NWA Clash of the Champions 3: Fall Brawl (9.7.88) review 

 

September 7, 1988 

 

We’re in Albany, Georgia at the Albany Civic Center with 3,700 on hand to witness history.

 

Jim Crockett’s Last Stand.  

 

Jim Crockett Jr took over his dad’s promotion way back in 1973. Before Vince McMahon had purchased the WWF from his father, Crockett had a head start and had been expanding since 1978. JCP first brought together various Southern promotions before seizing control of the NWA in the 1980s, in an attempt to battle McMahon and his national expansionism. Despite gathering together a powerful force to fight McMahon, Crockett was out-gunned. In particular when Crockett acquired Bill Watts’ much loved UWF promotion.  

 

In the battle with McMahon, Vince’s underhanded attempts to derail Crockett’s ventures in PPV were, unfortunately, highly effective. Despite garnering some free TV success with the Clash of the Champions shows, Crockett was on the verge of bankruptcy. The promotion had overreached, overspent and overlooked its core audience.  

 

What might have been if Magnum TA had stayed healthy and won the NWA title in 1986? What could have been if the UWF purchase had figured into an exciting invasion angle with top UWF stars battling top NWA stars on an even playing field? What might have happened if Crockett had invested in marketing and advertising rather than private jets?  

 

Another factor was Dusty Rhodes. At one point one of Crockett’s aces, his creative genius, Dusty’s ideas had gone from exciting to ridiculous and the fabled “Dusty Finish” had started to really piss the fans off. By November 1988, Crockett had no more money to fight with and sold up to Ted Turner, who famously rang McMahon to tell him he was in the “wrasslin business”.  

 

Hosts for this one are Jim Ross and Bob Caudle.  

I’ll give them credit here. The whole “DESIRE” promo about Sting’s quest for gold is different. They’re trying. 

While PBP comes from the above, Ric Flair joins Tony Schiavone for chats in between. I do miss the inevitable ‘star turns commentator’ business.  

 

NWA TV Championship 

Mike Rotunda (c) vs. Brad Armstrong 

Brad is from Georgia, so he is OVER. The whole Rotunda/Rotundo thing is at a peak here. JR calls him Rotunda and Caudle calls him Rotundo and then, to really cap it off, Ross calls him both Rotunda and Rotundo IN THE SAME SENTENCE. Caudle starts alternating his pronunciation and it is driving me nuts!   

 

Brad being crazy over is a huge bonus for this because the glacial old-school pacing of Rotundo should make this dull, but the tiniest bit of cheating gets the kids screaming. There’s a lot of ‘grab a hold/cheat/back to hold’ business. Brad knows he doesn’t need to do much to get the crowd on his side and this is extremely minimalistic.  

 

Every cheeky roll up the crowd are on their feet, like Georgia are about to win a superbowl, or whatever they do in Georgia. Eat peaches? The crowd is excited. It might be the most excited I’ve seen a crowd watching Mike Rotunda wrestle. They even stand up for Brad’s kickouts! Rotunda dominates the last couple of minutes but cannot get a pin and Brad hangs on for a draw at 20:00. The crowd consider that a win, of sorts, which should tell you what a jamoke Armstrong was booked as in 1988.  

 

While the match was as dull as every other Mike Rotunda match, the plucky underdog performance from Brad and the crowd’s reaction to him was fantastic. Call it ***.  

 

Video Control gives us a quick look at Jimmy Garvin, who got his leg broken recently. Thanks to Kevin Sullivan and a cinderblock. Garvin never got revenge for this because he left during the takeover and didn’t come back until the middle of 1989, by which point he was part of a retooled Freebirds stable and the whole thing had been forgotten.  

 

Steve Williams & Nikita Koloff vs. Sheepherders 

So, three quarters of this match is about to leave the promotion too. Late 1988 was a wild time to be watching the NWA’s TV. The change was radical. The Sheepherders have come close to winning me over during the summer of 1988, thanks to a couple of formula tag matches against great teams. This is almost on a par with those, and the Sheepherders aren’t an embarrassment here. Well. To a degree.  

 

Luke decides to sell a clothesline by turning sideways, sitting on the middle rope briefly, and then tumbling to the floor. Not for me. Amazingly, Luke has wrestled in this calendar year (2023). Both faces take it in turns to eat the heat. Doc does a better job of it. Koloff…his heart wasn’t in it. I don’t blame him for losing interest in wrestling. His wife Mandy had Hodgkin’s Disease and was only 27 when she passed away.  

 

The finish here is very abrupt. Doc gets a hot tag, gets immediately beaten up, so he tags out and Koloff nonchalantly batters Butch with the Russian Sickle for the pin. This was not as good as the better Sheepherders matches of 1988 and it’s the end for them in the NWA. They would be in the WWF before the year was out. Koloff quit before Starrcade too and didn’t come back until early 1991. Long after he’d buried his wife and remarried.  

 

Dusty Rhodes vs. Kevin Sullivan 

Dusty is in no mood to sell for someone who looks like a garden gnome. At one point, Sullivan drops a fist on him at ringside and Dusty sells it by rolling back into the ring, towards where the punch came from. Nice.  

Sullivan works a chinlock for a while, shouting “the Dream is dead”. Most of Sullivan’s offence looks like it puts Dusty to sleep, and the crowd too. The booking here is hard to swallow. First Dusty uses the spike, in clear view of the ref. Next Gary Hart and Al Perez both attack Dusty, again in front of the ref and in the ring. Tommy Young? I believe that is a disqualification my zebra striped brethren. Dusty overcomes these odds by rolling up Gary Hart for the pin.  

 

No, you read that correctly. He pinned a guy who wasn’t in the match to win it. Crockett selling up happened to coincide with Dusty Rhodes completely losing his mind on the booking. I can only assume he was trying to get fired at this point, knowing his run in the NWA sun was over. 

 

Video Control takes us to Tony Schiavone who interviews “Big” John Ayers, an NFL player, who stumbles over his words so badly Ric Flair has to take over the promo. Ayers is horrible on the mic. He has a history in the business, incredibly, as he was an onscreen figurehead for Bill Watts’ UWF. In his NFL days he was an offensive guard who won two Superbowls with the 49ers. He passed away in 1995 of liver cancer.  

 

Russian Chain Match 

Ivan Koloff vs. Ricky Morton 

So, Robert Gibson quit over money thus ending the historic run of the Rock N’ Roll Express in the mid 80s NWA. Morton, left alone, ended up feuding with Ivan Koloff and his Russian cohorts. He’s about to end this solo run for another Rock N’ Roll Express run, this time in AJPW. Chain matches generally suck. The tether prevents anything exciting happening and the match is won by slapping turnbuckle pads, which is lame.  

 

Ivan is a guy I’ve really enjoyed during this look back on 1980s wrestling. He surprised me with his bumping and ability to get people over. He takes a great bump here, where Morton drags him off the top rope. Why would you go up top in a chain match though? And that’s the issue with this one. Too many logic holes. It’s also boring. They don’t get creative or brutal. It’s just a chain match. One I’ll immediately forget. Morton wins when Paul Jones fucks up and loses grip on his riding crop, which he was using to try and help Koloff get leverage with. 

 

Post Match is where things get interesting as Koloff gets mad at Jones and vice versa. Ivan socks Paul in the jaw and Russian Assassin #1 jumps Koloff and beats him up, which results in the debut of Russian Assassin #2. See, it makes sense he’s been called Russian Assassin #1 this whole time! RA#2 is Jack Victory in case you wondered or cared.  

 

Yeah, so the match is bad the turn didn’t exactly pop anyone. Who wanted to see babyface Ivan Koloff in 1988? The crowd chant for “Nikita”, which would have made sense if he was in the building…which he wasn’t. The angle was short-lived as Nikita left a month later, replaced in the Koloff revenge team by former WWF star Junkyard Dog. Ivan followed in early 1989, and this is essentially the end of his story in these flashbacks, unless I cover a lot of ECW. Oh, he does appear on Slamboree ‘93.  

 

Video Control have John Ayers, again, who’s going to referee an upcoming Flair-Luger match. They gave this man a live microphone TWICE on the same show? At least Jim Ross is here to ask him quickfire questions and move on. ALAS, he’s going to join commentary for the main event. Urgh.  

 

NWA United States Championship 

Barry Windham (c) vs. Sting 

This is part of the continued angle where Sting looks great, wrestles great and just is great but can’t win a title. Every show I watch he seems to be challenging for a different strap. He’s already over enough to win the world title but Luger and Steamboat are next in line. “These two are going to be at the top for a long, long time to come” says Bob Caudle. Well. One of them will.  

 

They do a similar match to Flair-Windham only with Windham playing Flair and Sting playing Windham. It lacks the pacing and energy of those matches but it has the bare bones of a really good match. Sting’s enthusiasm and energy versus Barry’s ring savvy, bumping and technical skill.  

 

Barry gets busted open on the ring post, and they run an odd sequence where Sting has a sleeper, which eventually segues into Windham escaping with a shinbreaker and working the leg over to set up the Figure Four. It ends up being a well put together match before it falls apart a bit at the end. We get a ref bump, Dillon jumps in there and “Big” John Ayers jumps in to stop Windham getting a pinfall. The match was good up to the non-ending. ***¼  

Ladies and gentlemen, your winner; “Big” John Ayers! Wait, what? Sorry, that should read “the authority of “Big” John Ayers”. His authority wins the day and convinces Tommy Young that the dastardly Barry Windham should be disqualified. Any way you slice it, Sting still can’t win a title. What a big old choker. Good job he was over.  

 

It’s mad that this is effectively it for the Four Horsemen. Arn & Tully would drop the belts to the freshly turned Midnight Express and head to the WWF. Flair and Windham continued with JJ Dillon until Flair fired Dillon in 1989, and he also jumped to the WWF. Windham injured his hand not long after that and the Horsemen were finished. The original version is done and when it eventually did reform it would be a babyface group and include Sting! Never say never in wrestling stables.  

 

The 411: 

Dusty Rhodes 1988 booking was part of the reason for the NWA’s decline in business and popularity. It got so dumb at times. Tonight, we had Ivan Koloff turning babyface, John Ayers being the main guy to get over in the main event and Dusty Rhodes pinning a manager to win his match. For Jim Crockett’s Last Stand, it showcased the best and worst of the NWA. Their in-ring was better than the WWF’s but their booking was getting increasingly erratic.  

 

Ted Turner looms. My next NWA review will be Clash of the Champions #4: Season’s Beatings, which will take place under Ted Turner’s watch. Crockett himself remained NWA president until 1991 and after that his involvement in wrestling was minimal and he went into a different business; selling houses. He passed away during the Covid-19 pandemic, aged 76. As for “Billionaire Ted”, I guess we’ll get to him in due course.