Hollywood Blonds vs. Steamboat & Douglas Works In Any Era

I know that the narrative around this period of time is that it’s Steve Austin and Brian Pillman who made the best of a bad situation, put into a tag team because WCW brass didn’t know what to do with two obvious world-beaters. Five years and two days after this match airs on WCW Worldwide, Steve Austin will stake his claim as one of the biggest wrestlers in the history of the medium. Pillman, unfortunately, will pass in 1997, one of the bigger “what-ifs” in wrestling, a guy who perpetually seemed a step or two ahead of the zeitgeist and who never got a chance to heal from injury and adjust his in-ring game to fit the realities of his body. How could World Championship Wrestling fumble both of these wrestlers?

There are many answers to this question, most of them repeated to death at this point, so I won’t belabor it. Instead I’m going to start with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, for whom time is drawing short. It’s not like he or anybody else knows that — that’s just the way injury works — but it’s kind of crazy that WCW’s various attempts at a “youth movement” found Steamboat slotted into the old man mentor role. He’s got plenty of good stuff coming his way before he hangs it up, including Spring Stampede 1994 and a third reprisal of his feud against Austin (this being the second — Steamboat, in my opinion, cannot be given enough credit for how much seasoning ol’ Stone Cold had so early in his career), but he was a Veteran Presence, tagging with Dustin Rhodes, Marcus Alexander Bagwell, Johnny B. Badd, and, here, Shane Douglas — someone the fans could sink their teeth into while WCW tried to figure out who they were going to push up the card in this pre-Hogan utopia of poorly-drawing shows.

It’s not quite a waste, but considering how much Steamboat had in the tank and how good his 1994 singles matches against Flair, Austin, and Vader were (off the top of my head!), this match, however good it is, stands as a pretty spectacular case of roster mismanagement. The Blondes aren’t long for this world as a tag team, and Shane Douglas quits the company in April, unhappy with his push. Douglas is, up front, the least interesting of the four wrestlers here. He goes to ECW and is the guy around whom that promotion becomes what it became. He was good in that role but never transcended it — his attempt to make something of himself in the WWF (a condition otherwise known as “hubris”) had more to do with that than his leg injury — and the fact that Triple H made millions of dollars running a high production value version of what Douglas was doing in ECW says less about Douglas than it does about how easily cowed wrestling fans of the era were: it’s not like any of the post-Dean Douglas stuff Hunter was watching while telling Mick Foley that deathmatches were for simpletons was any good to begin with.

All of that is in the future though. Let us go back to 1993, where Ricky Steamboat is rocking a WCW Slam Jam ballad and an airbrushed gi. He and Douglas look like they met by bumping into each other at the food court at the mall, the Hot Dog on a Stick being the exact halfway point between the kiosk Steamer got his gear airbrushed at and the Wilson’s Leather Douglas picked up his tasseled and fringed jacket from. One of those teams who are at once strangers and a well-oiled machine. Steamboat starts with Austin, and while neither Tony Schiavone or Jesse Ventura mention it, the fact that these two feuded over the WCW Television Championship probably has something to do with why they start things off by slapping the taste out of each other’s mouths. In case you weren’t aware of their dynamic, Steamboat rolls Austin up for a clean two, only for Austin to counter and hold the tights for a two of his own. 

Boy are Austin and Steamboat good together. They’re quick and efficient, doing a lot of little things that put Steamboat over as the hero and Austin as a conniving dickhead. The bit where Austin throws Steamboat out of the ring, only to immediately beg off because it fires The Dragon up? Where is that spot in modern tag team wrestling? Both men make mistakes, but Austin is on his back heel and Steamboat’s passions are inflamed, so it’s the champions who maintain the advantage, Steamboat gorilla pressing Douglas into a splash on Austin for two. He’s the less experienced of the two, so his advantage is short lived. Austin leverages him into the corner and tags out. Douglas hitting a 1993 enziguri is wild. Pillman’s a known tape-trader, so I wonder if that’s a spot he called. Not that Shane wasn’t capable, but once you’ve seen Pillman wrestle The Z-Man or Johnny B. Badd you start seeing these bits and baubles in his opponents’ arsenals that diverge pretty widely from their normal routine and that nobody else on the WCW roster really knew how to sell. 

Going into the first commercial break, the story of the match is that the Blondes are simply not up to the task. They’re able to cheat their way into a momentary advantage, but Douglas is able to hold his own and Steamboat is simply overwhelming. That’s the story when we come back, too, highlighting how much of a bump machine Austin was as he loses an exchange of double-leg takedowns when he’s kicked outside the ring and suplexed back in over the top rope. If I have an issue, it’s that I don’t really buy Shane Douglas as a babyface. It’s a role he’s found himself in because he’s young and cleanshaven, not because he has any aptitude for it. He’s better off here than he was during his first stint in WCW, when he was a skateboarding fanatic who wasn’t very good at skateboarding, but watching him pump his fists and yell out to the crowd who really wants to see Ricky Steamboat in there, you kind of come to the conclusion that there are few roles more thankless than that of the bluechipper babyface. Sting got to skip that by being part of Hot Stuff International and Dustin Rhodes was the goddamn Natural, but otherwise Douglas is one of many, many, many wrestlers (many of whom had more notable careers) who struggled thanklessly as a Fan Favorite until they turned Rulebreaker: Marcus Alexander Bagwell, Chris Jericho, John Cena, Rocky Maivia — it’s a tough life! I’d like to say that Douglas figured it out in the end, but “I’d like to say that Douglas figured it out in the end” is maybe the nicest thing I have to say about him. 

His is a beige paint performance, but when the other three men in the ring are Steamboat, Pillman, and Austin, you can be as beige as your like. Austin is particularly delightful here, using one of the great advantages of the tag team format – the fact that you get to take breaks – to maximize his in-ring minutes. He’s such a frenetic presence here, bumping around the ring, controlling the pace when he’s trading leg trips, selling the exertion of a basic abdominal stretch – even when he’s on the apron egging his partner on, the look on his face is one of laserbeam focus, making the moment feel more grueling and intense than it actually is. Austin changes his game a lot in the coming years, some of which is due to neck and knee injuries, some of which is just him reading and reacting to what the crowd wants from him, but it’s hard to get over how locked in he is here, some three-and-a-half years into his run. 

When I tell you that things pick up in the third act of the match, when Pillman brings a towel into play, I don’t want you to think of what came before as idle time. It’s great tag team wrestling, which is what you expect from World Championship Wrestling, at least until 1994, maybe all the way until the Steiners broke up in 1998 if you want to be charitable. This is part of that lineage. But when the Blonds start choking Shane Douglas with the towel, the fans start caring about him, or at least his ability to tag in Ricky Steamboat, and that changes things. All match long Brian Pillman has taunted the fans, but now that the titles are really on the line you can see a dude in a green shirt and red hat (presumably for the Winston Cup) cussing him out. He won’t sit still while this injustice is happening before his very eyes! Another guy in a yellow shirt gets up out of his seat when Douglas lifts Austin and rocks with the impact of his backdrop. 

This is what wrestling is about, y’all. The ability to manipulate your body or the body of your opponent doesn’t mean a damn thing if you can’t put that towards manipulating the emotions of the crowd watching you. The build to this peak is slow and purposeful — the backdrop just leads to another cutoff as Steamboat is, strangely, out of his corner — and the blowoff is worth it. With Pillman and Douglas down, it’s Pillman who tags his partner in. Austin goes full pelt at Douglas, trying to slam his neck into the ropes with the full weight of his body, only Douglas moves and Austin rebounds off of them and crashes to the mat like Curt Hennig, and also like a star athlete who knows he’s fucked up the championship-clinching play. It’s kind of crazy:

Steamboat gets in and it’s a classic hot tag: big chops, big slams, the BOOM, BOOM, BOOM of the crowd marking every action. He throws Austin over the top rope without the referee noticing, an automatic DQ in the Bill Watts-era of WCW, but after fifteen minutes of the Hollywood Blonds doing whatever they want with no pushback from the referee, it’s nice to see the tables turned. The match breaks down even further from there, with Austin inadvertently hitting Pillman with a top rope forearm, but distracting the referee long enough that he can still break up the count. Douglas knocks Austin out of the ring and follows up with a plancha. Douglas keeps up the fight on the outside, but that just draws the referee into things, and while he’s forcing Douglas back to his corner, Austin decks Steamboat in the back of the head with the tag title, allowing Pillman to take the pin. Is it an injustice? Sure. But at the end of the match, both teams were willing to fight dirty and the smarter of the two won. That’s how these things ought to go. That’s why this format works so well, in 1993, 1983, 2023, or whenever you’d like to run it.

Rating: ****