-range market where you budget a movie for 10M and make 40M at the box + whatever you get for DVD/BR/streaming rights is pretty much analogous to what video games did right now. Every major publisher except for Nintendo abandoned the AA market and primed their customers to expect only AAA masterpieces every time a release came out, and this is the result: Nintendo continues to roll along selling AA games at a full-price MSRP that almost never drops and that never does permanently drop, and the rest of the industry is slashing workforce so they can make the shareholders happy at the next quarterly report.

Per this discussion: When I watch wrestling, I want and love broader story arcs. I don't mean a story told in a single feud, but a narrative arc that takes a character or characters and grows them as they move through the story. Modern wrestling takes too much of the dumb in-ring shit from CHIKARA (that was good in the specific context in which it occurred), but not enough of the unifying story arc stuff that, while also dumb, was a unifying thread that encompassed more than just one feud in the company.. Lucha Underground was probably the closest thing we had to modernizing the broad concept of overarching story arcs. I've been watching a lot of WCW and have my complaints about the nWo arc never ending, but had it ended properly at Starrcade 1997, it would be a gold standard. That era of WCW has a series of story arcs that, while they go on too long and are usually booked into dullness by the end, are compelling and encompass a number of spots on the card. Raven's Flock is actually what I'm thinking of; that had a surprisingly satisfying story arc in which Raven used his free agency to get J.J. Dillon to agree that he could have hardcore matches for every one of his matches if he wanted, then he gathered lower-card losers like his buddy Stevie Richards who he knew he could control and used the power that he had from negotiating his contract to basically maneuver them like chess pieces into matches of his choosing within the scope limited by his contract. Eventually, he brought his long-time friend Saturn into the company as his second, but unlike the rest of the toadies that he convinced to follow him, Saturn had a mind of his own and ended up being the downfall of the whole Flock. There were missteps along the way, sure! It's not a perfect story. But from the point at which Raven shows up in mid-1997 to when the Flock is forcibly disbanded by Saturn in late 1998, we get this wonderful arc in which Raven tries to keep power over his followers using what he was able to negotiate in his contract and ultimately failing because one member of his group decided to push back against him. This was a roundly satisfying character story. Had Raven just disappeared from WCW television after this, it actually would have been perfect because it felt like his full story had been told. The other cool thing is that because other characters were caught up in it, it was able to sometimes fill multiple story spots in the company in an effective way, and in the midcard, no less. I don't think, beyond LU, there have been many or any stories in American wrestling that take eighteen months to tell a grand story about a character and then to wrap that story up narratively so I feel like I took a journey. That, I miss deeply and would love to see in more modern takes on pro wrestling. I understand that there are matches that are just there to be good matches, that there are looser character journeys that happen on wrestling shows, and that feuds are still a thing. But I don't think there's been anything nearly as effective as, say, the Savage and Elizabeth saga that started right before WM V and basically narratively completed at WM VII and that had people ugly crying on television in years. I don't watch AEW regularly or WWE at all, but I do read here and other places and have a sense of the big angles, and they don't seem to have the same sense of narrative that wrestling should have. Like, I hear people talking about Cody Rhodes "finishing the story," but what's the story? It's all based on this real-life truth that he was a career midcarder who left, raised his profile, and is back to become a world champ like his dad. That is a narrative story arc, but one which relies on knowing the real-life career goals of a guy playing a wrestler, which I find far less interesting than a story arc that is built around a character. In fact, real-life stuff is a crutch for long-term narrative arc storytelling. In the '80s, I had no idea as a kid that Randy and Liz had already been married for awhile, so them getting kayfabe married hit harder. Maybe you can't put the internet back in a box and shove it into the corner of the closet, but LU showed a formula for telling longform stories with clear character development in the internet era. Thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk.

I will note, though, that 1998 has the botched Sting babyface run that ends poorly and then does the same thing to Goldberg pretty much exactly. There was a run of about two, two-and-a-half months where this company was in good shape creatively in '98. But no matter what Eric Bischoff protests about business being good in 1998, Starrcade '97 really was the beginning of the end of this company. '98's business is off the back of '96 and '97 being broadly creatively successful, and by the middle of '99, everything from Starrcade '97 up to that point has poisoned the creative well, which leads to a desperation play for Vince Russo, which leads to ratings and revenue oblivion, which leads to not being useful enough a piece of the schedule for Jamie Kellner to hold his nose and keep Nitro on television. Though I do wonder what happens to WCW if Kellner convinces AOL Time Warner to look for a buyer while keeping Nitro on the air through 2001 and into 2002. I need to review why Bischoff didn't try to, or couldn't, get a TV deal for WCW somewhere out there while wrestling was still hot in 2001. You'd think he could sell some exec on wrestling still being hot + him having that nWo storyline be successful for eighteen months. I need to review what he said about the Fusient Media deal going south beyond It was worthless without a television deal.

I am still a "DDP wins it at Havoc" guy. I am loving Jericho in 1998, but I don't see him as a legit guy to beat Goldberg. On the other hand, the Diamond Cutter is a flash move that no one kicks out of and that Page can hit from any position...

I would go so far as to say, from what little modern stuff I come across, that there are a ton of very good athletes, but not necessarily a ton of very good workers.