[1990-02-06-NWA-Clash of the Champions X] Ric Flair & Arn & Ole Anderson vs Great Muta & Buzz Sawyer & Dragon Master (Cage)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

With the angle earlier in the show, the match took on a completely different tone. Ole replaced Sting and the crowd boos them pretty soundly. The "We Want Sting" chants start right away. Fun to see J-Tex get cheered. Weird to see Flair not sell a thing from the other side, not that he should have at this point. Muta gets the biggest pop of all, which shows how much wasted opportunity they had to turn him babyface out of all of this. I think they wanted to, but Gary Hart convinced him that American fans would never cheer a Japanese guy, so he always refused. Sting starts climbing the cage as Flair swats at him. Sting injures his knee doing this, and yeah, now WCW is totally FUCKED. In the middle of all of this chaos, Sawyer does a frog splash off the top of the cage, which misses. Post-match is a scary scene, as Flair takes off running toward Sting, and he clearly has no idea Sting is injured, so Pillman and Zenk try (and fail) to catch him. Hot brawl to close the show, but in some ways, WCW was never quite the same for me after this.

[PeteF3]

FWIW, Hart absolutely rips Meltzer in his book for the Muta-as-babyface story and calls it an "asinine myth." I do think Hart was upset about Kabuki working babyface in World Class.

 

The match is basically a mess that's just a backdrop to the Sting/Flair angle. Sawyer's flight from the top is notable as is the huge pop Muta gets, but it's all chaos and not particularly organized chaos at that. The babyfaces then have to pretend to be "holding Sting back" while keeping him from collapsing, and obviously it'd be impossible to tell at that moment just how badly he was fucked up.

 

I have no love for Jim Herd but seeing where this is going makes me wish he'd fulfilled his desire to pull a Bischoff and get Turner to organize a talent raid on the best WWF workers and give WCW a weekly live show. Ted DiBiase along with Tully as a rival Horsemen clan? Bret Hart on one side or another? Yes please. Instead Sting, Flair, and Luger will all see their careers go off the rails.

[soup23]

A lot of stuff going on here. Buzz bumps like a madmen and Muta gets a tremendous face reaction. The crowd does hate the Horseman and frantically chant for sting. We get the schmozz at the end and Sting is legit injured. I got two questions out of all of this.

 

1. What was Stings actual injury and how did he hurt it? I couldn't see definitively.

 

2. What were the original plans for this angle? Was Sting going to be the champ at Wrestlewar.

[Loss]

He slipped when climbing the cage and injured his knee. It was a torn left patella, I think. Yes, Sting was going to win the title from Flair at Wrestle War. Flair promised him the belt would be waiting on him when he got back, no matter what anyone tried, and that of course led to tons of political problems for Flair.

[Matt D]

I never understood why they did the angle first and the match second.

 

Yes you get the visual of Sting climbing the cage to get revenge, but the promo done in the cage, after the Horsemen win the match would have made way more sense.

[jdw]

FWIW, Hart absolutely rips Meltzer in his book for the Muta-as-babyface story and calls it an "asinine myth." I do think Hart was upset about Kabuki working babyface in World Class.

The booking committee at this time had Flair, Ross and Cornette on it if I recall correctly. I suspect that Dave was more dialed into that committee than any in the history of the WON in terms of getting truthful info (i.e. in contrast to talking to Paul all the time during ECW's run but having to sift through Paul's bullshit, halftruths and delusions).

 

So whatever Dave was writing in the WON at the time has a fairly high probability of being true, especially relative to what Gary "remembered" two decades after the fact.

 

John

[PeteF3]

Hence the "FWIW" and the qualification about one of the reasons for the Hart/Kabuki split.

[Kevin Ridge]

Match definitely has odd feeling after the earlier turn on the show. This was the most heavily promoted match leading in and now you have the crowd actually cheering Muta's team. Trying to see the Sting injury but it's not clear. He was getting yanked on pretty hard at times by people trying to pull him off the cage. Oh the second time Sting tries to climb there seems to be something wrong as he barely even climbs it. And he's visibly hobbling too. That sucks.

[Cox]

What a clusterfuck. As it was, J-Tex was about two months past their expiration date as top heels going into the match, as evidenced by the Dragon Master somehow being part of a major Clash main event. It's heel vs heel, and the only wrestler the fans seem to like is Muta, who's wrestling his last match as a regular. And Sting wrecks his knee coming down from the cage and is never quite the same, only Flair doesn't realize it and tries to attack him anyway. The match itself is fine, fun to watch Sawyer bump around and the crowd go nuts for Muta, but this is pretty much a disaster.

[JerryvonKramer]

Why the fuck is Dragon Master part of this feud?

 

What's this odd cage? I kind of like it, feels solid.

 

Horsemen seem like awesome asskickers in this match. Dragon Master actually gets a face pop for his comeback against Ole.

 

I liked seeing Wahoo McDaniel as the 1990 WCW version of mid-90s WWF Sgt. Slaughter.

 

It's interesting just how EFFECTIVE this turn was, the crowd is 100% with Sting and against the Horsemen.

 

The match ends to ZERO reaction from the crowd who are too busy chanting "we want Sting".

 

I liked this for what it was.

[Rock_Of_Jericho]

I would have loved to have seen a Muta face run in the NWA. He was always a favorite of mine and my friends when we watched during this period. Another part I enjoyed was seeing Sting accidentally pop Pillman in the face as he was swinging at Flair, knocking him off the cage.

 

The match was pretty much nothing, but that wasn't the important part. This was an angle disguised as a match. One of my favorite angles of all-time, though I can see now it was a little out of left field.

[Laney]

The pre-match promos were off. Buzz Sawyer talk about Sting being in the match and Flair does a face promo. Muta gets a lot of cheers here and Sawyer takes a lot of dangerous bumps. The match isn't very good and most of it seem focused on Sting trying to get at Flair. Sting injuries his knee and WCW's main event plans with Sting/Flair at this point goes down the toilet.

[ajtroma]

You can clearly see Sting limping badly after the second attempt at scaling the cage. Flair's dive onto him (and Flair couldnt have known the knee was messed up) could not have helped. Pillman and Zenks attempt at catching the Champ looks very odd but give them credit for trying.

 

I think this was Muta's last hurrah as a regular.

 

I love chaotic endings like this but WCW was just snakebit at the time

[JerryvonKramer]

Where's Gary Hart here?

[Loss]

Where's Gary Hart here?

Gary Hart was fired/quit late in '89.

[JerryvonKramer]

Just about to read The Meltzers from that period now. Clash 10 is fucking awful.

[garretta]

The biggest main event in the history of free TV that absolutely no one cared about. Muta got one huge pop when he entered; otherwise, it was all about Sting. Even Sawyer doing a Jimmy Snuka special from the top of the cage mattered not one bit. Even JR and Corny gave up on it after a while. The only interesting thing about it was the Horsemen begging off from J-Tex, but no one cared enough about J-Tex for it to mean anything.

 

Either this match or the turn needed to be done on the Saturday night show, even if the audience was only a fraction of what it was here. At the very least, once they could see that the crowd just wanted Sting, they should have called an audible and let Sting get his hands on Flair in the cage for a few minutes. It didn't have to be a scheduled match or have a finish, just let them brawl and have Pillman and Zenk or the Steiners come down to hold off Ole and Arn. Get Sawyer and the Japanese out of Dodge and let the show end on the six-man war going on in and out of the ring, which would have been similar to the ending we got. Anything would have better than what ended up happening, and that's not even taking Sting's injury into account. By the following week, everyone had settled into their roles, but it was too late, at least for Sting.

 

I haven't seen Bash '91 yet, so I can truthfully say that this is the biggest WCW disaster I've seen up until the Bischoff era.

[drew wardlaw]

Between the earlier angle and the match, this is potentially one of the most damaging shows in WCW history. At least up until Starrcade '97. The match has such a weird dynamic since the Horsemen turned earlier in the night, forcing everyone to cheer J-Tex at first, then give up and cheer for Sting. What's impressive here is that everyone works hard, especially Sawyer and Anderson, considering how meaningless the match is to the larger angle. What's disappointing is that Sawyer's big splash has really been put over as a devastating move and here he goes for it off the top of the cage, which should be a huge moment but it's totally overshadowed by everything else.

[Migs]

Why the fuck is Dragon Master part of this feud? What's this odd cage? I kind of like it, feels solid. Horsemen seem like awesome asskickers in this match. Dragon Master actually gets a face pop for his comeback against Ole. I liked seeing Wahoo McDaniel as the 1990 WCW version of mid-90s WWF Sgt. Slaughter. It's interesting just how EFFECTIVE this turn was, the crowd is 100% with Sting and against the Horsemen. The match ends to ZERO reaction from the crowd who are too busy chanting "we want Sting". I liked this for what it was.

 

It's pretty wild to see the crowd flip so hard on the Horsemen that J-Tex becomes the babyfaces. Makes you wonder how things might have gone if Sting gets the belt three weeks later - maybe WCW ends up with a very strong year.

[ThomasFromIowa]

Historical ramifications aside, I thought this was a really good match. It was a crazy cage match that served to get in the way of the babyface getting his hands on the man that betrayed him. I find that to be really cool and unique storytelling. Also, Buzz Sawyer was awesome in this match. His bump on his head when bouncing off the cage was sick, as was his splash.

[dawho5]

The Sawyer bump was incredible. Some of the Flair/Sawyer and Arn/Sawyer interactions were great. Otherwise this didn't make a whole lot of sense.

[cactus]

These NWA cage matches where you can still get DQ'd and you have to tag in and out have never set well with me.

 

Leading on from the Horseman heel turn earlier in the night, this has a much difference dynamic than the tag match match The Horseman had with Muta, Sawyer and Dragon Master a few weeks prior. The crowd cheer for Sting as soon as the bell rings and the evil foreigners actually end up getting cheered. Buzz Saywer was great here, he really puts everything into the match and not caring for his own well being. He full-on hits the steel beam of the cage with his head multiple times. He even attempts a splash from the cage, but with all the commotion going on with Sting and Flair, no one in the crowd seems to care much.

 

Decent enough for what it is, but I do wish we got the advertised match with The Horseman as the babyfaces.

[Badlittlekitten]

What a wild, crazy mess! It's almost cruel how they played the babyface Horsemen promo on screen as a lead in. Hardly anybody is selling or following tag rules and Sawyer dives from the top of the cage like it's nothing. It's sad to see Sting hobbling on one leg even now. Flair recklessly launching himself at the injured Sting was a sketchy moment but really sold the intensity of the feud. It's rare to see such violence from Flair.

A hot, wild disaster.