More On Luger

Scott,

For some reason i can't login to your blog at work and I didn't want to wait until I got home, lest I forget all about this:

According to the WON at the time, the mentality for the booking of the GAB finish was to help boost attendence at house shows, which were dropping big at the time. The Athletic Commission stopping the match was a big gimmick done in CA during the '70's. It was supposed to make the Athletic Commission into the heels because THEY screwed Luger out the title.

This leads to WCW promoting rematches around the horn with the idea that YOUR state isn't so strict about blood, so make sure you're there to see Luger get another shot at Flair. Of course, we're talking about WCW here, so of course it got screwed up. Luger's looked like he nicked himself shaving rather than the juice job that Kerry did with Lawler.

On the comics front: Have you read the new Red Lantern series yet?

It’s on my “to do” pile.  Apparently it’s supposed to be so ridiculous that it’s good in a warped way, so I’ll probably give it a look along with Swamp Thing and Frankenstein and Blackhawks somewhere along the line. 

As for Luger, I now recall hearing that retarded justification before, and that’s exactly the kind of short-sighted thinking that led to Crockett going bankrupt.  Here’s a wacky thought:  Instead of coming up with a convoluted storyline for why people should go see Luger at the house shows, they should have just PUT THE TITLE ON HIM and let him try to draw on top.  Dusty Rhodes was seriously losing his mind at that point.  And of course, as has been pointed out by others, the very next year when they were in Baltimore Flair was bleeding all over the place and no one stopped it. 

By the way, I will say that Meltzer has improved tremendously as a writer since the 80s, or at least he has better editing now.  Some of those old WONs were an adventure in trying to decipher run-on sentences and aborted thoughts.