[1992-12-28-WCW-Starrcade '92] Battlebowl

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Joined in progress with only Muta, Doc, Windham and Dustin remaining. Windham/Rhodes just doesn't have the excitement you think it would. Windham and Muta are the final two. Muta wins to a huge pop after some pretty good action with Windham in the closing minutes.

[Tim Evans]

Muta as a babyface is just weird.

[PeteF3]

Even 23 months later, American fans still really, really want to get behind a babyface Muta. Had they been able to keep him around in 1990, a lot of the mess with Lex Luger could have been avoided.

[WingedEagle]

Williams, Muta, Rhodes & Windham as final four. Couple Japanese photographers at ringside are a pretty good tell who wins this. Crowd is super hot for Muta, and somehow this didn't lead to anything other than a big win for him going into the Tokyo Dome and a long, not so hot match at Superbrawl. Muta skins the cat like HBK and wins by eliminating Windham with a couple dropkicks. Pretty anticlimactic. Should've resulted in something much bigger.

[ajtroma]

All of those guys were all just running on empty by that point of the night. It was a miracle this was as good as it was.

[Robert S]

Did I hear right JR calling this "the tenth annual Battle Bowl"?

[ajtroma]

He might have said that. It was the 10th Starrcade and it was most likely a slip up

[TheU_2001]

For only an eight man Battle Royal, this was ok. Granted many of the competitors were competing in their third match of he night, but I thought it was cool that Muta wins the thing. It was also an ironic twist that he had to eliminate his lethal lottery partner, Barry Windham, to do it. For the end of the night, this was a good way to end the show. ***

[garretta]

What we saw here was nice, but the point of an eight-man battle royal escapes me. As I've said before, the Lethal Lottery should have been its own pay-per-view, a sort of bizarre world Crockett Cup, with the teams battling tournament-style for the prize.

 

Good action between Dustin and Barry, and Jesse turned out to be right: Dustin was so consumed with beating the hell out of Barry that it ended up costing him the match.

 

I'll be interested to see exactly what Muta's win leads to, since he didn't have a full-time stateside run that I know of at any point in '93.

 

If they have to do this again next year, get it away from Starrcade. A title match, a Lethal Lottery tag match, and Battlebowl involving the same wrestlers on the same card is simply overkill.

 

Dumb spot of the match (that we saw): Barry trying to come off the top tope twice. Didn't Mulligan teach him anything about how to survive in battle royals? Yes, he hit the superplex, but he's damn lucky Dustin wanted to punish him enough to slam him into the ring instead of knocking him out.