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The only time I can remember the office blatantly punishing a guy was that Perry Saturn vs Mike Bell incident. Otherwise, it often seemed like it was open fuckin' season on the jobbers in most territories. The offices seemed like they never gave a shit, since 1.it "got their wrestlers over" as being tough or something, and 2.there's always an infinite supply of wannabes who are starstruck enough to come get the shit beaten out of them and walk away with a dazed smile.

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People always talk about 1998 being the year that WCW started to go downhill, but they don't make enough of a differentiation between the Sullivan/Taylor booking regime and the Nash one. WCW had some issues in 98, but I've been watching the TV and there's still a lot of good stuff. You had things like the Jericho's feuds with Malenko and Mysterio, the Chavo/Eddie relationship, Raven's feuds, Flair being crazy entertaining, and OK build for the PPV main events. The booking fundamentals are solid. Yeah, company politics forced them to do a lot of bad stuff, but they were competent. However, once Nash took over in late 98, things jumped off a cliff. The TV became offensively bad. You had the Fingerpoke of Doom, the NWO spending ten minutes in a field beating up Flair, the show with no wrestling in the first hour, and Flair turning heel and going crazy when he had been super over as a babyface and was still a TV and PPV draw. I don't think people like Meltzer make that differentiation enough.

 

What was the deal with that show, I remember watching it when it happened thinking this company is just pulling some bizarre Andy Kaufman type shit on everyone.

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I know Jannetty broke a dude's neck,

It's called an accident.

 

but Michaels was shockingly unprofessional in the AWA stuff I'm watching regularly pitching a fit and taking out on jobbers with Steiners level disregard for their safety.

Why am I not surprised ?

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I know Jannetty broke a dude's neck,

It's called an accident.

 

but Michaels was shockingly unprofessional in the AWA stuff I'm watching regularly pitching a fit and taking out on jobbers with Steiners level disregard for their safety.

Why am I not surprised ?

 

Yeah I don't blame Jannetty either from what I know of the case. My point was more that he would seemingly be the guy with the rep for smashing jobbers up, when if you watch the stuff it is Michaels. There is an AWA match I watched a couple of days ago where Michaels gets so angry at a guy missing a spot that he throws a temper tantrum, stiffs the guy and a few minutes later when he comes back in kills him with a backdrop driver and then gloats over his body.

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What was the deal with that show, I remember watching it when it happened thinking this company is just pulling some bizarre Andy Kaufman type shit on everyone.

This was also the time where Nash was booking the show with the theme that the camera crews and the TV viewers could see everything that was televised but the fellow wrestlers and announcers couldn't, correct?

 

Something I remember pretty vividly from the late 90s, being that I was totally engrossed in pro wrestling back then, was how cheap WCW would be with their attempts to poach more Raw viewers. During the week where Shawn Michaels walked out on the WWF after his locker room brawl with Bret Hart the WCW shows began hinting almost every ten minutes that a "major superstar was defecting and could show up this very week on Nitro." I remember when Michaels returned to the WWF they just stopped mentioning it until Curt Hennig arrived.

 

Also around that time some TBS newsmagazine show did a feature on the Power Plant. They found some guy who looked very much like Shawn Michaels and took him to Nitro, dressed him in jeans and a leather vest, and had him sit in the crowd. They showed various clips of him getting huge pops from the crowd and getting asked for autographs and the reporter was awestruck by how popular the guy was without having been in a ring yet. I remember thinking, "the crowd thinks it's Shawn Michaels and he's going to do a run-in tonight."

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Guest Slickster

Watching the 1999 Great American Bash and I noticed a few things.

- The director COMPLETELY misses the opening pyro, instead shooting the ring so we just see the fans bathed in red and blue light from the pyro. Way to waste $10,000 worth of fireworks.

- The show opens with...a hype video running down the card. You'd think they'd air that BEFORE the PPV to get people to buy the show.

- Mike Tenay calls Master P "one of the most diversified entertainers of our time."

- Funny bit before the opening match where Tony Schiavone starts to talk but is interrupted by David Penzer's ring introductions. Once Penzer finishes, Tony tries again and is cut off by Bobby Heenan. Tony says "Mike, it's your turn to interrupt" and Tenay obliges, starting a conversation with Bobby.

 

Bobby: You know, Tony, you could go home and we'll lock up...

 

- Knobs opens his match by jumping The Sandman from behind.

Tony: And we have our first SWERVE of the night from Brian Knobs!

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Watching the 1999 Great American Bash and I noticed a few things.

- The director COMPLETELY misses the opening pyro, instead shooting the ring so we just see the fans bathed in red and blue light from the pyro. Way to waste $10,000 worth of fireworks.

- The show opens with...a hype video running down the card. You'd think they'd air that BEFORE the PPV to get people to buy the show.

- Mike Tenay calls Master P "one of the most diversified entertainers of our time."

- Funny bit before the opening match where Tony Schiavone starts to talk but is interrupted by David Penzer's ring introductions. Once Penzer finishes, Tony tries again and is cut off by Bobby Heenan. Tony says "Mike, it's your turn to interrupt" and Tenay obliges, starting a conversation with Bobby.

 

Bobby: You know, Tony, you could go home and we'll lock up...

 

- Knobs opens his match by jumping The Sandman from behind.

Tony: And we have our first SWERVE of the night from Brian Knobs!

My God, man, I'd forgotten how much I hated that card although the announcers seemed to be enjoying themselves. How could you forget Sting's match with Rick Steiner ending with Sting being mauled by dogs? About five minutes later Tony proclaims Sting will be ok because the dogs didn't actually hurt him. Then why shoot the angle? Just have Scott Steiner club him with a wrench when he gets behind the curtain.

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These reviews are rehashing a lot of memories. Man, Sting could have been severely injured or killed in some the stunts he performed. Attack dogs, lit on fire, fell from scaffolding, countless ceiling repels. He is lucky.

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I'm pretty sure the "on fire and jumps of the Titantron" thing wasn't actually Sting. The lights conveniently go out for a few seconds before "Sting" gets lit on fire, and I think it was a stuntman in his place. I remember watching it being fairly certain they'd pulled a (pretty decent) switcharoo. Been ages since I watched it though.

 

If it wasn't... Jesus, WCW.

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The announcers acting like they didn't know anything about the backstage skits was annoying to no end. The worst was when there were like 4 weeks of Torrie Wilson talking to the camera, and not a word about it from Tony, Bobby, or Mike. Then when she shows up with David and is with the nWo, they're all "Hey, it's that girl we've been seeing on TV all month!"

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How to damage a perfectly good card on paper :

_book two shitty finishes in back to back important title matches in which the champion loses his belt by basically pinning himself

_don't deliver on a stipulation that had been sold to you by two months worth of great promos

 

That was the story of Chi-Town Rumble basically.

_Rick Steiner vs Mike Rotunda : good match, and the first appearance on WCW TV of young (and sane at this point) Scott Steiner in the corner of his slow brother. Rotunda gets killed quite a bit and bumps his ass off for Steiner, who doesn't throw people around that much yet. Terrible finish with Steiner putting Rotunda in a sleeperhold, only to lay on the mat and pin himself while Rotunda goes out. Because Rick is slow. Yes, this is the NWA, "We Wrestle", but we still have shit finishes because of goofball gimmick personnality. Too bad. Which leads to :

_Barry Windham vs Lex Luger : Windham at this point is up there with Flair and Steamboat, maybe even better. Sadly I think he's leaving soon to get wasted in the Widowmaker gimmick in Titan. He's also one the most gracious wrestler ever. The way he moves is absolutely amazing, he's like a panther. Great work by Windham, in pure barwling mode, who injures his hand on the metal post, actually blades it (I think), and sells the hell out of it. Luger works super hard at this point, which makes up for whatever limitation he has. Really good, intense match so it has to end with the infamous "german suplex in which one guy lift his shoulder at the last moment so the other gets pinned" shitty finish. Which wouldn't have been quite shitty if we haven't seen another champion lose his belt via self-pin just a few minutes before. Terrible booking here, which kinda ruins a really good match.

_I don't know what the story was with Dennis Condrey, did the guy just vanished again, but he was MIA here, so instead of the final MX vs O-MX match, with Cornette & Heyman having to leave if their team loses, we get MX vs Randy Rhodes (who really was the lesser MX member of the four, by a huge margin) and Jack Victory. And now the loser of the fall must leave instead of Corny or Heyman. Huge letdown and way to fuck up with the stips. Best part of the match is Corny as a wrestler, who drops a great elbow and does a great face-in-peril. Rhodes gets fired, I say good riddance, he was just nothing special at all. Jack Victory "debuts" here as himself, after jobbing again earlier in the night under a hood. Was this guy paid double-duty every night ?

 

Sting vs Butch Reed was good, although the über deliberate Reed style is a acquired taste to say the least. I never got the Butch Reed pimping as him being this great wrestler.

Varsity Club vs Road Warriors was decent for a short bomb throwing match in 1989, although you get the feeling no one wants to really sell much for the others.

And of course Flair vs Steamboat is just an all-time great match, worked at a terrific pace, super stiff, just everything looks great, on timing, at the right place.

 

On the following WCW episode, Eddie Gilbert "introduces" Missy Hyatt. I chuckled at his little tricky promo. Gilbert was miscat as a babyface though, he was just a natural heel. It never struck me before I watched these WCW episodes how much he looked like Lawler, the way he talked, the way he carried himself, the way he moved.

And just a gigantic promo by the debuting Iron Sheik, with great line of him namedropping all the wrestling promotions "AWA, NWA, WW whatever !". This promo stole the whole show.

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I'm shocked you like Sting vs Reed. Literally nobody likes that match, which was the byproduct of George Scott telling guys who weren't suited for it to work holds in long matches.

Really ? I don't know, it didn't struck me as very different from all the super deliberate pace Reed had in Mid-south. I could have used more offense from Reed and less chinlock sequences, but the match made perfect sense, Reed fed for Sting's comebacks really well, I thought it worked. Energetic Sting grounded by the big powerhouse works for me. I had no idea it was a very unpopular match.

Again, I'm not buying the "Reed = great worker" argument I've heard in the last few years, but I still kinda enjoy his style.

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1989 Butch Reed is not what anyone argues to be his best. You may already realize that, but just making sure that you're not basing opinions on WWF or NWA stuff, but instead on Mid South and maybe a little Florida.

 

Chi-Town Rumble wasn't the best-booked show overall, mainly because they ran the same finish twice in the undercard. But the main event booking more than made up for it. The finish was a repudiation of the Dusty era, kind of a way to signify that those days were over.

 

The atmosphere for the show is also outstanding. But yeah, aside from Flair/Steamboat at the beginning of the year, not much else going on. Summer, after Funk came in and they moved from Techwood Drive to Center Stage and started building to Bash '89, is when things got really good.

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1989 Butch Reed is not what anyone argues to be his best. You may already realize that, but just making sure that you're not basing opinions on WWF or NWA stuff, but instead on Mid South and maybe a little Florida.

No, the "Butch Reed is great" pimping went over my head based on his Mid-south work. I just don't see it at all. I know people who are pimping him don't refer to his late 80's, post mid-south days, although I also heard lot of "Doom is a great team" pimping over the years, and I never got that either.

 

Chi-Town Rumble wasn't the best-booked show overall, mainly because they ran the same finish twice in the undercard. But the main event booking more than made up for it. The finish was a repudiation of the Dusty era, kind of a way to signify that those days were over.

It really feels like another era was beginning. The first TV show of the year had a Dusty promo, JJ Dillon was around for a few weeks while Arn & Tully were already gone, and then, Dusty's gone, Dillon's gone, no more reference to the Horsemen.

 

Also, Stan Lane is quickly getting more and more annoying. I was never a big fan, but watching "lots" of Stan Lane in a short timeframe really damages the opinion I have from this version of the MX. My opinion of Lane already went south after watching some Fabulous Ones matches, and now I can say that Lane really dragged the MX matches down quite a bit with his horrible offense. Man, can you imagine a MX version of Eaton and Pritchard instead ? It's strange that Bobby Fulton got so much shit over the years for being a "poor worker" in a great team, while he honestly is actually quite good, and Lane got a relatively free pass because it's the MX. Eaton was 90% of the reason the team was still excellent.

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1989 Butch Reed is not what anyone argues to be his best. You may already realize that, but just making sure that you're not basing opinions on WWF or NWA stuff, but instead on Mid South and maybe a little Florida.

No, the "Butch Reed is great" pimping went over my head based on his Mid-south work. I just don't see it at all. I know people who are pimping him don't refer to his late 80's, post mid-south days, although I also heard lot of "Doom is a great team" pimping over the years, and I never got that either.

 

Ok I think Im more than a little bit responsible for this , as he is pretty much the cornerstone of the Black Wrestling History comp I've been working on for a while here.

 

A lot of his work for me is more in how he communicates with the crowd and bring them into his match. He was a big power style wrestler who was really underrated on the Mic. His face turn on Devastation Inc was great. I honestly don't understand why more people don't see him as a great worker and a really capable hand. No one ever looked out of place or outclassed in the ring with him so It was easy to get into his matches.

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