Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: Nitro returned to two hours and stopped being an NBA Playoffs pre-show, so Hollywood Hogan also returned and was like, “hey everyone, look at Hollywood Hogan!” Note: Hogan does not appear on this episode.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for June 2, 1997.
Worst: James J. Dillon, Hard-Ass
About a month and a half ago, WCW named former Four Horsemen impresario and Buddy Landel spokesperson J.J. Dillon as head of the executive committee. In that same episode, Eric Bischoff showed up and was like, “bite me, you have no authority.” A few weeks later, Bischoff actually said this to Dillon’s face in the middle of the ring, calling his bluff. Dillon did nothing.
This week, James J. decides he’s going to be the toughest and most inscrutable bad-ass, because character consistency was never WCW’s strong suit. The show opens with Scott Hall and Syxx once again promising to throw Ric Flair and Flair’s aggressively heterosexual friend HOT ROD into the La Brea tar pits or whatever, so J.J. interrupts and says that Flair’s on a jet to Dayton, OH, right now, and Scott Hall will face him one-on-one in the main event or be forced to “leave the tag titles on his desk.” If you’re keeping score, this means the nWo — the organization that won the right to have any title match they want whenever they want it, and who have explicitly said the WCW executive committee has no power over them, save for costing them the precious contracts of Big Bubber and I.M. Wallstreet — must go through the motions of another nWo run-in in a no-finish main event or give up the championships they lost a couple of times but got back because they said “GIVE THOSE BACK TO US.” Got it.
Flair does indeed show up, thanks to some “favorable tailwinds coming in from Charlotte,” as best illustrated by this screencap that makes him look like he’s being sucked into an airplane engine. This segment gets a glorious supplemental Best, by the by, for Flair saying he’s going to kick Hall’s, “toothpick chewin’, WHITE HONKY ASS.”
In context it’s a pretty funny half-shoot on Hall pretending to be Cuban and doing a bad Scarface voice from Razor Ramon on. Out of context, it’s an extremely funny moment of Ric Flair, the dictionary definition of a honky, calling anyone else in the world a honky. Ric Flair as an anti-white social justice warrior or whatever is the greatest gimmick that never happened. MEEEEEEEAN, WOOO, PRIVILEGED GENE!
Hall vs. Flair goes exactly like you’d expect. It’s pretty good at times, with Flair doing his nuclear CHOP EVERYTHING THAT MOVES thing and the twice-the-size-of-Flair Scott Hall bumping way too hard off a 50-year old’s phantom jabs, but ends with Syxx interfering and Hall hitting Flair with a title belt for the DQ. They hold him up in the ring and slap him around a little until Rowdy Roddy PIper … haha, just kidding, until Jeff Jarrett and Mongo show up and run them off. Piper’s still off somewhere filming I’m Your Man 2: The KY Connection or whatever.
Dillon shows up again at the end of the episode to get in the face of the Macho Man Randy Savage, the single craziest and most prone-to-hitting-non-wrestlers wrestler alive, and be all, “I don’t have any respect for you, because you stood in the crowd when you cut promos on Diamond Dallas Page like a coward and also I bet you don’t have any balls, here, let he stick my neck out and tilt my chin up and say more mean shit to you, I bet nothing will happen.” He gets punched. Then, when referees and Eric Bischoff and Security’s Deadliest Santa Doug Dellinger show up to separate them, Savage breaks through and punches J.J. a few more times. And yeah, Savage is a crazy nut, but I’m not sure any non-Hogan human being in the two-year run of Nitro episodically needed to be punched more.
Next week’s episode is built around the drama of “what will happen to the Macho Man now?” Spoiler alert, he still gets to main-event WCW’s pay-per-view, only now his match will be non-sanctioned, which means there are no rules and anyone from the nWo can interfere. Good call, J.
Best: it’s A Bad Week To Be Alex Wright’s Head
This week’s opener sees everyone’s favorite Caucasian Ice Ninja — okay, the only Caucasian ice ninja — Glacier take on the human eggplant emoji, Alex Wright. Wright jumps Glacier before the bell and beats him down pretty effectively, but can’t stop pausing to hold up his hands and crotch-thrust at the audience. This gives Glashe enough time to recover, hit one (1) Cryonic Kick and score the win. It was only one kick, but to be fair, he really cold cocked him.
[cough]
After the match, Mortis and Wrath jump Glacier to get a measure of revenge for the locked-door whoopin’ handed out by Ernest ‘The Cat’ Miller at Slamming Jamboree. Alex decides his blood is running a little cold, too, despite evidence to the contrary, and helps them out. Mortis instructs Wright to hold him for a superkick, and since nobody in wrestling history has ever successfully completed a superkick while a third party was holding the victim’s arms back, Wright gets his shit kicked out for the second time on the night.
Part of me — okay, all of me — wishes Blood Runs Cold had really taken off, and that they’d shaved Alex Wright and turned him into Berlyn two years early to be a Mortal Kombat villain with them. Imagine Disco Inferno as one of those Cyrax-ass Mortal Kombat robots but with like, an exoskeleton made out of disco balls.
Best: Vicious And Delicious
Up next, Buff Bagwell takes on the physical opposite of Buff Bagwell, Desperado Joe Gomez. Gomez looks like he donated his muscles to Buff, so now he’s shaped like a child Gorgon from Zelda.
The major development here is that Buff is back from his job as one of the founding gaijin in nWo Japan, where he bonded and formed a tag team with Scott “Flash” Norton called “Vicious and Delicious.” If you’ve never heard that before, congratulations, you’re now aware of the greatest tag team name ever. The only thing that would’ve been better is if they’d called themselves “Thick and Laying It On.”
Buff wins a quick match with a Blockbuster, because you could beat Joe Gomez with a fucking Hollywood Video.
Worst: Prince Iaukea Cannot Perform Basic Wrestling Holds
Before we throw too much shade at Joe Gomez for having the physique of a balloon animal, here’s Prince Iaukea, who proves that having muscles and being in good shape does not make you an athlete.
Before the match even starts, Konnan hits Hugh Morrus in the back of the head with a broom (?) to continue his extended leaving of the Dungeon of Doom. The Dungeon of Broom? Anyway, Hugh Morrus is Con Cussed, so the match is supposed to be Prince baseball sliding through his legs and schoolboying him for an instant three. This takes like, two minutes. Here’s a picture of the first attempt, in which Hugh takes a wide stance with his leg up and Prince just kinda butt-fumbles into it chest first.
On the second attempt, Hugh decides to eliminate the difficulty of a baseball slide and tells Prince to duck a line. Prince ducks it, and Hugh goes instantly comatose, standing in the center of the ring staring forward, waiting to be rolled up. Prince just kinda runs into him, then backs up and puts his hand on Hugh’s butt. I’m not making this up. Hugh has to turn around and take a dropkick to stall, and then they go BACK to the baseball slide plan. Prince is able to put it all together here, and finally executes the impossible PUT YOUR HANDS BETWEEN MY LEGS SO I CAN LAY BACKWARDS AND THEN YOU JUST STAY THERE for three. Jesus Christ. Disappointed this didn’t end with Regal showing up and shit-kicking him again for professional reasons.
Worst: As The Haliburton Turns
No actual Hailburton action this week, but here’s Jeff Jarrett trying to cost Dean Malenko a match against “Occupy” M. Wallstreet by grabbing his feet during an outside-in vertical suplex. The story is that Jarrett wants to prove that his loss to Malenko at Slam Jamboree was daffally frook. As you might expect, Jarrett totally fucks up his interference here, allowing Malenko to recover and tap out Wallstreet anyway. Which is double weird because this was a United States Championship match, so Jarrett was trying to cause Malenko to lose the belt so he could, uh, beat Malenko for the belt. This plot brought to you by ANTHEM.
After the match, Jarrett calls Malenko an “un-charismatic block of ice,” which shows Honky Ric Flair levels of self-awareness, and challenges him to a rematch for the championship next week. Mongo shows up, Haliburton in hand, to interrupt and cut a totally unrelated promo on Kevin Greene. The idea is that you’re super sure Mongo is going to interfere again next week, but surprise! Swerve! He doesn’t.
Somebody else does, though, because this is WCW, and “someone interfered” is the only way the titles ever change hands.
It’s also the way we decide #1 contender matches!
Worst: As The #1 Contendership Turns
Somewhere in the middle of the show, James J. Dillon announces that the WCW executive committee board of committed executives has been looking “at the recent records,” and have decided that the Steiner Brothers are the number one contenders to the Outsiders’ Tag Team Championship. We know how well that worked out the last time. This brings out Members Of Harlem Heat and Sista Sherri, who insist that THEY’re the number one contenders. Dillon is like, “if the Steiners win their match tonight, they are a LOCK for the number one contendership.” He says this to Harlem Heat’s faces. He might as well have followed it up with, “I’m sure that match will have a CLEAN FINISH,” winking at them and nudging Sherri in the ribs.
So the Steiners wrestle Chono and the Great Muta, aka Sonny Without A Chance. What you’re seeing in that picture is Harlem Heat running down and blasting Rick Steiner with a chair while Scott stands in the ring holding Muta on his shoulders, waiting for nothing. With Rick knocked out, Muta … uh, hooks on a leg lock instead of going for a lateral press, and Rick has his shoulders counted down in the submission. Sure!
After the match, Harlem Heat is like, “NOTHING UNFAIR HAPPENED, NOW WE’RE NUMBER ONE CONTENDERS!” Dillon shows up and says the match is “under review,” and that neither Harlem Heat NOR nWo Japan are number one contenders. Ric Flair needs to come out here and run J.J. up the flagpole for being such an exclusive honky.
Later in the night, Harlem Heat wrestles Ciclope and Damien. BET YOU CAN’T GUESS WHAT HAPPENS.
The referee decides to like, bury his entire upper body in Ciclope’s abdomen so the Steiners can run out and blatantly attack Booker T with a chair. That sets up the Heat to take a shocking loss to a lower-than-undercard luchador team, but somehow DOESN’T set up Ciclope and Damien vs. Muta and Chono for the number one contendership. Can somebody hit somebody else with a briefcase already?
Finally this week, we have two horrible sights.
The first is Lee Marshall’s 1-800-COLLECT Road Report from Boston. I’m just gonna type this out again.
“As you know, Boston has so many sports legends it’s really hard to keep track. A lot of our own WCW stars are close friends with some of Boston’s best; for example, maybe you didn’t know this, Tony, that Sting actually once sent a special pair of basketball shoes to Larry Bird and he scored 40 points that night. Lex Luger once sent a special pair of skates to Bobby Orr, and Orr had a hat trick that night. And I’ll bet Boston fans would like to know that BOBBY THE BRAIN HEENAN once sent a customized WONDER WEASEL FIRST BASEMAN’S MITT to Bill Bucker and that day he only made one error!”
Shout-out to Luger for sending Bobby Orr a pair of skates when he was 17, because Orr stopped playing for Boston in 74-75. You really couldn’t update your sports references for 1997, Lee? Lex Luger can’t like Ray Bourque? Sting can’t teach Dee Brown how to dab?
The last is Chris Benoit vs. The Barbarian, which is definitely a Best in that there’s no better way to spend two minutes of Nitro, but also kind of a Worst in that Barb does not play and Benoit’s never like, “maybe DON’T kick me in the temple as hard as you can and drop me on my face a bunch?” It’s dope, but it’s also terrifying. For example, here’s that throwing belly-to-belly they do off the top rope. Here’s a further example, in which Barbarian OH MY GOD-
BARBARIAN, NO. NO.
