[1992-05-09-WCW-Saturday Night] Nikita Koloff vs Mr. Hughes

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Anxious to see this match, considering the love it has gotten through the years. Nice little TV match. I'm not quite sure I get all the love, but it's definitely solid stuff with a nice Nikita comeback at the end.

[Dylan Waco]

Anxious to see this match, considering the love it has gotten through the years. Nice little TV match. I'm not quite sure I get all the love, but it's definitely solid stuff with a nice Nikita comeback at the end.

Good, but overrated match. I think it is relevant in the sense that it illustrates just how great 92 WCW was that these two guys had a match of any length was quallity from bell-to-bell.

[shoe]

Put me down as liking the match, but not getting the praise it gets as in after hearing about it you are expecting a 3 1/2* bout.

[tomk]

Has this gotten a ton of "love" or been rated high enough to possibly be "overrated"?. The only people I think I've ever heard talk about it are me, Schneider and Cooke.

 

It's a solid long heavyweight match with lots of neat transition spots, and teases of transition spots.

 

92 is also a year where Nikita kind of puts it together as a singles wrestler. I don't want to say it's his Luger in 89 or HHH in whatever teh 6 month period was where he looked like he understood how to fill time effectively. But Nikita is a guy who had long since figured out how to be an effective hot tag worker...but at somepoint in 92 he figured out how to be effective in a singles match.

[El-P]

I never heard of this match before. I don't see what's any special about it. Well, yes, there's something special about it actually since it's the first time Koloff looks decent since he came back after some putrid matches. His offense still suck, so he seems better at selling, and since Hughes is bigger than him, it kinda works. Nothing more than a decent short TV big man match though.

[Kevin Ridge]

Was curious as to why this was included in yearbook. Hughes did take a pretty good bump when getting slammed off the top rope. Crowd doesn't seem to be completely behind Koloff.

[Loss]

This has a bit of a reputation, mainly from tomk pimping.

[WingedEagle]

Am I crazy or was Mr. Hughes pretty good? Had a great heel presence, and pulled off working in a tie and sunglasses pretty damn well. I've been impressed with him throughout the year. The finish didn't look so great. Perhaps this was good for a Nikita match but otherwise nothing so hot.

**1/2

[PeteF3]

Nothing special about this that I saw. Hughes daring Koloff to keep up with the shoulder tackles only for Nikita to catch him with a dropkick was a cute spot, and Hughes took some solid bumps. This was better than it looked on paper but nothing really worth preserving.

[MikeCampbell]

This wasn't awful, but wasn't anything especially good, aside from some decent bumps. It was better than expected, given who was involved, but that's about it.

[garretta]

This was a decent bout for what it was, which was Hughes trying to act as a roadblock to Nikita's showdown with Vader the following night at the Omni. All I can say is that they better have shown the Omni bout at least in part the following week, because otherwise it doesn't make sense that Nikita, who's good enough to be Sting's surrogate against Vader, had as much trouble as he did with a midcarder like Hughes. Don't get me wrong; Hughes isn't a stiff, at least not now. But Nikita should have beaten him a bit quicker and a lot more decisively than he did.

 

Where was Harley? JR mentions that Hughes has been/is being trained by him, which makes sense considering that they came in together to second Luger. But he wasn't at ringside here, which is a bit hard to fathom considering that Nikita's coming after his new star protégé unless Hughes stops him here. Could he have been fired before this taping, then brought back before the show aired? Doing something like that would be so typical of WCW it isn't funny.

 

Where was Randy Owen? JR did solo commentary here, which either meant that this match was taken from one of the syndie shows or that Owen was so bad that they wanted to feature him as little as humanly possible.

 

They really need to stop hyping JR's radio show so aggressively when it conflicts with a live Omni show. From the way JR talked about his interview with Zbyszko, one would think that there was going to be major breaking news. Thus, the fan's dilemma: Stay home and listen to Larry, thus forfeiting your chance to see Nikita/Vader live and in person, or go to the matches and risk falling behind on what's going on with the DA (like possible dissension in the ranks, perhaps?) It's a choice that Atlanta-area fans simply shouldn't have to make. What's wrong with giving the radio show a week off when WCW runs the Omni once a month?

 

In case you're curious, Nikita got a clean pinfall over Vader the next night at the Omni.

[dawho5]

Perfectly good heavyweight match.  Nothing reals special though.  The transition with Hughes missing the rope spot and crotching himself was pretty telegraphed, but good nonetheless.