Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: We had a bash at the beach watching DDP and Karl Malone lose to Hollywood Hogan and Dennis Rodman, Rey Mysterio powerbomb himself into sand from the top of a lifeguard tower, and Nick Patrick take the world’s most dramatic ref bump.
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 and all the episodes of Thunder on the Best and Worst of Thunder. Follow along with the competition here.
Remember, if you want us to keep writing 20-year-old WCW jokes, click the share buttons and spread the column around. If you don’t tell them how much you like these, nobody’s going to read them. We’re almost to Jay Leno. Hooray! Question mark?
And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for July 13, 1998.
Worst: Hollywood Hogan’s Worst Insult Ever, Somehow
AND THEN WE CROSS IT, BROTHER
Last week, Hollywood Hogan lost the WCW Heavyweight Championship to William Scott Goldberg in the biggest Nitro ever. He recovered nicely by using a Brutus Beefcake assist trophy to defeat the Blueberry Fruit Roll-Up Pants Connection in the BasketBrawl at Bash at the Beach, and now he’s decided to open Nitro with one of his favorite pastimes: the nWo is like the mob promo.
You’ve seen him do this before, where he suddenly gets obsessed about the “pecking order” of the New World Order and starts describing everything as “handling business” inside “the family.” Fun fact, Bernardo Provenzano also became a powerful mob boss by giving matching t-shirts to 40 of his friends and helping them beat someone up 41-on-1 every Monday night around 11 PM. Anyway, Hogan’s decided to be upset at Scott Hall for “not getting the job done” against Goldberg last week and preventing the title match from happening, which sets up Hall vs. Hogan with Eric Bischoff as special guest referee for later. I’ll give you 100 guesses as to how that match ends, and the first one’s correct.
The highlight here is Hogan trying to defeat Hall in a cool pro wrestling insults battle, which is great because Scary Terry makes Road Warrior Hawk sound like Oscar Wilde. The man who thinks Sting is a “wiener dog,” called Kevin Nash a “big sexy girlfriend” for like a month, and has called DDP “DD pee-pee” on more than one occasion manages to top himself with this exchange.
“Hollywood, you want some of Scott Hall? Don’t sing it, bring it!”
“You got it, brother. I guess, we draw the line tonight. So wax up your pigtail, little Bo-Peep, because I’m the big, bad creep tonight.”
Yeah, Little Miss Muffet, tell your big sexy girlfriend that there’s all curds and no whey you’re winning tonight.
Diamond Dallas Page, arguably the top singles star in the company right now, is barely able to defeat Brutus Bikecake with a surprise roll-up after fighting off some nWo interference.
Since pinning DDP in a pay-per-view main event where one of two non-wrestlers could’ve taken the pinfall wasn’t enough, Hogan shows up after the match to beat him to death with a steel chair. He then gets the nWo to hold Page down so he can sit on his chest and punch him in the face a bunch. Cool, cool.
Hogan, who is clearly coked out of his mind or something tonight, shows up again later to interrupt a wheelchair-bound Buff Bagwell’s attempt at a reconciliation with the man who injured him, an also injured Rick Steiner. Hollywood drops this line, and before you read it, I’d like to remind you that Rick Steiner is standing like 10 feet in directly in front of him with his arm in a sling.
“You know something, the one thing I hate more than a couple cowards, is a couple cripples. So the best thing for you to do, hound dog, is to stay back if you … unless you want another leg broken.”
Hogan, who cannot differentiate arms from legs, calls Bagwell both “little Buffy” and “Cream Puff Bagwell,” tells him he’s tired of “all the babyface crap,” and does this:
Don’t worry, Hogan gets his comeuppance in the match with Hall.
Hahahaha, yeah, right, this is Monday Nitro, you marks. Nobody’s allowed to be happy here, even for a second.
The Hall vs. Hogan match goes about like you’d expect, with Hogan giving Hall the bare minimum of cartoonish heel selling before more or less kicking his ass while special guest referee Eric Bischoff cheats for him. When this becomes too much, Diamond Dallas Page storms the ring to attack Hogan and Bischoff, and Kevin Nash makes the save for his best friend. The two even share a Too Sweet that pops the crowd, and then whoops, Hall attacks Nash from behind and all the Crappy Babyfaces® get beaten down. Despite Hollywood Hogan being a complete a-hole to Scott Hall for no reason, Hogan kicking Hall’s ass for a majority of their match, and Bischoff as special referee openly cheating for Hogan and treating Hall like his enemy, Hall is 100% loyal to Hogan, apparently because he “needs money,” and the other nWo full of people who want to be nice to him and be his friend work for free.
Bash at the Beach and this Nitro are what you get when Hulk Hogan loses one match and has to spend the next three months “getting his heat back.” An actual nightmare.
By The Way
Wondering what the Wolfpac was doing for the rest of the episode? Why, they’re locked in a sudden, one-sided feud with Disco Inferno and Alex Wright, which is definitely a thing that needed to happen. Pictured above is Lex Luger preventing Das Wunderkind from interfering in Bash at the Beach’s impromptu Disco Inferno vs. Konnan match and getting a full handful of dick to support the Torture Rack. Look at that grip, Luger could’ve waved him around like a flag by that thing.
On Nitro, we have two Wolfpac matches:
- Konnan vs. Barry Darsow, which is the kind of match you wanna run to make sure viewers don’t flip over to Raw to see what Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker are doing, and which would’ve been 1000% better as Konnan vs. the Repo Man
- Kevin Nash and Lex Luger vs. Disco Inferno and Alex Wright, which is the 1998 equivalent of John Cena and Roman Reigns vs. Zack Ryder and Curt Hawkins. Or like, Curt Hawkins and a second, worse Curt Hawkins. It ends with everyone in the Wolfpac taking turns beating up the jobbers for fun, and the referee allowing it, because reasons
WCW, the Future Is Now
Honestly the only highlight is Disco Inferno getting scared and tagging out because of titty intimidation.
Other Things To Make Sure You’re Completely Depressed From This Episode
Remember how Chris Jericho had run Dean Malenko out of the company and hounded him for months about how embarrassing he was to his dead father’s memory, and how Malenko returned at Slamboree in one of the coolest WCW “hero” moments ever? And how that ended with Jericho more or less immediately getting the belt back and negating the entire thing?
Unrelated story, but do you remember how Jericho had injured Rey Mysterio, keeping him off the show for about six months, only to bring out a midget dressed like Rey and “lose” to him to create a fake number one contender? And how cool it was literally a day ago when Mysterio actually returned at Bash at the Beach, pinned Jericho, and became Cruiserweight Champion? Well, here’s Jericho bringing up the fact that Malenko showing up to cause a distraction means the match technically “never happened” per the WCW rule book, meaning he’s still champion, Mysterio has to give him his belt back, and everything they did at the pay-per-view was meaningless. I love Chris Jericho a lot, but WCW’s working overtime to make sure nobody watching is happy about anything.
To continue that trend, Jericho suggests Mysterio and Malenko have a match against one another to see who should be number one contender, then whips Malenko in the kidneys with the Cruiserweight Championship to make sure he loses. Doing a great job of keeping Malenko’s momentum going after that star-making Ciclope moment two months ago, guys.
The opening match of the night is Horace vs. The Barbarian, which is depressing enough, but check this out: The Flock attacks Barbarian to keep him from winning the match, Barbarian’s long lost tag team partner The Monster Meng returns to make the save and single-handedly kick The Flock’s asses, then immediately swerves the man he just saved and attacks him.
Yes, WCW used the opening match of their post-pay-per-view show to create and destroy the idea of the Babyfaces of Fear in the span of a two-minute Horace Hogan match.
Championship win ret-cons, unnecessary swerves, and people in wheelchairs getting shoved over got you bummed? How about a career ending injury? Would that help?
Way back at February’s SuperBrawl VIII, Television Championship hopeful and former Native American-hating male model Rick Martel got his knee shredded when his leg hit the middle rope during a hip toss (of all things) and had to sit out for five months.
He makes his big return to face Stevie Ray on Nitro and is about to win when Bret Hart shows up and smashes him in the back of the head with a steel chair (pictured above). That allows Stevie to hit his new “Flapjack” finisher, aka Triple H’s Pedigree, and win the match. The only problem is that when you take a Pedigree you bump on your knees, and Martel didn’t want to do that since he was just coming back from knee surgery. So he keeps his legs straight out during the move, to protect them, and takes the bump on his neck, like so:
That proved to be a pretty terrible idea, as the bump wrecked two vertebrae in his neck and proved to be the actual, official career-ending injury for Martel at the end of his first match back. Super depressing. He’d wrestle one more exhibition match about a year later in Hawaii against the “Metal Maniac” for HIWF, but he’d never step in the ring for a major promotion again, outside of training and hosting the French versions of WCW programming.
Vaya con dios, Rick Martel, the Power Planet needed a guy to steal Tatanka’s ceremonial feathers and racistly atomize them with French-Canadian cologne.
Slightly Less Depressing Content From This Week’s Episode Includes
Want to see the Four Horsemen reunite in WCW and take on the nWo, once and for all? Steve McMichael certainly does. So does the crowd, who have saved up enough complimentary AOL hours to read about the real-life feud between WCW and Ric Flair and have started chanting “WE WANT FLAIR” on every show.
To address this, WCW runs Mongo vs. Eddie Guerrero on Nitro and ends it on a disqualification (despite there being no actual interference or illegal contact) because Chavo Guerrero Jr. has ridden to the ring on a hobby horse because he wants to “be a Horseman.” This is what the people want!
Here’s cheating-ass trifling-ass Hacksaw Jim Duggan attacking Rick Fuller from behind to start their match, because this cross-eyed sasquatch motherfucker needs a cheap shot to get a leg up on Rick Fuller. I would honestly like to know who decided to follow up a massive Georgia Dome Nitro and a massive ratings win with a card featuring Barry Darsow vs. Konnan, Jim Duggan vs. Rick Fuller, and like four Hulk Hogan swerves.
Bret Hart vs. Fit Finlay probably would’ve been pretty good if it hadn’t been four minutes long, with roughly 30 seconds of that being a chinlock, and the other 3:30 being Bret doing his Five Moves of Doom in order.
Speaking of marathon matches, Curt Hennig cuts a promo explaining that while yeah, he lost to Goldberg at Bash at the Beach, he’s finally been in the ring with him and knows the secret to beating him. So they sign a rematch for the main event, and it opens — opens — like this:
Bell-to-bell it’s about a minute and 20 seconds, which is roughly a minute of stalling and 20 seconds of action. It’s also two and a half minutes shorter than the Bash at the Beach match, and the Michael Buffer introduction is like four times as long. Hennig has finally figured out Goldberg’s secret: you can defeat him by losing as quickly as possible. Hugh Morrus could’ve told you that eight months ago my dude.
The closest thing to a “good match” on this entire three-hour show is Raven vs. Saturn vs. Kanyon, what with its fan favorite Tower Of Doom spot, but even that ends hilariously in a double count-out. Yes, you read that correctly, a triple threat match ends in a double count-out. Saturn and Kanyon fight up the ramp, so the referee counts them out and gives Raven the win. What would’ve happened if Raven had wandered up the ramp by himself? Would Kanyon and Saturn have both won via count-out?
Shut it down.
Next Week:
source: Dennis Miller
- two random title changes, because reasons
- Buff Bagwell’s extremely covert swerve plans that are not obvious at all are finally revealed
- Nitro continuing to battle Raw in the Monday Night Wars by booking a Jim Powers match and a Johnny Boone match
- Eric Bischoff’s Tonight Show parody, back by popular demand
All this and a 10-minute Hollywood Hogan promo! You can’t wait!
