My Favorite Wrestling: WCW Worldwide 6/15/98

Barry Horowitz vs. Chris Benoit

ER: Kicking off my deep Saturday night with pro wrestling's #1 rated murderer! But this is probably 100% my favorite Barry Horowitz match in WCW. It's freaking great. Benoit gives Horowitz 60% of the match, smack dab in the middle of Benoit thick in the TV Title hunt. Benoit is a guy finally getting up the card, and he's somehow generously giving Barry Horowitz a chance to showcase all of his genuinely great offense. It was 10 days after Barry's 38th birthday. Had Benoit felt bad about forgetting Barry's birthday, and thus decided to gift him the longest stretch of offense in his career? Whatever the reason, it was the best. Barry chokes him with his boot, throws an awesome headbutt you don't remember him throwing, sinks a nice knee, crisp legdrop, rakes Benoit's back like a motherfucker, comes off like an old territory legend. Surely Benoit eventually takes over with a hard back elbow, snap suplex, and big diving headbutt, but Horowitz looked like a guy who really belonged and completely crushed it in a nice late career opportunity. Made me love that guy even more. Worldwide Classic right here.

Scott Louden vs. Fit Finlay

ER: Scott Louden: Man Who Gets An Actual Ring Entrance and Onscreen Graphic. Who the hell is Scott Louden? He looks kinda like Bob Backlund if Backlund weren't fanatical about his workouts, but his singlet game is on. Yellow and black singlet with a tornado on the back, and STO on the leg. Was this guy some gaijin used by UFO? Florida indy guy? Also, Schiavone calls Penzer "Dave Lonely Man Penzer". That rules. This is a complete majestic mauling by Finlay, 3.5 minutes of ass kicking. Louden is a bit bigger than Finlay but his entire match-long offense consisted of catching Finlay with a kick to the stomach as Finlay charged the corner. The rest of this was what you wanted, Finlay roughing some dude up. He dekes him a couple times, makes him think they were doing a collar and elbow but ducked aside and dished a knee to Louden's gut, and later he held onto the ropes on an Irish whip and Louden missed a dropkick in one of those "I don't think HE thought he was missing" ways. The rest of this man, Louden may as well have been a bag of yard trimmings. Finlay hits the hardest short arm clothesline possible, kicks him in the spine THREE different times in the match, hard body slams, big bombs away, big kneedrop, all done with the expected vicious precision that makes Finlay the best. His rolling fireman's carry into snapped off Tombstone are an awesome finisher 1-2. RIP Louden. You couldn't have drawn a much worse name for your appearance.

Leroy Howard vs. Goldberg

ER: Howard was Rastaman in BattlArts, and he regularly gets put in with tough dudes in WCW, but it's frustrating as he never actually gets to do anything against them. He would have been a really fun semi-competitive job guy on WCW C shows, there were lamer guys who got more offense in than him. But this match is the exact thing that every single person in the building wanted to see. Goldberg no sells a hard shoulderblock from Howard, and then it's basically the spear into the jackhammer, and people are just losing their shit. Every single person went home talking about how awesome that spear and jackhammer were, it likely didn't even matter what else was on this taping.

Kendall Windham vs. Tim Cheeks

ER: Damn they are not letting the results of these matches be much in doubt. WCW had like 300 guys on the roster, how are Tim Cheeks and Scott Louden breaking into TV matches? But Kendall Windham is secure as fuck in his wrestling ability, he's got that Windham boys confidence and that Windham boys generosity. Windham gave Cheeks a lot of moments here, including a big comeback pop. He ate a couple hip tosses from Cheeks, missed THREE different elbowdrops over the course of the match to allow Cheeks back on offense, and Cheeks got to come up after one of those missed elbowdrops and hit a big clothesline and fire up the crowd. Windham made the guy look on his level, which is awesome. Cheeks dodged a corner charge from Windham by moonsaulting off the top and landing on his feet, and later misses a springboard crossbody that I certainly wasn't expecting him to attempt. Kendall let the guy shine a bit, and the rest of the time smothered him with uppercuts, great body shots, an awesome diving lariat, and finished him off with a great classic bulldog. Kendall rules.

Villano IV/Villano V vs. Disorderly Conduct

ER: Well this is totally great. You've never seen more Disorderly Conduct offense in a match, which is something all of you should watch. This is fun as hell and go go go, WCW syndie tags are always so good at time management, so much good action always packed into just a few minutes. V5 hits a couple hard lariats, one sending Tom to the floor, just these nice stiff arm lefts. Late in the match he hits an awesome flying clothesline on both Mean Mike and Tough Tom. Both teams make frequent tags, both attack nicely from the apron, crowd doesn't care who they're supposed to be booing as they cheer both teams on. The result is up for grabs as neither of these teams beat anybody (my brain gets excited for things like that while watching old WCW, helps out my constantly updating WCW hierarchy depth chart). V5 is working this more like a stiff brawler, V4 is going for more elegant lucha, hitting a crossblock and some spinning kicks. DO are good asskickers here, guys that know how to drop a nice elbow and hit a nice shoulderblock. Mike misses a charge in the corner, Tom gets dropkicked to the floor, and Los Villanos hit a Doomsday Device crossbody, and really stick it. Crowd was amped for all of this, and this brisk 4-5 minute tag really needs to be adopted by WWE as a TV formula. They really unnecessarily slow things down at times, but I know that teams could adapt to this style. There's no reason why most teams in WWE can't be as consistently fun as Disorderly Conduct.

Reese vs. Hacksaw Jim Duggan

ER: Man I don't care, Reese vs. Hacksaw was pretty good. Reese is huge and really didn't make TV a ton, and I'm a guy into freakshow stuff. Reese locks in a big bearhug (you obviously need to do a bearhug if you're 7' tall) and Duggan bites his face to get out of it, also goes for a huge big man elbow drop, and squishes Duggan in the corner with his butt. Duggan throws nice big swinging lefts and rights, slams into the big man a couple times, upends him with a lariat and drops a good enough knee.  This was a fun big boys battle. But it's pretty funny how Hacksaw was in the main event of a show that had freaking Goldberg on it, as late as June 1998, 3 weeks before the Georgia Dome main event.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE WCW B-SIDES

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My Favorite Wrestling! WCW Saturday Night 6/20/98

1. Yuji Nagata vs. Hardbody Harrison

Hardbody Harrison was like the least surprising sex trafficker in the history of sexual slavery. I'm assuming most people who watched WCW around this time just thought that he was working a "forced sexual slavery" gimmick. It was like Clay Aiken's interview announcing he was gay. I assume most people in attendance were expecting actual news, not something that everybody had known immediately when they first found out who Clay Aiken was. It would be like B.B. King holding a press conference to announce he has hypertension. All that aside, match itself was really fun. Nagata kicked a dirtbag around the ring and Harrison bumped around really nicely. That's pretty much all I wanted.

2. Van Hammer vs. Reese

This wasn't very good at all, but WCW's match structure made bad matches better than similar WWE bad matches. WWE matches are much slower paced and always have to feature a chinlock spot before the babyface starts his comeback. WCW lower card matches were usually just guys go-go-go for 3 minutes. So even if their offense wasn't very good, at least there wasn't much lying around building to a heatless comeback. You had guys rushing through spots and bad matches seemed more action-packed than they probably really were. I get the freakshow aspect of Reese and probably wanted him to be better than he was. It was stunning how bad Van Hammer looked here since he'd probably been wrestling 8+ years at this point.

3. Stevie Ray vs. Mike Tolbert

So this was better than it should have been. Maybe it looks better because it immediately followed a Van Hammer match. But Stevie Ray actually looked pretty decent here, with some nice elbow drops and big right hands. Mike Tolbert was not very good here, but I have a new weird appreciation for him after a recent Segunda Caida review drew some well-worded, humorous and most importantly informative criticism from a gay interest blog. I'm planning an actual response to the Mike Tolbert = mega hunk post, so I'll go into that more when I eventually write that. Tolbert is a green bodybuilder type who isn't very good at getting into position for things, so that results in some chinlocks with Stevie Ray trying to get him on track. The guy is not very good. But this was one of the better Stevie Ray performances (whatever that means).

There's a commercial for an N64 baseball video game and the player in the ad is Ken Caminiti. Phil is gonna have no clue what I'm talking about, but there is literally no more perfect baseball player to have during an ad featured on pro wrestling than Ken Caminiti. The ONE baseball player whose heart exploded due to steroid and drug use, and he's promoting a video game that's sponsoring a pro wrestling program. It is too 100% perfect. Ken Caminiti does pro wrestling better than most pro wrestling (including nailing the death spot).

4. Eddie Guerrero vs. Diamond Dallas Page

Really good fast-paced 6 minutes here. Eddie is maybe the wrestler I miss most (out of those that have died, not just retired). It's a treat watching him here as he hams it up with the crowd the whole time and challenges DDP to keep up, which DDP seems pretty game to do. There's a fun armdrag mirror sequence with Eddie stooging a bunch. Eddie bumps big for DDP and the crowd is way into both. Match ends with an awesome DDP powerbomb into Diamond Cutter and the crowd loses it. Surprised to see Eddie go down fairly easily, but DDP was becoming a pretty massive star at this point.

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