[1991-04-27-WCW-Saturday Night] Interview: Ric Flair

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This is Flair in old form, but the haircut is too much to look past.

[shoe]

Even though he can still cut an amazing promo their is a disconnect with the hair.

[PeteF3]

This is an incredibly tough sell, Fujinami in a PPV main event. Even a stock Flair promo does a decent job of it, though. Flair manages not to butcher Fujinami's name.

[Kevin Ridge]

Flair mentions he has been the main figure for 10 years in the World Title picture. There will also be 10 women waiting at the hotel for him when he gets to Florida. Tough to get over an outsider like Fujinami that most fans won’t know.

[soup23]

Good Flair promo but damn these angles feel really soft in WCW at this point. Only PIllman vs. Windham feels interesting and its a shame considering how good Wrestlewar was mostly as an overall show. NO Horseman dissension is mentioned here.

[garretta]

This one fell flat. They're not even trying to present Fujinami as anyone important. If the fans watching bought the Starrcade in Tokyo pay-per-view, they know that, disputed or not, Fujinami has a pinfall over Flair. That should have been more than enough to put him over as a threat, even if no one in the audience had ever heard of him before. Instead. Flair's doing the same old routine, as if the match is an afterthought.

 

If you're not going to try to make Fujinami a name worthy of respect to the WCW fans, why not just have Flair beat him clean in Tokyo and book Gigante or another WCW guy in the title match at SuperBrawl? Did Gigante and Sid have to fight each other right then? Did Sting and Luger have to fight the Steiners? Even Sting/Flair Part Infinity + 2 would have been better than basically booking a title vs. title (NWA World vs. WCW World) match as a throwaway.

 

One part I liked was Flair leading the audience in a call-and-response. Even he knows that his routine is the same as it ever was, and he has to find a way to keep the fans' interest up. Unfortunately for Flair, the response (if there was any) didn't really come through on camera.

[PeteF3]

I doubt NJPW would have gone for a joint Dome show if their guy wasn't going over in the end somehow.

 

That said...WCW would have been better off trying to swing it with Muto here, whose name carried at least some cache with their audience.

[garretta]

Good point, Pete, but I always assumed they booked Sting/Muta so the American audience (or at least most of them) would have a matchup they were familiar with.

[dawho5]

Flair tries to make this match important to the American fans. It's just too tough of a sell.