[1993-08-23-WWF-Raw] Rick & Scott Steiner vs Money Inc. (Cage)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This is the blowoff of this feud, and the conclusion of Ted DiBiase's last big feud. This is a little different from your usual WWF cage match, because the rules are that both team members have to leave the match. So at one point, Scott is out of the ring, but Rick is in there by himself getting beat up, so Scott comes back in. Rick keeps pulling DiBiase's trunks down, which something tells me DiBiase wasn't okay with. Then, IRS is out by himself while DiBiase is in and they tease IRS staying out but when both the Steiners try to climb out, he comes back in. So it's a different dynamic. Still too much climbing for my tastes, but it works. As they work one guy being on the outside while the other one is in like it's face in peril. Another interesting spot when Rick puts IRS on his shoulders to avoid him hitting the floor. Really well-worked considering what they had to work with.

[El-P]

This match is the picture perfect illustration of why WWF escape cage match suck. No blood, no violence, endless climbing up and down cages.

[flyonthewall2983]

^ Were they the first ones to invent that particular stipulation?

[El-P]

No idea. I don't know where it came from. Surely it also deliverd some awesome match like Tito vs Greg, but as a whole I thought this stipulation ampered the matches and was a way to shy away from the violence a true cage match should have been about.

[flyonthewall2983]

It's probably why they also built the blue cage. Climbing a mesh fence in wrestling boots can't be easy.

[Zenjo]

This was more like a game from American Gladiators than a cage match. It was pretty much non-stop climbing. And instead of blood they have male nudity.

[BruiserBrody]

I haven't seen this in 20 years, but I loved it when I saw it live on USA.

[Kevin Ridge]

So much shorter than I thought. This is a strange one because it's the blow off to the feud in a cage but no violence. They start the climbing right off the the bat. There wasn't enough beating down your opponents. I do wonder how much was edited off TV though as when they came back from a commercial guys looked more sweaty and worn down. Spots with one guy escaping but having to go back in the ring to rescue their partner getting double teamed were fun. IRS tries to escape down the cage at one point but gets caught by the tie and brought back in. I was shocked that Monsoon didn't go nuts about that. The finish was great to me with IRS getting blocked trying to escape when Rick Steiner climbs up underneath him. The end of Money, Inc.

[PeteF3]

New wrinkle here: the door will remain locked, so climbing over the top is the only way to escape.

 

This is REALLY bizarrely edited. Two things that I absolutely am sure happened in this match aren't here: IRS superplexing Scott off the cage (which was in the "coming up..." portion of this telecast earlier) and Scott leaping off the cage and hitting a double clothesline on Money Inc. (which I think made it into a Coliseum Video release). I have no rational explanation why the WWF would edit out two huge highspots like that, but that hurts this somewhat. But the work is good and I'll break from the JCP Love so prevalent among these boards: I do NOT like cage matches with guys tagging in and out. You can like or not like the escape rules, but I strongly feel that multiman cage matches should always be worked tornado-style. As a WWF watcher as a kid I eventually got used to pinfalls in cages, but with my favorite match growing up being the Sammartino/Santana-Adonis/Savage bloodbath, anything past that was too much. And I often see the point made that the Bret/Owen SummerSlam match was the "best possible use of escape rules," which might be true if that match wasn't a total fucking bore. This isn't--because while it's short on blood and violence it's also very short on downtime. Generally while one or two guys are climbing, the other two are working each other over. And there are also some clever strategies involving guys having to climb back in. And the finish was something I totally marked out over when I first saw it and still holds up as one of the cleverer escape finishes ever booked, at least until we got to gimmicked cages and rings in the late '90s and early '00s. Crowd goes nuts for it--the Steiners in a way feel kind of wasted being relegated to "just" a tag team, though they do come off better than LOD in the same setting. They could have been just as big as they were in WCW, seen as legitimate singles stars.

 

This was a fitting swan song for Money Inc., who I'm starting to think were an underrated team. I'm no fan of Rotunda's but he and DiBiase brought the goods when they had talent to work against.

[soup23]

Lets climb a cage, rinse, repeat. A sad swan song for Money Inc. and they look really dated and out of place now on Raw. *3/4

[garretta]

I didn't get into this one bit. I usually like WWF cage matches more than "NWA" ones, because I fully buy into the McMahon family's reasoning for making cage matches escape-based: By the time you get into the cage, who can outwrestle who doesn't matter. It's a bloody fight to the finish, and only by being more of a man than your opponent, being able to withstand the punishment a cage can dish out, and walking out alive to tell about it will you be victorious.

 

That's all fine, but it doesn't apply here. Not only is there no blood and no violence, but there's surprisingly little contact. I don't buy that anyone could be worn down, because the entire match only takes eight minutes. This is nothing but a climbing contest from start to finish, made worse by the fact that guys who climbed out are allowed back in for some stupid reason which only Vince knows. Why bother to try to escape unless you know your partner's climbing with you? You'll just have to go back in to save his ass anyway, and you don't get credit for having climbed out previously, either, which is nuts. If they insist on using a rule like this, the match should be over after each man on a team has escaped once, even if they get back in later.

 

Who came up with the idea to not use the door, anyway? Did they have some kind of strange desire to see Teddy naked from the waist down? That seems to be as good a reason as any, since we were never given a reason for the "climb out only" stip. (My wild guess? The door wasn't able to be opened and shut multiple times due to some kind of accident or mechanical failure, so rather than ignore it and have veteran fans wonder why no one was using the door to get out, they decided to make it part of the match.)

 

The finish was clever, with Rick holding Rotundo on his shoulders until Scotty could climb down for the last time, but they should have probably saved something like that for a more consequential bout.

 

I wonder how much of the way this was worked was because of Teddy's bad neck. The fewer bumps he has to take and the less time he has to spend on the mat, the lower the risk of aggravating the injury.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing how Teddy does on his return to All-Japan, which comes up at the start of September. He's Stan Hansen's tag team partner right off the bat, which is pretty far up the card for someone who hasn't wrestled in AJPW in over six years.

 

JR and Gino showed promise as a team, but I'll have to hear more of them in bigger matches than this to figure out what I really think of them. It's odd to hear Gino as a color man, which he hasn't been since he and Vince did the 2/18/83 MSG card. He became the MSG play-by-play guy a month later on 3/20.

[Beast]

Sounds like everyone in the thread watched a clipped version as the SummerSlam Spectacular version goes 20 or so.

The tag-team dynamic of both guys needing to escape makes this unique among recorded cage matches in this era of the WWF, but the psychology is all wrong. Letting guys go back in makes this a Groundhog Day-type deal where the story keeps repeating until finally Rick pulls off the great visual of keeping IRS on his shoulders so he can't touch.

We're deprived a great heel gameplan of letting a Steiner leave first and then double-teaming the crap out of the remaining one while one brother is stuck on the outside trying to get the crowd fired up. Or vice versa; have Money Inc. seem to get an advantage only for the Steiners reveal their plan was to get 2-on-1 and an easy final win.

Even at the end, it was amazing how both teams kept trying to stop one guy from leaving even though that'd give them a huge advantage.

Like I said, a memorable match since it's unique for its time, but a real waste of opportunity.