Fair points, but having gone back and watched a lot of old matches, it is striking how limited Flair's skillset was. Half of his offense in literally almost all of his matches are those chest chops. Not saying Bret and others didn't use a lot of their same moves often as well, but the narrative back then was that Flair was this awesome wrestler who could do anything in the ring, yet his matches do not really reflect that.
Yep, that is lame, regarding the Austin thing, I agree. Having him lose to Hacksaw was just stupid. HBK shouldn't ever talk about anyone else, though, since he was the king of politicking to get what he wanted, not to mention refusing to lose so many of his titles in the ring.
Oh, I agree. Bringing in Beefcake as The Butcher to main event Starrcade was awful. No one in their right mind thought Beefcake was a main event guy, and I am someone who enjoyed his work as Brutus the Barber in the late 80's. The fans loved him, but he was just not a main event guy. I have zero memory of Honky Tonk in WCW, which is probably a good thing. He was so terrible in the ring, it's almost comical.
After a certain point, every Hogan move and loss was a political move either to set up a bigger win down the road for him or to make him look good. I was at the Starrcade in Nashville for the match vs Piper. It was such a weird thing because they never announced if it was a title match or not. So When Piper won, nobody knew if it was a title change. It set up Hogan beating him at the next PPV and driving Piper crazy. With Luger, Hogan got the PPV win against Luger less than a week later in front of his biker crowd negating all of that build to Luger winning it and Luger went right back down the card. He sabotaged the Sting match at Starrcade so it looks like he won quickly. A year later he wasn't even scheduled to face Goldberg, then heard they had 30K+ in the Georgia Dome sold so he inserted himself in the main event a week before the show so it would look good to the Turner people in the crowd like he was the one who drew the house.
Yeah, Honky was there right after Hogan came in and I think he quit at Halloween Havoc when he refused to put over Johnny B. Badd in a TV title match.
flair clearly couldn't do anything in the ring but he did in the 80's and early 90's do a ton of different moves. guys who could actually do anything in the ring because of their size, big enough to lift others , athletic enough to do high flying moves were HBK- once heard around 1996 he was shown how to do a shooting star press on a crash pad but didn't feel like he did it safe enough bret hart johnny b badd 2 cold scorpio jericho RVD maybe a few other guys.
My big issue with the early Hogan run in WCW is he shouldn't have been champion in 1995 if he wasn't going to work pretty much the 1st 9 months of the year. I think his contract only had him do PPV's as he hardly defended the title in 1995. Keep him as an attraction for the PPVs, but have someone else as champion so the belt can also be a draw until he became willing to work more dates when Nitro started up.
I have read conflicting stories about the Sting thing, so I am not sure what to believe. I know Bischoff has said recently that Sting didn't show up in a good shape, which is why the match didn't go exactly as planned, and if you watch the match, you can see that Sting doesn't look very good (and it's not just ring rust), so there might be something to that, even with Bischoff notoriously being full of it. We will probably never know for sure. Yes, he got the belt back from Luger a week later, but he had to cheat to do it. He still put Luger over clean in a big way (which some love to say Hogan would never do). But do not get me started on Sting. Most overrated main event guy ever. Notice that he was never given a lengthy run as the world champ in WCW again after losing it to Vader in '92? That is because he flopped so badly as the champ in both '90 and '92 that he was never given the strap again except for brief stints.
Gotcha. I have no memory of that. If you watch any shoot with Honky now, he is definitely a guy who thinks an awful lot of himself, and good luck guessing as to why. LOL Clowns like him never should have had a problem with putting ANYONE over. Agreed. It is never a good luck to have a champion who rarely shows up and/or wrestles. See: Brock Lesnar.
Watch Flair matches pre-1988 or so. Once Flair had to work with Nikita, Luger & a really green Sting every night he really "dumbed" down his matches to a easier format . Watch his 89 matches with Steamboat, or his 86-87 matches with Windham, or anything in Japan vs Jumbo or Tenryu. Before Crockett pulled Flair home and he stopped being the traveling world champion, Flair worked tons of different styles depending on his opponent's skill level. Once he was pulled into just being a Jim Crockett Promotions champion he had to alter his style a lot. Once he did that that's when his matches got more formulaic.
speaking of guys who could do anything. anyone else ever hear that HBK shooting star press rumor? i also heard 2 cold scorpio showed hart how to do a 450 splash and hart could do it to the crash pad but said no way he was ever doing that to an opponent. anyone hear that one?
Oh yeah, the matches with Steamboat in '89 were incredible. Most think the WrestleWar one was the best, but I always thought the Chi-Town Rumble one was the best. Combine that with the awesome feud with Funk later that year and I could argue that 1989 was Ric Flair's best year.
Also, during that Austin vs Hacksaw US title change, WCW treated Steamboat like he was a nobody. Steamboat's back had gone out in the match where he won the US title to Austin and had to forfeit the title. They never mentioned Steamboat again after that moment. An all time great having to retire due to an in ring injury, but was WCW so caught up in Hogan they couldn't do something for Steamboat at all?
I was at WrestleWar 89 and at a house show in Chattanooga so I got to see 2 Flair vs Steamboat matches in 1989 live, so that was great. I thought the 2/3 falls match in New Orleans at the Clash of Champions was their best 1989 match. I think the Flair vs Funk I Quit match might be better than the Steamboat matches.
i'm trying to see if there is footage but the thing is this was not matches so i doubt it. i don't doubt HBK could learn a shooting star to a crash pad or hart could do a 450 splash though based on moves they already did
No idea, but it is pretty common knowledge now how poorly run WCW was at the time, so it is likely that all of they saw were dollar signs thanks to Hogan's presence and didn't care about anything else.
Oh, one more complaint about Hogan. The strap match vs Vader when neither Vader nor Hogan would let the other win so he beat Vader by dragging Ric Flair to all 4 corners is a horrible PPV main event finish. (Also him constantly no selling Vader's power bomb after it was built up as a killer for years.)
The 2/3 falls match was great, yes, but the atmosphere was terrible. The whole arena looks too dark and there seems to be little crowd noise. The Chi-Town Rumble match looked better and there was this electricity from the crowd that wasn't there in their other televised matches that year, IMO. The I Quit match was definitely awesome. I have watched that match more times than I can count. The post-match brawl is awesome as well.
Eh, I still want to spit fire at how Shawn Michaels killed Vader's chances to really succeed in the WWF. Vader should have gone down as an all-timer, not a footnote.
That's because they booked the Superdome and never promoted that the main event was Flair and Steamboat so they drew horribly that day. Their booker (George Scott) at the time thought if they promoted Flair vs Steamboat would happen on free TV that nobody would buy a ticket to other house shows to see the match. So nobody knew what the main event was for New Orleans until a few days before the show. WCW everybody.
Vader should have been the guy to beat Michaels, not Sid. Search Youtube for Cornette's take on that if you haven't heard it already.
His style was probably more suited to WCW, but he could have been great in the WWF as well if his push had been handled correctly, and had HBK not sabotaged him. Yikes.