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Perhaps sensing that this show was a little lacking, for each match they added “Starrcade Statsâ€, which were basically splash screens that would come up during the wrestlers’ entrances giving their height, weight, and hometown, as well as several quick facts about the wrestler in question. A lot of these facts were bizarre, obscure, or just flat out had nothing to do with wrestling, and most of them sounded like they were written by the same people who translated the manuals for Nintendo games into Engrish. I put them all in here, so I hope you get as much enjoyment out of them as I did because sadly, they were one of the things that got me through this show.
In any event, this show featured a ton of matches because, in addition to the usual main event and undercard, this show also featured the Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament. Pat O’Connor was the first (and only) World Champion to come from New Zealand, and he had passed away from cancer earlier in the year, so this tournament was held and named in his honor. In the spirit of the international flavor O’Connor brought, this tournament would feature eight teams from eight different countries, which sounds great, but…well, I’ll tell you when we get there. In the meantime, I’ve broken this review up into three separate sections for the undercard, the tournament, and the main event, so here we go.
The Undercard
The first match on the undercard saw the newly single Beautiful Bobby Eaton taking on “Z-Man†Tom Zenk. Eaton had, of course, come to fame as one half of the Midnight Express, but they got into some disagreements with then-WCW President Jim Herd, resulting in Jim Cornette and Stan Lane leaving the company and leaving Eaton to fend for himself as a single wrestler. Zenk, in the meantime, recently debuted and, as we discover from the Starrcade Stats, he is on a 35 match winning streak, he likes to utilize a top rope dropkick, he’s a former Mr Minnesota and, yes ladies, he’s a bachelor. As for Eaton, he is normally a tag team wrestler, this is his first PPV in a one on one bout, he likes to create offense off the top rope, and Dodongo dislikes smoke. Okay, I just made up that last one to see who was paying attention. Eaton took control of the early part of the match until Zenk suplexed Eaton over the top rope onto the entrance ramp WCW used at the time, then came flying out onto Eaton with a crossbody from inside the ring. Eaton tried coming off the top rope onto Zenk, but Zenk nailed him with the weakest superkick of all time and then went up top, but just to spite the Starrcade Stats, Eaton moved out of the way of the top rope dropkick and trapped Zenk with an inside cradle for the win.
The next match actually turned out to be sort of the dark horse match of the evening between two good workers in Terry Taylor and Michael Wallstreet. You might remember Wallstreet as Mike Rotunda (or later, Irwin R Schyster), but at this point he was the “Computerized Man Of The 90sâ€, as his manager Alexandra York (aka the future Terri Runnels) would carry a computer around which she and Wallstreet would use to help him come up with winning strategies to beat his opponents. The “computer†looked like a piece of junk even by early 90s standards (it looked like a Speak & Spell, actually), and it sounded a little stupid that Mike Rotunda, this master wrestler, needed a computer to figure out how to beat his opponents, but there you go. Not only did this computer tell Mike how to beat his opponents, but it also worked out roughly how much time it would take him to beat people, in this case the computer output told him he would beat Taylor in 8:32 or less. For some reason, the computer never predicted anything like “you will get squashed in 30 secondsâ€, but maybe I’m just overthinking things.
But let’s not forget the Starrcade Stats! Taylor is ranked eighth in the world, his fivearm (better than a forearm, get it?) is his favorite offensive weapon, and his father is a medical doctor. Wallstreet, on the other hand, is ranked seventh in the world, was featured recently in USA Today, he became the first wrestler to use computers to prepare for his bouts (and not by getting the backstage news from PWInsider.com), and his administrative assistant Alexandra York is a computer whiz! Well, with qualifications like that, how can Wallstreet lose? Actually, he didn’t. They had a nice little match where Taylor hit the fivearm, but Wallstreet landed too close to the ropes and used them to break the fall, then came back with the Stock Market Crash (a Samoan Drop) for the win…with 1:40 to spare! Gee, if it worked that well for Wallstreet, maybe I can get a computer to tell me…never mind, I’ll stop before I go down that road because there will be no coming back.
Instead, let’s just move on to the next match, pitting Big Cat (aka Mr Hughes) teaming with the Motor City Madman to take on the newly reformed Skyscrapers, complete with a Sid with two healthy lungs. According to the Starrcade Stats, Cat & Madman were “biggest ham on tonight’s event (which I have no idea what that means), a power match with little finesse, and both like to use the backbreaker.†Also, all our base belong to them. Unfortunately, the match started before we got the Skyscrapers’ stats, but it would have taken me longer to type them up than it took them to win this match with a really bad double powerbomb on the Madman, who was so mad that he lost this match that we never saw him again.
Instead, we move on to the much happier Fabulous Freebirds (the Michael Hayes/Jimmy Garvin version) as they, with Little Richard Marley in their corner, took on the team of Tommy Rich and Ricky Morton. The story here was that the Freebirds attacked Morton’s regular partner Robert Gibson and put him out of action for several months with a knee injury (presumably done to cover for some legit injury), so Morton got Rich to come help him in his quest for revenge. Morton and Rich had Gibson in their corner, I guess to keep an eye on Marley, who I have no idea who he was. The Starrcade Stats inform us that the Freebirds are former World Tag Champs, they’re the greatest rock and roll band of all time, and little Richard Marley was in their corner. As for Rich and Morton, all the Stats have on them is that Robert Gibson got injured at the hands of the Freebirds. Somebody skimping on their homework? Anyway, this was just a short tag match that ended when Marley went up top to jump on Morton, but Gibson pushed him off the top rope and he went flying into Garvin, allowing Morton to roll him up for the win. The Freebirds beat up poor Richard after the match and Morton and Rich made the save, but while they were busy checking on Richard, the Freebirds attacked Gibson on the floor. Michael Hayes is a genius with these jerk heel moves.
That was followed by a Lariat Match for the US Title as Stan Hansen defended against former champion Lex Luger. This wasn’t exactly a Bullrope Match, they were still connected by a lariat (actually a much thinner, weaker looking rope), but it was held under Strap Match rules where you had to touch all four corners to win the match. According to the Starrcade Stats, Lex Luger is a three time US Champion who has never wrestled in a “Texas Lariet Boutâ€, lost the title to Hansen on 10/27/90, and was a former pro football offensive lineman. Hansen, in the meantime, holds both US and Japanese heavyweight titles, was the first wrestler to perfect the clothesline maneuver he calls the Lariet (and yes, they did spell it like that), and played football in the NFL and at West Texas. Even though the rope they used for this match was really weak looking and had no bell in the middle, Hansen started whipping on Luger with it anyway, then took him to the floor and started whaling on him with a chair. I’m actually impressed with how much abuse Luger took in this one seeing as he’s not exactly known for working especially stiff matches.
At one point Hansen used the rope to hang Luger over the top rope, then used the rope to whip Luger into the ringpost. Luger was definitely taking a whipping in this one, and at one point he was on top of Hansen throwing punches, but Hansen just yanked him off by the hair and got on top of Luger and just started choking him. My god, I have to get more tapes of this guy. Anyway, Luger went to all four corners, but the ref got bumped as Luger went flying into the fourth corner and couldn’t call for the bell. Since the match technically continued, Hansen took off his cowboy boot and nailed Luger with it, then dragged Luger to all four corners, prompting a second referee to come in the ring and call the win for Hansen, but wait! The first referee revived and, having seen Luger hit the fourth corner before that all went down, reversed the decision and awarded the win and the US Title to Luger.
Next up we got a Street Fight for the World Tag Team Title as Doom (now no longer under the masks) defended against Arn Anderson & Barry Windham of the Four Horsemen. The match was originally supposed to see Arn & Ric Flair challenging Doom, but Flair apparently suffered some injuries and had to pull out of the match, so Windham stepped in. If this didn’t telegraph the surprise the whole show was built around, I don’t know what would have. According to Starrcade Stats, both men represent the Horsemen, they’ve had tremendous tag team success, and the street fight rules make Doom the favorite in tonight’s bout. Well, I don’t know what that last one really tells us about the Horsemen other than somebody must have thought they weren’t good street fighters, but I wouldn’t want to get in a brawl with Arn or Barry, that’s for sure. As for Doom, by this point they had replaced Woman as their manager with Teddy Long, and their Starrcade Stats told us that both are former football players, as Reed played linebacker for the Chiefs, while Simmons was a four time All American nose tackle at FSU, and the street fight rules are to their advantage. So it seems that they don’t have any wrestling accomplishments to speak of, but being football players turned them into such good street fighters that the Horsemen are pretty much screwed.
Anyway, I’m not very good at recapping brawls, but this was a pretty good one that got really stiff and actually looked like a real fight, unlike that Magnum-Tully thing from a few years before this. The finish had Simmons pinning Anderson as Windham pinned Reed and since all four men were officially legal men in this match, the referee counted both falls, so this match ended up just being declared a draw since one man on each team was pinned. Still, the brawl continued as all four men continued brawling after the match was over and brawled all the way to the back.
Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament
Pat O’Connor, for those who don’t know, was the first (and only) NWA World Champion to come from New Zealand, and O’Connor had passed away earlier in the year, so the NWA held this tournament at Starrcade and named it in his honor. Also paying homage to him being an international star, this tournament would feature teams from eight different countries. Unfortunately, they weren’t the greatest teams around (I guess you might have a limited crop of available, yet decent talent from South Africa), but this tournament was half about honoring O’Connor and half about showcasing one team in particular, and I’m sure nobody reading this knows what team I’m talking about.
Opening Round
The first match in the tournament featured #1 seeds and US Tag Team Champions Rick & Scott Steiner taking on the “South African†team of Col Deklerk & Sgt Krueger, neither of whom were actually South African. You may be more familiar with Deklerk as Rocco Rock of Public Enemy, while Sgt Krueger would go on to infamy as the man who replaced Matt Borne as Doink The Clown. The Steiners were in full on Jerk Mode for this match, no-selling everything the pseudo-South Africans did and squashed them in about three or four minutes after a Frankensteiner.
The second match featured the Mexican team of Konan (yes, that Konan) and Rey Mysterio (not the one in WWE today, the original who is actually our Rey’s uncle) taking on the UK team of Chris Adams & Norman Smiley. Just wanted to point out that Smiley isn’t actually British, he’s from Antigua, and yes, it may be part of the British Empire, but that’d be like calling a Puerto Rican an American, legally it’s true but realistically it’s not. According to the Starrcade Stats, Chris Adams’ superkick is a dangerous weapon, while Smiley is a tremendous weapon, and I have no idea what that means, but I think it was meant to say “THANK YOU MARIO, BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!†The Starrcade Stats for the Mexicans weren’t any more intelligible, as we learned that they’re the quickest team in the tournament, their wrestling style is very unique, and they could be the surprise of the tournament. In my head, I’m imagining a wrestling style where they put paper bags over their heads while playing the drums on the turnbuckles, but I’m sure that’s not what they meant by unique.
On the other hand, this was surprising in the sense that this was probably the best match of the first round from an athletic standpoint, but unfortunately it had no crowd heat because the fans didn’t know either team. Adams killed Mysterio (whose name graphic said “REY MYSTERIC†for some reason) with a superkick, but the Mexicans ended up getting the win when Konan finished Smiley with an inverted suplex off the top rope and then rolling him up with the Backlund Bridge. After the win, Mysterio dove onto Adams on the floor just to be a jerk.
First round match number three saw the New Zealand team of the Royal Family (comprised of Rip Morgan and Jack Victory, who even the announcers admitted is really from New Jersey) taking on the legitimate Japanese team of the Great Muta & Mr Saito. This time around, the Starrcade Stats informed us that the New Zealand team qualified late for the tournament and have wrestled extensively around the world, especially in America. That makes sense, since it’s like how I’ve walked lots of places, especially in my house. The Japanese team was the first one that had Starrcade Stats that actually made them sound like a couple of legit wrestlers instead of action figures, as we were reminded that Muta is a former World TV Champion who has a high flying attack, while Saito represented Japan in the Olympics as a freestyle wrestler. The Royal Family, for those who have never seen them, were big strong, brawling wrestlers that weren’t very good, and thankfully didn’t last long. Saito played the evil Japanese wrestler in peril, but made a hot tag to Muta who came in with “Judo chopsâ€, which is something that always drove me nuts because there’s no striking in Judo that I’m aware of. Morgan accidentally clotheslined Victory and Muta suplexed him for the win.
The final first round match pitted the Canadian team of Bull Johnson & Troy Montour against Victor Zangiev & Salman Hashimikov, representing the Soviet Union. You know, I would have to think that after all the terrific Canadian wrestlers we’ve seen over the years that they could have come up with a better team than this. Like, what were Chris Benoit & Owen Hart doing at this point? But alas, this is the team our poor, beleaguered neighbors to the north got stuck with. The Starrcade Stats seem to bear my thoughts out, as they say that Johnson and Montour won the Canadian tournament in a major upset (which is a really half-baked way of explaining how these two jokers wound up in the tournament), and are not favored against the USSR. This would be like a tag team tournament happening in some other country, and Team USA was Gene Snitsky & Hack Myers.
However, in the spirit of Glasnost, we welcomed the Russian team of Zangiev & Hashimikov, both of whom were former amateur World Champions who represented the USSR in the Olympic Games, and according to Starrcade Stats, they have excellent fundamentals. That’s probably no joke, as the Russians are probably the toughest country in the world when it comes to amateur wrestling, both in freestyle and Greco-Roman. Just ask Kurt Angle how tough these Russians can be. They were here because New Japan had this thing going for a while where they would bring in amateur wrestlers from Japan and the USSR and train them for pro careers. These two also weren’t the typical evil Russians we were used to, because rather than the cartoonish Nikolai Volkoff/Nikita Koloff type “Russians†we were used to (and before I get any emails, Nikolai’s not Russian, he’s Lithuanian), they just looked like a couple of amateur wrestlers, albeit ones that looked like low budget adult film stars.
I’m actually going to do a rare play-by-play for this one since I wrestled amateur wrestling and am probably one of the few people who enjoys watching it, and since the Russians dominated this almost exclusively with amateur style wrestling, I get to show off a bit. Anyway, Zangiev immediately catches Johnson in a Russian armbar, then does a foot sweep into an ankle pick, and then laces Johnson’s legs and crossfaces him, and then works that into a surfboard. Montour breaks that up with a stomp to the back, but Zangiev ties up with Johnson and just tosses him with an over the shoulder arm throw right into a side headlock ride. Johnson catches Zangiev’s head in a leg scissors, but Zangiev bridges out, then gets in deep on Johnson with a bearhug with the arm trapped, then did a really sick throw where he looked as if he were going for an overhead belly-to-belly suplex, but instead just dumped him straight back on his face, then went back to the side headlock for two. Somehow Johnson escaped and managed a double chop to Zangiev’s throat to make the lukewarm tag to poor Troy Montour, who now has to wrestle the shorter, but much stockier Hashimikov. Hashimikov catches him in the bearhug with the arm trapped and went through with the full overhead belly-to-belly, but hung onto him and went right into the side headlock with the arm trapped and pinned Montour. So right there, for anyone who’s never heard of anybody being pinned with a headlock, there you go.
Semifinals
The second round opened with another short squash by the Steiners, as they pretty much just tossed Konan and Mysterio around before Mysterio went for a Frankensteiner on Rick, but Rick wasn’t about to let his brother’s move get lifted, so he just powerbombed Mysterio and pinned him. Rough night for the Steiners so far, right?
The other semifinal saw Saito & Muta of Japan taking on Zangiev & Hashimikov of the Soviet Union. I was happy for the chance to see more amateur wrestling, but I’ll spare you the play-by-play this time. To summarize, the Russians pretty much dominated this one and caught the Japanese team with some pretty sick throws and suplexes, but Saito killed Zangiev with a nice lariat and then put him away with a Greco-Roman backdrop for the win. I was sad to see Zangiev & Hashimikov go, but at least now I won’t have to look at Zangiev’s outfit anymore, as it didn’t leave too much to the imagination.
Finals
So the tournament comes down to the top two seeds in the tournament, as the Steiners took on Saito & Muta in the finals. The Japanese were the only team to get any serious heat on the Steiners, even nailing Rick with the ring bell on the floor and catching Scott with a spike piledriver, but the Steiners were still in almost total control, and as Saito went for a piledriver on Scott, Rick came off the top rope with a sunset flip for the win. So now with this win, the Steiners had avenged their second place finish in the Iron Team Tournament the year before by winning the Pat O’Connor Tournament, albeit against much crappier competition. Really, the Steiners pretty much cakewalked through this one and it wasn’t quite as impressive a win as it would have been if this year’s tournament included all the teams from the 1989 tournament.
The Main Event
All this brings us to the main event of the evening, as NWA World Champion Sting defended the title against the mysterious Black Scorpion. Who was the Black Scorpion, you ask? That’s actually a really good question because not even the bookers had a clear idea of where this angle was going.
Here’s the basic jist of what this whole angle was about: Sting had defeated Ric Flair for the World Title, and the decision was made to move Flair out of the main event scene for the time being and match Sting up with other opponents. As part of this initiative, a plan was concocted to give Sting a shadowy nemesis known as the Black Scorpion, a mysterious black-clad, masked figure who claimed to have come from some point in Sting’s past. For months, the Black Scorpion would taunt and harass Sting, but the promos (which were actually done from backstage by Ole Anderson, who talked into one of those voice disguising gizmos they use for anonymous witnesses on shows like America’s Most Wanted) quickly went from bizarre to downright silly, as the Scorpion went from cutting cryptic promos to literally doing magic parlor tricks on unsuspecting fans, such as making a guy’s head spin around and turning another person into a tiger. Yes, somebody thought this would be a good idea and gave the okay to make it the top angle leading into the biggest show of the year.
So as ridiculous as this storyline was, there was at least still some air of mystery over who would turn out to be the Black Scorpion, and people tried to piece the answer together from the clues we were given in the Scorpion’s promos. Problem was, the identity of the Black Scorpion was as big a mystery to the bookers as it was to the fans, because the whole gimmick was created without anyone in particular in mind to take the role when it finally paid off at Starrcade. There were some rumors that they pegged the Angel Of Death for the role but they then decided that not enough people would have any idea who he was so they ended up scrapping that idea. Whether that was true or not I can’t say for sure, but eventually they realized that they would need to pay the angle off with someone big, so like always (and apologies to anyone who didn’t want to be spoiled on the payoff to this stupid angle), they went back to Ric Flair who, as you may recall, was supposed to take part in the World Tag Team Title Match earlier in the evening. So the injury angle was concocted to explain Flair’s absence from that match and he was stuck into the main event where he probably belonged all along.
So we finally get to Starrcade where, for the first time ever (not counting a TV match with an imposter wrestling as the Black Scorpion while the real Scorpion watched from the shadows), the Black Scorpion would step into the ring to take on Sting in a cage match for the NWA World Title. Before we got to the match, however, five or six fake Black Scorpions walked down to the ring and surrounded the cage, and then (and this is the best part) a UFO descended from the ceiling, landed in the aisleway, and from within emerged the REAL Black Scorpion. Again, people thought this would actually draw money. To put the icing on the tombstone for this angle, we next got the special guest referee and the only man deemed capable of controlling this match…Dick The Bruiser, who by this point looked so out of shape I’m surprised he didn’t blow up waddling to the ring.
So with all that out of the way, this was actually a somewhat fun match simply because we got to watch Ric Flair try not to wrestle like himself so as not to blow the surprise. He didn’t do any of his trademark moves or mannerisms, instead wrestling a very slow, methodical style and pulling out moves we rarely saw out of him like clotheslines, a gut wrench suplex, and a piledriver. At one point Sting tore the mask off of the Scorpion, and underneath was…another Black Scorpion mask. Finally, after several wretchedly slow minutes, Sting hit a crossbody off the top rope for the win, but when he went to unmask the Scorpion, all the fake Scorpions and also Arn Anderson & Barry Windham attacked and locked themselves in the cage with Sting, attacking the World Champion and fighting off the babyface brigade who ran out to try and make the save. Finally the Steiners came out with bolt cutters and forced their way into the cage where they helped Sting and Bruiser turn the tide and fight off the babyfaces, and finally Sting was able to unmask the Scorpion to reveal none other than Ric Flair.
Final Analysis
There’s no way to dance around this one, this show was really, really bad. Other than a decent Streetfight between Doom and the Horsemen, this show was mediocre at best and awful at worst. The Pat O’Connor Tournament was a nice idea, but stunk the joint up in terms of the actual wrestling, and between all the other silliness like Mike Rotunda needing a computer to tell him how to beat his opponents, to the running gag of the Starrcade Stats, and of course the king of stupid gimmicks in the Black Scorpion, this show reads from top to bottom like a lesson in how NOT to book wrestling. Unless you’re a masochist like me who can actually enjoy really bad shows for what they are, stay far far away from this one. Hardcore recommendation to avoid.
Thanks for sticking with me through this one, we made it! We’ll be back soon as we move on to Starrcade 91 as I get to tear that one apart too, but until then thanks for reading, and as always all feedback can be sent to stupwnisider@yahoo.com or you can catch me on Myspace at www.myspace.com/stupwinsider where I try to blog at least a few times a week and also archive all my past work. Take care and I’ll see you all soon!
