[1997-04-28-WCW-Nitro] Ric Flair, Roddy Piper and the NWO

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Gregor]

I was so disappointed when I finally saw this. I expected it to be this awesome shot from a condescending Flair said right to Syxx's face, but instead Flair was hopping around like a kangaroo and hugging Roddy Piper. I dunno - I guess I had this image in my head of Flair showing that he was still cool even near 50.

[Loss]

Yeah, Flair is off his game here, but that was a GREAT line.

 

"I've had the world title more times than you've had pieces of ass, pal!"

 

The NWO never come out. Instead, the ring fills with papers everywhere that say "Tradition Bites - NWO For Life".

 

I do love Flair saying "You drew the house? Come on down and face it" as a response to Hall earlier.

 

They do this weird thing with Piper here where he stands still and doesn't help Flair during the brawl and they never follow up on it.

 

The Flair/Syxx brawl is awesome, and Ric should have embraced working with him more than he did. Syxx seemed genuinely excited about doing the program and Flair wanted to work with a bigger name.

[Childs]

What was up with Piper just standing there while they triple teamed Flair? It was clearly intentional because Ric was moaning Piper's name. But they never revisited any tension did they?

[Loss]

Flair and Piper did feud over summer, but it had nothing to do with this. Piper came up with some lame excuse the next week, but I think they were toying with a heel turn initially.

[Kevin Ridge]

Piper came off like such a heel just randomly standing in the ring while Flair was being triple teamed. Flair wasn't so smart charging off down the ramp after the NWO anyways. Finally, before we go off the air Piper decides to help Flair.

[Robert S]

The NWO never come out. Instead, the ring fills with papers everywhere that say "Tradition Bites - NWO For Life".

This was a great visual though probably hell to clean-up.

[soup23]

I kind of love Flair in this as the crazed uncle that is not going to back down from an insult to his family. His line on SYxx was really good and I'm saddened that he didn't want to work with him because just watching this, I thought Flair was purposely trying to put over Syxx. the beatdown and brawl with him was good but the Piper stuff made no fucking sense at all.

[El-P]

I didn't realized Flair didn't want to work with Syxx. If anything, it shows how selfish and out of date he was too at this point. Good line about Syxx though. What the fuck was Piper doing, he looked like he was senile. "Tradition bites" kinda sucked.

[PeteF3]

The story as I understand it is that Piper was supposed to hesitate just slightly before making the save, adding a bit of tension to the potential Piper/Flair split without overdoing it. For whatever reason, either Piper was given bad instruction, misunderstood the instruction, or just missed a cue and he stayed put for way longer than he was supposed to.

[PeteF3]

Well, Flair going to town on all three guys at once in the aisle was awesome, and I did like the visuals of the falling leaflets, right out of a military propaganda operation. Piper's hesitation, whatever the reason for it, was pretty bad.