WRESTLING 20 YEARS AGO PODCAST

Listen to our May 1997 WWF podcast, reviewing In Your House: A Cold Day In Hell

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It's only been a few weeks since our last pay per view write up, since then things have been fairly benign – even Vader got released about being under House Arrest in Kuwait. The pay per view, largely, was the a continuation of where things were before: Steve Austin once again in an ill-advised main event, this time with the Undertaker, the next step on the never ending train that was Ahmed Johnson vs the Nation of Domination and, as always, a couple of completely thrown together undercard matches. The only real thing of note headed into the show was the in-ring WWF debut of former UFC Superfight Champion Ken Shamrock.
 

Flash Funk vs Hunter Hearst Helmsley (w/ Chyna)
If HHH couldn't get a servicable match out of Too Cold Scorpio then we may as well have written him off there and then. Thankfully, this was decent, if no better – Funk is so cold as an act, and Chyna gets a bigger reaction by breathing in than Hunter does with 95% of his stuff. Funk worked hard, HHH tried to get heat, in the end after an awkward looking pedigree HHH takes it. Not the best.
 

Mankind vs Rocky Maivia
Mankind has been featured pretty heavily since his debut a year ago, yet he had nothing to carry another completely flat act in Rocky Maivia. In my notes for the first half of the match I took very little down, they brawled up the unusually steel entrance ramp and Rocky got out a Rock Bottom (which, at this point, was just a move). If this match was saved by anything it was the finish – Rocky came off the top with a flying crossbody which Mankind rolled over and applied the Mandible claw for the clean win.
 

Ahmed Johnson vs The Nation (Crush, Savio and Farooq)
I really wanted to dislike this, and was particularly dismayed when Jim Ross seemed to insinuate on commentary that possibly all three of them were potentially unavaialbe to compete given how long this feud has been going. But... that all being said... they got the booking of this pretty much bang on.

Ahmed faced Crush first, and to my surprise there's a decent amount of heat for this, Ahmed wins in a few minutes with a heel kick. Savio comes out, gets himself DQ'd, then here comes Farooq. Ahmed hits a Pearl River Plunge but sells his back on landing before going for the cover, buying Farooq enough time to believably kick out but also get a surprisingly good reaction for the near fall from the crowd. Farooq slams Ahmed and gets the clean win. I've got nothing for contempt for this feud, but fair play – they got this about right.
 

Ken Shamrock vs Vader
Sweet lord was this stiff. This was a fantastic spectacle, incredibly memorable and one of the more violent "normal" matches you'll see in the WWE. Both guys agreed to lay it in a bit more than usual, and it showed for a match that the crowd seemed more watchful than vocally invested, I'm not sure they particularly know how to watch a match like this one, nore do they really know how to register the severity of the leg kicks Shamrock was laying in on Vader.

I wondered whether a criticism of this match was that it went a little too long, both guys seemed out on their arse by the end of it. The brutality didn't wane though, Vader missed a moonsault out of the corner before just pole-axing Shamrock with a right hand. Still Shamrock puts in an ankle lock and picks up the clean win. Super match, Vader looked good losing, Shamrock looked like a bad-ass winning. Big fan of this.
 

Steve Austin vs The Undertaker for the WWF Title
So they left five front row seats empty all night just so the Hart Foundation could sit in them. According to the story they'd bought tickets off of scalpers... which perhaps made sense, but didn't answer two questions: firstly, why did contracted WWF talent need to buy (presumably quite inflated) tickets for the show when they could've just sat at ringside anyway and two, if they needed the tickets to get in the front row then why did they walk out through Gorilla?

Anyway – you might get a drift of the bigger picture I'm looking at here, this match just didn't mean enough in the context of other stories. Once you sit five guys at ringside, you're signposting that you're going to a shitty finish. And given that both of these guys are so over I'm not sure the crowd even wanted to see the match. The action was fine, but it took a while to pick-up.

Undertaker hits a chokeslam, then Austin hits a stunner and for all the world it looks like he's won it – until the bell rings prematurely. Brian Pillman snuck around and sounded the bell before the three, obviously the match gets restarted, we get the Sid-tombstone spot – but this time after Austin counters Taker Taker counters him back. Taker wins cleanly before we get the battle that most people wanted to see – Austin and Undertaker fighting off the Hart Foundation. A good match but a bit of a vacuum.
 
Score Rating: 5/10
Go Back and Watch: Shamrock vs Vader is a must, everything else is coherent but very forgettable. 

Listen to our May 1997 WCW podcast, reviewing Slamboree in full.

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The build to Slamboree had been built around perhaps the two biggest matches WCW could put together in the absence of Hulk Hogan. With Ric Flair finally on the comeback path after about six months out with surgery, they lined up a pay per view in Charlotte, North Carolina – you suspect Flair would’ve been involved in the main event whether he’d have been ready or not.

As it was, the planned main event called for Flair to pair up alongside Roddy Piper – who by all accounts should’ve began a heel turn about two weeks earlier but after a timing cue was missed the whole thing basically had to be scrapped. Alongside those two was to be Carolina Panther Kevin Greene. The inclusion of Greene was a bit of a contentious one – his last involvement in WCW storyline was nearly a year prior at the Great American Bash – where his tag partner Steve McMichael turned on him to align with a Four Horsemen group headed up by Flair. In the end, WCW decided that in Carolina both would be faces so decided to ignore their priors before having Green screw McMichael in a match on Nitro later in the month.

Up against Flair, Piper and Greene was originally supposed to be Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Hulk Hogan. Hogan, who had been in and out of TV in the couple of months prior, worked out (or, perhaps, decided) that his movie commitments meant he wouldn’t be able to do the show. It’s also of course, entirely possible that Hogan decided that there was no way the NWO weren’t going to be able to put over Flair and Greene in the Carolina’s so thought better of it. Replacing him, suggested Hall and Nash, should be friend and defacto number four of the group… Syxx. Which is where the problems started.

Flair and Piper felt that Syxx wasn’t a big enough name to be in such a star studded main event. Hall and Nash thought that Flair and Piper were too old to be calling the shots and that given the wrestling ability of Flair, Piper and Greene that the match would need a worker to make it even somewhat passable. That created an impasse internally that quickly spread itself onto TV. Everyone started shooting, as the faces bemoaned the “youngsters” for having no respect (Nash was 37, Hall 38, at least Waltman was 24), the NWO retorted that the road the elder statsmen had paved was covered in potholes. It was hard to follow even if you had any gauge on what they were banging on about, let alone if you didn’t, but like a lot of semi-shoots at the time in WCW, it was less about what they were saying and more about how they were saying it that was getting the angles over.

The other big shift within WCW within a couple of weeks of the pay per view was the departure, temporarily, of head booker Kevin Sullivan. Sullivan was the man trapped in the middle of much of the backstage toing and froing, having to attempt to keep all of the various stakeholders within the company happy. Which included Hogan and Piper, who both had creative control over their storylines, and other factions divided into the Hogan camp – backed by Hall, Nash and others, and the other side lead by Flair and Piper, backed by guys like Diamond Dallas Page. Sullivan, so said Bischoff, was taking some time-off to recharge and would be back soon enough.
 

Steven Regal vs The Ultimate Dragon (w/ Sonny Ono) for the WCW Television Title
So Regal has dropped the Lord part of his name to tweak his gimmick a bit and, for tonight at least, that gimmick seems to be of a babyface, which will take a while to get used to. This match was technically fine, good in fact, but Regal being such a natural heel (playing a face) and Dragon seemingly being such a natural face (playing admittedly quite solid heel) it just didn’t feel right.

That being said, the work in this match was very nice, Regal got an STF in and the crowd actually started chanting his name, which may be a first. Regal kicks out of a frankinsteiner then got a nice near fall covering Dragon after he’d missed a moonsault. Then Sonny Ono gets involved, initially getting some shots in on Regal which riles up Dragon, before he actually kicks Dragon. Regal puts in the Regal stretch, Dragon submits and we have a new TV champ. Bizarre dynamic, but a good match.
 

Luna Vachon vs Medusa
So… at the beginning of the month on WCW syndicated television, WCW announced that Medusa had defeated Akira Hokuto to win the WCW Women’s Title in Japan. Which was fine, except the match never happened – which in itself isn’t a problem, phantom title changes aren’t unheard of. But the problem was, nobody really clued in any of the acts involved about the story, which caused confusion everywhere before WCW quietly decided to drop the whole thing. For now, at least I think, Hokuto is still the champ.

This match was flat. Barring a clothesline spot where Luna basically landed on the back of her neck, this was a flat, short match. WCW’s attempt at a women’s division (with two regular acts, neither of which are their champ) is admirable but it just doesn’t work. Medusa wins it with a German suplex. Later, on Nitro, Medusa is forced to put her career on the line in order to get a title shot. Either that, or (as Gene Okerlund put it) “she’ll end up walking the streets… [PAUSE]… to look for a job”.
 

Yuji Yasuraoka vs Rey Mysterio Jr
Yasuraoka is a bit of an odd case… 26 years old at the time of the match having been wrestling in Japanese promotion WAR for the previous five years, it seems like this match and the one that aired on WCW Saturday Night the previous day were his only two away from American soil. He retired in 1999.

History lesson aside, this was fine, Mysterio working a bit hurt and in a meaningless match is still excellent, and this was no exception. There’s a bizarre spot where, with Yasuraoka on the outside, Mark Curtis essentially blocks a Mysterio dive only to setup a horrid set-piece where Mysterio did a dive over Curtis to the outside (which looked good but was terribly signposted and directed). Still, after Yasuraoka gets his stuff in Mysterio hits a springboard hurricanrana and picks up the win. Good match, but if WCW wanted Mysterio to be a star (and parts of the company were pushing him hard in their marketing alongside Hogan and Savage) then he needs to be in better programs than this.

 
Mortis (w/ James van den Bergh) vs Glacier
Yeah… this Mortal Kombat stuff is flagging. It’s not inherently a bad idea, just one that may be a bad idea but also one that’s badly executed. This was short, as Glacier wins by DQ. After the match, Mortis leg drops Glaciers head onto the ringsteps, which looks real nice, before karate expert Ernest Miller comes out and hits a couple of lovely side kicks onto the heels.
 

Jeff Jarrett (w/ Debra McMichael) vs Dean Malenko for the WCW United States Title
We are in Horsemen country, but this is Jeff Jarrett, so he still gets booed. This was a magnificent non-event of a match, Jarrett’s such a black hole that not even Dean Malenko can get a memorable match out of him. After some back and forth, Jarrett gets a figure four in (no reaction, in Flair country), then gets knocked out on the floor. Mongo comes out and collects Debra, Malenko puts in the Cloverleaf and gets the clean win.
 

Meng (w/ Jimmy Hart) vs Chris Benoit (w/ Woman) in a Death Match
Well, it was a “death match”, but other than being unusually stiff this was hardly worthy of the name. Meng is a tough dude, as is Benoit, but where’s one crucial difference: fans know Benoit is tough because they see it, fans know Meng is tough because every now and then WCW announcers say it. That didn’t really translate here, as the two worked hard and snug, but never really got any kinda of reaction off of a flat story going in. Benoit busts out a trio of German suplexes, then goes for a top rope diving headbutt before Meng, preposterously, “catches” him as he lands into a nerve hold before getting the clean win. I’m all for building up Meng, I’d have just started the job three years ago.
 

Konnan and Hugh Morrus (w/ Jimmy Hart) vs The Steiners (Rick & Scott)
I mean… it was a match, but it’s hard to think of a Steiners match that had meant less. This, like quite a few matches on this card, went in cold (the past three Nitro’s had all been an hour long, limiting the TV time to build matches) and it came out cold too. It wasn’t a bad match, just irrelevant. Scott wins it with a frankinsteiner, and afterwards Konnan breaks up with the Dungeon of Doom. With Sullivan on hiatus, that’s about that.
 

Steve “Mongo” McMichael (w/ Debra McMichael) vs Reggie White
So this was the other big marquee match… and in some respects it did its job – the cameramen got their photos, the media got their clips and WCW got their publicity, but whoever thought this could go 15 minutes needs to be shot. The action was competent, but neither had enough to go so long and Mongo – despite his significant improvement – is still miles off being able to carry a match like this.

We get the “line of scrimmage” spot, where Mongo levels White. White does about all he’s been trained for – sloppy clotheslines, shoulder tackles and the odd splash. White, to his credit, does manage a nice suplex but buy this point the crowd have all but checked out. Mongo attempts to leave but White’s teammate Gilbert Brown appears on the aisle way and carries him back. After one thwarted haliburton shot, Jarrett throws Mongo a second, who smacks White over the back with it for the win.
 

The NWO (Scott Hall, Kevin Nash and Syxx) vs Kevin Greene, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ric Flair in a No Disqualification Match
The pop that Flair got, my word. The six guys get out there and there’s just that main event buzz that you very rarely see in WCW (and even rarer in the WWF in the past few years). The crowd are reacting to everything Flair does, as he dominates the first few minutes. Greene gets his own stuff in as Syxx is tasked with doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Greene does manage a bodyslam on Nash, which is incredibly impressive, before Piper gets involved and for a brief while plays the face in peril.

It's at this stage I need to fill in the second half of the story I was telling in the intro. Piper, with his creative control, threatened to pull out of the match in favour of facing Syxx alone. Quite why he’d do that was anybody’s guess – the natural singles match coming off the back of all of this was Flair vs Syxx (which would get its time). Anyway, in amongst the negotiations Eric Bischoff suggested that Syxx would be the person to take the fall – which Nash baulked at, if for nothing else that it was so obvious. Nash then said something to the effect of – “If you’re going to do that, why don’t you pin all three of us in the ring?”

Which is exactly what they did. After a ref bump (caused by Piper, who just knocked out the ref) the newly reinstated Nick Patrick came out. The match broke down, Flair low blowing Hall before putting him in the figure four, Piper put Nash in the sleeper and Kevin Green held Syxx in a powerslam position for an absolute age before putting him down. Patrick eventually counted the pin (on Hall, I think, who had passed out) to a huge reaction from the crowd. The Outsiders earned a lot of credit for agreeing to do such an emphatic and decisive finish – one that in the Carolina setting really was the only choice. Although one has to wonder how different things would’ve been had Hogan been involved. Still, a good match made so much better by an electric crowd. WCW’s match of the year so far.
 
Score Rating: 7/10
Go Back and Watch: The main event, obviously. Everything else is fine if a bit skippable, but top to bottom this isn’t a good card, with the probable exception of Mongo vs White. 

Listen to our April 1997 WCW podcast, reviewing all of the latest political situation spilling onto Nitro.

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Straight To Hell – It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that in the two weeks after In Your House the WWF leant on their only hot ticket. After Steve Austin and Bret Hart had their third PPV match, they devised an angle for Raw to “injure” Hart to enable him to go away and have knee surgery. The angle, a prolonged “street fight” including multiple waves of interferences ended with Austin locking Bret in a sharpshooter before Bret ended up being stretchered away.

As Bret was lead towards the ambulance, we witnessed the growing entertainment of Brets two stooges – Owen Hart and the British Bulldog – as they pleaded for mercy as Bret’s knee was being jarred on the way to the ambulance. But as the doors were closed it was revealed Austin was sat in the drivers seat, he climbed through to take some unopposed shots on Bret as pandemonium erupted in the arena and on commentary. Austin, and Bret on the stretcher got pulled out of the back of the ambulance before the signature shot of Austin getting some shots in on Bret, vertical and tied to a body-board. Excellent segment, Austin is hot.
 

Making Amends – The story in the past few weeks of the NWO had been one of dissention, with internal fractures causing the departure of both VK Wallstreet and Big Bubba. As with a lot of things on WCW television at the time, it was a storyline which had its roots in reality. After a shoot-laden promo from Kevin Nash at the end of March bemoaning Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff opting to be at the side of Dennis Rodman rather than at Nitro, that setup a summit of the NWO on the first Nitro in April. Hogan laid out his story and said that if Nash had a problem with him recruiting world class athletes like Rodman then he and Nash had differences that needed to be settled. It ended with Hogan and Nash patching up their differences but for once was a quite nuanced NWO storyline.
 

Hitman in his sights – With everyone developing a new attitude on Raw in the last six months, it apparently meant everyone was to start shooting also. Shawn Michaels was given an open mic on the April 7th Raw and went after Bret Hart. Shawn in a scattergun promo basically said that Bret would sell out his family for a dollar, deliberately left the WWF a year prior to try and set Shawn up to fail on top and that all Bret cared about was the WWF championship. Like a lot of these segments at the time, it was hard to work out exactly how it was sticking with the viewing audience, but it was a strong segment nonetheless. Perhaps the most noteworthy part was Michaels touting how he’d performed the best at the WWF box office in the last six years, only to put Vince on the spot for confirmation. Vince obliged.

 
Youngsters Aint Got No Respect – I mean, you’d be better off listening to our April WCW podcast to get the full low-down on this story, but to quickly summise it: after Hulk Hogan opted out of main eventing as a part of a six man tag match in May, there was call for Syxx to step into the breach alongside Hall and Nash – only Ric Flair and Roddy Piper both objected to that, feeling that Syxx wasn’t a big enough star to fill the spot that would also include Carolina Panther Kevin Greene. That, basically started this…

So, on Nitro on April 14th, WCW sent out Greene, Piper and Flair to do a short segment hyping the match. What we got was Piper (like usual) making no sense, Greene randomly talking about how the young NFL players have no respect (a shot at the “young” NWO group) and Flair giving us a history lesson of about how he only found out he belonged when he defeated Dick the Bruiser 25 years ago. The segment went so long it’s said WCW were trying to work out how they could get it over. As it was the segment came to an eventual conclusion. We hadn’t heard the end of this one.
 

Exhibition Mode – Wrestling, even by this stage, had a very wobbly relationship with “shoot-fighting”. As we saw with ECW in 1996, even when presented with the best of intentions people can get things wrong quite easily. Fast forward to April 7th and the WWF decided to host an “exhibition” with Ken Shamrock. The short segment was so incredibly flat, the action looking nothing like anything that resembled a “shoot”, Shamrock ended up unloading on the guy so much he busted him open , but the segment basically was a dud.
 

Off-Season – WCW were going football mad in April, building towards a May pay-per-view that would feature Kevin Greene in the main event and a match between resident Steve McMichael and… Reggie White. While the segment between White and Mongo on April 14th was relatively simple, the spit and pull apart brawl was easily the best thing Mongo has been involved in since he joined WCW.
 

Raw is Bore – As we’d seen in the couple of months prior, the switch of Raw to two hours had created a couple of “dead” weeks where tapings did not or could not exist. One of those was April 14th, where Raw was formed of part of a show taped the week before and part from a tour of South Africa. The stuff taped the previous week was flat, but the stuff taped in South Africa (that formed the bulk of the show and the majority of the in-ring time) was just awful.

I mean, put aside the audio issues that rendered many of the matches commentary-less, just imagine an EIGHTEEN minute match between Rocky Maivia and Savio Vega, then imagine hearing that it (arguably) wasn’t the worst match on the card. It’s a show so dull you almost need to watch it, one so bad that Jim Ross on his hotline said it “sucked”.
 

Saint Patrick – So, as part of a reshuffling of the NWO this month Nick Patrick was ejected from the group at the pay-per-view after taking an emphatic powerbomb from Kevin Nash. Not to say that Patrick returned as a babyface; he still had his attitude, but Patrick returned to Nitro on April 21st and took two minutes by the commentary position to plead his case. And you know what? Patrick is one of the best, most concise talkers WCW have. He adequately explained his position, succinctly gave his reasons why he wanted to return as a referee and asked to be reconsidered. It was a promo so strong I’d have knocked the whole thing on the head and found someone for Patrick to manage so he could talk more often.
 

House Arrest – So… Vader had been held under house arrest in Kuwait following a legit incident on a morning talk show where Vader got a bit physical with a host and swore. While the WWF didn’t plan the incident, it’s pretty clear they seized the opportunity to turn it into a storyline once they worked out the lay of the land. So we saw the clip, including WWF champion Undertaker in a bandana and sunglasses, and Vader flipping a coffee table.

Vader was held in Kuwait but made it back to Raw in time for April 28th, where he was asked by Jim Ross the same basic question that the Kuwaiti presenter asked him – “is this fake”. Vader once again wasn’t happy, but this time Ken Shamrock came out and threw Vader across the ring with an overhead belly to belly. This, not “exhibitions” was how to get Shamrock over.
 

Bite Me – Another part of the NWO restructuring has been the demotion, if you will, of Eric Bischoff. Not in so many words, but more that once it became clear that the NWO wasn’t going to have its own show or take over WCW that Bischoff wielding unchecked power made no sense. So as they did last month with Harvey Schiller, this time JJ Dillon came down to read Bischoff his rights. His contract was tight, but he had no power. Bischoff, the smug git that he was, just pushed the whole thing off – “BITE ME”.
 

Foundations of Gold – After the British Bulldog won the European Title at the beginning of March, the Hart Foundation added another piece of silverware to their growing cabinet after Owen Hart defeated Rocky Maivia for the Intercontinental Title. Rocky’s run, even short at a couple of months, was flat as hell and he needed to be put out of his misery. The match on April 28th wasn’t much of note, but it’s probably worth checking out just to see the smug reaction from Bulldog, Owen and the now wheel-chair bound Bret afterwards.
 

I Don’t Talk Much – We finish with a doozy from the NWO on April 21st, a retort if you like, from Syxx and Kevin Nash to Ric Flair and Roddy Piper. We got to hear from Syxx first, who said that he doesn’t sweat Flair or Piper, before Nash got the mic and basically shot on how he and Scott Hall were in WCW in the early 1990s, but that you only got a push in WCW if your dad was in the company. Nash then said that he and Hall left for pastures new and had success. Nash called his guys the “New Genaration” (where have we heard that before) before laying down the challenge. Mercifully, by this stage, both groups backstage had agreed that they’d work together for the good of the programme – providing nobody called Flair or Piper old!