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Re: The Wrestling thread
The Hawk vs Flair title match at night one of the Great American Bash 86 is on youtube. Just finished it. It's only 12 minutes.
It's a decent match but the Dusty finish just kills it. It also kills the crowd.
The lack of clean finishes is what really plagued the NWA at this time and is one of the reasons they could never get to the next level even though they had a better and more realistic product.
The 86 Bash tour was a complete disaster. They're lucky it didn't bankrupt the company. Half empty stadiums everywhere. They only had themselves to blame.
Why go to this event when you know Flair isn't going to lose? I was only 11 and even I knew Flair wasn't losing the belt until he went up against Dusty at the end of the tour....and would just win it back a few weeks later. Only part I was wrong about was a few weeks....he won it back a week later.
Re: The Wrestling thread
Flair should have dropped the belt to Funk at least once, and Muta should have held the belt longer during their feuds.
Never watched it. Other than wanting to move up to the big leagues quick or the decision to wrestle solo matches against Flair where Hawk was obviously quite capable, not sure exactly how he was sabotaging them.
When they got to WWF he was out of control, fighting with McMahon on finishes before matches, drunk, being high as fuck at Wrestlemania in the midst of their major push... Animal basically worked the match with Dibiase on his own, and then Hawk took off to Japan and replaced Animal with a Japanese wrestler. That episode might be on Youtube.
Re: The Wrestling thread
Here is an excellent example of what years of Dusty finishes were doing to the promotion....
Forgive the shit quality. It was not professionally filmed.
That is a literal dream match. It's also heel vs heel. Just these two teams arguing weeks earlier on the Saturday show caused a massive buzz.
Even when the pin happens, the crowd is indifferent. Why? Because they know the belts aren't changing hands even though they just saw it happen. It'll be reversed.
The nanosecond the referee hands the belts to the Midnight Express, the crowd goes ape shit.
It took a referee to allow them to believe what their eyes were seeing.
Dusty should've been fired years earlier.
Re: The Wrestling thread
Flair should have dropped the belt to Funk at least once
I technically agree.
One problem....
Flair had literally just regained the title from Steamboat.
The Flair-NWA formula in the 80s was very consistent....
Flair had lengthy reigns. When he lost the belt, his opponents would have incredibly short reigns.
You're basically asking them to turn the formula upside down.
Other than the Dusty finishes, this was another way too predictable aspect of the NWA.
One more thing against a potential Funk reign...
Luger was still in the mix...and Sting was about to become his main nemesis.
A Funk reign just wasn't in the cards.
Re: The Wrestling thread
That was probably my favorite wrestling feud ever. It just really sucks that they lose all drama by not having Funk win at least one of those matches. They handled Stan Hanson brilliantly during that period with his Luger feud.
They completely screwed up how awesome the Dangerous Alliance could have been: Sid Vicious, Mean Mark Callous (Undertaker) and Dan Spivey with Paul Heyman as their manager. How could you not push that?
Re: The Wrestling thread
Early-mid 89 definitely a high point of NWA/WCW history.
The Flair- Steamboat feud flowing seamlessly into the Flair- Funk feud was a work of art.
One thing I loved about Steamboat's reign, and it's never mentioned anymore, is his interviews with various mags challenging Hogan. It never made sense because it would never happen. It took a lot of nerve though.
How could you not push that?
They hated Undertaker from jump street. I never understood why.
They completely screwed up how awesome the Dangerous Alliance could have been:
They fucked up every stable not named The Four Horsemen.
It's why other than The Road Warriors with Dusty and Nikita, literally the four top stars in 87, the Horsemen had no other competition even though several stables existed during the Horsemen prime.
Re: The Wrestling thread
Dan Spivey
We saw him at a WWF event right before he went to NWA.
Me, my aunt, and two cousins were waiting outside for the wrestlers to come out to the parking lot. Spivey comes out and my aunt goes crazy. She went right up to him and started grabbing his ass while talking to him.
He looked uncomfortable... probably because a bunch of kids are standing there.
Re: The Wrestling thread
I wish NWA had invented the Survivor Series in 85-87 instead of Mcmahon...which was designed to compete with Starrcade.
Can you imagine the matchups with that insane roster? Holy shit. The tag team series alone would've been legendary.....
The Andersons
Midnight Express
The Russians
The Thunderfoots
Vs
Road Warriors
Rock N Roll Express
Frank and Jesse James (Dusty and Magnum)
Lazer Tron and Pez Whatley
The crowd pop would register on the richter scale.
Edit
Now that I think about it, other than that dream match listed above, they would play it totally safe with the other matches and also wouldn't allow a clean finish in the main event.
They also likely wouldn't even include Flair in the series and yes....there's precedent for this belief...
The Crockett Cup.
Instead of making things interesting by having Flair team up with Tully(the top two champions), they had Flair predictably defend the title against Dusty and ends in a DQ.
The whole point of the Crockett Cup is teams around the world and from different territories competing....so why was Flair defending against Dusty?
Even children like my cousins and I wondered why he wasn't defending against the likes of Dibiase, Duggan, or Steve Williams.
Re: The Wrestling thread
I remember during his wrestling news segment, Gordon Solie announcing Mean Mark had adopted a new finishing move called The Heart Punch. This was when all those Dangerous guys used the powerbomb as their finisher. He went a few weeks using it and They were carrying people out on stretchers and shit, but then he just disappeared and ended up in WWF. They were building up a good thing there.
Midnight Express had the best intro music of all time. Total eighties, total bad ass.
Re: The Wrestling thread
It's a miracle he was able to persevere through it all and actually breakout and become a star.
9 out of 10 people would've given up.
It's been 20+ years since reading about Undertaker but I remember this....
He was completely ripped off by Buzz Sawyer at the beginning. He paid to go to Sawyer's wrestling school and Buzz took the money, ran, and spent it on drugs.
He was really poor. Would sometimes have to go days without eating. Life in those territories was rough on a lot of guys. If you weren't near the top of the card(he wasn't), you were lucky if you got 20 bucks.
When finally getting his foot through the door in WCW, not only did they not see his potential, they told him he wouldn't amount to anything.
Like I said... lesser men would've crumbled.
He deserved all his success.
Midnight Express had the best intro music of all time. Total eighties, total bad ass
Yeah it was bad ass. It was my cousin Scott's favorite intro too.
Should've been on the radio.
Having said that....it's the 3rd best intro. 
#1
Iconic....to the point where people who don't watch wrestling know that music means Ric Flair is about to walk down that aisle.
He couldn't have picked a better song if he tried.
#2
The perfect song for them. Nothing else fit. If memory serves me correctly, they actually used Paranoid a few times before going with this.
From 1985 on, they literally owned this song. It's as if they stole it from Sabbath. Song was a faded memory until they gave it a second life.
Savage's theme is high on the list too.
Such a magical time when anyone could use any song without getting in trouble.
This is another area where Mcmahon was ahead of the curve and left his competition in the dust.
WWF weekly shows would use huge pop hits in their intros and as credits rolled.
