Loss
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Last few minutes. Possibly a decent match with Benoit and Page in there, so I'll check it out in full sometime, even though the finishing stretch isn't exceptionally hot or anything. But it doesn't seem bad. Dean Malenko comes out to help Saturn up after DDP Diamond Cutters him, which gives Bigelow a chance to run in and help Page do a combo Greetings From Asbury Park/Diamond Cutter. Benoit eats the fall when I'd probably have Saturn take it instead, but that's not a big deal and I like the idea behind the Jersey Triad. -
Another video package that hardly excites me for the match. Hey look, it's Tank Abbott. Sting seems to try but this feud is a losing proposition. Chris Jericho is at the WCW.com booth this late! Wow. They brawl into the back, where Tank Abbott chokes Sting out and a group of actual rabid dogs are turned loose on Sting. Security runs in to help and the camera cuts away. If you're going to do this angle (even though I think it's stupid), you can't just leave people hanging like this. Then the Steiners hit the ring and bully the ref. They're upset because the match was stopped and this was supposed to be a Falls Count Anywhere match. Scott claims that Rick did pin Sting, even though they didn't show it, and demands Mickey Jay raise his hand. The Steiners as out of control heels would have been better a few years earlier when they were already sort of irrelevant. I like the idea of using something like this to build up a new team, but it wasn't to be. WCW had no clue.
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The video package doesn't make this feud look any better. We do get recaps of some of the key angles in the last month that we cut because we'd rather include stuff that was actually good. I do like the potential of Flair vs Benoit/Malenko but they didn't do much with it. Last few minutes of the match. Arn runs interference for Flair. It works better when he's associated with Benoit-Malenko as a heel act because it's a fresher dynamic. Flair ends up socking Piper with brass knucks after Arn distracts the ref. He locks in a figure four with Arn helping add leverage. Bagwell shows up from behind and attacks Arn, then enters the ring to go after Flair. Flair works Bagwell like he's 1988 Sting and they are in an impromptu brawl, which is funny because Buff has nowhere near that charisma. Then Piper turns on Bagwell and all three guys team up to put him down. Flair and Arn hold Bagwell while Piper whips him, as Tenay explains that this means the established stars stick together when there are threats to their spots. Buff Bagwell. That's who WCW thought should spearhead an angle that admittedly was a good idea. I remember reading at the time that Nash wanted to lead the young guys and Hogan wanted to shoot on them for being flippy floppy nobodies who had never drawn a dime, so this all could have been much worse than it was, believe it or not.
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Doug Gilbert debuts in Power Pro as a babyface, coming to the rescue of the Dirty White Boy, who found himself in a situation getting attacked by a group of heels. Dave Brown points out that he has nothing to do with Power Pro and isn't under contract, so he's pretty surprised that he showed up. Dirty White Girl is there too. Good to see DWB in particular. I haven't seen him since TL Hopper. Dave Brown doesn't trust Gilbert when he threatens to reveal all sorts of things about Power Pro and doesn't want to let him talk and keeps trying to cut him off. He has his mic killed too. Randy Hales comes out and tells DWB firmly that Doug Gilbert is not part of the deal and will never work for Power Pro. He has made threats on people's lives and Hales doesn't take that lightly. He talks about Gilbert working opposition. Dave is trying to remind everyone this is live television and that people should watch what they say and cooler heads prevail. We see Doug in the parking lot saying he can NOT get in any more legal trouble and he has to leave since they are threatening to arrest him. Dave begs the cameraman to stop filming this. DWB comes out later to confront Hales about this in front of everyone, as all he wanted to do was get some help when he was outnumbered and that's it. Hales says he hates what has happened to him, but Doug Gilbert can't be trusted and is out of control. DWB says he's not going to look so great tonight in Jonesboro when half of his main event refuses to show up, and that's what will happen unless Doug is in his corner. Hales begs him to reconsider and offers to find him a partner and DWB won't budge. DWB says that's fine, they'll go to the airport and catch a flight back to Bucksnort. Period. The heels, led by JR Smooth, take this opportunity to attack DWB yet again. Hales looks on helpless and finally goes to the parking lot and begrudgingly tells Doug he can come back in. He clears the ring with a chair and the heels bail. Kimberly, who was handcuffed during all of this, is especially peeved at Hales for letting this get out of control. And now it looks like DWB has been seriously hurt. Things get heated again and Hales kicks him out again. This ends with Gilbert promising he'll be in Jonesboro tonight and will buy a ticket if that's what he has to do to get in. Memphis still gets the fake shoot concept better than anyone else after all these years. I specifically appreciate that this seemed more "real" than everything else, but everything else was never once presented or implied as fake. In fact, they wove the two things together perfectly. This was a great segment, mostly thanks to Dave Brown. Probably the best-executed and well-booked angle of 1999, as crazy as that sounds.
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Steve Corino cuts a promo before the match, still peeved at Taz. He mentions Ric Flair for heat since they are in Horsemen country. Taz comes out for his match and Corino begs him not to kill him before faking appendicitis or something. Funny! Corino makes a total ass of himself, which is great in a promotion where everyone is trying to be a tough guy. He keeps asking for them to hit his music and it's met with silence. Taz loses his patience and finally attacks Corino. Finally, Spike comes out for their match which Taz declares will be FTW rules where falls count anywhere. Fun match that goes all through the crowd. Spike takes some pretty wild bumps for a house show match. I'm not sure why they picked this show to go all out, but they did.
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I find it sad when people who claim to be wrestling fans can't find something negative to say about a disappointing show.
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It's hard to make sense of all of this. So many things that are absolutely tremendous and so many things that are such overkill. There are too many truly great things in this match for me to be disappointed in it or consider it anything but a great match, but they really go in some questionable directions at times, which makes it hard for me to go all the way and call it a classic. In the big picture, they absolutely got the idea over that Kobashi had pushed Misawa farther than anyone had. You could argue that in losing, Kawada never made as strong of a showing against Misawa as Kobashi did here. It's a different dynamic than Misawa-Kawada, where you're expecting Kawada to finally put the pieces together and figure out how to beat the guy. Instead, it's that they truly are virtual equals, and Misawa just happened to be the wrestler that won this time. As far as the good goes, they laid the foundation for something really awesome in the first 30 minutes of this. It reminded me of Flair-Steamboat at Wrestle War '89 in many ways. In that match, Steamboat was laser focused on Flair's arm with the goal of weakening him enough to apply the chicken wing, which earned him a submission victory at Clash VI a month before. In this match, Kobashi was laser focused on Misawa's arm with the goal of weakening him enough to neutralize his elbow, which seemed to always be Misawa's calling card at crunch time. It was a very strategic performance from Kobashi and it absolutely worked. Misawa did the exact same elbow KO near the end of this and while they didn't milk it for a nearfall, it almost would have been pointless to do so. Kobashi was out at that point from the fatigue as much as he was the elbow shot. He did his job there. I really liked that aspect of the match - the slow building, the Kobashi strategy that was apparent and Misawa's reaction to it. Where the match fell off the rails for me was when Kobashi did the half-nelson suplex on Misawa on the floor. That was the turning point when the match became all about big suplexes and kickouts. Even that on the surface would have been not great, but not a huge issue ... had they stopped with the half-nelson suplex. But then they kept going and going in that direction, and before you know it, Kobashi is kicking out of the TD '91, which goes back to my point about this being a very different feud than Misawa-Kawada. I need more time to reflect on how I'll actually rank this, but I should have it sorted out by the end of June. They are the absolute cream of the crop at certain aspects of their game, but they were pushing way too far. There was a five-star match somewhere in all of this, but it was the equivalent of a great pop song with a 10-minute drum solo tacked on to to end, and this was not at all a five-star match in the end. And unlike a radio edit that can tighten up a song that goes too long, I suspect the TV version of this was JIP and only served to highlight the worst aspects of the match. Talk about a great match in spite of itself.
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They are presenting the Hummer attack as something really serious. It's vehicular assault, so I guess that makes sense. Nash seems out of it. He has no guesses on who was driving the Hummer. WCW was off the deep end. Flair banned the big elbow in the Bash match, but Nash has been fighting to remove that ban because he wants no excuses. What a mess.
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Sable appears on Leno to promote her exciting new lawsuit! I don't understand that tactic unless she was advised that she needed to make some headway in the court of public opinion for some reason. She has changed her hairstyle in a way that makes her not as recognizable, and which I think reduced some of what the reaction would have been to her appearance on Nitro, although she might have tried hard to not look like Sable for legal reasons. I get the idea of Sable being hypocritical considering her complicit role in wrestling being more of an adult attraction, but she was a woman trying to make it in a man's world, so it's hard for me to criticize her too much. Leno doesn't seem to get that WCW's approach to drawing families was very different than the WWF's, but I can forgive him that. Arsenio is Leno's other guest and adds a lot to this, probably at least partially because he was a genuine wrestling fan at one time.
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BattlARTS is just killing it on this set. This was just as technically great as most of the best BattlARTS matches, with the added dynamic of brothers (I'm assuming) taking on the two kingpins of the company. I continue to be really impressed by how BattlARTS has really found a way to make tag matches work in this environment. They were brave enough to just take every element of typical pro wrestling that suited them and keep it, discarding everything else. So there is great selling. There are strong finisher teases. And you still get the top notch matwork to go with it. Just below MOTYC status but another great fucking match from a great fucking wrestling promotion.
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Last few minutes. Bart Gunn is now in the WWF as Mike Barton. Yeah, Jim Ross never had a problem with him or anything. They use his knockout punch for drama in the match, which is a great thing. He does look more than a little out of his league though. Akiyama pulls a Misawa and drags Kobashi closer to his corner so he can tag himself in, but he doesn't drag him far enough, proving that he's no Misawa. Action looks good but not great. They seemed to kind of overdo it with the nearfalls. Ace and Barton win the tag titles.
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Tenryu must think he’s Jerry Lawler, working a match mostly built around great punching and even grabbing the house mic to cut a promo mid-match. These two are hitting the crap out of each other. This wasn’t as great as previous versions of this match, but there is still plenty here to love - the stiffness, great strikes and big personalities are enough to carry this to something good. It’s almost all slugging with very little wrestling, so everyone should brace themselves for that, but it’s still really good and compelling.
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This was the match Shamrock wanted. Vince tries to lock himself in the Lion's Den alone. He distracts him long enough for Jeff Jarrett to crack Shamrock with a chair, KOing him. Vince then locks on an anklelock to get a win. Fun stuff.
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Michael Cole interviews The Union. Test wants one person in the ring - Stephanie McMahon. That's a match? Vince and Shane had the same reaction watching on from the back. He asks Stephanie on a date, she says yes and Vince and Shane freak out. "Daddy's Little Girl is gonna date a wrestler!" is the angle they're going with here.
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Here it is ... the moment that went over like a lead balloon. Undertaker calls him the Higher Power so I guess they switched back. Everyone in the ring gets down on one knee as announcers speculate that this is all Shane. Shane makes a delayed entrance and the way they did that with the real one in the ring nodding his head as if he was the one speaking was clever, as was Vince being on the Titantron watching on during the reveal. But the actual reveal was awfully anti-climatic. His motivation was that he had to teach Austin a lesson. That's not much of an explanation. He simply wants to make Austin's life a living hell. Stephanie and Linda interrupt and they aren't happy, but they also don't seem surprised. Stephanie's acting has improved so much. Vince explains to her that it was just business, and that love doesn't have anything to do with it. So Linda wants to talk business. She corrects the "lie" that Vince and Shane own 50% of the WWF - there are four McMahons and each McMahon has an equal share. Oh boy, they could never keep this straight. Linda called an emergency meeting of the Board of Directors this morning and stepped down as CEO but hand-picked her successor: Steve Austin. Vince and Shane sell that awesomely. First things first, Austin has a title shot at the time and place of his choice. Second, Austin will take on Vince and Shane in a handicap match at King of the Ring. Vince even says, "Pally, you're on!" which gets a big, genuine LOL from me. Then there's tonight - Shane vs X-Pac (which Austin pronounces X-Pack) and Kane in a handicap match and each person in The Union can have a match with anyone they want. HHH will have a cast match tonight against The Rock - since Rock's arm is in a cast, HHH will put on a leg cast and wrestle Rock. Despite the Vince reveal being anti-climatic, this segment was incredibly well-constructed and performed, even with Linda and Stephanie not being very good.