PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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Ross mentions for the first time a 5-minute overtime period in Gauntlet matches. Foreshadowing! This is slower-paced than you might expect from Morton or Eaton but it's a quality little match, with some solid arm work from Eaton and a few nice spots down the stretch and into the inevitable overtime. Stan Lane and Jim Cornette interfere liberally at the very end and that sets up EATON VS. SID for Saturday Night. In some weird way I'm intensely happy that such a match-up actually happened at that point in WCW.
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White Boy is trapped in a sleeper when he dropkicks Jerry Calhoun. After a miscommunication spot with the White Girl, Eddie Gilbert clobbers Bill Dundee with a chair. Brickhouse Brown is overpowered when he tries to make the save by Doug Gilbert, who knocks him out with a boot. They put Brown in a chair and the White Girl paints his face with makeup and puts a blond wig on him.
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I like how Dundee doesn't dance around his past history with Lawler, bringing up the Bill & Buddy run as it relates to both Lawler and Jarrett. Lawler recites his Unified title/company-champions spiel and recites the list of participants, which is quite the who's-who of quality non-Big Two talent. Despite all the trash talk things are kept pretty civil, even with Gilbert. I wonder if the more low-key and downright lighthearted last two weeks was a conscious reaction to the failure of the car angle to draw (in fact attendance went down).
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Rude murders somebody and is informed by Bobby after the match that Heenan's staff was unable to find anyone in the arena who wasn't an ugly, tattooed, IQ-of-3 redneck so no Rude Awakening. But no one in the arena is as ugly as the Boss Man's mother. 1991 WWF is going to be a breath of fresh air. Give me some damned feuds built around attempted murder and not rubber snakes and yo' mama jokes.
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Heenan has continued his insulting and degrading comments--IN PUHLIK, EEF YOU WEEL--about the Big Boss Man's mother. We get a recap of the Heenan handcuffing and comments from the Boss Man promising to come after Rude next. Did these two ever even have a match, even on a non-taped house show?
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Actually the finish seemed to be messed up by all four guys, which is probably a record in its own way especially for guys and a promotion of this caliber. Everything up to that was pretty much gold. Lots of new offense here from the Misawa/Kawada team, including the sick suplex to the floor and the legdrop/senton combo that I don't think I've seen since. This is the first true appearance of '90s Kawada, right down to the yellow & black tights to go along with the surly attitude.
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Two interruptions of Flair interviews are shown, the locker room incident earlier and a segment of the Danger Zone which results in a pull-apart. Long compares this situation to calling a timeout so you can slap your mother--I had the same reaction that line that Cornette does. Long admits without saying so that Doom might have bitten off more than they can chew, but plan to end Arn & Flair at Halloween Havoc anyway. Solid to-the-point promo. I didn't like the contrived set-up for this match but the idea of the feud is definitely an intriguing one.
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The thing was backwards from the second match on. De-push or not, getting the "random draw" part over or not, shouldn't Flair be the climax of the Gauntlet and not in the middle? You could even keep the same booking if you felt you had to--a DQ victory over Arn would just make Scott look like a bigger underdog going into the final match. Okay, okay, let's evaluate this as a match. Arn doesn't have the elite physical skills of Bobby Eaton to be matching Steiner big move for big move, so he tones it down with more matwork and shtick, building up to "safer" moves like a backbreaker on the floor that still get the point across. Plus a cute spot where Arn tries to "bring Steiner in the hard way" which Scott counters by simply letting go of the ropes. Arn counters a sunset flip by grabbing the ropes and gets a pinfall, but this is far more important than any title match apparently so Randy Anderson gets the match re-started. About three seconds later Flair yanks Nick Patrick out of the ring and it's a DQ. Flair and Arn attempt a beatdown but before even any heat can be drawn, Rick is out and the Horsemen are off. Well, try as I might, the booking can't be separated from the work. Scott gets to pin Ric Flair and then idiotically eats a pinfall himself the next night, regardless of whether it was overturned. The restart was rendered even more pointless by having the match end right afterward anyway. I would also posit that this match as booked was not part of the Gauntlet--the ring announcer doesn't mention it before or after the match, unlike in the first 2 matches. It simply became a Gauntlet match after the fact, which might explain the DQ finish but not excuse it.
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Heenan is presumably still there, to this day. Rude accuses Vince of being behind all this, getting bleeped a few times. "Heel manager makes comments about babyface's mother" is a lame enough impetus for a feud, but "heel reveals he told manager to say said comments" is an extra layer of lame.
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Boss Man and Heenan play this to the hilt, with BBM working hard to get this issue over as a blood feud. Heenan takes one of his last absurd bumps of his career, careening off the broadcast booth to the floor, as Boss Man drags him to ringside and cuffs him to the barricade. Boss Man works a pretty good squash match, incidentally. He's about to dish out hard time to Heenan afterward but officials shield Heenan. Boss Man responds by heaving the key into the crowd. Power & Glory are out for their match. Heenan offers them $10,000 if they can get him free, but as Herc is about to work on breaking the cuffs, the referee starts counting them out, forcing them to abandon the project.
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Nice to see Rogers working on top for most of this. Petitpas throws in a few unexpected offensive wrinkles as he looks sort of like a big lunkhead but doesn't remotely wrestle like one. Petitpas is making his comeback when a decrepit Bulldog Bob Brown ruins things with a DQ run-in, and THE MARITIME GIANT comes in to make the save. Yep, that's definitely (a very, very skinny) Kurrgan.
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We start with a green screen promo from the Freebirds as they unveil Rocky King in a ridiculous paint job as LITTLE RICHARD. Yes, there are always more than 2 Freebirds. It's hard for me to fathom this group sinking any lower. All that in the first post, plus it's telling that Flair is #2 in the Gauntlet instead of the climax. If Flair can't beat Scott Steiner, should we really expect Arn Anderson to do it? Anyway, it's an okay match, but not nearly as good as the Eaton bout the night before as Eaton got lots more offense in and more or less kept Steiner in check. We get a lot of smoke-and-mirrors false finishes and Arn interference that Scott keeps shrugging off, before one Rick Steinerline puts Flair down. It's rather fascinating to see such a rapid Flair de-push at this point.
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What a weak-sauce DQ, as the match is thrown out because Arn DDTs Zenk on the floor. Match was sort of an abbreviated good match before then. I've bitched about matches that I felt were longer than they needed to be, and we had the opposite problem here. Pillman was great working with Arn and lighting up Flair with chops, but the FIP segment was pretty perfunctory. Doom runs in after the match and a brawl is on.
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Really clever finish to a blindfold battle royal--Lawler ties up Frank Morrell, thinking it's Gilbert, and Gilbert peeks out from under the hood and uses that to cold-cock Lawler with a foreign object to take the pin and get his choice of mystery cars. His pick is a lemon, and he takes his frustrations out on the car including a pretty epic running chair throw. Gilbert leaves the junk car behind, and Lawler is making an Airport Toyota appearance with the car and some spraypaint, inviting fans out to spraypaint their thoughts on Eddie Gilbert on the car. That's fantastic. The incognito Unified World Title is finally mentioned again, as the tournament for the vacant belt is coalescing. They're really going all out with the participants here--Dick Slater, Mark Callous, Steve Keirn, Austin Idol, and others. Lawler takes some parting shots at the Snowman but invites him to be involved in the tournament anyway. Then he announces a spot show at Catholic High School where he'll meet Gilbert in a coal miner's glove match. As I was typing this up I was going to make that EXACT phone book analogy, dammit. That's exactly how it comes across and yet I'm still hanging onto every word.
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Arrogance is now presumably the new sponsor of the Brother Love Show. Love is still wearing his medal that Slaughter bestowed upon him at SummerSlam. Agreed that there is no way they could run any kind of heel military gimmick nowadays, regardless of whether or not they hitched him to a foreign menace. This Slaughter run is a tale of contradictions. He really does play the gimmick well, both as the '80s relic and as the turncoat Iraqi sympathizer. But the latter gimmick in particular is so distasteful and so utterly wrongheaded in the face of what was actually happening that it's really hard to call it an artistic success. At the same time, Slaughter was considered washed-up physically very shortly after he departed the WWF and hadn't been perceived as a top-shelf worker in 5+ years, yet he came back to a company he had been drummed out of on very bad terms, was given the Heavyweight title, and headlined their premier show...a premier show that had to get moved from a 100,000-seat stadium to a standard arena. Slaughter headlining even a failed WM was utterly inconceivable mere months before this. The entire stint was a personal success for Sarge but a failure on all other levels. Anyway, I was enjoying Sarge as a guy who couldn't handle a '90s post-Cold War world, but it all goes off the rails here as the Iraq alliance is now introduced to the character. The WWF tries to book an angle around current, outside world events but in their own hamfisted way, in the end everyone involved ends up looking even more trapped inside the wrestling bubble. Contradictions. (I should add here that Piper was really great in responding to all this.)
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Fantastic match. Steiner isn't quite in Bobby's league as an all-around worker but he does his best to match him bump for bump here. In addition to the tennis racket off the ropes, Eaton cuts Steiner off with an absolutely murderous clothesline that puts any Steinerline to shame. The hype for Steiner vs. Flair is so huge that you know who's going over here, but I'm pumped to see the rest of the Gauntlet now.
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Pedantic note, but I don't like having a backdrop conveniently backstage at what is ostensibly the Clash. Luger's promo is fantastic but it would have had more of an effect in a locker room proper. Hansen drips tobacco everywhere, calling Luger a "prima donna, preppy puke." He's always been #1 (just ask his wife), he's not fighting for it. I really, really, REALLY love storylines built around the Top 10.