NWA Great American Bash 1989 – Glory Days (7.23.89)  

 

July 23, 1989 

 

“Glory days, well they’ll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye
Glory days, glory days”  

 

• Bruce Springsteen, 1985  

 

We’re in Baltimore, Maryland. Home of the Baltimore Ravens, Spiro Agnew, “The Hoff” David Hasselhoff, Tupac Shakur, Edgar Allen Poe, the Wire and Axl Rotten. The Great American Bash came from here last year and this is the second of eight times they would run this venue for the GAB. Superstar Billy Graham won his world title in this building, but the WWF wouldn’t run a PPV here until King of the Ring 1994.  

 

This show has a stellar reputation and with good cause. The card boasts Luger-Steamboat, Sting-Muta, Cornette-Heyman, War Games, their new wacky two ring battle royal and Flair-Funk. It’s a loaded card by 1989 standards. It’s rare to see good stuff up and down the card like this.  

Two rings for our two battle royal/War Games matches. I still think it looks daft and I can see why the Fed never did it. So much wasted space.  

 

King of the Hill Battle Royal 

They ran qualifiers for this fucking thing. Competitors are Kevin Sullivan, Mike Rotunda, Bill Irwin, Ron Simmons, Flyin’ Brian, Scott Hall, Ranger Ross, Rick Steiner, Eddie Gilbert, Steve Williams, Terry Gordy, Scott Steiner and, finally, the Skyscrapers. Oh, shit, we’re into the era of SID.  

If Sid wasn’t total shit in the ring, he’d be one of the all-time greats. He had everything else. The personality, the aura, the look, the promos, the finisher. It was all perfect until he had to work a match. Unless you’re into chokes and nerveholds. Sid is a few years in, although he would never expand his moveset, and he only started with WCW on this tour. Sid eventually clears out ring one.  

This leaves a bunch of guys in the other ring while he hangs out, chilling. The other ring quickly clears out leaving Doc vs. Spivey and Rotunda. Logically, Williams clears the ring out and then we get a heel-face final two. Instead, Spivey wins ring two and the Skyscrapers split the cash prize. Doc was starting to look good at this point. It’s taken a while but he’s clearly ‘getting’ the biz now.  

 

Bill Irwin vs. Flyin’ Brian 

As with the last time I saw him, and every time I see him, I figure Irwin (a jobber) should be counting lights in short order. The match is long and boring enough for JR to talk about Boomer Esiason*. Pillman was drafted the same year as Boomer, so they probably did know each other. Irwin is a very vocal worker. He yells and screams and talks trash. His work screams too. It screams “I am a jobber for the American Wrestling Association”.  

 

*Famous 1980s/90s Cincinati Bengals quarterback. He took the Bengals to the Superbowl in 1988. The Bengals! He also made four Pro Bowl teams despite playing for the Bengals.  

 

Irwin works heat for an unspeakably long time, boring the arse off the crowd. Pillman doesn’t even win on his first comeback, missing a missile dropkick to create a second heat spell. This is done to emphasise why high risk is high risk. This is not the setting to prove that point. They do have a good finish though, with Pillman getting chucked into the other ring and he comes back into the first ring with a high crossbody for the win. Astonishing to think there’s a Brian Pillman match this boring in existence. On this show too. Unbelieveable.  

 

Backstage: Paul E talks about being a photographer when Cornette came off the scaffold and wrecked his knee. He has a tactic.  

 

Dynamic Dudes vs. Skyscrapers 

JR claims the Skyscrapers are not just “body builders who lay under a heat lamp”. Well, one of them is. Not many people know this, but Sid used to team with Shane Douglas. After his initial run as “Lord Humongous” (another Mad Max rip off) he took off the mask, turned face and teamed with his “childhood friend*” Shane. The crowd are very into Sid despite Spivey doing all the work in this. Aura goes a loooong way in wrestling.  

 

*They did not know each other.  

 

Seriously, whenever he’s not in there the crowd chant “we want Sid”. They could have pushed him to the moon right out of the gate. Poor Sid, hampered by being not very good. A crushing blow to an otherwise flawless approach to wrestling. Sid tags in, hits one clothesline, and then poses and gets a standing ovation! His next move? Gently massaging Shane’s lower back. Then he tags out and the crowd boo. Hahaha. It’s like mass hypnosis. I feel bad for Spivey, who’s good in this match.  

 

Sid looks so confused by any spot more complicated than him clubbing someone. Johnny botches the finish, so Spivey just pins him anyway. Ha! That’ll teach him! Sid was absolute dogshit here. Just awful and yet he walked out more over than ever before. You cannot put a price on aura.  

 

Backstage: Jim Cornette gets to retort to Paul E. He points out Heyman was right. He has got a bad knee after tearing his ACL. Cornette says he doesn’t care if his leg is broken, he’ll crawl over and beat up Paul E. While this feud in WCW was fascinating it’s nowhere near as fascinating as their real-life ambitions when it came to promoting. Cornette preferring the traditionalist route and forming Smokey Mountain Wrestling, Heyman latching on to ECW and re-branding it in his image. Both had short-term success and ultimately failed. Both have had great runs on creative for bigger promotions. The wrestling business would be a poorer place without them contributing to it.  

 

Tuxedo Match 

Paul E. Dangerously vs. Jim Cornette 

Normally tuxedo matches are garbage. Who wants to see two, normally non-wrestlers, stripping each other? Especially when it’s a couple of pasty white dudes. Someone ringside has a sign saying, “WWF stinks” and the Fed has blurred it! Hahaha.  

How thin skinned do you have to be? It’s not even the logo that’s an issue. The panda fuckers complained about the scratch logo and the WWF archive uses the more traditional WWF logos all the time.  

 

This is hilarious. Paul E throws powder in Cornette’s face and starts hammering his knees with the big 80s mobile phone. Cornette has always been able to take a bump, and his selling is great too. Jim Ross shoots from the hip, saying he’d rather Cornette stayed if one of these had to go. The punches look good in this thing because they really tag each other. I can only assume Cornette insisted so it didn’t look stupid.  

Paul E whips out another bag of white powder, but Cornette kicks the cocaine right into Paul E’s face. He loses his trousers in the process and sprints to the back. Colombian marching powder, so he got moving sharpish. You might think this was shit but they gave it their all and kept the crowd invested. It’s a lesson in putting together a match despite having almost nothing to go on. Putting a match together can be this simple. Heyman couldn’t do anything, and they still had a good 6-minute match. **½  

 

Kevin Sullivan & Mike Rotunda vs. Steiner Brothers 

They’ve done this before with Rotunda using a chair on Scott to get the win. The Varsity Club stopped being a thing a month ago, but the Steiners need to get their win back. This is a wild brawl, which is what brings out the best in Sullivan. The Varsity Club cheats a lot, but the Steiners just come back with cool power shit like overhead suplexes and powerslams. The match is under tornado rules, or Australian rules as they were known at the time, so they can just fight. The Steiners double team Sullivan for the win and this was brisk! Not even five minutes. Fantastic stuff all round though. So much energy and unlike most ‘tornado’ matches it had a structure and made sense. *** 

 

Sidenote: As I was proofing this review, I found out that Kevin Sullivan had passed away aged just 74. Sullivan was a unique worker. It’s very rare to have someone of a diminutive stature who’s not afraid to not exploit the ropes. He developed a brawling style and a character that played mind games and confused his opponents. His Satanic cult gimmick played off the fear of Americans in the 70s and 80s of Satanic cults.  

 

Behind the scenes he was a crucial cog in the organisation of WCW. During WCW’s most successful periods in their Monday Night War with the WWF, Sullivan was involved in the creative process. It would be easy to focus on his negatives as a booker, which resulted in the Radicalz defection to the WWF in 2000, but without Sullivan WCW would probably have been considerably messier.  

 

Overall Sullivan was a unique talent and voice. Wrestling always needs more people like that. Ones who think outside the box and make the product different and interesting. RIP. 

 

NWA TV Championship 

Sting (c) vs. Great Muta 

Muta is only here until the end of January 1990 so they can’t really go pushing him too hard but he’s too cool to just stick in squashes and stuff. So, they had him go after Sting. The pacing is brisk here too, with Muta bailing into the second ring so Sting dives over the ropes to get to him. Sting was good at creating cool visuals with his dives. He made a lot of highlight reels. Muta is over as hell because of the cartwheeling and the flips and such.  

For 1989 this is a wild, wild match up. It eventually settles down with sleepers and chinlocks. The crowd are more into Muta than I remember, chanting his name throughout this. I’ve never been a big Muta guy. While I appreciate how much cool shit he did and how innovative he was, the execution of spots never looked right to me. Muta accidentally mists Nick Patrick, which is surely a DQ. Sting catches Muta with a backdrop driver into a pin to retain. The bridge looked perfect, and I don’t think it was supposed to be. JR calls it “controversial”. Muta runs off with the strap and would eventually win it after it was vacated. Just a weird situation. ***. The replay shows Muta kicked out, but Sting’s shoulders weren’t down either.  

 

Backstage: Luger tells us the only way he’ll wrestle Ricky Steamboat is if we have normal rules and DQ’s are in effect. It had been announced as no DQ.  

 

NWA United States Championship 

Lex Luger (c) vs. Ricky Steamboat  

Steamboat comes out gimmicked out the wazoo. So, if you think WWF did this to him, you’d be incorrect, although they would push it even further. It’s insane to me that Steamboat had the great 1989 that he had and just left WCW in the middle of the year. How? Well, they had a contractual dispute and Steamboat just left. He needed surgery on an injured foot, so he went and got that and came back into wrestling the following year. Aside from an October 1990 tour of New Japan, this is the last we’ll see of Steamboat until his return to the WWF in early 1991. I have him at #1 on my Wrestler of the Year sheet at this point!  

 

The heels have been popular all night and Luger is over like crazy here. Luger has been hot this year but wrestling Steamboat takes him to another level. He just follows Steamboat’s lead. Steamboat can work miracles if he’s got someone competent. He chops the shit out of Luger but also sells anything Luger does like a gunshot wound. Steamboat makes Luger look incredible. He pops back up and gets floored with successive lariats, something that you see a lot now but back then? Hardly ever. The crowd love it. 

 

Steamboat’s concept of wrestling involves a lot of quick pinfalls to get pops from kick outs and lots of good bumping. That, combined with Luger’s cockiness and big power moves, makes this a winner. It makes me sad they never got the chance to do this feud through to a logical conclusion because this fucking slaps. The only thing it’s missing is a finish as Luger bails for a chair, Steamboat catapults him into the corner in a hilarious spot and Steamboat uses the chair to get disqualified. Thus playing into Luger’s hands with his desire to remove the “no DQ” stipulation beforehand. ****¼ 

 

Imagine how hot this could have gotten if they’d done a best of three series. The heat on it was fantastic. Luger’s best match, to this point, and one of Steamboat’s finest matches considering his better matches were against all-timer workers like Flair and Savage. Just brilliant. It still boggles the mind that Steamboat was gone after this. Even Jim Ross mentions they should do this over as a no DQ match. Presumably at the first Halloween Havoc. Brian Pillman subbed in.  

 

War Games 

Fabulous Freebirds & Samoan Swat Team vs. Midnight Express, Roadwarriors & Steve Williams 

This feels like a lesser War Games lineup. Usually, the Roadies are fighting the Horsemen. However, they were recently jumped by a combination of Freebirds and SST. It’s also wild that the Freebirds never lost the tag belts to the Roadies around this time. That feels like a no brainer title switch. Instead, we’re here. Where’s here? Badstreet, Atlanta, GA! Badstreet, the whole USA! Roadies come out on Harley Davison bikes, only sat on the back not driving. They’d never make it into BSK like that. 

 

Jimmy Garvin vs. Bobby Eaton starts the match off. My issue with War Games is that they’re all the same until the end section. Terry Gordy makes it 2 on 1 to the heels. Will the faces ever win a coin toss? At least Eaton is the right guy to take the initial heat. Steve Williams levels shit up.  

At least Doc does something cool, pressing the massive Gordy into the roof eight times. Samu enters next to give the heels a 3 on 2. Nothing much happens so in comes Animal. His flying tackle over the ropes from one ring to the other is very cool. Sting has really changed the way babyfaces behave in this company. Fatu makes it 4 on 3, and we go back to hugging the ropes and stuff. Hawk is so desperate for revenge he waited to be last man in, which doesn’t make sense? Maximise the pop, I guess. “I gotta go? Damn” – Hayes. The ideal Hayes strategy is to never enter the ring and simply run his mouth on the floor. Surprisingly he comes in and drills everyone with DDTs and goes into the other ring to strut and celebrate. Unfortunately, this upsets Hawk.  

 

THE WARGAMES BEGIN 

Hawk’s revenge sees him beat the piss out of every single heel. Including a huge dive from one ring to the other. Unlike Animal, he doesn’t grab the ropes. He just flies over. Paul E’s attempts to get the phone into the ring, which won’t fit through the cage, is a good laugh while all this is going on. Hawk goes after Garvin and gets him in the Hangman’s Noose neckbreaker for the submission. This was fine for War Games. There was no blood but a few cool spots. In all honesty, the shine has come off the concept already and I’ve stopped enjoying them. It was fine. *** 

 

Backstage: Ric Flair gets an emotional interview about his bad neck. It’s a much better promo than usual because he’s not yelling and screaming, he’s just talking. It sells the injury and makes Flair look human. This is Flair’s first match since winning the title at Wrestlewar in early May.  

 

NWA World Championship 

Ric Flair (c) vs. Terry Funk  

Terry Funk looks unhinged and stops off to argue with some fans on his way to the ring. He’d already been wrestling for 24 years at this point. Considering Funk tried to end Flair’s career, he seems quite calm about it. That is until the robes come off and then it’s fucking on, baby! Funk’s ringside behaviour is great. He’s out there throwing chairs around, climbing into the crowd. If only he waffled that nerd Jason Hervey and we’d be cooking. 

 

1989 has been the start of Flair’s legendary chops and they’re all over this match like a rash. Funk takes some wicked bumps. Several over the top rope that look untidy but in a good way. With Terry Funk, he designed his stuff to look different. Nothing was ever ‘clean’, which is what made him so fascinating to watch.  

 

Flair’s tactic in this match is to go after Funk’s neck. Get a receipt for Wrestlewar. What’s all this neck work setting up? Why, the Figure Four obviously! Um. I’m not convinced Flair was ever this genius who put together great matches, but he knew when to do shit, even if it wasn’t always the right thing. Funk sneaks in a shot with the branding iron, busts Flair open and piledrives him.  

I still think they should have had Funk win the belt. Even if they’d had Flair vacate it when he was injured. The big money was in Flair getting revenge and they should have saved that for Starrcade. At least here Funk makes a mess of Flair and makes him bleed his own blood. Having failed to pin Flair, Funk wants Flair to quit. Hey, that sounds like a fine idea for a match! So, he hits neckbreaker after neckbreaker, in a cunning attempt to make the champ give up. 

 

Gary Hart tries to give Funk an advantage, but Flair steals the branding iron and whacks Terry across the head. He’s lacerated too!  

 

It’s a blood bath in Baltimore! Funk does a great job of showing how much that blood loss has taken out of him, compared to Flair, who’s used to bleeding and is hunky dory. Funk gets the spinning toehold, countered into the Figure Four, countered into a roll up, countered into a pin and Flair retains. ****¼. A great wrestling match built around basics like punching, chopping and trying to incapacitate your opponent. Both guys are so good at their jobs that I wished it would go longer, which is rarity for me.  

 

Post Match: It ain’t over! Flair decks Gary Hart but Great Muta comes in and mists the champ. Funk proceeds to beat Flair mercilessly and Muta even whacks Flair with the belt.  

The crowd immediately starts chanting for “Sting” and he responds! The scrap between the four men is incredibly heated. JR is losing his mind! This is the start of a lengthy Flair-Sting angle. They’d team together against Funk & Muta at Halloween Havoc, be partners in a re-formed babyface Four Horsemen, be opponents in the weird mini-league thing at Starrcade, Sting would win a title shot, refuse to relinquish it, and it was going to come to a head at Wrestlewar. Only Sting got hurt and by the time he came back WCW had gotten dumber and then Robocop? It’ll be a wild ride.  

 

Speaking of wild rides, this still isn’t over! They start fighting again in the aisle after Funk throws a chair into the ring. Jim Ross starts wrapping up and talking about the TV title being held up, but the brawl continues past them! Jim starts calling the action and it’s right in front of where he’s standing!  

Flair takes the chance to cut a promo, and he thanks Sting for his help. He looks a mess, covered in blood and mist. Flair promises to wear Terry’s Texas ass out! Ross finally gets to finish his thoughts on the TV belt, which Sting is clearly too important to have anymore.  

 

The 411: 

What a show this is. The original ‘best PPV ever’. The first time a card delivered up and down. Even the less great stuff on this show is worth watching. It’s amazing to see the crowd’s reaction to Sid, the Tuxedo match is the best one ever, the Steiners tag was wild, Sting vs Muta was great, Luger vs. Steamboat was MOTYC any other year and so was Flair vs. Funk. I’m the low man on War Games, in general, so if you’re not me you’re probably into that too.  

 

All the ducks were in a row. Everything was clicking. It’s such a shame Steamboat left because WCW were cooking with him on board. This is, by some distance, the best show of 1989. It’s arguably the best PPV any company had done to this point and there’s only an argument because of the sheer scope of WrestleMania III. If it’s on pure entertainment and how good everything is, there’s no contest at all. An essential show and along with Flair-Steamboat series one of the main reasons why 1989 NWA has such an incredibly high reputation.  

 

 

 

 

The title of this show is ironic considering I’m sitting here writing about it in 2024.  

 

“Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister
But boring stories of Glory Days” 

 

Thanks, boss.