[1992-11-18-WCW-Clash of the Champions XXI] Barry Windham & Dustin Rhodes vs Ricky Steamboat & Shane Douglas

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Really always felt like a botched angle to me, as Dustin was being an idiot, and Barry's turn is how many people might react. That said, it kicks the Windham heel run that closed out his career into high gear, and what an awesome run it was.

[FLIK]

Been a while since I watched this but I always thought it worked well.

 

Sure Barry was kind of justified but good guys don't go for the balls, it's just not nice so I got whear Dustin was coming from too.

 

If anything, the follow up was what got botched since I don't recall the split actually leading to a big feud between them or even a major singles match or 2.

[Tim Evans]

I forgot that Dustin actually slapped Barry first. Good turn by Windham.

[shoe]

I dug the agressiveness that Steamboat and Windham showed in their tie ups. End result Dustin looks like the stupid one. Loved how Barry laid out the faces in the locker room.

[El-P]

I liked the execution of the turn. It's very organic. Barry was more agressive all match long, and he's a veteran and former Horsemen, he's not like young Dustin whose been tag champ with Steamboat a few months before, so he has a valid point about wanting to get the pin on the injured Steamboat, accident or not. Dustin coes comes off a bit hollier than thou as a white meat babyface, but at the time it still worked very well. Windham is pretty awesome and the best of the four there, and Douglas shows how much he has improved since the Dynamic Dudes, the bump he takes neck first on teh top rope is brutal. The only thing that didn't work with his work was that the belly to belly was definitely a weak finisher. Very good match, very good angle.

[PeteF3]

No heat at all for this until Dustin and Barry start mixing it up. It's not a badly worked match but the crowd can't be compelled to care, and Rhodes comes off as more of the heel even though they make every attempt to make Windham look callous and Steamboat sympathetic. And the nod to Starrcade '87 was pretty great, though it went totally unnoticed by Ross. LOVED Windham crashing the locker room, a perfect exclamation point that saves a somewhat iffy angle.

[WingedEagle]

Quick, solid work early. Barry & Dustin were such a great team, working a cool suplex/elbow combo and so capable of working any style depending on the opponent. Other than Dustin being the one to deck Barry, I thought it was a pretty effective heel turn for Windham and a hell of a follow up after the match and backstage. Really looking forward to his last run as a singles.

 

***1/2

[The Russian Daydream]

Enjoyable match I thought and a real shame there was almost no heat throughout. The crowd were pretty poor throughout the show actually. I guess in WCW's struggle to draw at the time, they gave away a bunch of free tickets to people who weren't really that into wrestling. There were some excellent exchanges in this from all four and, although he was by far the fourth guy, Shane Douglas still looked like he belonged there. That bump on the rope was really something. His belly-to-belly suplex never really cut it as a finisher though.

 

The turn did come off a little confused in the ring but the post match angle really put it across brilliantly. Steamboat was awesome here for not giving the surprise away by flinching before Windham walloped him with the chair.

[garretta]

I'm on Dustin's side here. Sure, you go for the win if you can get it, but after the injured guy kicks out, you don't keep going for the injured area the way Barry did. That's what led to the turn, not Dustin refusing to go for the win. The one mistake they made was having Dustin slap Barry first, which completely confused the issue.

 

But they cleaned it up after the match with one of the most brutal heel turns I've ever seen. Usually you get a few slaps, or maybe the newly turned heel hits his finisher to cement the turn. But Barry goes nuts on Dustin, the refs, and tops it off by attacking Douglas and Steamboat. For a second, I thought he'd take a shot at Jesse, who wasted no time getting out of the way. The crowning touch would have been one more reverse atomic drop to Steamboat on the concrete, but I guess they didn't want to do a lasting injury angle that would have in essence negated the title change. What we got was plenty good enough.

 

Jesse foretold all of this with his constant reminders that even title matches between friends can get heated, and JR, dedicated babyface announcer that he is, refused to even take the possibility into account. Even though I knew the turn was coming, Dustin going along with Barry's subtle heel work against Douglas and adding some of his own threw just a bit of doubt into my mind. After seeing that, it's interesting to ponder whether Dustin might have been okay with Barry going after Douglas, that the main reason he objected to Barry's tactics was that he was using them against Steamboat, Dustin's former partner. That would have given the angle a bit more intrigue, but given that the plan was for Barry to go back to singles as a heel and presumably feud with Dustin, I can see why they wanted to make the turn and the actions of both guys more black and white.

 

I don't agree that the belly-to-belly was a weak finisher for Douglas, at least not here. When it's used as a surprise move to knock the wind out of an opponent, it's about as effective a finisher as there is. Unfortunately, no one had used it in that way since Magnum, and the only other time I recall it being used as a finisher since Magnum's accident wasn't even in Crockett/WCW: Harley Race beat the Junkyard Dog with it at Mania III in their "loser bows to the winner" match.

 

I'd like to have seen the verbal confrontation between the two teams leading up to the bout to see if there were hints dropped about Barry's turn. JR seemed to be planting the seed on the very night Barry and Dustin won the belts, so it wouldn't be surprising to me if there was some "cultivating" being done in the leadup to this bout. I'll also be interested to see Barry's King of Cable match with Rude; I wouldn't think that they'd be talking much about a match that was still eleven days away in the limited time they had, but you never know.

 

I'm surprised that we don't appear to hear from Dusty at some point or other, unless he did a promo that didn't make either this set or the '93 set. I wonder if that was his idea or if Watts didn't want him on camera, and if it's the latter, why that stopped him; he could have gone back to Vince in a hearbeat and taken Dustin with him if Dustin had wanted to go. I'm not saying that he should have gotten in the ring, but a promo or two might have added some more fuel to the fire.