The Best And Worst Of WCW Monday Nitro 3/9/98: Well, It’s The Big Show

Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Thunder: We celebrated Macho Man Randy Savage’s Real Man Of The Year award from Harvard University, learned that Chris Jericho has counted up the number of holds he knows (1,004), and we met CHASE TATUM, the new face of the No Limit Soldiers next year.

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.

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And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for March 9, 1998.

Worst: Sex Education From Hulk Hogan

In case you decided to read this while you were eating breakfast, here’s Hollywood Hogan opening the show by saying Miss Elizabeth “did the boys” in the locker room back in the day, complete with penis and vagina (and/or butthole) fingers to illustrate.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s a recap: for the past couple of months, the Macho Man Randy Savage and Hollywood Hogan have been figuratively at each other’s throats about the “pecking order” of the New World Order, and have been almost getting into fights only for them to be interrupted by a mysterious NEW member of the Order, Brutus Beefcake with a Santa Claus beard and a leather vest. He still doesn’t have a name yet, but he’s got a Stone Cold Stunner five times worse than the Disco Inferno’s, if that tells you anything.

The idea for anyone paying even a mild amount of attention is that (1) Sting is a stupid idiot who will fall for anything, and (2) the nWo is so bored after being in two years of complete, unstoppable power that they’re orchestrating Machiavellian soap-opera schemes to lull him into a false sense of security that they can … punch him, I guess? And there are like 30 of them now, and Sting enters from backstage instead of the ceilings on most days, so you’d think they could just go find him and punch him, but nope, it’s a month-plus of Hogan being jealous of Macho Man’s fake awards and calling his ex-wife a whore. And then BRUTUS BEEFCAKE.

On this week’s episode, we spend three full hours setting up the Biggest Match In The History Of Our Sport™: Hollywood Hogan teaming up with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash to take on Sting, Macho Man, and The Giant. Instead of devoting an entire section of this recap to sarcastic build, here’s an un-doctored picture from WCW Monday Nitro 1998 of The Giant entering the match under a banner of signs reading THE BIG SHOW.

Crazy, right? I’ll explain the reason that’s actually there in a minute, but let me type this same goddamn paragraph again: the blockbuster nWo vs. WCW match that will change the face of our sport forever goes a couple of minutes before Kevin Nash gets tired of wrestling and jogs to the back, and then Grizzly Beefcake shows up and chaps the Macho Man with a Stunner before Hogan can get got. Hogan calls it “The Apocalypse … the End of the Line!” because even Brutus Beefcake’s moves have to have five additional names.

Uncensored is only a week away, and Sting’s like, “yes, helping this guy from the nWo fight another guy from the nWo seems like a great way to not get punched in the back of my head.”

Worst: When Lenny Met Lodi

Okay, so that “The Big Show” sign is there for the same reason Lodi’s holding up a sign that says “JOHN BOY AND BILLY ROCK!” WCW’s in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for this show, and North Carolina’s #1 morning zoo in 1998 belonged to the John Boy and Billy Big Show, the perfect radio show to listen to while you’re eating biscuits and gravy from Hardee’s. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience as a guy whose dad is on the radio, and who does not ever want to hear his own dad’s voice coming out of the radio. If WCW had turned into TNA at this point, I’d be writing about John Boy and Billy doing a run-in to cost somebody the tag titles.

Also a sign that we’re in Winston-Salem: the opening match of the night is Ernest Miller vs. Damián 665, and the black guy has to wrestle the Mexican guy under a confederate flag.

The second match is Lenny Lane vs. Sick Boy, which is the kind of WCW Saturday Night-ass match you get in hour one of Nitro when you’ve booked your top babyface to be a quiet guy who lives in the ceiling, and put all your other characters into a single, evil gang. If you’re wondering why Lenny Lane never got a singles push as a cruiserweight star despite having a good body, decent technical skills, and the looks of a Kirkland Signature Chris Jericho, it’s probably because of this match. Lenny gets his shot at glory, goes for a quebrada, and almost kills himself. In WCW terms we call this “Christopher Daniels’ing yourself.”

Sick Boy wins with a Pedigree, because WCW desperately wants to give lame dudes top WWF finishers, so you’ve got two people (Sick Boy and Konnan) using the Pedigree, and two people (Disco Inferno and The Disciple) using the Stone Cold Stunner. There are already 10-15 people backstage trying to convince Brad Armstrong to do a Road Dogg gimmick.

Longtime WCW fans may recognize this as the first on-screen meeting of Lenny Lane and Lodi, who eventually team up as the West Hollywood Blondes to combat wicked clowns with in-your-face Year 2000 homophobia. Are you bothered when men eat lollipops, because lollipops look like dicks? This is the team for you!

Best: Chavo Guerrero Jr. Strongly Dislikes Mustard, But Loves His Uncle

Learning from Hollywood Hogan’s suggestive sign language is Chavo Guerrero Jr., who shows up for a Cruiserweight Championship match against Chris Jericho either trying to steal Shocker’s gimmick or declare himself Version One.

While they’ve been doing it on and off on the b-shows, this is the first time on Nitro we really lean into the “Eddie Guerrero emotionally and professionally manipulates his dippy nephew for fame and fortune” angle, which will lead to the timeless EDDIE GUERRERO IS MY FAVORITE WRESTLER t-shirt. Here, Eddie’s upset that Chavo’s getting a shot at the championship before he gets one, so he’s simultaneously trying to root him on while totally getting in his way and costing him the match. Then, when Chavo loses — which is what Eddie wanted in the first place — Eddie gets in the ring, beats him up, and screams at him for losing. You know you’re a good heel when you can manage to be the least reasonable person involved in a WCW Chris Jericho segment.

Best: Jericho Tries Out Being A Cult Leader

You’d think Jericho showing up for his match in Juventud’s mask with a horribly airbrushed MONDAY NIGHT JERICHO shirt would be his episode highlight, but nope, he shows up during Dean Malenko vs. Bill Kidman and tries to COMMANDEER THE FLOCK. Dude’s thought process is that if Raven can get them to do his bidding, HE should be able to EASILY point them in the direction of a guy he hates and make them attack on his behalf.

He even comically leads them into the ring after the match, gathers them in the corner, and tries to lead them in a charge across the ring. It goes about how you’d expect:

Sorry, Chris, only the mental acumen of a former pretty boy turned entitled grunge cult leader is powerful enough to control a sexually-aggressive pirate, a reformed mummy, and a bunch of drug addicts.

Best/Worst: The Big Dog, DDP

As for Raven, he and Perry Saturn (now with real hair that looks like a Pee-wee Herman wig) team up against Chris Benoit and Diamond Dallas Page. Page has upped his rib tape game to include a full back brace over the tape, which makes his guts nigh-invulnerable and looks like Roman Reigns’ idea of a cumberbund.

The match is good while it lasts, which is about the best thing you can say about Nitro matches in 1998, and ends with comical babyface miscommunication: Benoit has Raven about to submit in the Crossface, and Page stops Saturn from interfering by Diamond Cutting him off the second rope. The only problem is that Page is a lanky fucker and ends up Diamondly Cutting Saturn across the ring ONTO Benoit, breaking up the hold. Benoit and Page start throwing hands and fight to the back, leaving Saturn and Raven to pick up a completely unconscious count-out victory. WCW Babyfaces: they get the job done.

Let’s Take A Moment To Talk About Carl Torbush, America’s Grossest Dad

This week’s special guest is then-current North Carolina Tar Heels football head coach Carl Torbush. He might not look like a lot here, but Carl really tore up a lot of bush in college. He’s here with his son, and the reason I’m devoting a couple of paragraphs to him is because he might be the grossest dad.

Torbush is on screen for, I counted, 13 seconds. In that 13 seconds he manages to:

• pick his nose
• wipe his snot on his khakis
• give a secondary wipe on his son’s jacket
• start digging in his ear
• WIPE HIS EAR WAX ON HIS KHAKIS

Here it is in GIF form, because LOL this is my job:

He also reaches back and pulls up his pants between the snot-wipe and the ear cleaning, so I’m gonna assume he would’ve jammed a couple of fingers up his ass and wiped them on his pants if we’d stayed with him long enough. I asked our UPROXX slack chat to watch the GIF to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating or something, and the consensus is that he’s not specifically “gross,” just “very football.” YOU WERE ON TV FOR 13 SECONDS, CARL.

Also Very Football: Bill Goldberg

Remember last week when WCW went to Columbus, Ohio, and was like, “Hey Buckeyes, let’s talk about how great the Duke Blue Devils are for several minutes?” This week they top that by showing us the head coach of UNC’s football team and then going live via satellite to Duke five times. We get to see Georgia Bulldogs defensive tackle William Scott Goldberg palling around with some students, watch a poor kid at the children’s hospital who asked to meet Sting or Macho Man or whoever get visited by the Disco Inferno, and continue torturing poor Mean Gene Okerlund to the point of insanity.

Seriously, these on-location Nitro Party shoots are driving Gene mad. You can see it in his face and hear it in his voice. He has to stand in front of like 200 college students holding up signs, yelling WOOOO, and holding up “number one” fingers at the camera, and he’s like “C’MON GENTLEMEN, CUT IT OUT, STOP TOUCHING ME, STOP YELLING, EVERYONE CALM DOWN, NITRO IS CRAZY, DON’T TOUCH ME.” He’ll ask a student a question, point a microphone at them, then immediately pull it back when they start talking. It takes him 2-3 times longer to get through the segments than it should because he won’t stop pausing to insult everyone. It’s like somebody send your grandpa to Spring Break and told him to get some content out of a thousand dudes in swim trunks who can’t see a camera without trying to press their faces into it.

Best: How Goldberg Sells A Shoulder Injury

Hahah, Jesus Christ. That band-aid-colored smear on the canvas is the Blacktop Bully, Barry Darsow, better known to most wrestling fans as Demolition Smash, and/or the Repo Man. He gets an unusual amount of armbar and clubbing forearm offense on Bill before Bill’s like, “wait a minute, I’m Goldberg” and puts him in a goddamn grave. It can’t be overstated: everything Goldberg did before he punched a limo window for real and zapped 50% of his own strength looked like it was done by Kratos. If he’d picked Darsow up after this and ripped him in half at the waist I would’ve been like, “yeah, makes sense, you shouldn’t wrestle Goldberg.”

Goldberg puts him away with a Jackhammer, and that’s good enough to be this week’s BENGAY® People Who Know Have BENGAY of the Week™.

Also On This Episode

The former Crush takes on Kenny Kaos in a match that should make you close your laptop and step away from your computer even 20 years later. I will say though, for any fans of Electric Six and Canadian rock and roll, this image is as close as we’re ever going to get to Brian Adams covering High Voltage.

And in the only match that dares top Brian Adams vs. Kenny Kaos for worst of the night, the British Bulldog takes on Konnan. There’s a weird “double duty” thing happening on this Nitro where Scott Norton and Konnan kinda have a handicap match against Juventud Guerrera (more on that in a second), then Konnan comes back out to wrestle Davey Boy, and Norton shows up again to team up with Scott Steiner in a tag match. I feel like maybe Buff Bagwell and nWo Vincent missed their flight to North Carolina.

Best: Scott Norton Sexually Dominates Juventud Guerrera

While that Steiner tag isn’t worth talking about — they wrestle Rick Steiner and Lex Luger for a couple of minutes and then all fight to the back with no announced decision — the Norton vs. Juvy match is great, as it’s the squashiest squash that ever squooshed. And yeah, it should be, it’s SCOTT NORTON against high-flyin’ brain-damaged teenage Michael Jackson, but they’re really playing up Juvy’s “never surrender” gimmick, so he spends like five minutes in submission holds. Pictured above is one of two times Norton puts him in a full nelson and walks him over to the corner to yell into the camera while Konnan pie-faces the poor guy.

Then, in a moment I have to GIF to fully explain, Norton locks on the world’s most sexual bear hug, and Juvy goes full symbolic crucifixion.

Pretty sure I saw this GIF in Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ.

Worst: Finally, Say Goodbye (For Now) To Ric Flair

It’s a Nitro in North Carolina in the late ’90s, so the show wouldn’t be complete without the nWo embarrassing the shit out of Ric Flair. The last time they were here he got his head smashed in a cage door, so this time Curt Hennig and friends beat him down, hang him in the Tree of Woe, and stomp a steel chair onto his face. Nothing North Carolina loves more than seeing their favorite wrestler get helplessly beaten within an inch of his life every time he appears!

Bret Hart makes the save before things get too bad, but here’s the worst part: this is actually Flair’s final appearance on Nitro for almost the entire year. Due to a combination of lawsuits and contract problems, Flair’s only match between now and after he returns to reform the Four Horsemen in December is on an Internet exclusive pay-per-view named after a Three Stooges short, WCW Malice at The Palace. To tell you how prestigious that show is, and dear God I wish somebody had taped it, the opening match is Texas Hangman #1 and Texas Hangman #2 against HACKSAW JIM DUGGAN AND BUBBA THE LOVE SPONGE. NOT A JOKE.

Things are, uh, looking great for WCW. See you in December, Nature Boy. We’d fire you, but you’re already fired.