Saturday Night Digging in the Crates

We take a trip to the glory days of 1992 WCW and get a visit from the co-founder of our little home

Nikita Koloff v. Vader 5/16/92

PAS: Vader is one of my favorite Clash of the Titans wrestlers ever. He is so good at those kind of Godzilla v. Mothra matches, although he didn't have a ton of them in WCW. Here he is matched up against face Nikita who was only five years removed from playing a similar unstoppable monster role. Dusty comes out with Nikita in a Superpowers reunion moment and immediately starts brawling with Race, such a cool random moment, as I don't remember Dusty and Nikita being aligned in 1992. Match it self is a total slugfest, with Nikita taking a big beating early and doing some really nice pained selling, lots of tensing up his hands to see if there is nerve damage. This goes out to the floor and they have a cool double countout, with Vader taking a nasty post shot. I am a fan of 1992 Nikita as he turned into a really fun wrestler and this was a match I could see getting way more hype if it happened on a bigger stage then a random Worldwide

TKG: Complete and accurate 92 Nikita? Are we going to do a complete and accurate 92 Nikita? That would be amazingly preposterous. Nikita comes back to WCW in April of 92 does a Ross sit down interview in a Hawaiian shirt where he apologizes for his 91 heel run and then asks for a shot at Vader. Nikita retires in November of 92 after getting injured in a Halloween Havoc match with Vader (where Vader replaces Rude, to prevent Rude from wrestling twice on same show).  The seven months that Nikita wrestles in 92 are a really fun little run where it feels like he puts it all together and figures out how to fill out consistently entertaining matches. It may not be as impressive a run as 89 Luger but probably more impressive than 00 Helmsley. Nikita isn’t really getting a big push (here he is announced as “#8 contender for title”) and it’s a year where lots of guys are having great to amazing runs of matches, so Nikita’s fun little run is going to get overlooked. This Vader match is all about the Nikita selling. Nikita really throws his body around both in and out of the ring for Vader (although I only remember one flat back bump). Nikita does a ton of wobbly winded selling where he needs to lean or rest on ropes, he’ll spasm and throw his body away from Vader to recover from eating moves. Nikita eats the first big lariat doing a Hennig style big spinning rotation into Kawada crumple sell, and then eats the big stiff lariat with a more realistic bump into another AJ sit-down style sell. The AJ 80s count-out finish also made me wish these two had a bigger program.