Previously on the vintage Best and Worst of WCW: We’re headed into a pay-per-view without Hollywood Hogan, Sting or Diamond Dallas Page wrestling on it full of mid-card angles and clean finishes that will definitely pull a terrible buyrate and justify another year of nWo bullshit. Unless it doesn’t, in which case … whoops, political apocalypse! Guess which one happens!
If you’d like to watch this show on WWE Network, and you really should, click here. In the coming weeks you’ll be able to read all the Thunder recaps on its UPROXX tag page, and of course if you’re reading these, you’re hopefully reading the corresponding Nitro bits as well.
And now, the second edition (of the third episode) of the Best and Worst of WCW/nWo Souled Out for January 24, 1998.
Best: La Parka’s Limit Break
Last year’s Souled Out, with its garbage trucks, house band and ugly lady beauty pageant, is one of the most embarrassing pay-per-views ever. Whoever put together this year’s Souled Out must’ve been like, “welp, we used all our good ideas on the first one, just do a wrestling show,” because Souled Out 1998 is, and I’m not shitting you, one of the best wrestling pay-per-views of the year. Who knew?
The opens with rudo dream team Psicosis, El Dandy, Silver King and the abusive skeletal homie La Parka taking on Juventud Guerrera, hip hop test dummy Super Calo, and Juniors Chavo Guerrero and Lizmark. First of all, the guy on the left there in the screenshot with the “Lucha Libre Wrestling, Translation Bathroom Break” sign can go screw. Second of all, if you’re ever wanted one single WCW cruiserweight match to hook someone and you don’t think they’d wanna pay attention to a 20-minute title match, show them this. It’s not the best cruiserweight match ever, but it’s certainly one of the most balls-out fun, and set a very clear template for the billion junior heavyweight scrambles that followed. Here’s a DailyMotion version if you don’t have the Network.
It’s got everything you’d want from a match like this. Guys wandering in and out of the ring independent of tags even by lucha libre rules. Dusty Rhodes on commentary. Super Calo being crazy/getting beaten on. Psicosis bumping on his neck for basic shit. That Mike Tenay line about how you shouldn’t underestimate Silver King because of his “stocky physique.” And, most importantly, La Parka being the greatest. The greatest. Okay, so Chavito pins Psicosis with a tornado DDT to win the match. La Parka shows up and lays out the entire técnico team with chair-shots to the face. He then attacks his own team with the chair until everyone is knocked out, and then he sets up the chair in the middle of the ring to dance on it and do Hulk Hogan hands.
When he’s done, he tucks the folding chair under his arm and struts away with his nose in the air like he’s a cartoon businessman. I don’t understand anything La Parka’s ever done or even who he is, really, but I’ve always loved it, and this is peakest peak WCW La Parka.
Best: Raven Rules
The rest of the card is bolstered by three (3) good-to-great mid-card matches and a semi-main that WCW had actually been building up to for the past few months on TV. Crazy, right? Note: if you’re reading this and were like, “isn’t that what you’re always supposed to do,” please remember this show’s main-evented by Lex Luger vs. Randy Savage, a match with zero build other than that they’ve wrestled a billion times before and that they’re on different teams.
The best of the three is Chris Benoit vs. Raven, which you know if you read the Best and Worst of Nitro and Thunder has been building for seemingly forever. Benoit wanted a shot at Raven, so Raven built an Eden’s Gate of jobbers and ex-ECW guys, put them in 90s super hero movie bad guy clothes and made them wrestle for him. Benoit’s never gotten his hands on Raven, forced to fight his “substitutes,” sometimes up to like six at a time. For this one, the Flock is banned from ringside. Also it’s “Raven’s Rules” which means anything goes, so … in theory the Flock could just run out here and attack again and be fine, but nobody ever pays attention to that. Here’s a DailyMotion version of it with German commentary, if you want to watch it and pretend Alex Wright’s talking to himself over it.
The brilliant part of this match is the finish, which sees Benoit finally lock dude up in the Crippler Crossface. Instead of tapping out or even just passing out, Raven starts laughing in the hold. THEN he passes out, and Benoit wins the match. So now the entire feud up to this point is re-contextualized as Raven taking a guy who only gets truly rowdy when he’s been tossed up and down a flight of stairs a few times and having his posse of nerds beat him up for two months until he’s ready to maim. That way he’s got a real challenge, and gets the pain he feels he deserves. *mwah*
Best: Chris Jericho Is Your New Cruiserweight Champion
Also very good is Chris Jericho vs. Rey Mysterio Jr., because of course it is, but also because it’s the official official beginning of Chris Jericho’s epic “conspiracy victim” title run that made him everybody’s favorite. Up until now, all he’s really done is heel it up a little, apologize, and then take it back. Here, he is Chris motherfucking Jericho.
The general story of the match is that Mysterio’s clearly the better wrestler and Jericho’s too focused on the crowd booing him. It’s going well for Rey until he goes for a springboard and Jericho shoves his legs off the ropes, causing him to topple down with his leg caught and absolutely ruin his left knee. You may remember that body part from the “bodies have been bruised” video that ran before WWE shows for like half a decade. Jericho capitalizes, and is able to reverse a top rope rana into the Lion Tamer because Rey’s legs aren’t strong enough to take him over anymore. Jericho’s your new Cruiserweight Champion.
When the match is over, Jericho grabs the mic and does the Mikey from the Life cereal commercial bit before realizing that, wait, he’s still being booed. “Don’t you boo me! You don’t wanna be booing me!” He decides to give the crowd something to boo about, so he rips off Mysterio’s leg brace, stomps it a bunch and then crushes it against the ring steps with a big-ass metal toolbox. As he’s walking away, he’s muttering “soary, soary” under his breath. Christopher by God Jericho.
Best: Rick Martel, Super Face
ALSO very good is the Television Championship match between Booker T and Rick Martel, who returned from relative obscurity looking like Alex Wright’s jacked dad and working the whitest-meat babyface style you’ve ever seen. Like, he’s so babyface you’ve gotta wonder if the character had gone on a Vision Quest or something and realized he wasted all those years modeling and spraying pesticide cologne in people’s eyes. The Flock had been messing with Booker, so Martel stood up for him and saved him so he could politely ask him for a title shot. He got it, and here we are.
This match is all about mutual respect, with Martel seemingly falling back into his old ways — only a little — when things get tough. He pretends to get clocked in the balls on a leap frog to play genital opossum and gain an advantage, for example. It never goes too far, though, and Booker’s able to put him away with a Harlem Hangover that’s 100% side of the boot to face to retain the championship. After the match Martel completes the story he was telling, yanking the belt away from the referee and kinda sorta teasing a heel turn before being a good sport and presenting it to Book himself. Saturn shows up before we find out if Martel’s completely on the level or not, and Booker makes the save for Martel to set up a triple threat of sorts at SuperBrawl.
Supplemental Worst: That match ends up being the one where Martel suffers a career-ending injury, and has to retire after only a few months in WCW making this amazing comeback. He shows up again a few months later and tries to go, but gets immediately injured again, and that’s all she wrote. Super sad, especially since I didn’t appreciate his smiley Quebecois dadittude when I was younger.
Best: Bret Hart Settles The ‘Who’s Better, Charlotte Or Natalya’ Rivalry Like 15 Years Early
If you’re wondering how egregiously politics fucked this show, Bret Hart and Ric Flair have their first one-on-one match in company history and it’s stuck in the semi-main between the “battle of the giants” and that Luger/Savage Nitro match.
For weeks now, Ric Flair’s been taking offense to Bret Hart’s already years-old “best there is, best there was, and the best there ever will be” catchphrase. HE is the best there whatever, you see! After passive-aggressively fussing at each other about it for a few in-ring interview segments, they decided to settle it in the ring. Here’s a huge surprise: a Bret Hart vs. Ric Flair match is pretty good!
Flair’s already a little past his prime and Hart’s still trying to find his footing in a new company after the biggest in-ring controversy in wrestling history, so it’s not as good as their early ’90s WWF matches — especially not the Ironman at the Boston Garden which is like 15 times better than Hart/Michaels at WrestleMania — but it’s good. It’s got a clean finish, too, with Flair putting Bret over hard with all five Moves of Doom and a submission victory with the Sharpshooter. If this had just been the main event and had gotten those seven extra minutes they gave to Luger, it could’ve been even better. Ah, well.
Best/Worst: Scott Steiner Wants To Know More About Friendship And Muscles
The Steiner Brothers once again team up with the Big Lost Man to take on the nWo B-team of Vicious, Delicious and whatever adjective best describes Konnan. They’ve done this match like six or seven times since last month, it feels like, and most of the recent matches have revolved around Scotty Steiner’s growing confidence in himself and, perhaps most importantly, his huge honkin’ muscles. Scott’s started doing all the work and wrestling entire matches without tagging out because he realized he’s massive AND an amateur wrestling wizard AND still kinda mobile enough to throw Frankensteiners, so his team “punishes” him at Souled Out by having him start the match on the apron and never tagging him in. Good call, guys. I know the Cleveland Cavaliers love to punish LeBron James by making him sit out entire games and watch Ante Zizic and London Perrantes do all the work.
Anyway, Scott has to stand on the apron and watch his team lose for like 11 whole minutes before finally getting in the ring uninvited, dumping Konnan on his head and then walking back to the corner to make the tag. When Bubber finally tags him in, Scott single-handedly suplex-murks the evil team (minus Buff, which is important) and wins with an hilariously safe Steiner Screwdriver on K-Dogg. All head to thighs. I hope Konnan bought him dinner for that.
When the match is over you’d think Scotty would be mad at his team, but he’s once again too busy standing on the ropes showing off his muscles. Buff hops up on the apron and pulls him down for a weird too-close conversation we can’t hear, and he does the “I’m watching you” fingers. The announce team doesn’t know what this means, but I think we all know: Buff understands how much Scott loves posing, and think she should join the team where that kind of shit is encouraged. The moral of the story: if your brother suddenly becomes a narcissist with Bane’s venom body but he’s winning all your matches for you, maybe chill out and let him do what he wants so he doesn’t discover and join the anarchist boy’s club down the hall.
I guess now’s the time to talk about the bad stuff from this pay-per-view. Quick, name the worst thing that could suddenly happen. Did you say “nonsensical turns,” “career-threatening injuries” or “Roddy Piper returning?” Congratulations, it’s all three!
Worst: I’M HERE
WCW’s Tobias Fünke, Rowdy Roddy Piper, is back. He’s still some sort of undefined authority figure, even though the last time we saw him he was temping for James J. Dillon and now Dillon’s back and fine, and he’s here fresh from the set of Walker Texas Ranger to make decisions about the WCW World Heavyweight Championship.
In case you missed it, Hollywood Hogan pinned Sting clean at Starrcade but Bret Hart has referee PTSD and restarted the match, so Sting won the championship. They had a rematch the next night on Thunder that saw Hogan pin Sting AGAIN in a re-do of the same damn finish, causing Dillon to vacate the championship on the first Thunder. To complicate things, Scott Hall won World War 3 and is also owed a title shot.
Piper’s masterful solution is to tell Scott Hall to wait, because Hogan and Sting are having another match for the championship at SuperBrawl, and this one will definitely 100% have a clean finish, he bets. You’d think Piper’s play here would be, “Hulk Hogan is a lousy cheater who has screwed everyone out of matches for years so nuts to him, Sting’s the champion, and we’re gonna uphold that ‘punish people who break the rules’ stuff we introduced a few weeks ago and then completely forgot about,” but WCW is the Democrats and the nWo are Republicans and when the nWo goes low, WCW goes high. And then everybody goes out of business!
The segment is punctuated by Sting giving in to peer pressure and deciding to try out crotch chops for the first time:
when youre bad at being a mime
Scott Hall won’t get his title shot until March, having won it all the way back in November, and it doesn’t even main-event the show because Hogan and Savage decide to have a cage match for nothing with a Brutus Beefcake finish. I’m honestly surprised Piper didn’t book Sting vs. Hall for SuperBrawl and put himself in another cage match with Hogan.
Worst: Hard Times For Larry Zbyszko
I’m not sure you can say this is where the nWo jumped the shark — that was probably at the previous Souled Out, or at the very latest nWo Monday Nitro — but Dusty Rhodes turning heel and joining to screw Larry Zbyszko out of a match is jumping some sort of marine animal. This is where the nWo jumped the manatees booking the show, maybe?
But yeah, Larry brings Dusty to the ring with him as back up to counter Louie Spicolli, which is like bringing a tank to counter a Razr scooter. When the ref gets bumped and it’s time to get stupid, Dusty gets in the ring and pinballs Louie around with Bionic Elbows, which is GREAT. Larry holds Hall for a big final blow, and of course Dusty misses and hits Larry instead. That’s when the master plan is revealed: Dusty is nWo 4 life, and everyone takes turns dropping elbows on Larry.
I’m not sure if they turned Big Dust because they needed a color commentator for a possible nWo weekly show and couldn’t turn tweener-ass Stagger Lee or if they turned him because they were turning everybody, but aside from Hall casually mentioning Dusty in a promo on Nitro, it’s completely out of the blue. Dusty’s kayfabe explanation is that he was tired of being corporate and “carrying Tony Schiavone,” and that he wanted to keep the “marks on the Internet” from getting a Larry Zbyszko comeback. You know the Internet, always clamoring for more Larry Zbyszko content. Dusty’s great, don’t get me wrong, but you know who super doesn’t need someone to talk to him? Scott Hall.
Worst: Fee-Fi-Foh No
First off, let me say that the “battle of the giants” between Kevin Nash and … uh, The Giant is actually pretty good. It’s got a wacky overbooked finish with Eric Bischoff taking a chokeslam and Nash throwing more “hot coffee” into Giant’s eyes before low blowing him, but it’s got an unexpected amount of intensity for a Kevin Nash match. I mean, he does a leap frog (!!) and throws a plancha. Kevin Nash. I’m not kidding. It’s not great looking, but shit, he does it. Big Show loved his “hosses doing cruiserweight stuff” matches way back when.
The problem with the match is the actual finishing blow, and it’s one you might’ve seen before. It’s supposed to be Nash throwing coffee in Giant’s eyes, punching him in the dick and powerbombing him. If you’re like, “wow, I don’t know why he thought he could pull that off,” remember that he did the deal flawlessly at SuperBrawl a little over a year earlier. This time, however, Nash throws out his back about halfway through the move, loses his grip on the Giant, and drops him on his head. It also probably didn’t help that they were covered in coffee.
Gruesome. The good news is that Giant’s neck injury wasn’t as severe as it could’ve been, and WCW managed to wrangle the situation into a “banned powerbomb” angle that gave us Kevin Nash quoting Dog Day Afternoon on Nitro. The funny part is that immediately after the botch, they cut to Hollywood Hogan on the outside yelling, “I TAUGHT HIM THAT MOVE, YES I DID!” Pro-tip: don’t let Hulk Hogan powerbomb anybody.
Giant rightfully lies in the ring for a long time after the match getting medical help, which mostly equates to the WCW “EMTs” taping up his eyes because of the unforgiving coffee scalding. The announce team keeps saying stuff like, “you can see the steam rising off of that coffee!” to really sell it, possibly because they didn’t want to say “we just watched a man almost die by accident and we’re still not sure if he’s alive, so let’s not draw attention to it.”
Worst: The “Main” “Event”
As we’ve already talked about, the main event of the show (because politics) is Macho Man Randy Savage vs. Lex Luger for the [checks notes] nothing. It’s barely a match, is mostly stalling and Miss Elizabeth trying to cheat by attacking Lex Luger, and then an nWo run-in. It’s the most purely Nitro thing you’ve ever seen them end a pay-per-view with, complete with Sting making the save and (more or less) an “aw nuts, we gotta go.”
The tenured stars would continue to position themselves at the top of the card whether the situation called for it or not, and ipso facto the show goes down the tubes. I’m not saying they should’ve strapped a rocket to La Parka or whatever, but when the world wants to see Bret Hart and Goldberg and you keep feeding them nWo run-ins that got tired in 1996, they’re gonna figure out that exciting shit’s happening on the other channel and switch over. And if you don’t notice that until it’s too late, nothing you do matters, and your legacy ends up being 1/3 of a failed “invasion” angle and a bunch of Network specials about how your company was stupid.
Next Week:
Another one of Bret Hart’s lame relatives shows up, the Nitro Girls and Mean Gene finally go to that Nitro Party winner’s house like they’ve been saying they’re gonna do for months, and Kevin Nash gets arrested by real police officers for doing an illegal pro wrestling move that was legal yesterday. See you then!
