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August Leftovers: WCW Road Wild 1998

The Netcop Rant for WCW/nWo Road Wild 98

(Another one written “live” for the show, but you’ll note that I’m getting better at this as we move from 97 to 98.) 

Live from Sturgis, South Dakota

Your hosts are Tony, Mike and Bobby.

Opening match: Meng v. Barbarian.

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH! Actually, it's not too terrible or anything. Barbarian pulls a couple of nice suplexes on Meng, but really everyone is moving faster than normal. But it goes on waaaaay too long. But Barbarian turns around at the wrong time and gets hits with the TONGAN DEATH GRIP! Yeah, whatever. * Hugh Morrus and Barbarian double-team Meng until Jim Duggan makes the save. Good thing he was there in his wrestling tights just in case he was needed for an emergency save like that.  (This was just on Vintage Collection a few weeks ago for some reason, part of the “good friends better enemies” theme.  It sucked.)

Disco Inferno & Alex Wright v. The Public Enemy .

Luckily we're all getting near a good blood alcohol level going at this point.  (Thumbs up for booze!)  HSB takes note of Wright's "package" but no one else notices. Some crappy wrestling and suddenly a trash can gets brought in and Rocco Rock runs back to get a ladder and suddenly the announcers declare it an "anything goes street fight". HSB continues his analysis of Wright's assets. So now Disco goes back to get some stuff and then TPE goes and gets a kitchen sink and toilet seat and a typical weak WCW garbage match breaks out. No blood, cookie sheets as weapons, you know the routine. Tokyo Magnum gets involved too, of course.  (That guy should have stuck around.  Great name, funny guy, great worker.)  Alex Wright gets hit by Tokyo by accident and walks. Tokyo follows. Disco is alone with Public Enemy and they set up a table spot which literally takes 10 minutes and involves putting Disco through three tables. Would have been nicer had Disco not had to lie around for 10 minutes. Tokyo runs in and tries to break up the pin but misses and the pin is academic. *1/2

Raven v. Saturn v. Kanyon.

Lodi does his Bob Dylan impression. (I’m assuming that was something to do with him having signs related to “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.)  Kanyon and Saturn do TOTAL ELIMINATION! Whoa! Saturn and Kanyon do some nice spots and then break up the pin on Raven when the other goes for it. Crowd is pretty dead. They fight onto the rampway (which is painted to look like asphalt) and Tony acts like it really is asphalt. (Well Tony wasn’t paid to give a shit at this point.)  They do some more weak brawling spots. They work in the triple sleeper spot, of course. Raven and Kanyon brawl outside and Kanyon climbs the scaffolding but misses the splash. Lodi and Boulder get involved and in the chaos Saturn hits the DVD on Raven for the win. Had the spots but not much else. **

Psicosis v. Rey Mysterio Jr.

Winner gets a title shot. Okay, this could be good. The alcohol is also kicking in at this point so I'm not really in a clear state of mind. :) (Oh great, drunk smilies.)  Really slow start. This is the equivalent of Meng-Barbarian for these guys with lots of stalling and playing to the crowd. HSB stages a match between my STOMP Steve Austin figure and Megatron (Beast Wars version) to stave off boredom. Austin whoops Megatron's ass. (STOMP was a pretty cool concept for the wrestling figures, reimagining them as secret agents armed with high tech weaponry and stuff.  I’m pretty sure I had Austin and Pillman.  I don’t recall owning Megatron, so it must have been Zen’s.)  This match is SO FUCKING BORING. Finally Rey makes a comeback and hits a couple of nice highspots. New move: Corkscrew Rockerdropper. Rey with the springboard rana and drives Psicosis' head right into the mat. Ugly. Rey gets the win. *1/2 (This was probably better than that, but I was also probably pretty intoxicated.) 

TV title match: Stevie Ray v. Chavo Guerrero Jr.

(WCW in a nutshell:  Booker T gets injured, so Stevie Ray declares himself to be TV champion in his place and initially it’s a fairly big angle that seems to be leading to Booker returning for revenge.  Never happens.  Stevie just defends it for a while, loses it to Chris Jericho, and the whole thing is never mentioned again.)  White bikers raising the roof is a scary sight. (Maybe they’re indicating that Stevie is getting hung from the scaffolding?)  Chavo is nuts, we get it. Chavo runs around the ring for a few minutes, then gets caught with a Slapjack about two minutes in for the pin. (What kind of a stupid weapon name was “slapjack” anyway?)  DUD. Stevie tries to beat him up more and Eddy makes the save. What a fucking waste.

Rick Steiner v. Scott Steiner.

No, JJ is out to let Rick know that the match won't take place because Scott is injured. Buff wheels Scott out on a gurney with a few casts and an oxygen mask. JJ announces a hidden clause in the contract that states they will have to wrestle at Fall Brawl. Crowd chants "bullshit". So do we.

Bryan Adams v. Steve McMichael.

If Juvy-Jericho isn't **** at least, then this is the single worst PPV ever. (C’mon, that’s just the vodka talking.)  This was so bad it was getting into comedy match territory, including the worst ref bump in history. Mongo with the shitty piledriver for the pin. -**** This rating was based on HSB picking a number between 1 and 5 and adding a negative.

Cruiserweight title match: Chris Jericho v. Juvy Guerrera.

This the make-or-break match for this show: If this is less than ****, this makes worst PPV ever. Jericho is in samurai dress, which may or may not be a good sign. Jericho seriously pisses off the bikers by making reference to Honda. Juvy with some pretty decent spots in the early going. Ladies and gentlemen, this ain't ****. Lots of resting and stalling. Jericho misses the Lionsault and Juvy mounts the comeback. Jericho with a double-powerbomb. That was cool. More stalling. Juvy driver for two. Jericho crotches Juvy on the 450 attempt. Superplex for two. Rana into Liontamer but Juvy's in the ropes. Jericho and Malenko argue. Juvy goes after Jericho but pokes Deano in the eyes by mistake. Jericho nails him with the belt for two. Jericho ends up on the top rope and kicks Malenko in the head, so Malenko alley-oops Juvy to the top rope for the frankensteiner and the pin. Malenko decks Jericho after the match, which will probably be the overturning decision. ***

Let the bullshit begin!

nWo battle royale:

HSB says hi to Memery. So does the rest of the CMA.  (Hi Mem, if you’re reading this!) They're all drunker than Scott Hall anyway. Participants for the nWo Hollywood: Scott "Last Call" Hall, The Giant, Curt Hennig, Scott Norton. Scott takes a little survey. Participants for the Wolfpac: Kevin Nash, Sting, Lex Luger and Gonnad. Participants for Goldberg: Goldberg. Scott Hall gets dumped by Goldberg and Nash puts himself out to follow and beat him up. More kicking and punching follows in the ring as the crowd chants for Goldberg. Goldberg spears and dumps Konnan. Hennig almost eliminates Goldberg. Wouldn't Hennig make a good corporate champion? Goldberg dumps Hennig, then Norton and Sting, then Luger. But Giant chokeslams him and he does a zombie situp. Spear, jackhammer, pin. So Goldberg just got put over every major contender in WCW in ONE FUCKING MATCH???? *1/2

Oh god please end this show now.

I've had four hard lemonades and I'm still far too sober to be watching this bullshit. I start working on a fifth as we head to the alleged main event. (Man, I used to be kind of a lightweight.  I don’t even drink anymore and it still takes more than that to get me buzzed now.) 

Hulk Hogan & Eric Bischoff v. DDP & Jay Leno.

(This feud was just made of win.  You had DDP debuting the Hulk “Scum” Hogan putdown, Eric Bischoff doing a talk show on Nitro, Jay Leno wrestling under the TNA theory of ANY celebrity pub being good pub…so awesome.)  We have roughly 15 minutes of airtime left so hopefully this won't be too painful. Oh, who am I kidding? Team Leno uses the Tonight Show music. I can't believe they're actually going through with this. Bischoff has those, ahem, cool pants and boots like he had at Starrcade 97. DDP and Hogan start. Hogan bails and gets beat up by Kevin Eubanks. Yeah, right. I need more to drink. Hogan does his cheap heel moves (back scratch, choke, etc). DDP actually sells Eric's shitty kicks. Leno in. Bischoff runs in fear and tags Hogan. Now Hogan is the "legendary" Hollywood Hogan. Leno makes fun of Hogan's hairline. DDP back in. DDP works on the arm and Leno in with a full armdrag and twist. Double clothesline. DDP plays Ricky Morton. Hogan pops DDP with an international object and Bischoff gets a two count. Then, finally, the hot tag to Leno and it's the exciting Leno-Bischoff confrontation. Leno with a lowblow and a pair of weak rights. Leno is trying, I'll give him that. Chaos ensues and Eubanks hits a Diamond Cutter on Bischoff, and Leno gets the pin. Well, it was better than last month's show. 3/4*

An nWo beatdown ensues until Goldberg makes the save. The Jew World Order celebrates to end the show.

The Bottom Line: I'm not one to throw around lines like "The Worst PPV ever" but I think this was it. Nothing redeeming whatsoever. Maybe the CW title was watchable, but the rest was total shit. Hey, fuck you WCW.  (Sadly, Fall Brawl 98 was EVEN WORSE.) 

Comments

  1. Hogan put over Jay Leno more than half the roster. Sad.

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  2. (Another one written “live” for the show, but you’ll note that I’m getting better at this as we move from 97 to 98.) 
    Sadly, the same can't be said for the shows themselves. 

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  3. To be fair, 1998 Drunk Scott was wrong, and they did let that decision be the final blowoff for the Jericho angle.  Very well done angle beginning to end all things considered, especially for 1998 WCW.

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  4. My GOD this was horrible show.

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  5.  Such a depressing show, showcasing what a deadzone WCW as at this point.  I thought they were desperate when they brought in Rodman *again*, but then they followed that up with Eric Bischoff basically comandeering the show for his own purposes.  This was deep in the dog days of the glass ceiling  for WCW: Jericho was god, but he was obviously not doing anything outside his station as long as Hogan was around.  Ditto with Raven/Benoit/the Flock who got nothing to work with and just had to keep going out and having good matches for their own sake.  And then to top it all off, the biggest draw on your roster  gets wasted in a nothing battle royal that, IIRC wasn't even announced until a week before the show.  They could have drawn a monster buyrate with Goldberg/Hogan II or at least done Hogan/DDP leading up to that, but no, it's more important to compare hogs with Jay Leno than to make money or give the fans what they want. And then  they got handed a guaranteed , surefire, can't-possibly-fuck-it-up angle with the Horsemen returning and pissed that away even before the next PPV! It was astonishing to behold the parallel rise of the WWF and catastrophic fall of WCW.

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  6. Fun Fact: If you had gotten a chick pregnant on the night Scott Steiner turned on Rick (Superbrawl VIII), the baby would have been born before they actually had a match on PPV (World War III)

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  7. Fun Fact: If you had a child the day Ric Flair won his first world title, he/she would have been old buy cigarettes (in the U.S., not in Canada) the day he lost his last world title. Not that has anything to do with this, but I found this comment amusing and wanted to come up with my own.

    Not so fun fact: Flair's second-to-last title reign ended when Russo stripped him of the title to "reboot" the promotion. His last title reign (which I don't really count, but it's in the official history) started with Kevin Nash handing him the title, and Ric losing it the same night to Jeff Jarrett. I've never been a big Flair mark, but he deserved better than that. What surprised me looking this up is that he never even got a 24-hour world title reign when he came back to the WWE.

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  8. True, I figured Flair would've gotten at least a short run with one of the belts in WWE at some point.  I actually thought he was going to win MITB at Wrestlemania 22 to set up a "Flair's last chance" kind of storyline.

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  9. What kind of a stupid weapon name was “slapjack” anyway?

    "Where'd you get that, anyway?"
    "Sent away."

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  10. I actually found the descriptions of Leno's training fairly interesting- behind the scenes, he wasn't at all funny- he basically saves the jokes & humor (or "humor" if you're not a Leno fan... and really, who is anymore?) for the show, and he's all business outside of it. He actually took his training seriously, and made a real go of it. Not that the angle wasn't a big fat pile of pooh.

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  11. what a bad show.scott was really pissed at this show.

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  12. they ruin things on starrcade the screwjob on the main event as the trigger to the death of the company

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  13. Tommy Hall is still trying to convince people that the two guys in the first match are Samoan.

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  14. Leno's failure to use the Chindrop Of Doom as a finisher means his angle was a failure.

    What's the point in ordering a PPV then getting so drunk you can barely remember it?  If it's good you don't want alcohol to dull your perception of it, but if it's so bad you need booze to tolerate it why order it at all?  I don't understand the mentality of alcohol consumption sometimes...

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  15. Almost immediately after this, they started to build to a Goldberg-Giant program, where the announcer idiots kept wondering if Goldberg would even be able to pick up Giant for the Jackhammer, even though he had just done it on this PPV.

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  16.  Oh sure, but really they could have pulled out of the tailspin at any time between then and Russo's arrival, and the latter half of 98 really took the bloom of the rose entirely.  

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  17. I just read Bret Hart's book. In Tommy's defense, Bret referred to Barbarian as a "Samoan born in Tonga" or something similar.

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  18. In Bret's defense, he's had a lot of neurological problems.

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  19. "What kind of stupid name is 'slapjack, anyway?"

    Story behind that one:  WCW's standards and practices ordered the name changed from the commonly accepted "blackjack" because of the word "black."  Kind of like "illegal foreign object" being renamed "international object" despite the word "foreign" not being used in any kind of nationalistic context.  

    Of course, that still doesn't explain why they just didn't go all old-timey and call it a "sap," but then I don't lose millions of dollars in other people's money as a matter of course so what do I know?

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  20. Agreed, early 98 actually had a lot of good stuff for WCW with Goldberg's streak and growing popularity, Benoit-DDP-Raven, Jericho's heel personality developing, and the shakeup to the stagnating NWO.  If they had kept it up they could have recovered from Starrcade 97, but once they blew Goldberg-Hogan on free TV and relied on celebrity matches to get them through the summer PPVs it was all downhill.  

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  21.  Wasn't the object in question a tire iron? Why not just say that?

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  22. The way they used Goldberg here showed they had no idea what they had with him. Goldberg vs. 5 of those guys (Sting, Luger, Nash, Hall & Giant) could have each been a PPV main event that would've drawn big in 1998.

    Instead, he just runs through everyone in a mid-card match no one cares about.

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  23. I missed this whole thing, but is it something to do with Camacho? 

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  24.  I dunno but I do it for Wrestlemania every year.

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  25.  No it was a little black leather thingy with a handle that had some kind of metal in the end, it's shaped sort of like a big mixing spoon but it's loose on the end, cops used to use them to knock someone out with a quick whap to the back of the head when they needed something easier to carry than a nightstick in crowded situations.

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  26. "You didn't have to do that, they wanted to be astronauts."

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  27. Call it whatever you want, all I know is that it hurts like hell to get hit with one.

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  28. Yeah, there is NO defending that one.

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  29. Yeah early 1998 and early 1999 were both pretty good -- then the summers really stank it up. 

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  30. TheRealCitizenSnipsAugust 26, 2012 at 3:57 PM

    " (That guy should have stuck around.  Great name, funny guy, great worker.)"True, though you can hardly blame Tokyo for looking around at the landscape and deciding his long term options were better in Japan. Of course, knowing WCW they probably offered him a fat guaranteed contract to do nothing anyway.

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  31. He also took backstabbing David Letterman and Conan O'Brien behind the scenes quite seriously as well.

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  32. Hard to tell which was dumber, the name or the fact that it looked like a worn out dirty sock. Not to mention every time he used it, he so blatantly telegraphed the shots that he looked like he needed to watch Jerry Lawler tapes to learn how to properly use an "international object".

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  33. If not for the ECW relaunch, I imagine he would have. I seem to remember that being a pretty popular rumor at the time, given that Vengeance was in North Carolina that year.

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  34. WWE's keeping that tradition alive with every Cena/Show feud. 

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  35. Of course! Who wouldn't mark for Goldberg? In a company where old guys were cutting 20 minute rambling promo's and having horrible matches; Goldberg didn't say a word and kicked ass in 10 minutes or less!

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  36. Aside from the obvious, who else in Hollywood doesn't like Jay Leno? I actually have the sequel to "The Late Night Wars", but I haven't read it yet- it might go into more detail there. But from what I've read, it paints Conan as a bit of an obsessive weirdo at the same time.

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  37. Actually, to correct Scott, the slapjack was WCW's name for the Pedigree. Yes, folks, Steve Ray was using the Pedigree as his finisher.

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  38.  not to rehash the whole Jay/Conan thing (in which NBC realized that Conan just does not have enough mainstream appeal and I like him way better than Jay's dumbed down comedy for morons) but Jay Leno is a very nice person.  He recently used a large portion of his own salary to keep a bunch of production people on the show that NBC was going to cut.  He does lots for charity.  He is good people except possibly (don't know enough about it) in regards to Conan. 

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  39.  well he did get the tag belt and the US belt, just not either world title.

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  40. Man, Stevie Ray was so bad, they couldn't even trust him with a finishing move  They just gave him a Dr. Scholl's shoe insert to use as a weapon instead.

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  41. I wasn't watching much WCW at this point, but I was a regular Tonight Show viewer, so I still got to see this feud play out every week. Lucky me. 

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  42. IC belt too (or instead of US, cant remember that one).  And he held the tag belts with both Batista and Piper at different points.

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  43. i agree,early 98 had some good stuff but from there on the cracks on WCW where stating to show.

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