WCW Monday Nitro: The Best and Worst of September 29, 1997

Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: A “night of upsets” featured, most notably, Hugh Morrus getting whomped by a jacked-up rookie by the name of Bill Goldberg. In the main event scene, Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan are threatening to eat each other out.

Click here to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network. You can catch up with all the previous episodes of WCW Monday Nitro on the Best and Worst of Nitro tag page. Follow along with the competition here. We’re on the same week again, finally!

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And now, the best and worst of WCW Monday Nitro, originally aired on September 29, 1997.

Best: We Still Don’t Know Anything About Bill Goldberg

Willy Scott Goldberg returns to Nitro and notches his second consecutive victory, this time over The Barbarian because last week’s clean victory over number one contenders the Steiner Brothers meant less than nothing. It’s less impressive because it’s especially sloppy — Goldberg Jackhammers Barb onto his armpit and spends the match throwing awkward dropkicks and crossbodies — but also more impressive because he beat someone not choosing to call themselves “the laughing man.”

During the match, Mike Tenay reveals that he’s done some research and discovered that this guy they gave a wrestling contract without asking him to share any personal information played football for the Georgia Bulldogs and the Atlanta Falcons. Mean Gene has a picture of him from his college days and tries to confront him about it for some reason, so Goldberg pushes the camera out of his face and bails. Gene is like, “YOU’RE OUT OF LINE, MISTER,” and I’m starting to think Goldberg got over because everyone else on the show acts like a nosy but spineless stepdad.

Goldberg takes a couple of weeks off after this for fine tuning, and returns with (1) an entrance, (2) his music, and (3) his first bad-ass spear. And he ups the difficulty of his match against a Tongan male by facing an American one.

Best: We Know Less About The Mysterious ‘El Caliente’

A week after humiliating Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio Jr. must step into the ring with ‘El Caliente,’ a luchador with like -3% body fat who moves like Eddie Guerrero and does all of his moves. Crazy coincidence, right? The announce team is like, “who???” because in 1997 three children in a trench coat could show up to Nitro, say they’re “El Súper Niño” and get a primetime match with the Macho Man.

The crowd starts chanting “Eddie sucks,” and when Mysterio wins and unmasks him, Tony Schiavone is like, “he didn’t fool anybody, except us for a few minutes.” Nice save, Tone. Mysterio actually wins the match with a double-jump through-the-legs hurricanrana, and I swear, the man was never better than he was during this program with Guerrero in September and October of 1997. And that’s saying something.

I would give anything to see green-as-goose-shit rookie Goldberg try to pull that off. I bet he could jump from rope to rope, but that swing through the legs would destroy two entire legs and like one whole neck.

Worst: We Know Even Less About This Life-Sized Andre The Giant Pillow Person A Guy Brought With Him To Sit In The Nosebleeds On Nitro, And Why Sting Decided To Stand Next To It

what the

At first I thought this was a guy in a costume wearing like a sumo fat suit and a Max Headroom TV head, but it is in fact an Andre the Giant scarecrow. When they zoom out you can see that it has garbage bag legs and that the guys holding it are wearing matching Andre shirts. One of them has an afro wig. No wonder Sting looks so unhappy.

If you have any information about these guys, possibly leading to their arrest, drop us a comment below.

Worst: Kimberly Page Is A Great Dancer

Best: Bananas In Pajamas Are Coming Down The Stairs

Disco Inferno manages to defend his newly-won WCW Television Championship against Juventud Guerrera despite the interference of Alex Wright, who tries to distract him with the one and only dance he knows. The announce team can’t stop talking about Wright’s pants. I think Alex Wright is the only guy who could wear an entire pair of pants and still get accused of rocking a banana hammock.

So Disco has Guerrera beat, but Wright puts Juvy’s foot on the rope. That brings out Miss Jackie, who chastises Wright for cheating and then trips Juvy herself so Disco can pin him. Disco doesn’t want anything to do with either of them, and I love the idea of a champion who has no influence on the finish of his own matches because one person who wants a title shot keeps trying to cheat him out of it, and a second person who wants a title shot keeps cheating on his behalf. He’s like Forrest Gump, the wrestler. He’s not doing anything, but things won’t stop happening to him.

Best/Worst: And Speaking Of Dick Attacks

Here’s Buff Bagwell trying to incapacitate Diamond Dallas Page by … putting Page’s face near his crotch? He’s not even hitting him with it. It’s not a boner spear attack or anything, he’s just like, BE AWARE OF MY DICKKKK and hoping Page passes out. Page of course kicks his ass, Diamond Cuts him AND Vincent, and wins the match.

You know that part in Speed Racer where Rex tells Speed to listen to the car and let it tell him what he needs to do? Maybe it was like that. Maybe all that time spent as a threatening gigolo taught Buff that his penis COULD be a deadly weapon, he just didn’t know how. Like the Joey Ryan bit in beta. Like when Shawn Michaels knew he should be doing SOMETHING while waiting for a guy to get up for a superkick, but hadn’t yet thought about a big stomp. In five years Buff’s gonna be sitting at the breakfast table and suddenly BOOM, his dick destroys the table.

After the match, DDP exits through the crowd specifically so he can bump into Raven. Stevie Richards is behind them, but doesn’t do anything. I’m not sure, but since the Flock angle starts in earnest next week, I think maybe going nose-to-nose with Page convinced Raven that he should ditch Stevie and replace him with like six additional, misshapen Stevies.

As The Halliburton Turns

Now that he’s taken a few weeks away to get humiliated by the nWo and participate in the ruination of the Four Horsemen, Steve ‘Mongo’ McMichael is back to feuding with Jeff Jarrett about his wife and the endless abyss that is human suffering.

As per usual, they have a perfectly fine match that would’ve been mildly watchable if they hadn’t done it 65 times and hadn’t been in this hillbilly cuckolding angle for the past year. Jarrett counters a Mongo powerslam by getting Debra to hold his hands, causing Mongo to drop him, forget he’s in a wrestling match and get rolled up for three. Double J suffers exactly one (1) more week of this angle before he returns to the World Wrestling Federation with renewed confidence and, as we find out later, an extortion plan. I mean, it beats hitting football guys with briefcases for a living.

Worst: Ric Flair Calls In Via Toaster

Ric Flair calls in to update everyone on his situation, and boy, look at that picture-in-picture. In 1997 there was no way to get a clear photograph of someone, so you had to download a low res bitmap from AOL keyword “rasslin.” Plus, you had to make sure people saw as much of your flames and metal print as possible.

Flair’s announcement is that the Four Horsemen are officially disbanded, but that he’ll be back soon to beat up Curt Hennig for fooling him and completely winning in every way. Maybe dress up a mannequin like Mr. Perfect and get some Barker’s Beauties to say Hennig can’t get an erection? Worked against Piper.

Wooh indeed.

Best: Scott Hall’s One-Man Crusade Against Referees

Scott Hall shows up on crutches, having missed a couple of shows over the weekend due to an injury I’m assuming he suffered throwing around hoss referee Mark Curtis. He’s managing Syxx here, distracts Chris Jericho to set up the finish, then ruins the same finish he just set up by going into the ring and attacking referee Scott Dickinson with a crutch.

Well, “attack” is a strong word. He holds Scott in the corner with the crutch across his neck and gives him a pink belly. Larry Zbyszko hits the ring to break up the Buzzkiller on Jericho and stop Hall from harassing Dickinson, because a 45-year old semi-retired heel color commentator is the only guy in the company willing to step into the ring on a regular basis and say, “hey, stop it.”

Worst: We Have Our First Nitro Party Winners

No Lee Marshall this week (unless I missed him), but we do finally get to see our first lucky winners of the prestigious Nitro Party promotion. It’s a group of college students from Brown who I’m 75% sure are just 35-year old interns from the TNT studios they put in some nWo shirts and lab coats because “college.”

The entire thing is like 30 people crammed into a living room screaming YEAH WOOO at a TV screen showing other fans and no wrestling — odd — and then drinking “Nitro Punch” with dry ice in it. And then they take turns telling the camera which college they go to. It’s amazingly underwhelming, and made even better by the fact that they aired it after the sad Ric Flair phone call. “The Horsemen are disbanded, WCW will never win, and Ric Flair almost died. YEAH MUNDY NITE NITRO WOOH!”

Next week we better see Lee Marshall at one of these things with bikini girls on his lap.

Worst: I’d Wrather Be Watching Raw

Not much to report on this one, but Lex Luger hasn’t done much lately so they default to “have him put a big guy in a Torture Rack,” which is always a crowd pleaser. You could put Luger in cryogenic freeze for a thousand years and the second he thawed out he could do the Torture Rack taunt in front of complete future strangers and they’d go CRAZY. That’s gotta be the most effective taunt in wrestling history. Luger could do it in an empty warehouse and the fucking dust would form itself into a man just to clap for him.

Best: Hey, Remember The Time The Giant Teabagged Curt Hennig On National TV

Well, you do now.

This week’s main event is Curt Hennig defending the United States Championship against The Giant, and I’m out of “guess how it ends” jokes. All you really need to get out of this is (1) the image of Big Show resting his to-scale softball-sized plums on Mr. Perfect’s chin, and (2) this GIF of one of the greatest Fisherman’s suplexes you’ll ever see.

Twenty years later I’m GIF’ing it and it’s still mind-blowing. Giant kicks out at two, of course, which triggers the entire nWo to run in and attack him. That brings out Sting to beat them up by himself, which gets a DEAFENING reaction from the crowd. I can’t blame them. At this point you hadn’t seen Sting for a few weeks, Hogan kept calling him out with no response, and all you wanted in the world was for his mime-ass to drop out of the sky and chop-punch-combo them to death.

Sadly, Starrcade doesn’t go the way anybody wants it to and that Hugh Morrus-trouncing rookie has to pick up the slack. But man, what we thought Sting was gonna do to these jokers during the build.