WCW Road Wild 1997

Another year. Another Sturgis show. Yippee. This show was following the 100th episode of Monday Nitro, which saw Lex Luger defeat Hollywood Hulk Hogan for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and all his friends came out to celebrate with him on the accomplishment of actually winning a world title over a hated heel and not over a countout win.

So now let's see how WWE WCW fucks all that up because of course they would...

Harlem Heat defeated Buff Bagwell & Scott Norton in a perfectly acceptable little tag team match. On the bright side, there seems to be less racist bikers in the crowd as Harlem Heat got some modicum of cheers this time around. So that's something, I guess.

Konnan defeated Rey Mysterio via submission in what was advertised as a Mexican Death Match, which translates to a no-DQ plain jane wrestling match. Rey had a bad knee here that he claims was faking. Yeah, sure, pal. And Dominick is really your kid. ALL LIES, I TELL YOU! Anyway, this was merely okay, but not great. And certainly not living up to the whole death match thing.

Steve "MONGO" McMichael & Chris Benoit defeated Jeff Jarrett & Dean Malenko in a thing that happened. This was elimination rules, leading to a funny bit where Jeff Jarrett, terrified on Mongo, forced Mongo to pin him, thus leaving poor Dean alone to get murdered brutalized (for fuck's sake, dude, AGAIN?!) by the Horse people. Eh.

Cruiserweight champion Alex Wright defeared Chris Jericho via roll-up with a handful of tights to retain the title in a fine match between two young lions. This Jericho kid seems pretty good.

Ric Flair defeated Syxx... I fell asleep durin this match, but if you like REST HOLDS, have I got the perfect match for you? So many REST HOLDS in this here match, even Randy Orton passed out.

Curt Hennig defeated Diamond Dallas Page... so Hennig was being groomed by Ric Flair to join the Horsemen, which would lead to the Wargames match where Hennig would turn on the Horsemen and join the nWo, because the Horsemen is Sting to the nWo's Ric Flair... what a terrible analogy that was. Anyway, the match was fine. I didn't mind it. Page bled a gusher. Cool, I guess.

The Giant squashed Randy Savage... not much to say here other than Macho was nWo and Giant was not. So Giant squashing an nWo name is a happy moment.

The Steiner Bros. defeated Tag Team Champions the Outsiders (Hall and Nash) via DQ due to Nash pulling the ref out of the ring while Hall was getting Steiner-dogged. As a result, the Outsiders would retain the titles. This would, of course, be followed by Hollywood Hulk Hogan defeating WCW World Champion Lex Luger via copious amounts of outside interference including one from a fake Sting to win back the title after he dropped earlier that week, thus making that whole celebration on Nitro completely and utterly pointless. All of a sudden, a countout win doesn't seem like the worst thing to happen to Luger in the World title picture.

Both matches were horrible, both finishes were bad, and both were made to re-establish the status quo rather than try to change it. And they needed to change it sooner or later. And by the time they did, it was too late and even that didn't fucking hold. But hey, the crowd was more into this shitshow than they were the previous year's edition. Someone even threw a rock at Hogan. They were being generous.

Fuck this show. This show sucked.