A Kick to the Dick Is a Kick to the Dick (Except in WCW) | WCW Monday Nitro 3/8/99

The aim of the WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST is to rank every match in the history of WCW Monday Nitro from worst to first. Such an ambition ought to save me from the ignominy of a three hour long episode of Nitro famous for its first hour featuring zero professional wrestling, but nah dawg: I love this show, and I must pay witness to its highs and lows.

The March 8, 1999 episode of Nitro is a pretty serious low, though. I am decidedly a Kevin Nash fan and even like some episodes of TV he produced during his short tenure as the head booker of World Championship Wrestling, but nothing — not even WWE Raw during the dogshit days of the guest host or Thunderdome eras — will better serve how difficult it is to fill out three hours of broadcast wrestling than watching a show like this one. He has, in theory, a good PPV main event in the barbwire steel cage match between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan, and a fairly interesting road to said match involving Flair’s refusal to be a father to his son David, who stuck him with a cattle prod because Hogan and the nWo brainwashed him. This drives a wedge between Flair and Arn Anderson, isolating Flair in a moment when he could use a friend in quelling a resurgent nWo. Flair and Anderson are Flair and Anderson, so all of this is good, compelling television, only it happened last week on Thunder. This is Monday Nitro, live on TNT, 11,000 people in the crowd and 4.4M watching at home. 

Here’s a list of everything you see on this episode before a live shot of the arena:

• A pre-tape where some guys weld the barbwire steel cage together.
• The entire Flair/Arn conversation from Thunder.
• Commercials.
• A WCW Spring Breakout promo.
• A second WCW Spring Breakout promo with the Headbanger’s Ball jawn.
• A profile of Nitro Girl AC Jazz.
• A Hulk Hogan promo where he talks about how good of a dad he is to Nasty Nick Hogan and how sad Ric Flair’s life is because he loves wrestling more than his son.
• A commercial for a Konnan t-shirt. 
• ANOTHER NITRO PARTY SEGMENT WHERE KONNAN INTRODUCES HIS NEW MUSIC VIDEO.
• Konnan’s music video. 
• ANOTHER NEW WORLD ORDER PROMO WHERE HOGAN AND NASH WATCH FLAIR’S PROMO FROM LAST WEEK’S NITRO AND RUN LIVE COMMENTARY OVER IT.
• OH MY FUCKING GOD A LEX LUGER HIGHLIGHT PACKAGE. 
• DDP promoting the WCW credit card. More commercials. MORE KONNAN SHIRT COMMERCIALS. A WCW Bruise Cruise ad. 
• ANOTHER SPRING BREAKOUT PROMO … oh wait thank fucking GOD it’s the skit where Scott Steiner and Buff Bagwell are deputized as cops and fuck around in Boston. OH WAIT NEVER MIND IT’S THE HEADBANGER’S BALL JAWN HYPING PIZZA. 

• A Kevin Nash/Rey Mysterio hype video.
• Another nWo video where Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash visit Torrie Wilson at the gun range. Neither of them wear ear protection. Both of them deserve tinnitus. 
• A commercial for WCW Uncensored. Wrestling matches would be a great advertisement for a PPV, theoretically, but instead…
• KEVIN NASH, HULK HOGAN, AND TORRIE WILSON EAT DINNER. Nash quotes like 15 different movies during this, like he’s WWF’s Goldust. 
• THE OPENING VIDEO PACKAGE FOR WCW MONDAY NITRO. 

That is 47 minutes of television, and it fucking STINKS. Then, finally, you get to see the poor, beleaguered masses of Worcester, Massachusets as they’re informed that in just moments, Mean Gene Okerlund will be interviewing famous and beloved wordsmith William Goldberg. Things pick up here, as David Flair interrupts Goldberg’s time, replies to Da Man’s lecture about respecting him, his father, and This Business by poking at his chest, and gets assaulted for it, which brings out Flair. This is a bad era for Ric Flair, maybe his worst as an active performer, but it’s got nothing to do with his heart or drive. This motherfucker pelts it to the ring like his son’s life and the wrestling world depends on it and lights Goldberg up with a particularly nasty chop, more of a thud than a slap, before taking a gorilla press slam. The crowd is justifiably on fire for this bit of Flair/Sting magic, and we’ve got ourselves a goddamn motherfucking MAIN EVENT. It’s fucking crazy how good wrestling works when you let wrestlers wrestle. There’s no way this could go wrong, right?

THE WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST

Every episode of WCW Monday Nitro. Every match. Reviewed and ranked.

BIG EGGColette Arrand

Up Next: The 288-sided die is not my friend, as it landed on episode 273 of Monday Nitro, which actually aired on Tuesday. A mixed tag match, a billion Natural Born Thrillers matches, a trillion Misfits In Action matches, and Goldberg vs. Dewayne Bruce. Can’t wait. 

Raven vs. Hardcore Hak

Raven has a chair. Hak has his cane. This is a falls count anywhere match. The bell rings and both men drop their weapons and hug it out. It’s a good thing they were running dark matches during the hour of pre-tapes because if I was watching this in 1999 I would have been out for blood. Oh thank god, their embrace merely signified that they know each other From Elsewhere and now they’re gonna kill each other with plunder. I love that Sandman got a WCW run and think it rules that he tried to meet the moment by upping his workrate a bit — I wouldn’t say that he’s improved any (how does one improve upon perfection), but there’s a clarity to his work that perhaps owes to the fact that he can’t meander around the ring drinking beer while his favorite song blares out on the TouchTunes. This is mostly detrimental to his whole deal, as his aura is miracle bits of stupidity that you’re only ever going to get in small venues from a guy working his way through a second 12-pack before he hits the ring.

He enters and leaves WCW cooked, basically, and Raven is just as washed at this point. Watching Raven scale the Nitro set to drop an elbow on Sandman I remembered how at one point in their WCW careers the Public Enemy were doing double table spots on Disco Inferno and Alex Wright — reckless, crazy-looking shit that absolutely nobody cared about because WCW mistakenly believed that what fans of “hardcore wrestling” liked was violent spots, as if the characters who did them were as interchangeable as the jeans and t-shirts they wore to the ring. Not the case! Oh, here comes Bam Bam Bigelow, who starts pummeling both wrestlers, which draws a disqualification. 

But wait! Tony Schiavone says that the bell was inadvertent, the match continues under Raven’s Rules, only now Bam Bam Bigelow is in the fight because there isn’t a single person on the planet who is buying Uncensored for their triangle match, so why not?

Raven vs. Hardcore Hak vs. Bam Bam Bigelow

They brawl to the back, where Bam Bam hits Raven with a bowl of apples. Commentary makes note of the Zamboni and forklift none of these three men are certified to use, and Hak takes his insane summersault bump into a ladder. All three dudes hurl each other into the ambulances, which likely cost more to rent for this purpose than the match at Uncensored drew. If it wasn’t for how well worked out the limo sequence was, you’d have to wonder if all three men were fucking with WCW by smashing into as many vehicles as they could. 

I had some fun with this, but it goes on too long and never reaches a point of violence that justifies its time. Eventually you can hear a guy in the crowd loudly saying “BORING” and it’s just three dudes heatlessly clobbering each other and breathing heavy AND THEN THEY CUT TO VIDEO OF A BRAWL FROM LAST WEEK WITH NOTHING RESOLVED?? AHHHHHH.

Rating: * 

Lizmark Jr vs. Chris Jericho

Jericho peaked in his Ralphus era. He claims to be the swami of the chain match and challenges Lizmark to put the dog collar on — Joseph’s going to have to go back and reevaluate Jericho on the basis of the man LIVING HIS TRUTH like Mad Dog Connelly. Tony Schiavone picks this moment to get upset that there has been too much talk and not enough wrestling. LIZMARK PUTS THE COLLAR ON. This works pretty well, the point of it being to show that Jericho is, in fact, dangerous with the chain. Lizmark Jr. being a WCW cruiserweight he’s mostly got high flying in his arsenal, so he’s boned aside from a hopespot or two while Jericho strikes a balance between chain violence and his goofball heel work in a chain match where neither man can bleed. Some of his ideas work better than others — the chain-assisted knee drop almost works, and wrapping Lizmark Jr. up with the chain would be funny were it not for the running history lesson about the Valentine/Piper classic. But this choke? Aww yeah. The chain-assisted Liontamer is a nice touch, and it's the only match on the card without a low blow.

Rating: * & ¾ 

Scott Steiner vs. Booker T

In a previous edition of the WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST, I posited that WCW would have done itself a favor by betting it all on Scott Steiner in 1999. This episode of Nitro takes place a month after the Steiner/Jericho match that prompted this thought (currently the #2 match in Nitro history), and despite the fact that Steiner is still finding his stride on the mic (he’s doing a mix of Superstar Billy Graham and Rick Rude, which will never not be true but is decidedly more obvious than it would eventually become), I’m going to go ahead and say that I’m not wrong. Despite ACAB canonically including Buff Bagwell and Big Poppa Pump after this episode of Nitro, their act is incredible, Bagwell the dipshit little brother Steiner can only stand so far as it’s his body that’s being venerated. Like Bagwell’s Vicious & Delicious team with Scott Norton (who currently hold the #1 match in Nitro history), this run is oddly definitional to my conception of the WCW of its time despite being way, way shorter than a memory that strong would imply. Bagwell is such a shithead, clapping for Steiner while he talks about having the greatest body in wrestling despite having one of the few in pro wrestling that measure up to his. He’s an incredible stooge, dicking around at ringside to annoy Steiner’s opponents, avoiding getting popped in the jaw until, at last, he does.

This match is something of a preview of WCW’s future main event scene, though Booker T’s road to the main event is miserably rocky, as if nobody behind the curtain really believed he had it in him. Like a lot of WCW’s talented midcard of the time, he’s perpetually on the verge of breaking through the glass ceiling. The shame of it is that WCW wasn’t great at elevating babyfaces, especially during the nWo’s run at the top of the card. The exceptions to this — Goldberg and DDP — inevitably prove the rule, spinning their wheels after Hogan programs or fruitlessly turning heel with money left on the table. Listen to how crowds responded to them, Sting, Booker, Piper, Flair, Luger, and The Giant, and you’ll hear how desperate the crowd was for a babyface to just fucking win something, but the 90s were about shades of grey or whatever, and WCW’s adeptness with those shades is exactly why they’re still around to this day.

Booker and Steiner don’t have a great match — again, Steiner is adjusting to the realities of his insane body, and commentary hasn’t yet caught up to the fact that he’s not the wrestler he was in 1992 — but they hit each other hard, which counts for a lot on this godforsaken episode of Nitro. Booker was a big kick guy during his WCW run but leg slaps hadn’t come in style yet, so that’s meat-on-meat contact you’re hearing when he kicks Steiner in the chest, and there’s a lot of weight to his early flying forearm. Even Steiner’s simple offense, mostly clubbing blows, feels heavy, and when it comes to integrating amateur wrestling into professional work, I much prefer what he does — picking a leg, floating over into a headlock, and grinding Booker down with more blows to the head — than the perfunctory exchange of hold and counterhold that’d later come to mar the WWF’s presentation of “technical” wrestling.

The crowd is into the match until Steiner low blows Booker in front of the referee, who warns him to “watch the low blow.” Buff attacks Booker in front of the ref, too, at which point the fans start chanting “STEROIDS” at him and Steiner. Like, they were probably going to do that anyhow, what the fuck else are you gonna chant at the juiciest motherfuckers in the game, but it’s funny how quickly they go quiet on the low blow, like they’re reacting to another nWo fuck finish only to find everyone persisting. Few things stolen from ECW soured under the bright lights of national television quite like WCW’s adoption of their lax ruleset — decades of wrestling on the Turner networks promised consequences for breaking the rules, and while you couldn’t get away with DQing a wrestler for throwing someone over the top rope or into the ringpost by 1999, a kick to the dick is still a kick to the dick. 

Not only is Booker denied the hollow win, he isn’t given much in the way of shine. Steiner is all over him, immediately cutting off a brief glimmer of hope with a stiff lariat, throwing Booker around like a bay-beh deep into the match. They almost get it back when Booker hits Steiner with a neckbreaker, but 14 minutes is a long time to meander, especially when the rally is just there for Buff to spoil, crotching Booker when he goes to the top for a missile dropkick. Steiner locks in the Recliner, Booker death-sells it as Boone checks his arm three times, then he adds a little twist at the end where he tries to wrench Steiner’s grip from around his neck only to pass out, which is so far ahead of where the tech was in 1999 that both Mike Tenay and Johnny Boone seem confused, which is unfortunate given how confusing a lot of this show has been.

Rating: **

Scott Norton vs. Rey Mysterio Jr.

The two gods of the game, baby. I’ll say this about post-mask Rey: it was a bad idea and they shouldn’t have done it, but it maybe could have worked if he wasn’t immediately and forever placed in a second-in-command role with Konnan. Rey’s an extremely good looking man — babyfaced, sure, but he’s 24 years old. Most of the time when you look at a photo of a wrestler from the 1990s they look haggard as hell, like a 57-year-old man somehow bubbled to the surface of a man in their mid-30s, but Rey looks his age and is fucking jacked. The old canard about the money WWE made on Mysterio’s mask is true, but more important than that, they believed in him as a true singles star — WCW did not, so they bailed on the followthrough necessary to rescue a bad decision.

What followthrough we did get was a lot of fun, though — I can’t wait to find out whether or not the Nash/Mysterio match that marked the official end of my WCW fandom is as good as I remember it, and according to a fan’s sign there’s also a Bam Bam Bigelow match. Here he’s up against Scott Norton, who is the uncrowned king of the WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST. It’s a great matchup on paper, and Norton bowing up to Rey before leveling him with a chop is some real man shit. Wild that Norton never so much as sniffed a championship in WCW. He wasn’t dynamic enough on the mic for the World Championship but he would have crushed a TV Title reign — a great style match for virtually everyone on the roster, like Lord Steven Regal if Regal was a barrel of muscles. He’s ruthless against Rey — when he hits a vertical suplex on him, Norton doesn’t fall with him, releasing Mysterio and slamming him down so he lands the way you would on a Jackhammer if the slam part of the move was being executed by a ghost. He’s heavy on the clotheslines here, jaw-jacking every so often to drive the point home that this is his match and he could win at any second, which of course it isn’t and he doesn’t. 

This rules, not the least which because Rey is a truly sympathetic babyface. There’s a moment where, after getting thrown over the top rope to the floor and stomped on the shoulder, he pounds the floor with the fist that isn’t limp from Norton’s attack, where he looks like he’s going to cry but doesn’t, choosing instead to steel himself and get back in the ring while Bobby Heenan says the smart play would be running away. It’s like, yeah, this is exactly how you’d react to getting beaten up by Scott Norton, right up until he resolves to get back in the ring and pick up the fight, to solve the problem of this mountain of a man, which is the kind of determination that sets wrestlers apart from the rest of us. Put a sick mask on him and give him a good theme song and you’ve got yourself an aspirational figure. He gets so little here that his struggling against a shoulderbreaker is a legitimate hope spot — he’s beaten big men with roll-ups! — which is brutally crushed when Norton flings him backwards into the turnbuckle, which he follows with a gross powerbomb. THEN HE HITS REY WITH A ONE-HANDED PRESS SLAM, YAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. 

Norton’s downfall, of course, is hubris. He keeps lifting Rey up from the mat when he could be pinning him, talks trash when he should be headed to the pay window. After the press slam, the referee is distracted by something (really just a little better than watching something illegal happen and going “c’mon watch the illegal stuff”) and Rey kicks Norton in the dick. Flapjack hearkens back to his territory days with a timber sell of the blow, and that gets Rey the win. An absolute blast, and not just compared to the rest of the show.

Rating: ***

Van Hammer vs. Bret Hart

Van Hammer is bouncing around before the bell like he knows this is the most important match of his life, and while Bret Hart is game to wrestle his big goof and is willing to elevate him, he’s never not going to be Van Hammer, you know? Like, Bret is one of the all-time best at drawing out the strengths of big man wrestlers, and Van Hammer was as capable here as he ever was, as enthusiastic to be in there with the Hitman as he was to brawl with Cactus Jack, but he’s still Van Hammer — unlike, say, Daniel Bryan vs. Big Cass, there’s nothing more for him on the other end, no drive or desire to do anything more with his national platform than take home a paycheck and score some weed. That’s fine — that’s the spirit of WCW, in fact! — but there are two things running in the back of my head while watching this: first, how awful this episode of Nitro has been, and second, how little time is left in Bret Hart’s career.

Van Hammer can help neither of those things, obviously, nor would any sane professional wrestler say “I’m hardly worthy of the honor” of the opportunity to be made to look like a star for 11 minutes by Bret fucking Hart, so let’s instead take this at face value. Bret Hart. Van Hammer. It’s one of those Bret Hart matches where he wrings every bit out of an opponent who has no chance against him, like the sort of thing he’d be thrown on a WWF taping in 1993 — go out and defend the title against Papa Shango and make it look good — only he’s the heel here and WCW doesn’t care about the rules anymore so Hart takes over with a blatant low blow. Like in the Steiner/Booker match, this is met with indifference. 

Hart puts on a clinic after that, breaking down Hammer’s leg with ruthless efficiency. Hammer’s hope spots fail to get a rise from the crowd because he’s Van Hammer, but he puts more effort into selling his leg than he’s put into combined years of his wrestling career. It doesn’t need to be this long, but without the burden of “protecting” someone like Sting or Luger from taking an actual loss, this is a rare match in which Hart is allowed to lead things like the star wrestler he is, a full expression of the sly heel character he’d been developing throughout the course of 1999. Given everything that happens in the months that follow, including the death of Owen Hart and Bret’s hiatus and return as a babyface thereafter, it’s tough to say that this version of his character would have eventually risen to the top of the card, and it’s a shame. This is good, solid, fundamentals-based wrestling against a career no-hoper about whom the words “good” and “solid” are rarely said. Hammer’s missed enziguri that leads to the Sharpshooter finish is as good as he’s ever looked. All praise to the Hitman.

Rating: ** & ¾

Ric Flair vs. Goldberg

Hogan and Nash are on commentary for this to further drive towards the Flair/Hogan cage match. Despite the fact that their plan has led Flair to taking a match with Goldberg on zero notice, that he’s on the point of insanity and being questioned by his friends and peers, Nash complains that Flair “hasn’t sold” their scheme. Hogan, meanwhile, hits us with an all-time Hogan line: “It feels good to tell the truth. I love telling the truth.” Nash immediately cracks up. Schiavone’s face is an all-timer. 

This match should have headlined a pay-per-view. Holy shit what a blown opportunity. Give it a proper build, anchor a show around it, and put a spin on the Flair/Vader Starrcade ‘93 match and you have, I think, the makings of a modern classic. Schiavone desperately wants that to be the case while Nash and Hogan run an MST3K routine in the background. FLAIR RUNS INTO GOLDBERG AND GOES DOWN! YEAHHHH. This is classic stuff. Oh my fuckin’ GOD he takes the gorilla press powerslam. Goldberg does a bit of conflicted character work while Flair sells it, like he doesn’t want to wreck this legend but he also doesn’t want to do him the disservice of laying back. Three straight matches with a blatant low blow in front of the referee, but it’s Flair and Goldberg so the fans stay up for it. Subtle evidence of how careless WCW booking was at this point. This is Flair’s only shot against Goldberg, so he hits three, also putting his all into every punch and chop thrown at Goldberg. He’s an all-time master of desperation, so he breaks out the chop block, figure four, and added leverage from the ropes immediately. He’s also been in there against the likes of Sting, Luger, and Vader and is an utter king of putting over that kind of impossible strength, and does so here in having Goldberg power Flair off of the ropes and turn the figure four over without the referee breaking the hold. 

They’re on their way towards something like a great match, Flair having successfully chipped away at Goldberg’s leg, Goldberg’s utter dominance giving way to his playing through pain. Flair dodging the spear would, on a better show, be the moment when the match hits second gear, and Goldberg popping up after a vertical suplex to actually hit the spear is a tantalizing glimpse into the world where a better show is possible, but this is a 1999 episode of WCW Monday Nitro, so the nWo B-Team swarms the ring and that’s it, show over, both heroes are getting their asses kicked while the show goes off the air. “Tune in on Thursday!” Schiavone implores us of a show featuring a Flair/Disco Inferno main event. It’s also got Steiner and Bagwell against Booker T and Rey Mysterio though. Hmm. Hmm. Diamonds in the rough. Cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see them. Like paychecks and weed, the spirit of World Championship Wrestling.

Rating: ** & ¾