Previously on Best and WCW Monday Nitro: We revisited Fall Brawl ’97 for Curt Hennig’s sudden but inevitable betrayal, Ric Flair getting his head hit by a cage door and Mark Curtis being told to suck Scott’s dick Hall. All in all, a banner night for WCW.
Click here to watch this week’s episode on the WWE Network. You can watch all past episodes of WCW Monday Nitro on the Best and Worst of Nitro tag page. Watch the competition here.
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And now, the best and worst of WCW Monday Nitro, which originally aired on September 15, 1997.
Worst/Best: Curt Henning May Have Killed Ric Flair
To refresh your memory, this is how Fall Brawl ended:
Nitro opens with grisly footage of what looks like a dead Ric Flair on an operating table, and honestly they could have opened the show with a smashed watermelon surrounded by a sparkly robe and I would have bought that as Flair’s head.
I mean, these signs are more like the beginnings of a rhytidectomy from, say, brain surgery, but if you’re taking time off to get a facelift, “the bad guy I trusted like an idiot for three months ruined my normal face” is a serious reason.
Tony Schiavone is an absolute mess at the top of the show, refusing to do the action and leaving the set because despite the fact that Flair spent the 1980s bragging about ruining people’s lives and the early 90s using magic tricks and evil voices to psychologically manipulate Sting, Tony and Knight have always been buds. Flair would like to give him money and boost his confidence to do dirty spots for Dusty Rhodes.
As a result of all of this, the New World Order has real heel heat for the first time since Bash at the Beach ’96?. At least since that Nitro a month later where they ruined Rey Mysterio’s day at Disney World.
Do you know what it took? Curt Hennig turns on The Horsemen, nearly kills Ric Flair, kills Arn Anderson’s legacy, and wears Ric Flair’s robe to the ring for a condescending promo in Flair’s hometown. Oh, he’ll also get a United States Championship match tonight in the main event against Steve McMichael, who thanks to a Chris Benoit concussion is the only member of the Four Horsemen still standing. Cool.
Hennig gets smashed in the head with a beer as soon as he starts talking. Here it is in glorious slow motion:
Nash takes the empty cup and pretends to drink from it, and I’m surprised he didn’t show up dressed as Old Man Arn, give way to Virgil’s liver, and harikari in the middle of the ring.
So with all this heat and only one member of the Horsemen left to battle the entire nWo for the Nature Boy honor in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mongo either flattens Curt Hennig in the main event and sparks a big match New World Order- in, or WCW decides to stand behind him to prevent another near-homicide like this, right?
Oh
Do you know? It’s good that the nWo was getting real heat again, especially if the ultimate payoff for the angle was for Sting to finally come in, wipe them out forever for the good of the company, and re-enter World Championship Wrestling, but (1) LOL, like that it was actually going to happen, and (2) immediately rewriting it as an “nWo plan” is pretty ridiculous. The team announces that this was the plan all along, but really?
Your grand plan to attack Ric Flair and win a minor championship was to bring in Curt Hennig, have him courted, deny him for several months, put him in a War Games match against WCW, rely to the departure of Arn Anderson and finally getting Hennig to join the team, relying on Lex Luger and Diamond Dallas Page having problems with the War Games, relying on Hogan to injure JJ Dillon and the WCW Executive Committee for to bring back Rowdy Roddy Piper, rely on Piper to get Luger and Page out of the war Games at the last minute and replace them with the Horsemen, stage a fake backstage attack to make people think Hennig is wouldn’t be in the match for some reason and then have Hennig show up pretending to be injured so he can take out a bunch of handcuffs on the low low which are technically legal in a War Games match anyway and turn on the Horsemen? Really; You couldn’t walk backstage and kick Ric Flair’s ass?
Worse: In other news, we still have no idea who the number one contenders are
One of the strangest things about Hennig winning the title (and winning) is that Mongo’s opponent, Jeff Jarrett, defeated Dean Malenko to become the number one contender for the United States Championship. Guess what? It’s not the only time they do it. In this episode.
At Fall Brawl, the Steiner Brothers defeated Harlem Heat for the seventh or eighth hundredth time to become number one contenders for The Outsiders’ World Tag Team Championship. Also on that show, Mortis and Wrath defeated The Faces of Fear in a grudge match that had nothing to do with the tag titles. So what’s the tag title match on Nitro next night?
You guessed it, The Outsiders vs Mortis and Wrath. As much as I would love to play this match in a video game, I find it hard to put into words how counterproductive it is to (1) have a number one match and then give someone else a title first, (2 ) pit two heel teams together the first night after August Hall and Nash had heel heat and (3) not only ran heel vs. heel, but did a “cool realistic heel” vs. “the cartoonish karate bad guys from the Glacier angle.”
The Outsiders win, of course, but only after Syxx helps them cheat. Because dot dot question mark question mark a JPG of me throwing a vase at the wall.
Don’t worry though, the Harlem Heat are here to lose again, this time to the Faces of Fear because they can’t tell Meng and the Barbarian apart. The Steiners aren’t on the show at all.
Here’s a fun fact: The Steiner Brothers end up getting a title shot in October and winning, but not against Hall and Nash and not at a pay-per-view. They manage to defeat Hall and Syxx, who Freebirded, I guess, on Nitro. Harlem Heat doesn’t get a pay-per-view or even a pay-per-view title shot fight as a group until August 1999almost two full years later when they win the belts from The Triad at Road Wild ’99. The number one contender forever!
Better: There’s good wrestling, at least!
The positive thing about this episode, which I can’t say about all of them, is that despite the futile nihilism of the systematic Hearing-killing style of the Knights in the Land of the Knights, Nitro has some good fighting in it. I think my favorite match of the night is Rey Mysterio Jr. vs. Juventud Guerrera, who basically STARTS with Juventud powerbombing Rey from the apron to the floor.
The highlight for me is the finish, which is Mysterio hitting one of the smoothest hurricanrana hits I’ve seen.
It’s one of the best moves in wrestling history when the timing is right and it doesn’t wobble on someone’s leg or the height difference doesn’t turn the guy on. Sorry, psychosis.
You wouldn’t think North Carolina would be in trouble Lord Steven Regal, but if you let him slap the Christ out of Alex Wright in front of them, you have a cult hero.
This is the best Alex Wright match I’ve seen in… maybe years? Because it’s built around them doing World of Sport-ass wristlocks and waiting for the exact moment the crowd starts to lose interest and then boom, Regal punches Alex in the face. And Alex stumbles into selling it for about 30 seconds. The crowd starts chanting for Regal, so he turns face mid-match, then turns heel again and everyone loves him more because even a British Lord with a drug problem is more recognizable to a Southern crowd than a handsome German teenage adult with Randy Orton’s body and the throw of all three Legacy members combined.
Wright holds back with a dropkick to the turnbuckles and a German suplex because WCW can’t leave a single person in North Carolina happy.
Also on the show
WCW’s big idea for this leg of the tour was, “what if we HATE you?” So outside the main corner, there is a lot of padding.
The Giant obliterates Konnan in about a minute with a chokeslam, because Nitro needs to acknowledge that WCW has an unstoppable 7 foot tall supernatural monster that hates the New World Order but doesn’t do anything about it until it’s time to make a dime and like them again.
The match they choose to run after showing Ric Flair dying on an operating table is Dean Malenko vs. Disco Infernowhich is depressingly hilarious. Malenko needs to be on the Horsemen sooner rather than later, and/or he needs Chris Jericho to find his shit and figure out how to be awesome so he can have an opponent other than ‘any heel or faces that don’t get hurt or do anything now.”
Earlier in the night, Diamond Dallas Page delivers a promo on how he has a diseaseand this disease is Macho Man Randy Savageand also the cure for this disease is Diamond Dallas Page. The crowd reacts to this with murmurs, possibly due to the irony of a man having to fight a disease for which the man himself is the medicine, and Page stops and awkwardly wipes his mouth because you know he thought it was a bad line and no one cracked up about it.
Later, he pins Stevie Richards. After the match, Raven shows up and shoves Stevie for no real reason. It’s notable for being the first match between the Raven character and main-venter DDP, which becomes something later, but it’s also not notable for being a Stevie Richards Nitro match.
Finally, Eddie Guerrero defends the Cruiserweight Championship against Ultimo Dragon in a match that isn’t as good as it sounds. It’s one of those nights (like WrestleMania XX) where Dragon can’t seem to do anything right, as he can’t even get through the headscissors without flipping halfway through and sending Eddie flipping in the wrong direction. However, Eddie and Mysterio both won and we can’t start this Halloween Havoc schedule soon enough.
That’s it for this week’s show. We hope you don’t like any of the Four Horsemen, or any of WCW, or don’t like tag team wrestling, or see weird surgery footage!
In conclusion:
(Who’s) Next Week:
The number one contender to the Tag Team Championship loses a tag team match, the Hulk Hogan vs. Roddy Piper feud gets slightly weirder than usual, and the Silver King eats one of those errant Rey Mysterio hurricanrana I wrote about.
Oh, also, Hugh Morrus takes on a pretty impressive debuting wrestler who brings his legendary winning streak to 1-0.
