Wrestling Observer Flashback–01.02.89

It’s 1989!  Happy New Year!

And first up:  Starrcade 88!

– Man, Dave really loved the show, calling it what a PPV should be from a wrestling standpoint.  The show drew 10,000 to Norfolk, but wasn’t a sellout, showing just how much damage that Dusty has done to the product.

Dave’s review:

The Varsity Club won the US tag titles from the Fantastics in 15:30 when Doc pinned Fulton with a stungun.  Great opener, with Doc working up to his potential and lots of hot action.  ***1/2

The Midnight Express beat the Original Midnight Express in 17:26.  Another hot tag match to start the show.  ***1/4  I actually loved this one even more, but I have a real soft spot for the whole feud.

The Russian Assassins beat JYD & Ivan Koloff at 6:47 to keep their masks.  Wasn’t good, but it was watchable and short.  *1/2

Rick Steiner won the TV title from Mike Rotunda at 17:59.  Slow pace to start but it picked up bigtime.  Dave notes that Steiner is either incredibly tough or insane, which would explain the hard bumps he takes.  The answer of course is “both”.  ***1/2

Barry Windham beat Bam Bam Bigelow by countout in 16:17 to retain the US title.  Dave calls this Windham’s audition as Flair’s heir apparent to “best wrestler in the world” and he delivered bigtime, carrying Bigelow to a great match.  Unfortunately, it proved to be his peak in the business instead and everything was downhill from here.  Finish was crap, but Dave loved the match.  ***3/4  (Really?)

The Road Warriors retained the tag titles over Dusty Rhodes & Sting by DQ in 11:20.  The match kind of died whenever Dusty was in, and although the finish was bad, people didn’t mind because they weren’t expecting a finish anyway.  **3/4  This one actually finished really high in the “Best of Starrcade” poll that WWE did for their Starrcade DVD set, but I think that was more because of name value and not because people had actually seen it.

Ric Flair retained the World title by pinning Lex Luger in 30:59.  Dave calls this by far Luger’s best performance ever, and that’s tough to argue with.  Dave thinks that either Luger is legit a main eventer, or Flair is so good that he managed to snow everyone into believing Luger was great here.  Man, Dave just wasn’t on the Flair train these past couple of years, was he?  Dave notes that Flair even changed up his offense somewhat.  Best PPV match of the year, easily.  ****1/2 

Dave notes that the last time they put on a show like this one (Clash #1) they managed to ride that wave of goodwill for nearly TEN DAYS before self-destructing again! 

(My own rant is of course available as well:  http://www.rspwfaq.net/2011/12/starrcade-countdown-1988.html  I notice that I didn’t rate Windham-Bigelow, but it was about **3/4 by my count.  And I love this show too, although not as much as Dave did.)

– Whatever the opposite of an exodus is, it begins next month, as we’re getting Steven Casey, Michael Hayes, Butch Reed, Jimmy Garvin, and Brian Pillman all coming in.  Most of those would actually stick around long-term, too!  Two other major names are also coming in, Terry Gordy and someone else who can’t be talked about yet.  I assume everyone can figure that other one out? 

– Dave discusses the state of pro wrestling as 1989 begins:  NWA and WWF are strong, everyone else is in a shitload of trouble and fading fast. 

– Onto the WWF, as the main event of the Main Event looks to be a rematch of the Megapowers v. Megabucks match from Summerslam, with the Hogan-Savage breakup happening there.  Close but not quite. 

– The horrible SNME headlined by Savage v. Andre managed to draw a phenomenal 9.2 rating. 

– The Royal Rumble match, which will be on PPV this year, will feature 30 men and 2:00 intervals, which means an hour-long match.  Dave doesn’t know if this will fly as a long-term concept.  The show also features a Rude-Warrior posedown, which Dave notes will be the best match of their feud thus far. 

– Up to Stampede, where the Bulldogs are doing big business as the top team, although Dynamite will leave for Japan soon and Bruce Hart takes over as booker.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaand, that’s the sound of the doors getting ready to close on the promotion. 

– Sid Eudy as The Vicious Warrior is apparently a thing that is going to happen in Japan in February.  I really feel like the wrestling world was robbed when he went to the NWA instead.

– Verne Gagne is not even putting up the pretext of playing along with the “Unified” World title, and is advertising Lawler’s title defenses as the AWA World title, period.

– Madusa starts working All Japan in January.  This is notable because she was pretty horrible in the AWA, but every time she worked Japan she got better and better (what a shock, I know) and eventually was one of the better women working in the US by the early 90s. 

– Dusty has sold his house in Texas and is moving to Florida, while TBS decides what to do with his $585K a year contract (!!!!!!!)  Dusty was making THAT MUCH?!?  Not to mention whatever he was getting as booker on top of that.  Most don’t expect him to be around long-term, but Dave notes that even if they cut that contract in half, that’s still better than most people do in the business.  No shit. 

– Clash IV did a crap rating, and Dave notes that it wasn’t exactly a secret that TBS was embarrassed by the poor quality of that show.  Probably explains why they never talked about it afterwards.

– Best guess for Superclash III was around 40,000 buys, or 0.7%.  Actual number was 0.5%, which would be closer to 25,000 buys.  Break-even point was 1%, so they lost money on the show.  Biggest market was Memphis, of course. 

Finally, we close with a great letter from a reader, as he calls Dave on something that he still does to this day.  The letter points out that Dave pretty flippantly mentioned that oh yeah, Kerry Von Erich has an amputated foot, when in fact we’re paying for this newsletter and that’s exactly the kind of thing that people might want some explanation about!  Like, what happened to the foot?  Why was it amputated?  Who knew?  Or when Muraco and JYD were fired from the WWF in Europe and Dave just dropped a line about it in the middle of a paragraph and then moved on.  These days it’s just as annoying when he’ll tease some bit of news on the radio show and then talk about it with Bryan off the air, because that’s exactly what we’re paying $10 a month to hear about!  We’re already paying for the newsletter to get the radio show, why tease it out with mysterious vague wording? 

And on that note, we wrap it up for another week.