[1990-05-19-NWA-Capital Combat] Ric Flair vs Lex Luger (Cage)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

The injury stuff is not storyline. Luger was working hurt. He has a look on his face when he is walking to the ring like he just wants to get this match over with. The cage is absolutely huge - HIAC sized.

 

There is some interesting pre-match stuff with Luger insisting that Woman be checked, and Flair disputing it. I'm not sure why she was in the cage to begin with. He finds "the proverbial international object", as Flair puts it and Flair tries to immediately change the subject and start the match.

 

Luger gives a solid performance considering his health, and Flair works for two. Flair is a bloody mess and sells like crazy for Luger. Luger gives Flair a superplex and injures his knee on the way down, which creates an opening for Flair.

 

The match is going really well actually until the Horsemen come out and attempt to get in the cage. Sting comes out to throw a few punches at all of the Horsemen. The Horsemen are triple-teaming Sting when El Gigante makes his debut and scares them away. This distracts Sting long enough for Ole to control the cage and raise it. Barry Windham runs in and goes after Luger and we get a really flat DQ finish. What a total bullshit ripoff. Luger never recovered from this feud, and no wonder. The Horsemen beat the hell out of him after the match for good measure. This reeks of NWO overkill. Sting tries to come into the cage and can't because Ole is controlling the switch.

 

Post-match, Flair does an awesome fired up promo covered in blood and Sting finally gets his hands on Flair for the first time to a big pop.

 

Good match, but at the end, I was more sympathetic to Luger than I was anxious for Flair/Sting. I sometimes wonder if that hurt Sting's run as much as anything - the idea that the promotion fucked Luger over and Sting was the anointed one.

[PeteF3]

"GET SECURITY! GET THE POLICE OVER THERE AND GET OLE ANDERSON AWAY FROM THE SWITCH!"

 

I'm a ways away from this, but the post-match features a Top 10 All-Time Ross Call.

[Bix]

When I was a little kid, I was sort of halfway between knowing exactly what pro wrestling really was and believing. A big part of this was John Arezzi's radio show.

 

After this PPV, I was under the impression that Ole was able to get control of the cage because he's the booker. He's the booker, the booker is in charge, ergo Ole easily had access to the cage controls.

[El-P]

They really fucked up not giving Luger the title there. Luger was hot as hell for WCW, and had good matches. Sting vs Luger didn't draw nearly as well and Sting was nowhere near as good a worker as Luger at this time. All of this because, well, Flair wouldn't do the job. For all the nostalgic talk about Flair being this great guy victims of assholes during the nWo era, people forget a little quick that Flair was an asshole himself who did his share of unprofesisonnal stuff that hurt the promotion. This and leaving with the belt and without doing the job to Luger *again* a year later are the most obvious instances.

[jdw]

I'm pretty sure that by this time they knew Sting would be back in July for the Bash, hence keep it on Lex. Ric already had the moment of turning down the belt going to Lex anyway.

 

John

[PeteF3]

Yeah, Luger was fucked by management here, not Flair per se. They decided that Sting was going to get the belt that he would have won in February and that he would get it from Flair. Lex just a placeholder feud because, as Meltzer put it in reporting on the Sting injury, the next-highest singles babyface after Sting was Norman the Lunatic.

 

Knowing the condition of Lex's knee now, his performance here is probably one of his best. I really don't think you'd know the knee injury was legit judging from what Luger does--whether or not that's a good thing I'll leave up to others. But all of his moves still have snap and the cage allows them to do some high-impact, heat-getting stuff that just involves heads into the cage rather than big bumps. Pivotal moment where Lex fucks up the knee on a superplex and Flair has him almost beat with the figure four, and then we go off the rails. First the Horsemen come down, then Sting, then El Gigante--with what I believe was no hype or announcement whatsoever other than what we saw from Connie Chung. The knee shit is all blown to hell as Luger goes nuts again on offense. RoboCop is nowhere to be seen. Then the cage raises and we get the mother of all bullshit finishes.

 

The post-match is great stuff, with a long beatdown as Sting and Gigante are helpless outside the cage, and a fantastic crazy bug-eyed Flair promo.

[soup23]

This match has the following things going against it:

 

1. Luger being legit sick and looking miserable. On the way to the ring he tells the cameraman to get the fuck out of the way.

2. One of those huge thunderdome, cheap looking cages that are hard to integrate into the match.

3. One of the dumbest finishes in history with a complete cheap feeling, Ole gaining control of the cage, El Gigante coming out to no response, and the Horseman hanging out right next to Gigante with him standing there picking his nose.

 

 

With these overbearing parameters it truly is amazing that this is a very good match. Flair was wonderful and his blade job and bumping were sick. I really have to give credit to Luger because as sick as he was and as fucked over he might have felt, he still gave a courageous performance. Sting attacking Luger at the end was a good visual moment but I agree with Loss that a lot of traction was lost for that match up with the result of this one.

 

This may be one of the most interesting matches in wrestling history to evaluate.

[Kevin Ridge]

Interesting that WWF had their champion Hogan feuding with Intercontinental champion Warrior and WCW has Flair versus US champion Luger. The return of Robocop. Thanks for reminding me Ross. WCW cage is more in the background compared to WWF blue bar cage. Kind of like Hell in the Cell where you can still move around ringside. Woman gets to hangout inside the cage! Which completely defeats the purpose of a cage match. Ross mentions Lugers 3.78 GPA. Damnit. Glad I’m not driving. Is Flair ranking near the top of taking 10 count corner punches? Flair’s blading is so obvious. But I’m cool with some blood.

 

Luger busts his knee up in a suplex attempt. Time for Flair. Figure four by Flair. Ref breaks the figure four and here comes the Horsemen. Sting shows up and pops Ole and takes on the rest of the Horsemen. El Gigante backs up Sting! Windham is able to sneak under the cage and interfere which causes a disqualification in a Cage match? That was stupid. Woman was also useless in this match as she was in cage whole time and didn’t do anything.

[Cox]

Man, this was really good until the Horsemen showed up at ringside, then it turns into a giant clusterfuck. Sting and El Gigante (what happened to RoboCop?) chase the Horsemen away, then somehow Ole goes from being chased by Sting and El Gigante to finagling the controls to the cage in like 13 seconds, and getting it up for Barry Windham to slide in for a bullshit DQ finish. Arn gets into the cage and they're tripling on Luger until somehow they get the cage open. El Gigante, who scared the Horsemen from ringside not 2 minutes ago, just kind of stands around and doesn't do anything while the Horsemen walk right by him and Sting makes the save.

 

The finish both sucks and blows, but if it had set up a Luger/Windham feud of former partners over the US title, in a program that would have seemed fresh since their last feud was 2 years ago, I could at least see it, but by the Bash, Luger is working with Mean Mark, so this just reeks of "We don't want to beat Lex again, since that would kill him, but this is supposed to be a cage match, so we can't DQ, so...fuck it, let's just rip off the fans and drop Luger vs the Horsemen even though it's a hot program."

 

Oh, and whether it's over working this match while injured or because of the finish or what, Luger looks like he'd rather be anywhere else, audibly telling the camera man to "get the fuck out of the way." Which, you'd think he'd be smart enough not to curse at the guy whose job it is to make sure he's seen on camera in front of a large audience, but I guess that's just why folks didn't really warm up to Lex too much. Flair and Luger both seem pissed at the camera guy in the ring during their prematch stuff too, so maybe they just don't like the camera guy.

[ajtroma]

And WCW starts to go to shit right about here...

[bradhindsight]

So the storyline from the broadcasters was Luger had a knee injury which led to the staph infection. He didn't sell any kind of knee injury (even during the match it was pretty sporadic) though. [edit: ok reading above, knee injury was legit. Good on him for powering through]

 

After recently watching WrestleWar 90, things do translate nicely here. Luger is SUPER fired up (despite the illness) and gets all the offense until the knee buckles and Flair takes over. Flair constantly climbing the cage was odd but the announcers tried to cover it with Flair doing this to slow things down and throw Luger off his game. Flair gets super bloody also which the match needed.

 

My favorite part of the Horsemen coming down is Sid doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Of course we get a very lame finish of Ole raising the cage. Gigante coming down (and also doing nothing) was pretty underwhelming, outside Ole being scared.

 

I liked this a lot less than WW90 and can imagine that watching and following the months of build back in 1990 - this was a super lame letdown of an ending. Makes sense in hindsight with Luger hurt and Sting ready to come back though [edit again: ok so he wasn't THAT hurt since he still wrestled the Bash?].

[bradhindsight]

El Gigante, who scared the Horsemen from ringside not 2 minutes ago, just kind of stands around and doesn't do anything while the Horsemen walk right by him and Sting makes the save.

This baffled the hell out of me, almost as much as Sid just standing there instead of helping to attack Sting (prior to the cage being raised). I don't recall Sid even making it back to the ring for the beat down later. Where did he go?

[garretta]

Okay, this was........something.

 

First, out of all the things to have a problem with (and they are many), not giving the belt to Luger isn't one of them. Even in a world without Sting, even in a world where Luger would have gotten the belt here, they'd have had to audibilize and have Flair retain, even if it was with a bullshit finish like the one we got. Luger didn't actually work a match with a documented finish for almost another two weeks after this, when he defeated Flair by DQ in Pittsburgh (my hometown, by the way) on June 1. He was subbed for by JYD a few times, and was scheduled to compete on cards with no known results a few more times in the thirteen days between. If I could pretty much count on my new World champion missing my first round of TV tapings because of a legit injury, chances are I'd do whatever I could not to put the belt on him and worry about how that affected him in the fans' eyes down the road.

 

That said, as long as they knew that Luger wasn't getting the title, did they have to screw him over this way? All this does is leave the whole issue between Luger and Flair unresolved and divide the fans, because even some of the little Stingers probably thought that Luger would win the belt here to set up a Luger/Sting dream match. Now, some fans probably wanted to see one last Luger/Flair match (probably an "I Quit" match) instead of Sting/Flair at the Bash, which is completely counterproductive, not only because Sting was going to win the title, but because the Luger/Flair feud, at least for the World belt, was completely forgotten after this. If they knew that Flair was moving on, have him score some type of screwy pin, then do whatever you needed to do in order to set up Sting/Flair.

 

Other observations:

 

1. I'll buy that Gonzalez was 7"7' (whether he actually was or not), but there's no way in hell he looked like he weighed 450, even to the stupidest of marks. Three hundred, maybe a little more, but not 450. That was just an attempt to make him as big as Andre, and I thought WCW was supposed to be above that kind of thing.

 

2. If Luger really swore at the cameraman, I didn't catch it. But if he did, no wonder they didn't want him holding the title. Flair screaming "OH, SHIT!" while selling as he sometimes did was bad enough, but at least it was easily explained should they have cared to try.

 

3. I wonder why JR and Bob didn't try the most obvious way to explain Flair climbing the cage: making Luger climb up after him with his bad knee, thus weakening it. I guess Flair the coward made a better story.

 

4. If you ever wondered where JR got his WWE style from, you hear early vestiges of it here. "Patch me through to the cage guy! Somebody raise the damn cage! Get Ole away from the switch!" Unfortunately, he overdid it to the point of parody during the Attitude Era, but it works fine here.

 

5. Why leave Woman in the cage? I like the spot where they searched her, but if that was the only reason to leave her in, it was kind of stupid.

 

6. I noticed that Gigante didn't try to raise the cage by hand. That would have been a nice feat of strength to debut him with, even if he didn't join Sting in saving Luger. I noticed Sid's absence too; maybe he didn't want to get his nice new tux dirty, or maybe he had a softball game the next day and didn't want to risk injury.

[drew wardlaw]

So this is the old doomsday/thunderdome/chamber of horrors match, correct? Maybe even the one from Halloween Havoc 97? This thing is so stupid. Anyway, I've seen this match no less than 5 times and I honestly cannot remember anything about the match part, and barely anything about the interference outside of Ole at the controls. Really a shame, given the history of matches these two have had.

[dawho5]

I noticed Lex was incredibly over here. I mean like world champ level over. For having a legit injury like he did, it's amazing we got what we did. And umm, yeah...fuck whoever came up with everything involved with this finish. Had Robocop left the building? Did Sid get lost somewhere after running away from Giant Gonzalez? What did Gonzalez even do during this segment that amounted to more than ambling around? How did Ole get all that time to mess with the cage? Last but in no way least.

 

WHO thought putting a finish to the match that made NOBODY look good at all was a good idea? Flair looks like he lucked out keeping the belt. The Horsemen look nothing like the most elite group in wrestling. Luger looks like a guy who just got fucked over one too many times and never gets to win. Sting gets one or two good licks in on Flair I guess. I'm struggling to see where this seemed like a good idea in terms of how everybody comes out of it.

[Superstar Sleeze]

NWA World Heavyweight Champion Ric Flair vs Lex Luger - NWA Capital Combat 1990

Everyone always says that Wrestlewar 1990 is The Last Stand of The Man, but this match is not too far behind honestly. Both matches plagued by some of the shittiest finishes in pro wrestling history. This match is the Greatest Hits of Flair vs Luger so I dont think it is in the same league as Starrcade '88 or Wrestlewar '90, but this is still every bit a great match. I am a bit confused on Luger's health. I thought the knee injury was a work and the staph infection/fever was a shoot. It seems the knee injury may have been a shoot too. He was definitely working hurt so kudos to him because he looked great in this match. I thought this match even moreso than the other two more famous ones made The Total Package look like Superman. There is a part after Flair has been busted open that he tries an inverted atomic drop and gets blasted by a clothesline. Then Nature Boy tries to ram his head into the cage, Luger blocks and rams his head into the cage. Then Flair just tries to hurl his entire body at Luger and just bounces off as Luger roars! It was amazing! Luger looked like a million bucks! I dont think I have ever seen Luger's clotheslines look so good. I am a big Luger fan, but he doesnt have the best clothesline even though he uses them a lot. In this match he was STEAMROLLING Flair. That shine was king-sized. This match was all action. The cage is one of those way too big Thunderdome cages that look impressive from a size standpoint but dont add much from the match. We get a short Flair heat segment when he kicks Luger in the head. He looks to go knee, but instead hits a kneedrop and then suplex. Luger NO-SELLS! No-selling is a type of selling people. It is a conscientious move that says "YOU CANT HURT STEEL" and pops the crowd. That is different from "not selling" which happens later when Luger blows off the knee work to hit a military press. It is just all down hill from here for Flair as he ends up getting busted scaling the cage. Then they go into that sequence I loved above. I love Luger after that primal scream and just killing it, hitting a superplex, BUT his knee is blown out on the move. Great short Flair heat segment. He is at his best when he is bloody and crazed. Up until the figure-4 I thought this match was amazing, but had seen it before (forgotten how good this was) and knew the finish sucked the big one. The Horsemen come out then Sting & El Gigante. Ole lifts the cage. Windham sneaks in as Luger has Flair racked. The need for a hot comeback while all this gaga goes on outside fucks Luger as he has to blow off the selling to have his comeback. There is a DQ in a steel cage match which is terrible. Horsemen beatdown in the cage, they get the cage lifted and Sting & Gigante save. Luger gets screwed over again. Sad. Ignore the finish, the first 90% of this match rocks and the match should be remembered as a fun action movie blockbuster and a game Luger overcoming a fever and delivering a helluva performance. ****