WCW Monday Nitro: The Best and Worst of Februrary 23, 1998

Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW: We finally made it to SuperBrawl VIII, where Sting became the real, official, no-take-backs WCW Champion. Also, Rick Martel blew out his knee taking a hip toss, Juventud Guerrera lost his hood, and Scotty Steiner chose lifting weights and wearing sunglasses over having a loving family.

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 February 23, 1998.

Best/Worst: Scott Steiner Reaches His Perfect Form, Almost Gets Blinded

This week’s most important plot point coming out of SuperBrawl The Eighth is the arrival of Big Poppa Pump. Well, he’s not “Big Poppa Pump” quite yet — he still has to go through the better, funnier, and more socially concerning WHITE THUNDER nickname — but he’s in the white singlet with the blonde hair and the sunglasses. It’s the moment when WCW Scott Steiner becomes modern Scott Steiner, or the Scott Steiner most modern fans remember or think of when they hear his name. Crazy muscle monster who kinda reads like 2018 Donald Trump did the Get Out surgery and put his feeble, hateful old man brain into 1983 Lou Ferrigno’s body.

Steiner debuts the new look during a run-in to end the episode’s opening match, Curt Hennig vs. Lex Luger. At this point Hennig’s making bank just to stand in the ring for 20 seconds before an nWo run-in. The key factor here is Luger, though, as new recruit Steiner has to go through the gang initiation of “stand around in a big circle and hit WCW’s top stars with clubbing forearms.” The New World Order held workshops for that shit. The key factor in the key factor is that if you’re trying to get over a guy who throws a bunch of suplexes, you shouldn’t send him in to attack a guy who’s never taken a suplex in his life.

Evidence:

If you can’t totally see what’s happening there, Luger’s afraid to take the suplex bump (or straight-up doesn’t know how) so he turns in mid-air and bumps onto his forearm. When he turns, his legs go inward instead of outward, and his right knee comes down directly into Steiner’s left eye. It even knocks off his sunglasses. Here’s the still frame.

Steiner rolls over with his eye socket full of blood, and then Luger starts kicking his ass like a true politically-motivated WCW main-eventer until the rest of the nWo shows up with those circle-jerk forearms. I guess we’re lucky Hogan didn’t also show up and punch Steiner a bunch for not being cool or strong enough.

Some stuff happens at the end of the episode — raise your hand if you think the announced WCW World Heavyweight Championship main event of Sting vs. Scott Hall is going to happen in full and not be an nWo run-in — but before we get to that, let’s get to the … [checks notes] TWO HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF FILLER, WHAT?? Ah, Christ.

Two Hours And Forty-Five Minutes Of Filler

We might as well start with Rick Steiner, the gremlin with a face of a dog, as he gets the squashiest squash that ever squashed against Vincent. Poor Vincent’s in there painting his palette blue and gray and Steiner descends from the Heavens to shove his face into the ground. It’s exactly what it should’ve been, with Rick responding to Scott’s betrayal with Michigan State Spartan Rage and obliterating the nWo’s lowest rated guy.

One of my favorite parts of the episode is how WCW went backstage to film reaction videos about Scott from WCW’s top babyfaces. Bret Hart says he knows the feeling of having a dirtbag little brother turn on you more than anyone, Ric Flair speed-talks his way through a vague promo to get to the “woo all night long” part, and Booker T’s backstage in a dress shirt and tie like he’s selling churches door to door. I wish they’d filmed one with Buff Bagwell where he’s like, “HAHAH LIFTING WEIGHTS IS GREAT, IT CAN FILL ANY HOLE IN YOUR HEART.”

Diamond Dallas Page defeats Van Hammer as well, and while “Diamond Dallas Page vs. Van Hammer” isn’t a match anybody’s going to request, it’s nice when WCW actually uses its massive roster to promote fresh matches. If DDP’s feuding with Raven, he doesn’t just wrestle Raven five times in a row. He doesn’t just wrestle Saturn to set up wrestling Raven. He’s got this expansive roster to work with, so if he needs a strong, decisive win against an opponent who’s his physical superior but nowhere near good enough to be beating Diamond Dallas Page? Boom, nipply-ass Heavy Metal Van Hammer.

After that we get the Nitro debut of Kaz Hayashi, who we can assume from his gear and opponent was brought in to be the Taka Michinoku to Ultimo Dragon’s Great Sasuke. He was even in Kaientai Deluxe! We just need Brad Armstrong to show up in a leopard print vest and sit at commentary making racist jokes for five minutes.

Hayashi never fully clicks in WCW, but has a respectable few years as a comedy jobber and as 1/3 of a roving band of backstage ninjas. Eventually he becomes Additional Great Muta, heads to the WWE for one (1) appearance, then says nuts to this and spends a decade in All Japan Pro Wrestling. He’s currently the President of Mutoh’s Wrestle-1 promotion, so he’s doing okay for a guy who got FILLER and WHO ARE YOU signs in his stateside debut.

Chris Benoit takes on Raven again, which is always good except when you hold the match under “Raven’s Rules” where there are no rules and no disqualifications and then end it in a disqualification. That’s what happens here, when Benoit has to dispatch a randomly occurring Billy Kidman and the bout gets thrown out.

You know, in retrospect, the Bullet Club — especially the Firing Squad — is a lot more like The Flock than the New World Order. They’re just a pack of low-level cheaters who ascended to some level of popularity and greatness by taking on every problem, no matter how small, six-on-one. The nWo had some cache behind it. The Flock were like, “oh no, Riggs got hit with two non-consecutive moves this two minute Worldwide match to Sgt. Craig Pitbull Pittman, better send out literally everyone and stop it!”

DDP shows up to make the save, which accidentally causes a three-way fight between Page, Benoit, and Raven. I bet that won’t be the best match at the next pay-per-view by a mile!

After that, new Television Champion Booker T must defend against the worst Television Champion ever, The Renegade. If he’s not number one, he’s at least in the top three alongside Prince Iaukea and that version of Jim Duggan who finds the belt in the garbage in 2000. Renegade’s looking especially bad here, not helped by his decorative choker, as he’s entering the final year of his career.

The saddest highlight from this is the finish, which is supposed to be this ambitious thing where Renegade cartwheels into the corner and Booker Harlemly side-kicks him in the back of the head, but they fuck up the timing and it ends up looking like this. That looks like it’s all on Book, but we’ll excuse it since this is his third match in the past 24 hours. One of those ended in an unexpected career-ending injury, one was called completely on the fly, and the other was against the goddamn Renegade.

Konnan vs. Lizmark Jr. is exactly what you think it is — a luchador flipping and cartwheeling around while Konnan catches enough of his breath to throw a clothesline — but is notable for being the match where Konnan decides he needs to add a bunch of lingo and catchphrases to his act. YO YO YO, LET HIM SPEAK ON THIS. On the way to the ring he tells the camera about how he’s “bout it bout it,” and peppers in as many “¡Orale!” as he can. That’s more or less the Spanish equivalent to “yee haw.” I wish Konnan’s catchphrase had just been him screaming YEE HAW and jingle-jangling the front of his JNCOs.

Geographical note: Alex Wright lives just north of Sac-town.

We Are Nowhere Near Done With The Filler, Sorry

/trudges

Perry Saturn defeats Yuji Nagata in a match booked by an agent who’s either on a ton of sedatives, or forgot he’d booked the match until five minutes before it happened. Basically — and I type “basically” like this isn’t exactly it — Nagata dominates for five minutes, doing that Alberto Del Rio-ass thing he does where he singles out a body part and works it the entire time whether it’s exciting or not, and then Saturn hits one (1) drop-toe hold and locks him in the Rings of Saturn. That’s it. Macho Man put this together, didn’t he?

I wish I had more to type about some of this stuff, so I’ll use this spot to say how much I wish WCW was still around so we could get Hiroshi Tanahashi on here decimating Dash Wilder for eight minutes before tapping to a headlock.

Speaking of not having much to talk about, the announce team spends most of Buff Bagwell and Scott Norton vs. High Voltage match wondering which one is “vicious,” and which one’s “delicious.” It’s a standard tag team squash and the only match High Voltage knows how to wrestle, but it really makes me wish we’d gotten a Vicious and Delicious face turn. Tell me you wouldn’t cheer for the arm wrestling champion hoss built like a walking barrel in sunglasses and his tag team partner, an effeminate southern bodybuilder who uses baby oil like soap and has to ride his friend to the ring so he doesn’t get preoccupied posing. They could’ve (and should’ve) been the new Steiner Brothers, or some vague equivalent.

At least with a modern audience, you could turn these guys into massive babyfaces with like a single, gentle nudge. Vicious and Delicious for NXT Tag Team Champions! (Note: hahah how pissed would the NXT crowd be if BUFF BAGWELL showed up at TakeOver War Games or whatever and pinned Kyle O’Reilly? Call it NXT TakeOver: Souled Out.)

Best: Eddie Guerrero

“Eddie Guerrero was very good at pro wrestling” types the guy with the wrestling blog.

Guerrero hasn’t been much of a factor in WCW since Starrcade, but he’s firing on all cylinders here, getting an entire arena of people to chant “Eddie sucks” at him by no-selling Disco Inferno’s disco dancing and telling him to wrestle. He even does the tranquilo bit where he stretches across the corner ropes like they’re a hammock. Two-plus hours into a show with nothing but near-mindless filler and Eddie Guerrero’s so good at this he can get 10,000 people engaged in a DISCO INFERNO MATCH before they’d tied up. Brother was truly the Rembrandt of his craft.

Eddie gets the win with an emphatic frog splash, re-focusing him as an important part of the show and ending the Disco Inferno: Super Worker experiment. Disco was a lot better than you’re remembering him, especially if you’re aware of him becoming Great Value Jim Cornette on the Internet 20 years later, but he’s not Eddie Guerrero. Nobody’s Eddie Guerrero.

Well, okay, one other guy is Eddie Guerrero right now

Best: Surprise! It’s Chris Jericho

Here’s Chris Jericho a night after defeating Juventud Guerrera at SuperBrawl, showing up for a Cruiserweight Championship match against the least notable non-Mark Starr person in the division, Lenny Lane, while wearing Juventud’s mask. He didn’t just unmask Juvy, he stole his face, and now he’s “83% sure” he’s popular and successful enough to change the name of the show from “WCW Monday Nitro” to “WCW Monday Jericho.” Chris Jericho is the true pioneer of shoehorning “Jericho” into show and faction names whether it fits or not, and this is where that starts. Pretty cool.

Also cool is Jericho giving Lenny Lane ALL THE OFFENSE IN THE WORLD, even skinning the cat just to get clotheslined to the floor and sell it like he’s Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice.

The little victory hop before he gets clotheslined is killing me. I’m just gonna start handing out free cups of my slobber for Jericho with these columns.

Best: Ric Flair Distracts The Referee By Pointing To The Outside Of The Ring And Yelling “HEH???” So He Can Blatantly Kick Brad Armstrong In The Dick

Question: Name The Most Canadian Thing

Answer: Bret Hart getting into a hockey fight with a guy named Brian Adams?

Crush and Bret Hart are having the feud nobody in history asked for, with Crush doing his best to deliver a Hollywood Hogan-style heel promo and only being able to think of one adjective: play. [checks notes] Sorry, “stinkin’.” Everything Brian Adams says is STINKIN’. He tells Mean Gene to shut up — “ya stinkin’ amoeba!” — and then accuses Hart of being “too stinkin’ yella” to come out and face him. I guess it’s better than he’s saying “stinkin'” instead of “brah” like he did when he was Kona Crush? I wish someone had pulled him to the side and said, “you know you can prepare more than one word for these several years of promos, right?”

This brings out Hart, who of course kicks Crush’s ass with Canadian street justice. That triggers a run-in from Curt Hennig and Rick Rude, which brings Ric Flair back out to even the odds with ADDITIONAL COCKMANGLINGS. Flair respects Hart now that Hart has respected him, and they’re gonna use some old man technical brilliance to defeat the New World Order. Flair’s starting with Hennig at Uncensored, which is appropriate because I still think every ridiculous decision and statement the Ric Flair character made on TV after 1997 was due to getting his head smashed in a cage door.

Best: I’ve Made A Giant Mistake

Speaking of returns to television and challenges for the nWo, The Giant returns for the first time since getting dropped on his neck at Souled Out, looking like a character from a Japanese horror film. Dude looks like he pulled himself up out of a well to cut this promo.

He wants another match against Kevin Nash, and encourages WCW to unban the powerbomb so when they wrestle, Nash won’t have any excuses for losing. Good stuff here, as The Giant/Big Show has always been an underrated promo. Assuming you don’t remember that time he and the Undertaker carried motorcycles through the desert and made clothes out of the local wildlife. “I said good answer, big man, but I don’t sleep!”

Worst: No Main Event Please Don’t Sue

Here’s a picture of WCW World Heavyweight Champion Sting defending the title against World War 3 1997 winner Scott Hall in the main event of Nitro:

Not a joke! The only real highlight here is Hogan claiming Macho Man attacked him with a “ten-foot long crowbar” at SuperBrawl instead of gently bopping him with a can of spray paint. Otherwise it’s just an nWo plot to get dumb idiot Sting to the ring so everyone can beat him up again. If Hogan kicking this guy’s ass three times in a row didn’t let you know who the strongest and most important character is, maybe a fourth time would?

As a fun aside, this sets up Hollywood Hogan vs. Macho Man Randy Savage in a steel cage and Sting defending the championship against Hall at Uncensored, on pay-per-view. As an even more fun aside, both of those matches involve Sting getting his ass kicked. Fun times!