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Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW: Mean Gene Okerlund and the Nitro Girls finally made good on that promise to go to a frat house and have an awkward Nitro party, Davey Boy Smith returned to WCW to have a terrible match with Mongo, and Kevin Nash went to Wrestling Prison for doing a powerbomb when he wasn’t supposed to.
If you’d like to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network, 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.
Note: This is still a relatively new vintage column in the rotation, so if you like it, please make sure to comment below and share the column on all (or at least some) of your social media. It helps, especially when you’re writing about the B-show that’s honestly more like the C-show to Saturday Night, and possibly the D-show to WCW Pro.
And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Thunder for January 29, 1998.
Welcome To The NEW WCW Thunder!
Pour one out for the Dungeon of Doom rock climbing wall version of the WCW Thunder set. Episode five re-imagines the show as taking place inside a cheese grater factory! So now instead of waiting in line at an amusement park for a roller coaster in a mountain, you’re waiting in line at an amusement park for a roller coaster in outer space.
Note: I’m legitimately sad that Tommy Dreamer never showed up in WCW and tried to grind someone’s face against the Thunder set.
Best: The Ballad Of Lance Ringo
Or, “Diamond Dallas Page defeats Sick Boy in the same way Lucy from Peanuts defeats Charlie Brown.”
AAUGH!
Way back in March of last year, Diamond Dallas Page had a random encounter with an NPC named “Lance Ringo” on WCW Monday Nitro. Ringo showed up with a copy of Playboy Nude Celebrities featuring Page’s wife Kimberly, and instead of being like, “yeah, isn’t that awesome, I’m married to a fox,” Page gets upset that this jobber looked at Kim’s boobs in a nationally published magazine and kicked his ass.
Fast forward a year and now Lance is in the Flock as “Sick Boy,” actually getting in a surprising amount of offense and forcing Page to beat him with one of his Diamond Cutter variants, the pop-up version. Can we assume that getting beaten for masturbating is what turned Lance Ringo into a grunge outcast? They never connect the characters, but when the Flock breaks up Sick Boy briefly turns into ’90s Dolph Ziggler, so I’m considering it canon.
The match also sets up one of the most unintentionally funny things I’ve ever seen on a WCW show, which is saying something.
Best: Jerry Lee Lewis Gets Killer Seats
Rock ‘n Roll pioneer and child cousin-fucker Jerry Lee Lewis is in the crowd for Thunder this week, possibly doing some early scouting to see if he’d be down with naming a WWE pay-per-view 20 years from now. Bobby Heenan jokes that he loves his movies with Dean Martin, then asks if he’s the guy with the Lambchop puppet.
That’s all well and good, but the funniest bit is when they’re done with Lewis’ closeup and pull back to reveal that he’s sitting right behind Raven’s Flock.
Amazing. He gets to watch an entire Raven vs. Marty Jannetty match. I hope he kept bothering Scotty Riggs throughout the show trying to get the rights to cover ‘American Males’ on some album only Jerry Lawler would buy.
Best: The Ghost Of Castrol GTX
Up next we have The Monster Meng taking on [checks notes] ah shit
Trifling-ass cheating-ass Jim Duggan returns to primetime television for the first time since putting on a pair of purple underwear several months ago and trying to start a feud with Hollywood Hulk Hogan in WCW’s honor. WCW was like, “[breathes through teeth] we’re good.” Tony Schiavone refers to him as “The Hacker” as he’s walking to the ring, and things are off to a rollicking start.
This match contains another unintentionally hilarious moment, which would be the funniest thing on the show if Billy Kidman hadn’t just glared at Jerry Lee Lewis’ weird grandchildren. They’re supposed to show one of those sponsored replays after the match, but they jump the gun and put up a few seconds of a completely blank Castrol GTX advertisement. That in itself isn’t particularly funny, but it falls between Duggan warming up in the ring and reacting to Meng’s shadowboxing, so it ends up looking like Duggan saw the ad pop up, too, and looked around all bewildered to make sure we saw it too:
It’s like Hogan seeing the Ultimate Warrior in a mirror.
Duggan vs. Meng is actually pretty enjoyable because they kept it short, filled it with a metric ton of clubbering forearms and fed The Hacker to Meng like a pig at a luau. Duggan even “breaks” his 2×4 over Meng’s back, but he hits him too high on the plank so it breaks in the wrong place and looks like Sting cutting Triple H’s sledgehammer in half with a baseball bat. Jimmy Hart (dressed like Lita for some reason) causes a distraction that lets the Tongan Death Grip occur, and Duggan earns some points by trying to throw a bunch of punches while he’s in it and going down swinging. Maybe if you’d rooted around in your shorts and wrapped your fist in dick-scented athletic tape?
Best: The Rhodes Less Traveled
Dusty Rhodes turned on WCW and joined the nWo at Souled Out. The announce team’s reaction was to treat it like George Washington had sold out America to the British. Most of our reactions to it at the time were, “huh?”
Thunder attempts to explain the Dusty turn, and while it doesn’t totally work, it’s Dusty Rhodes cutting a promo so it gets a Best. Dusty’s point is that when he came back to WCW, corporate types had “destroyed” the wrestling vibe he’d worked so hard to build, and he ended up a front-office yes-man on weekend show commentary with Tony Schiavone. He realizes the nWo is what made WCW popular again, so he wants in on it? It’s a lot like the Eric Bischoff turn, where they put a hell of a lot of stock in our ability to accept that a guy running a successful business would decide it’s a good idea to work for a smaller subsidiary of that business in an attempt to bring down all the same shit he worked to build.
On the positive side, they put a little work into explaining why someone like Scott Hall needs a manager like Dusty Rhodes by having Hall be super arrogant in a match with Disco Inferno, almost lose clean because he’s not paying attention, and only get his head in the game because Dusty saved him and razzed him about it.
Also real quick, WWE Network needs to hired a closed captioning team that knows basic wrestling terminology. Remember when they called Tom Brandi a “jabber?” Now they’ve got Dusty Rhodes shading the “mocks on the Internet,” which I guess is a pretty good phonetic representation of how Dusty says “marks.” Would smart marks be “smocks?”
Worst: Nick Patrick Is Back
First of all, this looks like Kenny Powers being interviewed by a kind old turtle.
Second of all, the Worst here isn’t for Nick Patrick necessarily — he’s still very good on the microphone and doing a good job with what he’s given, all things considered — but for the situation WCW’s built around him. Patrick, the guy who abandoned WCW to be the masked nWo referee, gets kicked out of the group for not helping them enough. He comes back to WCW and ruins not one, but two Hollywood Hogan vs. Sting WCW World Heavyweight Championship matches with “fast counts” that weren’t particularly fast but we’re supposed to think they were, because heels. Patrick sticks to the “it was a normal count” talking point, which would be funny and heelish if, again, they weren’t normal-ass counts. Now he’s back again to insist that he’s double secret not in the New World Order and wants to be reinstated to referee the Hogan vs. Sting match at SuperBrawl. BISCH PLEASE.
Also On This Week’s Show
William Scott Goldberg gets another strong win against Yujence Middle Name Nagata with the tackle and jackle in about a minute-34. We’re at the point in The Streak where fans are officially crazy into it, and still buying into ridiculous Lee Marshall talking points like, “Goldberg might lose here because he’s never wrestled a guy who knows judo.” Stagger Lee, allow me to direct you to Goldberg’s only understanding of selling being “briefly pausing the animation for my next move.”
While the actual match doesn’t amount to much and only gets about six minutes, check out the greatest collection of talent ever assembled for a throwaway tag match on a B-show: Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko vs. Eddie Guererro and Chris Jericho. Don’t worry, it’s still rad as hell even in truncated nothing form. Go watch it on Daily Motion if you don’t have the Network. The highlight is Jericho tapping out to the Crippler Crossface to lose the match, then walking to the back holding his face with the belt held over his head yelling I’M STILL THE CHAMPION!
There’s also a solid post-match bit where Diamond Dallas Page returns from his celebration huddle in the crowd and says he’s giving Chris Benoit a United States Championship match next week because “the promoters won’t make the match.” This ends with Benoit answering the challenge without actually saying anything into a microphone, and Mike Tenay dropping the worst-ever buzzphrase for describing someone with bad mic skills but good wrestling ability, “silent but violent.” DDP smelled it, so he dealt a challenge!
Booker T has another Television Championship defense against Perry Saturn and gets overwhelmed by the Damned Numbers Game™ until Rick Martel takes a break from selling encyclopedias door-to-door and makes the save. Saturn bumps Booker into Martel, though, so Martel thinks Booker hit him on purpose. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, wrestling babyfaces gotta ask why did you do the thing you clearly didn’t do on purpose on purpose.
I can’t believe you’d do this in front of Jerry Lee Lewis, Rick. Imagine if Booker T had shown up acting like this in Canada and Paul Anka was in the crowd!
Worst/Best: Kevin Nash Is A Patsy
Finally we have the show’s main event, which isn’t much of a match but admirably tries to tie together two concurrent storylines: James J. Dillon’s obsession with banning the powerbomb after Kevin Nash broke The Giant’s neck at Souled Out, and Scott Steiner abandoning his career and brother because he wants to have more muscles than Buff Bagwell.
The Steiner Brothers get a WCW World Tag Team Championship match against The Outsiders. Just kidding! You know that can never actually happen. Hall wrestled a singles match for some reason early in the show, so Konnan subs in for him in the tag match. KONNAN. Rick Steiner’s about to win the match with a powerslam because Konnan’s got about 5 HP total and loses 10 every time he tries a forward roll, but Nash bashes him with one of the tag belts and causes a disqualification. Where was Scott during this, you might be asking? Why, having a full-on Zoolander walk-off with Buff Bagwell in the entrance aisle. Wrestling championships are temporary, MUSCLE DOMINANCE IS FOREVER.
Referee Charles Robinson gets in Nash’s face — well, his abdomen — after the match for cheating, so Nash gives him the world’s most gentle jackknife powerbomb. He just kinda picks him up at shoulder level and lets him fall flat, straight down. I’m guessing he didn’t wanna get Souled Out loosey-goosey again and turn Lil’ Naitch inside out. J.J. Dillon had already fined Nash an aggressive 50K earlier in the show for the powerbomb on Nitro, so doing another one nets him a night in Wrestler Jail.
Nash skips the Dog Day Afternoon references this time and goes straight to the JFK assassination:
Join us next week when Kevin Nash powerbombs Jerry Flynn and gets taken away in handcuffs screaming about John Wilkes Booth conspiracy theories.
Next Week On Thunder, But Really:
Chris Benoit gets an actual championship match against Diamond Dallas Page (bet you can’t guess how THAT ends), Goldberg tests his might against the dreaded armpit veins of Jim Powers, and Dusty Rhodes lives Bobby Heenan’s dream of kicking Lee Marshall’s ass. All this and more on the secretly awesome WCW Thunder!
