[1993-11-20-WCW-Battlebowl] Battlebowl match

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Last 8 minutes or so. The final four in the battle royal are Flair, Sting, Vader and Austin, and the action is really good. Flair gets laid out on the ramp by Vader and taken out so it's Sting against two heels and it's awesome. Sting puts up a hell of a fight before finally going down to Vader.

[flyonthewall2983]

This might be the best BattleBowl in terms of participants, and in execution. And a great use of that wonderful ramp they used a lot back then, cutting the sides for elimination down to three.

[El-P]

Great last 10 minutes, one of the better ending stretch to a battle royal I've seen. As soon as the Nasties are thrown out by Dustin, it gets really good. It's amazing to think that WCW had it, they had Austin positionned as a top guy right there, they just had to go with him. What the fuck happened (don't answer me, I know...) ? Of course it's not a given they would have been able to market him, we know they wouldn't with idiots at the helm, but still, they got so close to figure it out. Anyway, the Flair beatdown is excellent, and I loved how they really had dramatic turns before the real ending. 19 years after and without knowing the result, the finish took me by surprise and I actually marked out. I love when that happens. Dusty's booking as been terrible, but if there's one bright spot on his 1993 watch, this is it (I'll concede it to Dusty although Ole was also booking then, maybe I'm wrong). Great stuff.

[Kevin Ridge]

I thought this was a tag match until Flair got the boot and then realized was end of Battlebowl. Did have some good action but I dislike the ramp "saving" people from being eliminated when the get knocked over the top rope but land on ramp. Sting survives this way so you think he will come back and get the win but he gets too much height the Stinger Splash and comes up empty. It was a good looking elimination. Austin looked like he belonged.

[PeteF3]

I thought this was the least consequential Big Two PPV of all-time (and one of the least successful ever, financially) but this was a hell of a closing stretch that hit all the right notes. Sting delivers another awesome fired-up performance, Austin looks like a guy on the verge of breaking into the main event scene (hah!), Vader looks like a killer, and Flair even gets put over in the act of being put on the stretcher--never officially eliminated, and as Schiavone points out Race & Vader come off as afraid of him. One of the best battle royal closing stretches you'll ever see.

[JKWebb]

Vader always seems to pull the best out of Sting, and this is no different. The last 10 minutes of this match are super fun, and man did this card need it. I really didn't enjoy much of this show at all, and the Gene/Fifi stuff grew old pretty fast. Overall, this main event was a welcome sight to an otherwise pretty dull show.

[garretta]

No, JK. No, it wasn't. It was a gigantic waste of time and money.

 

You see, I don't care one iota what a good fight Sting put up. I don't care one iota how good Austin looked. And I don't care one iota what a monster Vader looked like, either. The only thing I wanted to see- the only thing that made sense- was an exhuasted Flair somehow eliminating Austin and Vader and putting himself on a collision course with Vader at Starrcade.

 

What did I get instead? Flair going toe-to-toe with- and ​being outfought by- ​two hundred and six year-old Harley Race, as if this was 1983 instead of 1993. Then Flair being squashed like a grape by Vader and being put on a stretcher and carried out like yesterday's garbage, sniveling and crying while Harley and Vader sneered at him. He should have been saying "Fuck you!", rolling off the stretcher, and coming back after Vader full bore. That's what real ​challengers, ones who might actually have a chance at Starrcade, do. Why the hell would I want to pay to see Flair-Vader after this? What chance has a pathetic old man like Flair got, anyway? Vader will just bust him up all over again and let Harley have the scraps.

 

So okay, we have Sting left, and he does ​put up a hell of a fight, eliminating Austin. But just as he's got Vader on the run, he mistimes the Stinger Splash and basically eliminates himself. Vader thus reigns supreme, and there's not a viable challenger for him in sight. He's already taken care of Sting, Flair's a wreck whom even Harley can beat the hell out of, and Austin's on the same side of the fence. Who's going to save us from Vader? Even Hulk Hogan isn't a gleam in WCW's eyes quite yet, remember.

 

Can you tell I hated ​the way this was booked? Sting should have been the one doing the stretcher job; he's not in the main event at Starrcade, and he can feud with Austin while Vader's busy with Flair; let Rocco the dummy team with Hawk against the Nasties, if you can find him. Flair puts up the fight that Sting did, only he actually wins, ​albeit by a whisker. You can even beat him down a little afterward to make sure Vader stays strong. Fuller and Race are both knocked into the middle of Christmas, and I tell Harley that if he goes for a suplex on an active talent again on my television, he's fired on the spot, and Leon can go with him if he wants to. I'm usually not that hard on former wrestlers turned managers who still do spots, but Harley trying to suplex Flair on the floor defied common sense. If he still can go to that extent, he should put the tights back on. (Even headbutts and kneedrops are a bit much, but it's Harley, so I can live with those.)

 

While they're at it, over the top and to the ramp should be an elimination. To me, a ramp is part of the floor, so it should count the same. I guess they're trying to make the ramp a part of the ring, technically speaking, but that makes no sense to me whatsoever, like a lot of the boneheaded things about this trainwreck of a finish.

 

I got a laugh when Tony tried to save what he could of the Starrcade hype (at least for the moment) when he claimed that Vader and Harley were scared of Flair. Scared ​of a man whom they just squashed like a bug and eliminated as a threat to Vader's title? Are you crazy, Tony? Wait, don't answer that.........

 

This outfit doesn't even know who they want to close their shows. Mean Gene was obviously expecting Vader out in the arena, but he randomly (at least so far as we know) popped up with Tony and Jesse instead. The one good thing out of that little mini-disaster was Tony saying to Vader "You're the man!" in order to get off the air with his hide intact.

 

I'll be interested to see how they get the people believing in Flair again over the next month or so. They're going to have a tough sell as far as I'm concerned, even though I already know that Flair not only wrestles, but wins the belt. Right now, I'd have either put him with Hawk against the Nasties for the tag belts and had Sting wrestle Vader or done something else with Dustin and have Austin go against Vader heel vs. heel. That's how far off my radar Flair is at the moment, and it's nobody's fault but his old pal Dusty's. Hell of a way to treat a man who was almost your "brother", isn't it, Dream?

[soup23]

For a completly forgettable PPV, this was an awesome ending stretch. Flair and Vader keep going at it with Race getting some shots in on the stretcher. Then you get Sting vs Vader and Austin and that was excellent with him sticking and moving and hitting some stiff shots. The elimination using the ramp was clever. Vader vs Sting is always compelling and while the finish here was predictable it was executed predictably well. Jesse is happy as shit with Vader shouting on commentary as the show signs off the air. Really strong looking battle royal based on this finish.