The Best And Worst Of WCW Monday Nitro 2/1/99: Lash Monday

Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: United States Champion Bret Hart tried to give title shots to El Dandy and Hypnosis, but was shut down by the doubters.

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.

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And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for February 1, 1999.

Worst: Kimberly Falls For Scott Steiner

Scott Steiner, due to muscles-based sexual naïveté and the belief that when you defeat a man in a World Championship Wrestling match you lay claim to his wife, has been stalking Diamond Dallas Page’s wife, Kimberly. So far this has been limited to the male gaze and following her into the bathroom to explain how they should be together because they both have great bodies. This week, however, he gets an early start and harasses her during a Nitro Girls rehearsal. She accidentally falls down and hurts herself in the encounter, cementing Steiner as the company’s biggest heel for both injuring a woman and for keeping the Nitro Girls from some much, much needed practice.

WCW isn’t very good at action set-pieces, so enjoy Kimberly accidentally getting tabletopped, David Flair-style, when Steiner grabs her arm and fellow Nitro Girl AC Jazz doesn’t have the spatial reasoning to scoot out of the way of Kim’s shimmying, approaching butt:

That short, safe tumble onto carpet knocks Kimberly out, causing Steiner to flee the scene and the Nitro Girls to crouch around her with tears in their eyes like they’re Lois Lane cradling the dead body of Superman. Later, before a match with Chris Jericho, Steiner attempts to explain the situation. He also attempts to pronounce the word, “mesmerized,” and fails spectacularly. Read this out-loud in your best shrill and aggressively stupid Scott Steiner voice:

“AS YOU PEOPLE ARE MESMER-MIZED BY THE GREATEST BODY IN THE WORLD, YOU CAN SEE WHY I AM A CHAMPI-EN! AND BEING A CHAMPION MEANS YOU GOTTA TAKE ON ALL COMERS, THAT MEANS EVEN WHITE TRASH! NOW DIAMOND DALLAS PAGE, LAST TIME WE WRESTLED THERE WAS ONE STIPULATION, AND IF I BEAT YOU, I GOT TO SHOW YOUR WIFE WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE WITH A REAL MAN. YOU HEARD IT, THE WHOLE WORLD HEARD IT, AND NOW YOU GOT PROBLEM WITH IT. BUT THERE WAS ONE OTHER PERSON WHO HEARD IT, AND SHE SEEMS TO LIKE THAT STIPULATION, AND THAT’S YOUR WIFE. BECAUSE SHE’S IN THE BACK FLIRTIN’ WITH ME, ASKING QUESTIONS WHY ALL MY HOOCHIES SAY THERE’S NOTHING FINER THAN SCOTT STEINER. SO DIAMOND DALLAS PAGE, YOU NEED TO STEP ASIDE AND LET NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE, AND LET THIS BODY ROCK YOUR WIFE’S BODY UNTIL SHE TELLS ME WHO’S HER DADDY! BECAUSE IN ONE NIGHT I WILL FULFILL ALL HER FANTASIES, CAUSE AS YOU CAN SEE, THIS BODY IS NOT BUILT JUST FOR PLEASURE, AND YOU DON’T NEED NO TAPE MEASURE. BECAUSE THAT IS THE LARSHARMSWORL AND THIS BODY CAN GO. SO THIS GOES TO ALL MY FREAKS OUT THERE, BIG POPPA PUMP IS YOUR HOOKUP, HOLLER, IF YOU HEAR ME.”

Note: Jericho loses that match, badly, due to the combination of being physically outmatched by Steiner, being constantly cheated and distracted by Buff Bagwell, and interference from Perry Saturn. It starts to kinda feel like WCW’s getting together and having an intervention to make sure Jericho leaves the company and becomes a huge star as soon as possible.

Secondary Note:The Nitro Girls continue to dance throughout the night, because the show must go on.

DDP arrives to the arena about halfway through the show (because it’s a good idea to be very late to work when your wife’s spent the past few weeks being accosted by a steroid-infused sex monster with corporate gang connections) and Billy Kidman immediately narcs on Steiner. Keep an eye out for future Cruiserweight Champion ‘Primetime’ Elix Skipper and almost Evolution member Mark Jindrak as security making their on-screen debuts in the background.

An enraged Page stomps off to the Wolfpac dressing room and DEMANDS SATISFACTION, but they just make fun of him and tell him Steiner’s in another castle. You could ask 1999 Kevin Nash to recite the alphabet and he’d find a way to make “L-M-N-O-P” sound sarcastic and condescending. When Page leaves after dramatically threatening the wrath of God, we find out Steiner’s actually in THIS castle, and … might be having closet sex with Kimberly?

The angle’s probably not going in the direction you think it’s going after revisiting these segments, but I don’t want to spoil next week’s Wet Hot American Summer homage.

Adventures Of The nWo B-Team

(With apologies to Scoop This, who once hired me to write jokes and fired me a week later because they hated all my jokes.)

We catch up with the B-Team — now with their official, classic lineup of Vince, Brian Adams, Scott Norton, Stevie Ray, and Horace Hogan — stranded at the Minneapolis−Saint Paul International Airport due to Vincent’s inability to properly book them a rental car, or successfully do anything more complex than fanning a small amount of money in the background of a Million Dollar Man promo. Stevie Ray, the abstract thinker of the group, walks like 10 feet to their left, locates a driver holding up an “NWO” sign, and loudly announces that his talks with Hollywood Hogan about the treatment of his stupidest subordinates has paid off. The team hops in the limo, all except for Vincent, who is made to stay at the airport as punishment for being the world’s least secret nWo Wolfpac mole.

In what might be the least realistic moment in the history of a show that includes the thawing of a horny Himalayan ice mummy and the band KISS birthing a fully-grown, KISS-themed man from an elaborate stage womb, Vince gets on the horn with the Elite and tells them he needs a ride. Then, before he can even end the conversation, the Wolfpac limo pulls up. Vincent’s got those “spawn limo” cheats enabled.

When they get to the arena (at the same time), Stevie tries to bury Vince to Nash but, you know, Vince is right there, so they’re forced to make up. Lex Luger insists that, “we’re all Wolfpac,” which is extremely not true, and the group Too Sweets it out. Tensions are eased when the B-Team gets to the locker room and discoves nWo Elite has set them up with some of Minneapolis-St. Paul’s finest hoes.

Later, when it comes time for Scott Steiner to deliver a challenge to Diamond Dallas Page for SuperBrawl but avoid an on-the-spot beatdown, they order Vince to deliver it personally. Instead of doing what they say, Vince outsources the job to the only member of the team with less prestige, the Disco Inferno, with the note that the slap is the signal for the nWo to attack. Disco does his due diligence and slaps Page, but, like the bells at King’s Landing, the nWo’s never known a slap to mean “attack,” so Disco gets his ass beat. Nash compliments Vince for his delegation of duty, because even Disco Inferno’s friends hate Disco Inferno.

America Runs On Dunking

It’s mentioned in passing that Hollywood Hogan himself isn’t here tonight, so where is he, exactly? Before we can talk about that, we have to talk about what Eric Bischoff’s doing.

Eric Bischoff lost control of WCW to Ric Flair for 90 days, so he must do everything Flair tells him to do, no matter how demeaning, or he’ll be fired. Because that’s how jobs work. Previously he’s been stuck on ring crew, which ended with him slipping a wrench to a member of the nWo to help them win a match, and stuck behind the merch stand, which ended with him slipping a 2×4 with a foam finger on it to a member of the nWo to help them win a match. This week, Flair sets up a dunk tank outside the arena (in Minnesota, in January) so disgruntled employees can humiliate their karate biker boss in the public square. Hope this doesn’t end badly for WCW, somehow!

The dunking continues throughout the show, with the line featuring Ric Flair, Dean Malenko, the former members of the Latino World Order, and James J. Dillon, seen here missing so many pitches in a row that Bischoff has to slide himself off the seat and pretend one connected.

Other highlights include La Parka triumphantly dancing at Bischoff’s expense, and Bobby Heenan going full 1993 Raw by trying to help but tripping into the button. Bischoff insists that he’ll have the last laugh, however, repeatedly asking Flair WHERE’S YOUR KID?? Flair is instinctively like, “uh, easily winning on every WWE show every week? Oh, you meant David.” I’m kidding, even Ric doesn’t seem to care when Bischoff’s basically screaming WE ARE MURDERING YOUR SON AS WE SPEAK at him in front of everybody.

So what’s going on with David? Well, let’s talk about Ric. I promise this all ties together in the end. And it’s anti-Semitic, somehow!

Flair And Balanced

Mean (woo, by God) Gene brings Flair to the ring for Flair’s usual screamed list of regional legends and a series of announcements, including booking Bret Hart to defend the United States Championship against Chris Benoit at SuperBrawl. This is a thing people would like to see, so WCW baits and switches it before the segment’s even over. Scott Hall shows up, wonders if Benoit got the title shot for washing Flair’s car, and says HE should get the shot, because he bought a taser a month ago and started bring it to work. This sets up Hall vs. Benoit for later in the night, but not before Benoit interrupts the interruption and says the kind of sentence only Chris Benoit with a microphone is bad enough to deliver. None of this is a typo.

“Guts? You wanna talk about guts? We’ll find out just how much you’ve got after I ninnerduce into my foot to your brown-eye.”

I’ll go ahead and spoil the match for you: Benoit loses, because Benoit always loses — it’s not even his only loss on the night, as he got pinned by Curt Hennig in a tag match in hour one — and the Outsiders stand tall, literally and figuratively.

The best part of the entire segment is Flair reacting to the nWo interruption by trying to Too Sweet Mean Gene and not knowing how it works.

That means the United States Championship match at SuperBrawl will be nWo vs. nWo and heel vs. heel unless, you know, someone should happen to arrive by boat and ruin everything.

Hilarious Worst: Buffer Is The Stuff(er)

Fun note about the main event, this is the episode where the normally corny but reliable Michael Buffer huffs a bunch of paint before he comes to the ring and can’t get anything right. He describes Benoit vs. Hall as, “a special heavyweight eliminator match,” for some reason, and says Benoit, “brings to the ring one of the great legacies of professional wrestling, a family tree filled with history.” When a person teaches you how to wrestle, do you get added to their family tree? It’s also the one where Buffer, who has been working here a long-ass time by now, doesn’t know Bret Hart’s name:

More on Bret ‘Hitman’ Clark‘s situation in a bit, but let’s recap.

Ric Flair is confident that the nWo is finally falling apart because Hollywood Hogan’s not at the arena (which happens fairly often) and Bischoff’s getting humiliated with parking lot carnival games. Bischoff’s like, HEY RIC FLAIR YOUR SON DAVID IS DOOMED, DOOOOOOMED, but Flair can’t put the pieces together. Can you? ARE YOU THE WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE?

Hold on to your butts, as it turns out Hogan isn’t in Minnesota because he’s hanging out in the parking lot of a Charlotte eye doctor and stalking David Flair. Hogan is accompanied by Oz actor and former president of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels, Chuck Zito, because the one thing Hogan and Bischoff have in common is that they’re obsessed with wanting bikers to think they’re cool. Here he tries to impress Zito by calling the camera man a, “jiggly, jiggly Jew,” which is retroactively on-brand for the Hulkster.

From the 2/15/99 Observer:

“There was some heat on Hogan calling the camera man a ‘jiggly, jiggly, jew’ on Nitro, but evidently not enough for the segment not to have been replayed on every show during the week.”

[breathes through teeth]

Worst: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

In other nWo news that won’t end badly for everyone, Konnan and Rey Mysterio are sick of the Wolfpac’s anti-lucha libre shenanigans and challenge them to a match at SuperBrawl, sweetening the pot by saying they can have any stipulation they want. In a moment that will come back to bite him in the ass and then not matter at all a few years later, Mysterio offers to put his mask on the line against Nash’s hair, or Luger’s hair, or even Miss Elizabeth’s hair. Konnan explains their motivations thusly:

“Lex and Nash, you bum-rushed little Rey, I know why you did it, to get back to me. But you know that’s like going into a bank taking they cheddar and they gold bullions and on your way out you shoot the teller who happens to be in a wheelchair. That ain’t thug, that ain’t cool, that ain’t me. I don’t ride like that.”

Yes, K-Dogg, trying to remove a wrestler’s mask is exactly like stealing bullions and murdering a handicapped person. Konnan isn’t like that. He would NEVER steal bullions from a bank and then pistol-whip the differently abled. He promises Nash and Luger that he and Rey will, “make you two strawberry fools BOW DOWN,” and burns them with a mic drop line that makes a little less sense every time you read it: “You guys used to be my stand-up dogs, too bad you now have to sit down in the bathroom to take aim.” I only liked you when you pissed standing up, assholes. Luger and Nash later accept the match and put Liz’s hair on the line, because that was presented as one of the options.

In Other nWo News, Because Somehow There Isn’t Enough Content About This One Faction

Ernest ‘The Cat’ Miller shows up and does his normal “I’m the greatest” call-out, declaring he can whoop errbody in here if necessary to prove his worth as a Karate Champion. Scott Norton was in the bathroom for this, apparently, and when he gets out the nWo does a bit where they pretend Miller called Norton out specifically to piss him off. Norton, with the mind of an enraged child and the body of an enormous beer keg, power-walks to the ring and throws Miller into the Earth about it. This is one of those matches that looks good on paper, looks GREAT as a match in a video game, and is fun but a little underwhelming in practice. Still, part of me wishes I could go back in time and book a three-month Ernest Miller vs. Scott Norton feud that turned 15 minutes of every Monday Nitro into PANCRASE.

You Know

On a show that’s already featured “mesmer-mized” and “don’t shoot the handicapped man when you’re done stealing gold coins from Wells Fargo,” you might be surprised to learn that it’s Booker T who has the worst promo of the night. I cut out the Gene interjections and emboldened every time he says, “you know,” because, you know, you will not believe it.

“You know you come up here axing me these questions you know I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking the same thing the people out in TV land are thinking.

“With a torn ACL and you know received by Bret Hart you know um you know the doctors you know they told me to take six months off you know me being you know the stubborn mule you know and the fan mail coming in, I took three and a half months off and I came back you know ready to raise the roof if you know what I’m saying.

“You know that’s what I’ve done you know, but you know after that match last week with Bret Hart you know I had to rethink this whole process you know, um, you know … well Gene, where I’m from, when you get caught slipping, you get ganked, you dig? And that’s just the way it is. But um, you know a guy told me Booker T you need to refocus you need to rethink this thing, you need to turn a negative into a positive and that’s what I’m gonna do, you know the committee told me tonight at SuperBrawl I’ve got the Disco Inferno an nWo Wolfpac wanna be, you know right now he’s on track, he’s on fire, you know but um the BT Express is coming hard and he’s coming correct and Disco Inferno I want to let you know you’re on the track and you gon’ get derailed sucka, Booker T, at SUPERBRAWL, I promise YOU, he will raise the roof.”

Yeah, but does he know?

Best/Worst: Nitro Debuts Of The Week

ECW Hardcore Icon The Sandman pops up on this episode, wrapped in barbed wire, performing the very Sandman task of mercy-killing a Kenny Kaos vs. Van Hammer match by hitting them both in the face with a stick. The announce team is stunned, asking, “What is this all about, and who in the world is this?” Apparently they don’t keep up with wrestling outside of WCW, despite the whole “butts in seats” debacle, and don’t watch Nitro, where Sandman’s popped up as “Jim” in those Raven at home segments.

Sandman, not yet identified by Jim or his eventual (terrible) WCW identify of “Hardcore Hak,” calls out — his words, not mine — BAM BAM BAG-ALOW. Nobody’s watching any wrestling anywhere, it’s fine. “Bag-alow” shows up and more or less kicks his ass while the announce team buries him for stupidly wrapping himself in barbed wire. ECW was really great about taking guys who weren’t necessarily special or good and saying, “THESE ARE THE COOLEST BAD-ASSES IN THE WORLD,” until you believed them. WCW takes the coolest bad-asses in the world and are like, “fans, we want to let you know that Hollywood Hogan will be here tonight.”

As a quick side note, Goldberg shows up after this to challenge Bag-alow to a match at SuperBrawl. I’m sad Sabu didn’t randomly show up and throw a chair at Bill’s face.

Finally we have the WCW Monday Nitro debut of the Ragin’ Cajun, Lash LeRoux, who joins Blitzkrieg (also debuting soon) on the short list of lower lower under-card guys every WCW fan loved. He’s from Louisiana, you see — Alabama, actually, but kayfabe Louisiana — and he shaved his sideburns into L shapes. He traces them with his finger sometimes. That’s pretty much it. I don’t know why everyone on Earth including me loves him, but I think it has something to do with the lack of legitimate redheads in wrestling.

His match with Kidman is really good, too, complete with elaborate step-assisted dives over the security railing and into the crowd, and the announce team actually puts Lash over for doing well enough on WCW Saturday Night to earn a spot on Nitro. Kidman wins, of course, but Lash is different and innocuous enough to instantly become a smark favorite.

NOW BRING ON BLITZKRIEG.

Next Week:

Kanyon learns an important lesson about how Raven’s childhood is a worked shoot, a mysterious blonde makes her first appearance en route to a spot in the WWE Hall of Fame, and Bret Hart ends up in a United States Championship match against an Alcatraz escapee.

Also,

See you then.