WRESTLER OF THE DAY: LEX LUGER

[ArtVanderlay]

I will go to my grave disagreeing with Meltzer.  Lex absolutely should have won the title at GAB 88.  As Bruce Mitchell pointed out in that podcast with Dave in regards to the Crockett documentary, in 1988 all the titles were on heels and that was no way to attract fans to the arena.  I sure as hell wasn't going to ask my Dad to spend his day off taking me to the arena to see "Mr. Chinlock" Mike Rotundo go to a time-limit draw with Jimmy Garvin for the TV title, I loved my father too much to do that to him

 

I was 11-years old in 1988 and I and all my friends viewed the NWA as second-tier "because all the titles were held by bad guys."  We had grown up on Hogan hitting the legdrop and cleanly pinning the bad guy every month, not Ric Flair tossing his opponent over the top rope for the DQ.  

 

I wasn't going to go to  a house show where I knew the show would end with Flair walking out still champ, instead of Dusty or Sting or Luger cleanly pinning him and celebrating with the crowd, holding the title belt high over his head.

 

GAB 88 really should have been the beginning of the end of the original Horsemen, with Luger walking out as champ and then possibly building up to Starrcade with a "Horsemen Must Split Up If Flair Loses" match with Luger destroying J.J. Dillon and Barry Windham before racking Flair and getting the submission to end the show.

 

I acknowledge that not having Flair as champ would have hurt the core Southern markets, but Crockett had no hope of expansion in the North East without a strong babyface champion.

[RandomAct]

I actually love that we are at a point in the last few years where you can have an actual dialogue about Luger.  It wasn't long ago where the common(wrong) opinion was that he was dogshit with no redeemable qualities.  Seems that most rational fans have revisited his stuff with an open mind.

[Matt D]

People watched footage instead of just listening to Scott Keith conventional wisdom.

[Jenalysis]

I actually love that we are at a point in the last few years where you can have an actual dialogue about Luger.  It wasn't long ago where the common(wrong) opinion was that he was dogshit with no redeemable qualities.  Seems that most rational fans have revisited his stuff with an open mind.

 

I only thought Luger was dogshit in the Russo era.   His peak was his first NWA-WCW run.  Even end of career Luger was better than some of the other WCW old guys (better than Nash at least)

[SirSmUgly]

I became a huge Luger fan after watching his '87-89 and '96-'97 again over the past two years. Love the guy. Surprisingly good face for such a smug dude, great heel, even when he was breaking down completely in '99, his Total Package act with Elizabeth was fantastic and made up for his in-ring. Probably one of the biggest non-Barry Windham wastes of talent I can think of. Vince McMahon totally wasted a legit main event guy so bad that he was stuck in a midcard tag team by the time he left to go back to WCW. 

[Technico Support]

 

Most underrated wrestler of all time?

 

Could be.

 

I actually really quite like the GAB match as it was an impossible match and its flaws have nothing to do with Lex as a performer. I've written about it before.

 

The first match on the docket is Lex Luger vs Barry Windham, in a cage, for the vacant WCW World Heavyweight Championship. It’s a fascinating match, especially for the sake of this exploration, because in so many ways, it was an extraordinary match for all the wrong reasons. What Lex and Barry, two talented wrestlers with a definite connection to the crowd, were asked to do was contradictory at best and impossible at worst, and it leaned far closer to worst than best.

 

Everyone knows the context. Ric Flair refused contract negotiations. Ric Flair refused to drop the title to Luger. Ric Flair offered to drop it to Windham but Herd balked on the entire situation. Ric Flair left for Titan and they ended up here, with a build towards Luger finally winning the title but with no champion for him to vanquish, with Barry pulled from the mixed tag as the only viable opponent for Lex, and with a crowd who was openly hostile to the company and it’s main event, which wasn’t even a main event since it was the second to last match on the card.

 

What they were trying to accomplish was a mishmash of epic proportions. Lex Luger had to be established as a champion. More than that, though, he had to leave the match looking strong as a potential heel champion. There needed to be some slight question about how he won. He couldn’t wrestle the match as a heel, though. One of the few things WCW had going for them here was that a large portion of the crowd had followed him for years and wanted him to win the title. They couldn’t take that moment away from him. He couldn’t appear to look weak throughout the match, as well. Of secondary importance, Barry couldn’t look too fiendish. He was going to be one of the company’s top babyfaces in the fall. Finally, they needed to wrestle a match that at least partially would make the crowd forget about the specter of Ric Flair that was hanging over the entire event. They had to combat the “We Want Flair” chants, and as part of a live PPV, even in the best circumstances, production alone couldn’t be counted upon to manage that. It wasn’t the best circumstances, anyway, it was WCW, where they spent fifteen seconds panning over excited front row fans, or at least fans that were excited to chant “We Want Flair!” The wrestlers were very much on their own.

 

Let’s look at this again, because a lot of this deserves reiteration. They had to wrestle a main event caliber match, in a cage, without having any real, recent reason to be feuding, for a vacant title, in front of a hostile crowd. They couldn’t use a lot of the usual tools at their disposal. There was no real impetus for blood or hate-filled brawling. Windham couldn’t work a long heat segment on Luger, because the end goal of the match wasn’t about Luger garnering sympathy or overcoming adversity. In the end, he had to win because Harley Race and Mr. Hughes came out to refocus him/distract his opponent. At the same time, they couldn’t do a heavy double-turn within the match because there was no context for it and, more importantly, because they needed the crowd to be able to revel in the finish, even if they were, perhaps, a bit bewildered in it. WCW needed to give them this moment or else they’d turn on the night even more. Really, though, the wrestlers couldn’t even work a spotfest, which might have drawn in the crowd given the setting, because it had to feel like a legitimate NWA/WCW World Heavyweight Championship match to reestablish the title and lineage considering how Flair left with it. It had to feel legitimate in pacing and scope, but without many of the tools that previous such matches could utilize.

 

Ultimately and unsurprisingly, the match failed when it came to keeping the crowd and having them forget Flair. It did have some things going for it and may have succeeded in other ways. I think the fans were ready for Luger to win and they did seem to pop for it. It was his time, or at least it would have been had things gone differently. It’s impossible to know how a babyface Luger victory, with Flair still in the picture, would have gone. The announcers did a very good job protecting an artificial feel of importance to the pre-match (though the live crowd wouldn’t get to see that), bringing up the wrestlers’ respective past as teammates and rivals. At least the people at home could pretend. Barry used the cage in interesting ways, mainly as a way to steady himself for top rope moves (a flying clothesline and later a flying kick that led towards the finish) and most interestingly, as a counter to torture rack, where he used his height to push off the cage and flip out of it. They obviously had the intrigue of Race and Hughes coming down, a surprise which took the fans’ mind off of Flair, at least temporarily. Windham exited the match fairly well protected and probably a little elevated from when he came in. Luger had gained a layer of doubt (could he have won without Race coming down?) but also had a new management team, a new attitude, and a new, immediately over finisher. The fans could refocus some of their resentment in Flair being forced out (or the illusion of such) to Luger robbing them of their moment of celebration by using a shortcut and going heel.

 

While it may have accomplished some of WCW’s longer-term goals, at least in a watered-down manner, it was still a bit of an albatross in the moment. They worked a more measured title match style, each wrestler being careful not to make a mistake, but without a strong face/heel dynamic, the fans were restless. With every break in the action, they chants began anew. Alternatively, anytime they started to pick up the pace, they seemed to fade, but the match didn’t call for much of that faster pace. Windham tried, and the big spots were fun, but it made for an almost experimental feel. The cage ended up feeling like a goofy prop and in fact, I can’t think of another cage match where the cage had less meaning either as an imposing structure to create mood or as a tool to be used in the narrative, even in the era of WWE PG. Having Race and Hughes come down was very smart, but there was no reason they couldn’t have added drama by arriving earlier in the match. This crowd needed every distraction it could get. Frankly, there was no fooling this crowd into thinking they were witnessing history, so they should have gone all out in order to keep them engaged and entertained.

 

Still, Luger turned and while business was down into the fall of 1991, the heel machine this match christened in him looked pretty good on paper, at least. Barry’s babyface turn, drawn out for a few more weeks on the weekend shows, was a bit more successful, and he helped give a rub to first Ron Simmons and then Dustin Rhodes along the way. I don’t think the title would feel truly significant again until Vader took it the following year, but then there was almost no way this match could have accomplished that, even if they went sixty minutes and bled buckets and started a riot (for good reasons, not bad). This was a case of a two wrestlers put in an impossible situation, drawn into the middle of a forced storyline reset not of their making, and basically sent out there to die in front of a crowd who wanted very little to do with what they were seeing. In the face of that, they did a competent, and in Barry’s case, slightly inspired, job but one that was ultimately forgettable. The next day all anyone would remember would be Harley Race and Ric Flair; not an auspicious start to yet another new WCW era.

 

 

Really good writeup.  I was there and, man, the crowd was crazy.  Looking back, I have no idea why they didn't just change up the entire card and book a one  night tournament.  Sting and Koloff were right there and were wasted in a "touch all corners" chain match (the worst kind of chain match).  Instead we get a meaningless macth with the heir apparent vs a midcarder back when such distinctions meant something and it was so terribly flat.

[J.T.]

Jesus, I hate Lex Luger.  

 

The only reason he turned out to be such a wonderful seller is because he learned his lesson from the times he tried to no sell against Bruiser Brody and Bad News and got his ass beat for it.

 

One thing I will give him credit for is his ability to lead a match as well as be carried, but again it took lumps and bumps to get that wisdom through his thick skull.

 

Frequent turns really did transform him into a very smart worker that could either infuriate or inspire a crowd and he was equally brilliant in his role as a dominant heel or a convincing face in peril.

[Web Conn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2G4hDohpVo