[1991-07-14-WCW-Great American Bash] Steve Austin & Terrence Taylor vs Bobby Eaton & P.N. News ('Capture the Flag' Scaffold)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

They have the nerve to call this The Skywalkers II. Not just a scaffold match, but a CAPTURE THE FLAG scaffold match. Austin tries to put on as much of a show as he can, I think because it's his first pay-per-view, and Eaton is reliable, but this is still a horrible match.

[Matt D]

This may be the single match i saw the most times as a kid. No lie. The only tape I owned was a taped off the TV version of GAB which cut off halfway through Sting vs Nikita.

[PeteF3]

Not only do they dub this "Skywalkers II," but they have the nerve to announce that a team can win by knocking an opponent 20 feet down knowing full well that no one will be taking the bump. Does Taylor's presence here make any sense at all? WCW's mid-card was a total mess...of course, so was the tag division and so was the main event division.

 

This match naturally sucks and on top of things the finish is completely and horribly botched. Eaton captures the flag, walks 3/4 of the way back to his end, THEN Lady Blossom hands her aerosol can to Austin and Eaton stupidly walks back over so he can get sprayed. Then the flag falls to the ring. Then we meander for a little bit. Then Gary Capetta announces Eaton & News as the winners. Then Taylor takes a bump into the ring. Then the announcer's mics give out. Unbelievable.

[Kevin Ridge]

I don't like scaffold matches much. Some match to start off the show. Match is awful with very little happening. Eaton grabs the flag walks over to his side and then returns. Match just continues until guys start climbing down the scaffold. They've had enough and Gary Cappetta randomly announces Eaton/News as winners.

[soup23]

Opening for the PPV is actually not half bad and we get a Dennis Stamp cameo.

 

Them calling this Skywalkers 2 is our first in a long line of LOL moments from this show. Second comes immediately afterwards with PN NEWS attire. Taylor/Austin feels like a completely random duo together and I have no clue if there is a rivalry with these guys or not because last I knew, News was fighting with Salt N Pepper. Someone has a sign in the crowd for Lady Blossom giving away their hotel number. I appreciate the camera angle with the scaffold point of view because you can see all the empty seats by the entranceway. This match is probably one of the worst I have seen. I had no idea that bobby won but I guess he did. The action after they climb down is insanely more heated than them staring at each other on top of the scaffold.

[dgrblue]

During the match ross says that the scaffold is plywood, and and hard, with no give, not like in the ring, which is plywood covered with canvas, which we all know makes all the difference.

 

Was the setup for the original skywalkers match not available? Not in mothballs somewhere, or was it being used at a consrtuction site somewhere. Worst scaffold setup.

[PhilTLL]

"[The plywood surface as opposed to steel] is worse for traction, but certainly much better for the skin." - Schiavone

 

What a crap pile, complete with a long, boring, and pointless post match.

[garretta]

If anyone can tell me what the point of that match was, I'm all ears. This was actually as well-done as you could reasonably expect, considering that only one of the participants (Eaton) had any real business up there. I mean, a 400-pound man in a scaffold match? Did News lose a bet or what? At least he didn't do much more than lay there, which makes him the smartest man in this whole trainwreck, as JR pointed out. Austin seemed to adjust pretty well, and Taylor stayed out of the way for the most part. Jeannie might have shown the most athleticism of anyone in the match, as she darted out of the ring like a cat after Austin threw her hairspray back to her.

 

What I'll remember most from this is JR and Tony coming as close as they could to calling this the stinkbomb it was without crossing the line and possibly getting themselves fired. They knew going in that it was going to be a horrible match that no one would give two cents about, so they didn't try to trick us into believing that it was going to be some sort of titanic struggle. Tony even came up with some nice background stuff to put the match into some kind of perspective; I enjoyed his story on doing the opening for the Starrcade '86 videotape from high up on the scaffold at the Omni. Kudos to them for doing a thankless, impossible job well, and I hope they got paid extra for it.

 

The brief exchange after the bout was much better than anything we saw during it, and it made me actually want to see a straight tag between these four guys. When a gimmick match between certain competitors makes you want to see a straight rematch between them, there's something wrong with the gimmick. (Not that they had much of a choice; there was absolutely no way they could even tease someone like News taking a bump off of a scaffold, so they pretty much had to do the capture-the-flag bit.)

 

Idiot of the Yearbook nominee: Bobby Eaton, for capturing his opponents' flag, then using it as a weapon instead of planting it in his own corner to secure the victory. Maybe he picked up a "stretch" sign from someone at ringside, because there's no other explanation for this, reasonable or otherwise.

 

Where was Terri? You'd think she'd have been at ringside, even with Jeannie seconding Austin. Did they not want two women in the same match at the same time, even as seconds?

[dawho5]

I'd call this a mess, but that would be giving it too much credit. Was there anything leading up to this match besides Austin beating Eaton for the TV title?