Loss

I think I liked this a bit more than you did. I loved how the match just built and built and built. They brawled in their ring jackets to start before settling into a heel-dominated and more calm tag back in the ring. It wasn't the match I expected to see at all, as they stuck almost entirely to fundamentals, with MAKOTO and TARU taking on the heel role and hiding the piece of cloth, whatever it was, that they were using to choke out whoever was FIP -- not entirely sure who was Mochizuki and who was Kanda. The crowd was pretty dead for most of it, but they mostly worked a conventional Southern tag, which it takes pretty bad workers to completely screw up, I thought the work was solid and I also thought it was pretty cool that unless I missed it, no one even attempted to go to the top rope until halfway through the match. And Mochizuki and Kanda winning felt really earned because they took such a beating and MAKOTO and TARU were put over so strong, so they had to fight back pretty hard to get the victory. ***1/2

Heyman has pretty much always favored one client over all others when he's tried to balance his services. I wouldn't mind Heyman managing me, but I would insist upon an exclusivity clause in the contract.

Slick, God love him, never did a damn thing for any of his clients. Rick Martel was able to diversify his brand as soon as he severed ties, simultaneously becoming a star in both the worlds of fashion and sports entertainment.

Why would Fuji leave Demolition while they were the champs? He cost himself a lot of money doing that, and he went with the Powers of Pain, who never won the titles, so it was a gamble that never paid off. On top of that, he ended up having to get in the ring and take punishment, which was far beyond his job description. Edit to add: Do you blame the WM9 debacle where he actually got Yokozuna all the way to the title in just months and then couldn't quit while he was ahead and managed to make him an ex-champ within just a few minutes on Fuji being an idiot, or is that more typical Jack Tunney incompetence and bias?

Go with Jim Cornette if you want someone exclusively focused on you and don't mind his hotheadedness occasionally getting you into trouble as baggage. Go with JJ Dillon if you don't mind splitting time with a team, but would rather have someone more level-headed steering the ship.

"Slapnuts" remains the dumbest insult of early 2000s wrestling. "He's not only confident, he's outright cocky," says the ultra-dweeby Mike Tenay. Jarrett repeats himself multiple times in a few short minutes before Scott Hall interrupts with Wolfpac music and I'm not even going to try to make sense of NWO loyalty and WCW storylines. I'm pretty sure this was Scott Hall's last WCW TV match ever anyway. Nash shows up via Turnertron and rambles about God knows what for several minutes and messes up the timeline from Nitro to Thunder (has it been one day? two days? three days?) at least three times. Finally, we end up with Jarrett vs Hall tonight with the winner getting Sid at SuperBrawl. And yeah, both guys are pretty motivated here. Maybe Hall is better when Nash isn't around. This is overbooked to hell, but would have been a good match without the bullshit and more time. The crowd was actually into it and everything. Even then, it still almost got there, but WCW was nowhere near strong to be trying to do Pat Patterson layouts in their main events.

I too liked what I saw of this, but considering everything Olimpico went through, I was hoping Panther would take more of a beating in this match. I would have rather Panther won after taking so much punishment than Olimpico won after taking so much punishment, but it's the latter that we got. Olimpico seems unsure what to do with his rage at times when he's got Panther down, but I got the sense that was part of his character more than a deficiency as a worker. I enjoyed this. Love the blood, and Blue Panther is so MEAN.

This reminded me a lot of a Nitro match, showcasey and full of highspots. A good match that I enjoyed while it lasted for sure, but not something that I think made too much of a lasting impression. They were going nonstop though. ***

Seeing Hall, Flair, Luger and Hogan, but not Nash, Goldberg and Savage or Sting. I don't think there was any point after maybe 1998 or so where they had all of their top guys from the glory days around and healthy at the same time. WCW is purely a nostalgia promotion at this point, and fans are just showing up to see the guys they grew up on, but aren't invested in what is going on now for shit, nor should they be. Jeff Jarrett is in an NWO shirt. It doesn't get much lamer than that. Jarrett smashes the guitar over Hall's head because he doesn't want Hall to be champion, so Sid retains. I like Jeff Jarrett the wrestler and really despise Jeff Jarrett the personality.

The "I Quit" match was awesome in 1989, but that "Remember when...?" highlight package really makes WCW look like an old folks home because the spots aren't super impressive in a modern context, and it's not the spots that made that match anyway. I do think Flair-Funk can still be presented as a marquee match in a way that's fresh, but that ain't it. This was an effective angle, though ... in some ways. This was around the time you could tell people in attendance for WCW shows didn't really watch the TV for the most part and probably got their tickets before the company spiraled completely out of control. The segment got Terry Funk over as a big time heel, which I don't think was the goal, and the significance of Flair not coming out seemed lost on the live crowd at least. I am glad we at least got a nice Arn promo to close things out though, and the match was compelling at times. Mike Tenay ... just ... no. Just no, Mike Tenay.

Dave's legacy ... first off, his podcast ... hahahaha.

For the WWF, it's hard to top Albano. What is it -- 17 tag team title reigns he's managed? Something like that.

JJ Dillon ran a tight ship and did a great job managing egos and protecting his assets while acting as Executive Director of the Four Horsemen. He was happy to replace aging team members who wouldn't put business first with younger and more promising athletes, even if they had family members on the team. If those younger and more promising athletes started getting a big head, they were out the door. Anytime his premiere meal ticket, Ric Flair, dropped the title, he quickly got his client back on track and returned him to the throne. When Tully Blanchard lost the TV title after a record-breaking run, he formed a tag team with Arn Anderson and they were champions within weeks. After recruiting Barry Windham, he guided him to the U.S. title in less than a month. Three years of overwhelming success later, he lost half of his organization due to circumstances beyond his control and accepted a buyout from a Japanese corporation headed by Hiro Matsuda. The new company of course ran the Four Horsemen into the ground in record time, Windham -- JJ's most prized recruit less than a year earlier -- quickly bolted and Flair lost the title for a few months before regaining it back, only to be sidelined with a neck injury, something unthinkable under JJ's leadership. Future attempts to revive the group under different leadership consistently failed. If I was a wrestler, I know I wouldn't want anyone else managing me.

I was pretty amazed at how awful he was here. If this was an outlier and he's normally unremarkable but inoffensive, this was quite the off night.

This was an absolutely phenomenal match. I'm really excited to talk about it, but first I'll talk about the opening segment, which contained both a pair of great money promos from HHH and Cactus (like, exceptionally great) and a strong angle assimilating The Radicalz in the WWF by turning on Cactus in exchange for contracts provided by HHH and Stephanie. HHH got so many details right in his promo -- the way he sold Cactus suggesting their match be Hell in a Cell was tremendous the point that you'd probably have to work harder to convince me that it *didn't* have a positive effect on the buyrate for No Way Out than that it did. He's been on a roll thus far. I have to give credit where it's due. As for the match itself, it was awesome, and not just for the legendary hot crowd. I want to talk about each guy in the match. Some there aren't much to say about. X-Pac and Scotty 2 Hotty pretty much hit their signature stuff and got out, although X-Pac is always good at setting up over babyfaces for retribution spots. He did it for Rock and Foley here, much like he did for Flair many times in WCW. Brian Christopher was FIP for a while, which he did well, and ate the fall in the end after taking a pedigree from HHH followed by a diving headbutt from Benoit. Rock added heat. Foley added heat. To me, the most impressive guys were HHH, Benoit, Saturn, Malenko and Rikishi. I want to start with Rikishi. I've said this before, but it really bears repeating. Rikishi was a superstar. He also was a tremendous worker. I love his exchanges with Benoit, which managed to put them both over, both in Benoit's immediate feed eating the Samoan drop and in Benoit finally hitting the German after struggling at first. Their stuff was really crisp and fast-paced, and I'm hoping they have at least one singles match that is given time and clicks this year. I know they have some matches against each other, but I don't remember any being hyped as particularly special, but it's possible they were just forgotten or overlooked. The fans are overwhelmingly excited to see Rikishi take on everyone and root for him in a big way. I watch this and totally think Too Cool rode his coattails, and I'm not sure I looked at it that way at the time. I love Brian Christopher and think both guys are perfectly capable workers, but they had been around for a while and hadn't clicked in different repackage attempts until they were paired with Rikishi and added the dancing. The Radicalz were fun because I think they were all genuinely amazed by what they were experiencing. Maybe not Benoit because he flirted with WCW main events at times when the company was hot and was pretty over consistently. But Saturn seems excited as hell to be teaming with the champion and working opposite the biggest stars in the business in front of a red hot crowd, like he can't wait to get in his offense and can't wait even more to bump for the other guys. You get the sense he's just overly thrilled to be in what at the time was a mostly professional company when it came to main event-midcard interaction, especially compared to WCW. I also liked Malenko and saw a different side of him as a heel worker. We've talked a lot about how he worked "cold" in WCW, making guys conform to a match that often wasn't what the crowd wanted to see. But I thought he was excellent when he was with Rikishi at setting up his spots, teasing retribution spots and paying them off. He contributed quite a bit to the match not just in terms of action, but in terms of psychology, to a point that it surprised me. And HHH continues his hot streak. The way I would describe HHH in everything I've seen so far is that he does what I think a top heel should do in terms of not playing for cheers or laughs, being genuinely loathsome, coming out with the upper hand enough to maintain his heat, recognizing the strengths of other guys in his promos while putting himself over more, giving on-point reactions to things that may otherwise be a tough sell, getting guys who are near the top over at the top level (he deserves a big part of the credit for Rikishi for sure) and working effectively with anyone in any spot on the card, which he showed here in his interactions with Brian Christopher. It wasn't a perfect match. Hebner was off his game (as he usually is) when he was supposed to miss a hot tag but was just standing there with his back turned instead of being engaged in something so he had a reason to miss the hot tag to Cactus Jack. I think Cactus also blanked on the finish and tried to break up Benoit's fall on Christopher before he realized what he was doing and got out of the ring. But neither of those flaws really brought the match down in any way that was all that meaningful. So this match does a lot really well. It has a hot crowd, but the hot crowd is the icing on the cake. There is a lot of cake beneath the admittedly large amount of icing. I really enjoyed my dessert. ****1/2

I liked this a bit more than soup. Really hot match, even though Road Dogg actively pisses me off in every match by working as a babyface and playing for pops. Christian can work his tail off. I know there's kind of an idea that he developed into a great worker much later in some circles, but he has looked excellent thus far. The Dallas crowd loves these guys. There are a small handful of wrestlers who are actively good on color commentary, and the Dudleys both fall in that category, doing a great job getting themselves over and getting their feud with Edge and Christian over. Even though the Outlaws pick up the win, you can still feel the focus of the tag division shifting away from them, slowly but surely. Great altercation with Jim Ross and Bubba Ray after the match, then a quick post-match brawl before the Dudleys bail. Hot crowd, good babyface selling and Christian being a workrate machine makes for a good match. ***

It's a title match and we try to watch title matches, so let's take one for the team. I remember seeing Tiger Steele in some of the TWA stuff. Not sure if he was an actual Shawn Michaels trainee or not. He felt like a second-rate Diesel clone in TWA and wasn't very good. I do admit it's kinda cool to hear a "Me-xi-co" chant from the crowd, since I've never seen fans chant for their country outside the U.S. I'm not really familiar with Cobarde, but he's pretty good and tries to go the Michaels/Terry Funk route when working with big stiffs of creating a lot of movement around them in order to create the illusion of more action than is actually happening. Here, the truth is pretty transparent, but I can't fault the effort. Steele looks barely trained, actually ducking and staying ducked and waiting for a back body drop off a criss cross when Cobarde had already stopped running the ropes. I have no idea what the hell that pin attempt was with Tirantes. Cobarde tried really hard and put forth an admirable effort to create something decent, but he's a wrestler, not a magician. Normally, I'd complain about an 8 minute lucha title match and I will here as well, but instead, I'll say it went far too long. Wow, Tiger Steele is bad. Ambitiously bad.

It's under 6 minutes.

I think because Randy Orton panicked when HHH tore his quad and hit himself with a chair for no apparent reason, which made him gig hardaway. It's definitely a fun watch for seeing how all the wrestlers respond to the planned match falling off the rails, I guess.