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There were some hiccups along the way, of course, and a pretty major one was thrown at WCW tonight, as a pre-Executive Eric Bischoff announced that US Champion Rick Rude, who was supposed to challenge for the WCW World Title that night, had suffered a herniated disc in his neck and would not be wrestling at Starrcade. I believe this was a legit and pretty serious injury, as Rude ended up being out of action long enough that they ended up stripping him of the US Title. Wrestling in his place would be Steve Williams.
Lethal Lottery Matches
The first match drawn was Van Hammer teaming with Dan Spivey to take on Cactus Jack and Johnny B Badd. Van Hammer was this big, muscular guy who they brought in and gave a heavy metal gimmick even though he couldn’t play a guitar worth a lick. He was gone from WCW about six months after this and disappeared for several years before resurfacing in the late 90s as a member of Raven’s Flock, though I don’t ever remember him actually wrestling during that time. Dan Spivey was of course a former member of the Skyscrapers with Sid Vicious, but I don’t believe he was doing anything important at this time, and he was still a couple of years away from going to the WWF to become Waylon Mercy, a gimmick which showed a lot of promise before he was forced into retirement by knee injuries. Cactus had really started to make his mark in 1992 with some great matches against Sting and Ron Simmons, including one Falls Count Anywhere match against Sting that he actually considered his favorite match ever until he wrestled Shawn Michaels at Mind Games. Johnny B Badd had started to evolve away from the silly character he had started out as and was a more serious persona at this point, though he hadn’t yet developed into the good worker he would become in 1994-95. Anyway, they played up right away the face/heel dynamic in these matches as the faces didn’t want to play along with the shenanigans of their heel partners. Miscommunication led to Badd accidentally dropping an elbow on Cactus, leading to a shoving match that ended with Badd socking Cactus and allowing him to be rolled up by Van Hammer for the win.
Next up was Dustin Rhodes and Vader taking on Kensuke Sasaki and the Barbarian. Dustin had just come off his World Tag Team Title run and was just starting to hit his stride as a singles guy, while Vader was in between his first two reigns as the WCW World Champion. This was a short, but wonderfully brutal match where these four guys just stiffed the crap out of each other. The match started with Vader and Barbarian going at it, with each seeing how badly they could no sell the other. After Barbarian tagged out, Vader beat up Sasaki for a bit (back when Sasaki knew how to sell), and even when Dustin got in against Sasaki, the two babyfaces had a nice, stiff back and forth. Finally Dustin rolled up the Barbarian for the win, and just for kicks, Vader beat Dustin up after the match. That was so much fun.
The third Lethal Lottery match saw Barry Windham and the Great Muta take on 2 Cold Scorpio and Brian Pillman. Again, we see the weird fates the luck of the draw can weave, as Windham and Pillman are on opposite teams here, but will team together to challenge for the Unified World Tag Team Title later in the show. Pillman and Muta hada really good, fast paced sequence early on until Muta tagged out and the partners started going at it, not holding back at all. That’s what I love about these old school heels, they were always all business. Windham hit the implant DDT and Muta followed that up with a moonsault for the win, after which Windham and Pillman left together, leaving their partners in the ring.
The final first round Lethal Lottery match pitted last year’s Battlebowl winner, Sting, and Steve Williams against Erik Watts and Jushin Liger. Jim Ross mentioned that Liger and Williams worked for competing promotions in Japan and that you wouldn’t normally see this match in the Land Of The Rising Sun, so I guess it’d be like Ted Dibiase taking on Brian Pillman, or something like that. Erik Watts was really green at this point, and he got a bunch of flak from casual observers who felt he was overpushed because his dad was running the company. There’s probably some degree of truth to that, but to be fair, every father in a position of power probably helped their kid out wherever they could, just like you’d expect your dads to do for you. Also, he did work hard and it’s not like he was David Flair or anything, he had some idea of what he was doing in there, and I felt like he was often unfairly singled out. As for Liger, this was completely the wrong situation to put a guy like him in because he’s too small to believably compete physically with Sting and Williams, who spent most of the match treating him like a jobber. Even Sting, who’s a medium-sized heavyweight at best, looked huge next to Liger. Liger finally made a hot tag to Erik Watts, but Williams quickly hotshotted him off the top rope for the win.
The Midcard
Now with the Lethal Lottery tag matches out of the way, we move on to the midcard, which featured several title matches, the first of which was for the NWA World Title as Masahiro Chono defended against the Great Muta. A bit of background here: way back when, the company that would eventually come to be known as WCW was a member of the National Wrestling Alliance, and by the early 90s was the only remaining member worth mentioning. When Ric Flair (who held the NWA Title but was also interchangeably referred to as the WCW World Champion) left the company in 1991 to go to the WWF, WCW immediately withdrew recognition from Flair and put the WCW World Title on Lex Luger at the Great American Bash. However, the NWA still recognized Flair as its World Champion for several months, which was the first real split in the lineage of the two titles. The NWA did finally strip Flair of their title when Flair began making appearances in the WWF, and the title remained vacant until the Fall of 1992 when a tournament to crown a new champion was held in New Japan and won by Chono, defeating Rick Rude in the finals. With Chono as the champion, the title would now be defended in both New Japan and WCW, and though the NWA Title was referred to as a World Title on WCW television and treated as roughly equal to the WCW World Title, a lot of people felt that you could only have one World Title in a single promotion and saw the NWA Title as a secondary title at best at this point. Personally, I would say that WWE has disproven the “one promotion/one title†theory three times over already, and besides, the NWA was its own promotion even if the only members of note in 1992. For anyone curious on the subject, this does mean I count Flair’s 1993 NWA Title win as a World Title victory, but that’s another debate for another day.
As for this match, there was some word going around that Bill Watts had told Chono and Muta to hold back so as not to show up the WCW guys who would be in higher profile matches later in the show, and I don’t know for sure if there’s any truth to that, but I can believe it because this was a pretty dull match. Very slow paced and it seemed like both guys were dogging it a bit, though that may also have something to do with the fact that Muta was seeing a lot of in-ring action that night and wanted to pace himself. Muta ended up injuring his knee on a moonsault attept and Chono took advantage of it, working over the knee and then locking Muta in the STF for the submission win. Chono retains the NWA World Title and Muta is now 1-1 for the evening.
The NWA World Title Match was followed by the other World Title contest, this one for the WCW World Title as Ron Simmons defended against Steve Williams. As I touched on earlier, Rick Rude was the originally scheduled challenger until the neck injury took him out and Williams stepped in to take his place. Williams getting the shot ahead of everyone else comes as no surprise to me as he’s always been a favorite of Bill Watts, and frankly, I’m surprised the guy never got a chance to become a top singles guy on a national level. Jim Ross was in heaven quoting college football stats for this one, as both guys apparently had really impressive college careers. I’ll reiterate that good football players don’t necessarily make good wrestlers, but luckily these two worked out pretty well. Williams actually has a pretty impressive collegiate wrestling resume, and in fact lost a close decision in the NCAA finals to future four time Olympic medalist Bruce Baumgartner. I never got the decision to put the title on Simmons, I’ve heard theories but he just seemed like the Ronnie Garvin type of champion that you give the title to just so he can drop it in a couple of months. He was a marginal (at best) power wrestler, but his interview skills just weren’t there and even though it was a fun shock thing when he got the title, they then had to deal with booking him as champion and it just didn’t work. Of the two, I would have preferred Williams get the shot with the title since he comes off as a more legit badass to me, but it wasn’t my call. This wasn’t a very good match and it even had a pretty lame ending where both men got counted out, but then Williams attacked Simmons back in the ring after the match was over and the referee changed the decision to a DQ win for Simmons.
Fortunately things got better in the next match as Ricky Steamboat and Shane Douglas defended the Unified World Tag Team Title against Barry Windham and Brian Pillman. The title is “unified†because the NWA revived not only its World Title, but its World Tag Team Title as well. This tournament was held in WCW and was won by Terry Gordy & Steve Williams, who were already the WCW World Tag Team Champions. I don’t know if there were ever plans to separate the titles, but it seemed strange to me to have the WCW Champions win the title right out of the gate instead of having the two titles run separately for at least a little while. In any event, Williams and Gordy lost the title to Windham and Dustin Rhodes, and then they in turn lost the title to Steamboat and Douglas when Dustin’s attempts at sportsmanship ended up costing them the title because Rhodes refused to take advantage of an accidental lowblow on Steamboat. After the match Windham turned heel and dumped Dustin, and when he came to get his title back, this time he had Brian Pillman as his partner. Steamboat, in the meantime, officially had the wussiest entrance music in history at this point, it was this really wimpy song about him being a family man. It was almost as if somebody didn’t think he had it bad enough being made to carry the has been who never was himself, Shane Douglas. Just as a personal aside, Shane Douglas is the most overrated pile of garbage of the entire decade of the 90s, and he is such a mark for himself that I’m amazed he never found a way to sit in the front row for his own matches so he could cheer for himself. He wasn’t a bad wrestler per se, but he wasn’t as good as he thought he was or as good as the press he was getting would have had you believe. He did end up with a good reputation in 92-93, but if you almost exclusively spend your time in the ring with Steamboat, Windham, Pillman, and Steve Austin, you’re working a group of guys who could make pretty much anything with a pulse look good.
Rant aside, this was a pretty good match. Steamboat and Douglas worked Windham over pretty good at the beginning, including Steamboat slamming Windham hard on the floor, and then Douglas slamming him on the rampway. The heels eventually got the upper hand and started working Douglas over, prompting Steamboat at one point to come over and hit Windham with a chair. What a sport. However, even once Douglas made the hot tag to Steamboat, the heels remained in control and now started beating up Steamboat. Finally Steamboat made Hot Tag Numero Dos to Douglas, who came in and hit the belly to belly on Pillman for the win. Soon after this Windham was moved into singles competition and was replaced in the team with Steve Austin, and the two would form another (moderately overrated) team called the Hollywood Blonds.
In the semi-main event, Sting battled his arch-nemesis Big Van Vader in the finals of the King Of Cable Tournament. These two guys of course had battled many times over the years, but this was still fairly early on in their feud. Vader had come into WCW and started decimating everyone in his path, finally steamrolling over Sting at Great American Bash 1992 to win the WCW World Title. These guys always had really great chemistry because Sting wass one of those guys who was really good at the hope spots, and when you throw him in the ring with an opponent as dominant as Vader, it really clicked well because Vader would beat the tar out of Sting, but would make some mistake and Sting would get a short comeback before Vader shut him down again. Sting actually dominated the first few minutes of this one until he missed a Stinger Splash on the floor and hit the guardrail, and after that Vader was on him like a shark. Vader was such an awesome big man, and I know he had weight issues and all, but I still think he should have beaten Shawn Michaels for the WWF Title at Summerslam 96, because not doing so pretty much killed any credibility he had left. Vader hit the chokeslam he used to beat Sting at the Bash and followed that up with a second rope splash, but when he tried coming off the top rope, Sting caught him and powerslammed him for the win, which I believe was Sting’s first pinfall win over Vader.
Battlebowl
So now we’re down to the finals of Battlebowl, and our finalists are Dan Spivey, Dustin Rhodes, the Great Muta, Barry Windham, Sting, Big Van Vader, Steve Williams, and Van Hammer. Another change to Battlebowl this year was that they only used one ring, which I was fine with because even though Dusty Rhodes obviously has some fetish for multi-ring matches, battle royals are hard enough to follow in one ring, and when you have two (or three, as they would get to a few years later) it just becomes more of a mess. Vader and Sting, who had just wrestled one another in the last match, got right into it as Vader attaked Sting on the rampway on his way to the ring to start the match. Not surprisingly, Van Hammer and Spivey were the first ones out. Dustin pulled out a pretty cool spot by bulldogging Windham on the rampway. A lot of people wonder why WCW used these rampways for PPVs and Clash shows, but I’m glad they did because not only did they look cool, it also made for some cool spots like the bulldog. The ramp also played into matches like this as Vader took another run at Sting and both went over the top and onto the ramp, and it was ruled that it counted and both men were eliminated even though they didn’t go to the floor. A few minutes later there was another double elimination as Williams clotheslined Rhodes and both went over the top and to the floor. The match was now down to Windham and Muta, and Windham pretty much controlled Muta and tried tossing him over the top. Windham thought he had won, but Muta held onto the ropes and skinned the cat back in and hit a pair of dropkicks on Windham to eliminate him and win Battlebowl 92.
Final Analysis
Was this the greatest wrestling show of all time? No, but it was so much better than the abysmal 1990 and 1991 versions of the show that I enjoyed it on that basis alone. Still, there was some other good stuff on this show: the World Tag Team Title Match was solid, and Sting and Vader brought the goods as always. Muta made an interesting choice for a surprise winner, and the finish to Battlebowl was pretty cool. Good but not great, I’ll go Mildly Recommended on this one.
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