NWA WrestleWar 1990 – Wild Thing (2.25.90) review 

 

February 25, 1990 

 

We’re in Greensboro, North Carolina. Flair Country. Nearly 10k in for this one and a 1.6 buyrate. Again, buyrates from the NWA in this era look weak compared to what the WWF was doing. Although the NWA had a better product. Sadly, the numbers don’t lie, and they spell disaster for early 1990s wrestling. This show was originally headlined by Flair vs Sting for the belt, and I think they had a title switch planned. Mainly to get ahead of the WWF’s switch from Hogan to Warrior. Get their exciting facepainted king crowned first. But Sting got injured, so it’s not happening until July. So, it’s Flair vs Luger. Hosts are Jim Ross and Terry Funk. 

Has there ever been a more embarrassing rap in wrestling than “Wild Thing”? I mean, probably, but it does suck. JR announces Dan Spivey is injured. Which means tonight’s “Skyscrapers” team includes neither original ‘Scraper.  

 

Kevin Sullivan & Buzz Sawyer vs. Dynamic Dudes 

This is it for the Dynamic Dudes, thankfully, with Shane Douglas about to defect to the WWF. Johnny Ace would remain in WCW until going to All Japan, where he’s very unwelcome, around the summertime. Speaking of Johnny Ace, he fucking stinks here. He’s one of the worst wrestlers to not have a reputation as a “bad wrestler”. When you’re out here blowing monkey flips, maybe wrestling isn’t for you. Douglas, despite his own shortcomings, is a much better worker. 

 

Buzz always used to be hated because he ripped off Mark Calloway when the young Taker was trying to break into the business. In retrospect, he nearly did us all an enormous favour. As a worker, I like Buzz. He hits hard and he’s a jerk. I’m not sure why he’s in this match though, as he left the company immediately afterwards and retired. Although part of that was due to a broken wrist, sustained in this match. Maybe he would have stayed otherwise. Sawyer’s life came to an end shortly afterwards, dying of a drug overdose in 1992. He was just 32.  

 

Back in the match, Johnny Ace fucks something else up. Buzz looks hot about it. Buzz hits a top rope splash for the win and that’s clearly hwere he bust his wrist as he grabs it immediately. THE REPLAY IS SICKENING. Good grief. I guess they didn’t want to draw attention to it because of the injuries to Sting and Spivey but it was horrible. Speaking of horrible; this match was but mainly because of dumbass Johnny Ace doing things wrong. 

 

Cactus Jack Manson vs. Norman (the Lunatic) 

Foley is still going by “Manson”, but I think this is the final time. He will have dropped it by the time Robocop is in the promotion. Foley is a great example of a guy just doing it his way. I know he thought he had to do the silly bumps to get over, but the personality worked by itself. Foley obviously didn’t think so, as he takes a backdrop over the rail here for shits and giggles.  

 

The trouble with him working Norman is that they both have similar strengths…and similar weaknesses. Norman can’t dominate and bully Cactus, which is what Mick wants. Most of Mick’s spots involve him throwing himself into stuff with reckless abandon and Norman is just a big immobile blob. It wouldn’t be so bad but guess which one of these is getting the push?  

 

Uh huh. 

 

Mick eventually just gives up and they sit in some rest holds. Norman gets a bad rap for being shit, which is not true, but this is a dreadful performance from him. Norman sits on Cactus for the win. Mick did all the work here, but it still sucked.  

 

Rock n’ Roll Express vs. Midnight Express 

This is a throwback! The two teams had torn it up in the mid 80s before RNR left in 1988. Jim Cornette has his work boots on too and gets into it with Nick Patrick. MXP show a lot of ass, and even get into a shoving match with each other to show their frustrations. RNR’s barely have to do anything. It’s a great demonstration of how goofy MXP were, when they felt like it, and how wildly entertaining they were. 

 

It’s not all goofy and MXP do switch gears eventually after a killer crossbody to the floor from Morton. Eaton took a wicked bump over the ropes on it. Eaton shines in that mid-section of the match. He’s such a great technician. Cornette plays into this too, by socking Morton and getting on the apron to kill a roll up. Morton finds himself isolated (I KNOW RIGHT?) 

 

MXP push until Morton gets knees up on the Rocket Launcher and hot tags Gibson. MXP try a double flapjack on him, but Morton knocks Eaton over and Gibson falls on top for the pin. A nicely innovative finish. One of the last great formula tag team matches, thanks to Morton playing Morton and MXP running through different kinds of heel offence. ****. Possibly the final great match of the Rock n’ Roll Express. 

 

Skyscrapers vs. Roadwarriors 

The ‘Scrapers are Mean Mark (the future Undertaker) and “The Masked Skyscraper”, which, to my shock, is not Jack Victory. It’s Mike Enos under a hood. A sign of the impending doom for the AWA, as Enos (and Bloom) were among their remaining top talents. Enos does make Callaway look a lot bigger but the fact neither Sid nor Spivey are here, means this is the death knell for the Skyscrapers.  

 

The match takes place tornado style and it’s fair to say that nobody gives a shit. Literally everyone would end up in the WWF a year later. All of them, bar the Roadies, under different gimmicks. Mark gets chucked out of the ring and Enos is whacked with the Doomsday Device.  

Speaking of “Doom”, here they are, at ringside, looking spiffy. That ends up as a brawl, which you would think would result in a match at Capital Combat and you would be wrong. Unless the match you were expecting is Doom vs. Steiners for the tag titles. Roadies shuffled back into the pack ahead of their defection to the WWF. Amazing how much of an afterthought the “Skyscrapers” were throughout all this. Thanks for coming, Mark and Mike. 

 

US Tag Team Championship 

Flyin’ Brian & Z-Man (c) vs. Fabulous Freebirds  

The US tag belts are back. They had a tournament, this was the final, and the obnoxious faces beat the obnoxious heels. The Freebirds have a rematch, and this is it. The Freebirds can be quite fun as a team, but they give this match 25:00, which is just nuts. You wouldn’t give Tom Zenk vs. Jimmy Garvin 20+ minutes, would you? Given they have to fill a lot of time, the match is very sluggish with only Pillman lighting it up, occasionally.  

 

The crowd get very excited for no reason, so I think Hayes was beefing with the front row. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with the in-ring. Tom Zenk’s finisher around this time was the Z-Lock, which is a sleeper, which shows how fucking lame he is. It’s hard to get excited for it when the match is full of sleepers and chinlocks. The chinlocks continue unabated. Is this 25 minutes long or 4 hours? Fuck me.  

Zenk gets out of position and Garvin has to push him out of the way. Why are you in the ring? Have you forgotten what’s happening? Pillman has to barge the cameraman out of the way and a high cross finishes for him. Thank god. A painfully long and boring match filled with rest holds. Just hot trash.  

 

NWA World Tag Team Championship 

Steiner Brothers (c) vs. Four Horsemen (Ole & Arn Anderson) 

I’m a little sad Tully failed that cocaine test in the WWF because without that, this would be Steiners vs. Brainbusters. Which is pretty much baseline ***½ regardless of content. Ole is a definite weak link and is days, not months, away from retirement. This is his final televised match. He would take over the book as a result, replacing Flair in the booking committee before going solo second half of the year. Black Scorpion and all that. 

 

JR points out that Rick Steiner has a degree in education and was going to be a science teacher, which rather punches a hole in his previous gimmick of ‘dullard’ who speaks to his hand. Bill Apter is ringside for this and boy does he ever look BORED. It’s fair to say that the show has fallen off a cliff since the MXP match. They just can’t seem to get on the same page, which is wild when Scott and Arn tag in and they stop dead in their tracks and Scott grabs a headlock. That’s a hot tag too!  

 

Scott wakes the crowd up with a Frankensteiner and we get the real hot tag with Steinerlines galore and Ole just gets rolled up for the L. Going out on his back, like a pro. This match was surprisingly dull. It got good in the last minute or so.  

 

 

NWA World Championship 

Ric Flair (c) vs. Lex Luger 

With Sting, champion elect, on the shelf they had to turn Luger face to save the PPV. If WCW had any kind of common sense, they’d have pulled the trigger on Lex and just put Sting’s injury down to misfortune. But hey, we know that’s not the case. Instead, Luger ended up a serial choker.  

Sting, complete with hefty leg brace, is out here for moral support. The more I think about it, the more you should have had Luger win and hold the belt all year, turning into more and more of a prick until Sting beat him at Starrcade. Hey, hindsight is 20-20. Although, it makes sense as WCW themselves were keen to move on from Flair, who was seen as an “80s wrestler”.  

The last time they ran this match was Starrcade ‘88, in a match I dubbed “arguably Lex Luger’s best match”. We go back into the same approach here; Flair’s cunning vs Luger’s power. Flair bails to waste some time and on coming back in says “how about that big man? WOOOO. How about that?” A masterclass. He bails again and Luger chases him and throws Flair back inside. The attempted bait was taken but Lex just powered on through it. 

 

Plan B for Flair is chops and Lex just completely no sells them. Flair’s “now wait just a dang second” selling is one of my favourite Flair ‘bits’. Not the full on “noooo” begging off. The more subtle one in between.  

Lex briefly looks as if he’s going to fuck Ric in the mouth but he’s just posing ahead a ten-count punch spot. The main event scene has clearly got Luger going though, he’s half chub. The turning point is Luger flying over the top rope and Flair takes over on the floor. Which is a common trait in Flair matches. He’s dirty and the floor gives ample opportunity for shortcuts.  

 

Luger does some dull work from underneath, with Flair in control of the middle of the match. Luckily Flair’s cheap tricks and big chops keep the match interesting.  

Ringside a fan holds up a sign saying “we have HERD enough” in a slight at WCW honcho Jim Herd. Oh boy, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Herd’s idea for Flair was to give him a gladiator gimmick, complete with spiky short hair, and rename him “Spartacus”. I’m not making this up, I swear. The two would continue to butt heads until the middle of 1991 when Herd fired Flair for refusing to drop the belt, but we’ll get into that in due course. 

 

This starts to get good when Flair continues to lay in the chops and Lex starts no selling them again. It’s a shame Luger is too stupid to know when to push on and has to wait for Flair to drag him into the next spot. It’s frustrating that Lex became his own man in 1989 and got great at pro-wrestling and now he’s back to being Flair’s follower. Lex further ruins his reputation by going after a Figure Four and applying a god-awful version of it. “Lex Luger is not proficient at the Figure Four” says Jim Ross. Pffft. No shit, mate.  

 

Luger has spells of no selling and doing muscle poses, where he’s all fired up and then Flair takes over for more heat. I think they probably overcook the heat but all of Luger’s stuff gets popped huge so maybe I’m wrong. It just feels like they keep going to the well but if people are buying it then keep going, I guess. Lex has a crack at selling the leg again, and it’s not great, again.  

Flair hooks the Figure Four and cheats, using the ropes, so out comes pegleg Sting to argue for the babyface mafia. It looks, briefly, as if he’s going to turn on Luger. Imagine if he was just in the Horsemen this whole time and it was all bullshit? WCW have booked wackier than that, brother. Instead, Sting has words of encouragement; “kick his you know what*”. The encouragement causes Luger to forget his bad knee and fire up into a series of power moves. 

 

*The kind of guttural, visceral smack talk heard in bars across the country circa 1990 before the word “ass” was invented in 1991.  

 

Lex gets the powerslam, the setup for the Rack, and then covers near the ropes to allow Woman to slap him in a horribly planned spot. They conspire to fuck it up, twice, and the ref gets bumped. Luger gets a visual pin from a superplex but the Horsemen run in. Lex clears them out and gets the Rack on Flair. It’s over but Ole decides to attack Sting.  

Of course, they could have just run in again and got Flair disqualified. Luger gives up on the Rack to save his buddy and gets counted out. Hahaha, what a dreadful finish. Lex Luger comes off looking like a complete moron and gets a kicking off the Horsemen for his troubles, so he looks like a loser too. This is NOT how to book a main event. While Starrcade ‘88 was a good match with a bad finish, this is a good match with a terrible finish. Call it ***½ because I’m feeling generous but the booking…fuck me.  

 

The 411: 

Not a total disaster but Flair-Luger from this show is overrated. I’ve reviewed this show before and was far more generous with the snowflakes, but it rubbed me up the wrong way on this viewing. MOTN goes to RnR vs MXP, a match that has been done (to death) beforehand. And everything else sucks! A hearty welcome to WCW under Jim Herd in the 1990s. All that goodwill from 1989 pretty much gone and we’re only in February. The worrying part is this *might* be their best show of the year.  

 

NEXT: For the NWA it’s Capital Combat and fucking ROBOCOP in May. My next show is something from Japan. Probably multiple somethings.