Dangerous Alliances

Happy New Year!

I started watching some of my old converted DVDs from late 91-92 and my bias to The Dangerous Alliance is clearly showing as I must have taped somewhere between 30-40 matches of those guys fighting some combination of Sting, Ricky Steamboat, Dustin Rhodes, Barry Windham, Ron Simmons, Z-Man, Flyin Brian and Marcus Alexander Bagwell. What's astonishing to me is that the DA just doesn't seem capable of a bad match even if some of the combination have squared off before, each match has some new folds and wrinkles to make it different so the WCW Main Event crowd doesn't see the exact same match as the World Championship Wrestling audience. 

Combine that with the fact that the DA was involved in a handful of some of WCW's best matches (War Games 92, the Clash encounter with Steamboat/Rhodes vs. The Enforcers and the Rude vs. Steamboat Iron Man at minimum), I'd argue they're the best faction ever from a pure wrestling standpoint.

Rude was never portrayed as the coward that Hollywood Hogan or Flair was; Austin was a better superstar prospect than Orton or Batista and Anderson with either Eaton or Zbysko was a top-level tag team. And best of all, most of their matches had clean finishes before the run-in as the DA members didn't have crazy egos that demanded they never jobbed. Taking drawing power and revenue out of the equation (a big aspect of it I know), where would you rank The Dangerous Alliance and their yearlong run of awesomeness with other stables?

Pretty high.  The only thing they were truly lacking was a main event level heel on top of the group, but otherwise they had all the tools.  Paul E. Dangerously was the perfect mouthpiece for them, and you had the eye candy in Madusa as well.  I actually think they were short-changed on the length of their run, because they were broken up before they could get any real momentum going.  Most of that was due to Bill Watts coming and absolutely hating Paul Heyman, of course.  I think the group was kind of lacking in a big turn to kickstart them, given that Bobby Eaton was just kind of like “Um, hey, I’m joining the heel side” with no real backstory to it. 

For me, the best is still the Barry Windham version of the Four Horsemen, which was created by one of the greatest turns ever, and featured the team holding all the titles at once.  Should have turned Barry into a legit main event guy, too.