WCW in 1992 and 1993... surprisingly not terrible

[PeteF3]

The other problem with the top-rope ban was the second major show after it was the tag title tournament Clash, where because of "NWA rules" moves off the top were allowed--so you immediately had Pilman, Liger, and Benoit leaping all over the place undermining whatever Watts was setting out to accomplish.

[C.S.]

the thing is that a goldberg push just doesn't work with guys who rely so much on chinlocks and front facelocks. monsters need explosive offense!

 

When I compared Doc and Gordy's push to Goldberg, it was not my intention to imply that they got the exact same push. It was just a quick and dirty example of the whole "badass mows everyone else down" type of push both Doc/Gordy and Goldberg got. The particulars are, obviously, quite different. At the time, Doc and Gordy coming in as wrecking balls against the seemingly invincible Steiners made them look like world beaters.

 

CS - To what you said earlier about my not pointing out the Gordy/Williams loss to Dustin/Windham. I was not covering up it was simply something I had forgotten. I thought Windham/Rhodes beat a surrogate team not the MVC.

 

Fair enough. Easy to forget, because Dustin/Windham were probably rushed into that spot - likely because of whatever out of the ring stuff Gordy was dealing with.

[The Following Contest]

The other problem with the top-rope ban was the second major show after it was the tag title tournament Clash, where because of "NWA rules" moves off the top were allowed--so you immediately had Pilman, Liger, and Benoit leaping all over the place undermining whatever Watts was setting out to accomplish.

 

I always think of this whenever I hear Watts give his defence of the ban. The logic is sound if it were executed as Watts states (heel distracts/knocks out ref, hits high flying whatever) but for babyfaces and the light-heavies, the ban is just a limit on their ability to get over.

[C.S.]

I'll defend the top rope rule...sort of.

 

Was it an an antiquated and misguided idea? Sure.

 

But I understand where he was coming from too. Watts wanted the rules to matter again - and in the time that I've been watching wrestling, they've never mattered more than during that brief period (for the sake of context, I started watching in late-1991). In major American promotions from 1991 to now, the rules were given the most emphasis during Watts's tenure in WCW. I can't think of another federation or era in the past two-and-a-half decades where the rules mattered more. It gave WCW such a different, sports-like feel that it still stands out in my mind as one of the coolest times in wrestling.

 

Are there better ways to accomplish that than banning cool top rope moves? Well, yeah! But I gotta say, there's something awesome about gasping at the fact that a heel just did something as basic as going off the top rope. "Oh my God, how dare he!" It seemed so nefarious somehow. Especially if he got away with it!

 

Pillman's babyface rebellion of going off the top rope (I think he got DQed against a jobber once) was also pretty damn novel.

[Matt D]

The top rope rule is so easy to deal with.

 

Make it apply to everything but Light Heavyweight matches. Suddenly it's a tool to make rules matter AND it makes the Light Heavyweight matches stand out and be more exciting.

[Bierschwale]

An idea that I KNOW is flawed but has recurred to me too often to never mention: Could the LHW title have actually been saved with Steamboat as the guy to take it off of Flamingo, instead of Steamer being in the Austin feud for the TV title?

 

Could you have run US-title level feuds with Steamboat as LHW champ, especially with the HW title having so many legitimate heavies as challengers? You can still introduce everyone who'd make weight named by Loss earlier, use the NJ deal to work in a lot of guys who were at the 235 range like Hase and Koshinaka, plus the true juniors (Was there an actual UWA deal or just Watts getting King/Texano for that one-off?), and obviously Armstrong, Eaton, and Pillman are still around. Steamboat had the credibility to keep it from just being a set division, which would then elevate the new guys and so on.

[jdw]

 

I'm a little shocked that the idea of WCW 1992 being good is surprising.

 

Go back and read the stuff Scott Keith used to write about 1992-93 WCW, which was more or less parroting what he'd read on rspw.

 

 

It wasn't parroting what he read on rps-w. There was a big split in the early days on the group between hardcore WWF Fans and the hardcore WCW Fans. By and large they liked their own shit, and didn't like the other shit. SKeith was originally in the WWF Fan camp, and he showed up right at this time slotting right in with other WWF Fans.

 

WCW Fans in rsp-w loved their shit when it was great like in early 1992. They were happy when Watts took over. They became less happy when Watts did what Watts did, but they still loved stuff like Vader vs Sting or Dustin & Steamer vs Barry & Pillman.

 

There were some fans who watched all sorts of shit like Kunze and Scherer. There were the folks who grew fed up with both Feds and eventually became the ECW Fans, who were loved their promotion even more than WCW Fans and WWF Fans.

 

Was it as polarized as it became in the Monday Night Wars era? Eh... hard to tell, especially with the explosion of the group in 1996 thanks to AOL. When reading old archive stuff when very early Google first showed up with a (much better than now) Usenet archive, I tended to go back and read people who were broad in what they watched. But you'd see them weigh into a WCW or WWF topic, and all the other posts going on back and forth between partisans.

 

* * * * *

 

The complains of WCW being up and down in 1993-94 can even more easily be found in the WON (and Torch for that matter). Everyone loved the Frey era. Everyone was excited about the Watts era. Bloom came off, and the promotion was inconsistent.

 

I'm looking at Halloween Havoc over here:

 

http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/wcw92.htm

 

Only three matches reached Yearbook level, and only one was rated above ***+ by Loss:

 

Barry Windham & Dustin Rhodes vs Steve Williams & Steve Austin (WCW Halloween Havoc 10/25/92) ***3/4

 

A WCW PPV with just one match above *** is pretty brutal.

 

Starcade had two matches he liked a good deal:

 

Vader vs Sting (WCW Starrcade 12/28/92) ****1/2

Barry Windham & Brian Pillman vs Ricky Steamboat & Shane Douglas (WCW Starrcade 12/28/92) ***3/4

 

But a Starrcade where only two matches are Yearbook worthy is one that's top heavy with two good matches and kind of a strange mess underneath with BattleBowl not really booked well to kick out good matches.

 

Compare them with the next PPV SuperBrawl, and one runs into a deeper quality card.

 

Slogging through the TV at the time, you'd have stretches of nothing interesting... then something popping up that was cool on Saturday Night or Main Event or Worldwide that was nifty. Then stuff that wasn't.

 

WCW in 1992-93 makes for a very good Best Of. At the time as an NWA/WCW fan rather than a WWF fan, WCW could deliver the goods then frustrate the hell out of you. Battle Bowl did it all in one show with those two really fun matches, and then the wasted chance to book BattleBowl in a way that was either interesting or kicked out good matches. 1993 could kick out something as awesome as SuperBrawl (first PPV that I watched with Hoback and we dug the heck out of it), then something as pedestrian as Fall Brawl.

[Infinit]

It didn't really help when Cowboy would do thing like tell Muta and Chono not to have a great match at Starrcade, either.

[JaymeFuture]

I think calling Fall Brawl 93 pedestrian is being rather magnanimous. The TV in general in 93 is really tough to watch with the parade of losers brought in dirt cheap, and you have to overlook the major elements of stupidity that made viewing at the time so tough (the mini-movies, Cactus Amnesia, Shockmasters push, Flair For The Gold which were mostly worthless segments) in order to watch the isolated moments of quality. Rick Rude went from one of the best heels in the business in 92 to utterly boring in 93. They decided the Nasty Boys were a better choice than the Blondes, and led to them having some dire matches. Just a real hard slog, not that there isnt some great in there.

[jdw]

I think calling Fall Brawl 93 pedestrian is being rather magnanimous.

 

I didn't feel like calling it dog crap in the event someone, such as the original poster, liked parts of it. The card did nothing for me, but I also spent the decade watching a metric ton of bad PPVs from the WWF and WCW (not to mention ECW), so consider "pedestrian" to be "yet another weak PPV".

 

 

The TV in general in 93 is really tough to watch with the parade of losers brought in dirt cheap, and you have to overlook the major elements of stupidity that made viewing at the time so tough (the mini-movies, Cactus Amnesia, Shockmasters push, Flair For The Gold which were mostly worthless segments) in order to watch the isolated moments of quality. Rick Rude went from one of the best heels in the business in 92 to utterly boring in 93. They decided the Nasty Boys were a better choice than the Blondes, and led to them having some dire matches. Just a real hard slog, not that there isnt some great in there.

 

 

I indicated in my post that it was a slog at the time to watch. The promotion comes across far better in Best Of sets than it did in real time because all (or at least most) of the tripe gets left on the cutting room floor.

 

I mean... I was watching All Japan weekly in 1992 & 1993 at the same time. I know that a slog it was to keep up with the US promotion that I liked at the time, hence my other comment: "frustrate the hell out of you".