Against The Grain 9.05.09: A Simple Fan’s View of WCW

Welcome everyone back to Against The Grain, my take on some of the most unconventional and not-often talked about subjects in the wrestling world. After recently watching the pretty good The Rise and Fall of WCW DVD last weekend, I had thought to myself of all of the crap that I and many others had witnessed WCW throw out throughout the years, there were some horribly good moments in the company that I enjoyed a lot but often forget. The only problem is I often don’t remember these moments due to the memories of shitty booking overtaking my little brain. So here I want to revisit a handful of these good memories as a simple fan of WCW…and bring just one of the many zany moments up down in my WTF?!? section (Tank Abbott dancing…nuff said).

One of the reasons why I actually liked WCW back in the day…The Flock.

The “Bright Side” of WCW
With my selections below, I honestly just wanted to take a look back at the fond memories I’ve had of WCW without harping on the obviously negative parts that everyone tends to talk about. So here you’ll hear no talk of crappy booking decisions, backstage politics, and plain-as-day bad mistakes. Instead just the simple good memories of what I saw in the late 90s as a simple WCW fan. So here they are…

Chris Jericho’s feud against Dean Malenko
I know that a good handful of fans fondly remember this excellent feud with the chickenshit-heel Chris Jericho against the super-serious bad-ass ring technician Dean Malenko back in the good old cruiserweight title days of WCW, but I honestly think it still isn’t talked about enough. Not only did the due provide a good long series of good to great matches, but they also provided some of the best out-of-ring drama that also rivaled the main-event storylines of the nWo. From Jericho literally calling out the “1,004 holds” that he knew in comparison to Malenko’s nicknamed “1000 holds” to Malenko dressing up as a random masked luchador to sneak in and beat Jericho for the title to Jericho going around Washington D.C. claiming to those who would listen that he was a part of a “conspiracy” by WCW management (as a result of losing his belt). Funny, action-packed, and definitely one of the best memories I’ve ever had when watching Monday Night Nitros.

The Flock Saga
The storyline surrounding the mysterious heel Raven gathering up random B-list wrestlers (Riggs, Resse, Lodi, Kidman…who eventually broke out of being B-listed) to make up his goth-inspired group, the Flock, started off pretty basic as a standard angle. But WCW did a pretty good job of building up this group from some folks not to be messed around with to slowly having the band split up. Starting off the Flock were bad-ass mindless grapplers that were messing in the affairs of Chris Benoit and DDP due to the will of their fearless leader Raven, until one of the main members Perry Saturn started to question his dirty deeds. This led to a nice back-and-forth feud between Saturn and Raven, a random, but horribly cool in my opinion, inclusion of Kanyon to the Flock, and then finally the slow break-up of the group. I personally wished that the group would have stayed together a lot longer, but it was horribly great while it lasted.

Tag Team Greatness in the form of The Jersey Triad
Simply put, the team of DDP, Bam Bam Bigelow, and Kanyon was a rare near-perfect tag team combination. I was big fan of DDP at the time, was one of the few who was digging the underrated innovative style of Kaynon, and always had a liking for the Beast from the East in Bigelow. Not only did the guys all rock the pretty corny premise of being “Jersey boys” to awesome perfection, but they took the old school “Freebird Rule” of allowing any of the three group members to interchange themselves during any match (i.e. Kanyon and DDP could suddenly turn into DDP and Bigelow at any given moment) and made it an awesome gimmick to frequency use. Despite having a too-good-to-be-true at the time (due to the other really bad crap WCW was showing) awesome as hell TAG TEAM TITLE feud…rare in WCW…I know…with the duo of Benoit and Saturn, the company pulled the plug on the group in only a few short months. Again like the Flock, it’s too damn bad cause they were great while they lasted.

Going Out In Style…The Cruiserweight Way
While the entire company was seemingly slowly going down in flames, WCW managed to do one thing totally right in its end days…rebuild their once highly coveted Cruiserweight division. Everyone remembers the early days of WCW with great high-flying action from folks like Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, and Ultimo Dragon, but not everyone stuck around to watch the new wave of title contenders and the introduction of the Cruiserweight Tag Team championship. Watching mainstay folks like Kidman, Mysterio, and Chavo Guerrero get back in the mix to witnessing the uprising of folks like Shane Helms (aka Hurricane) and Jamie Noble (aka James Gibson in ROH) kicking ass. Hell…one could look closely to see short appearances from current stars like TNA’s AJ Styles. The one distinct last great WCW show that I watched before they closed (not counting the last Nitro…which was kind of sad…in a “damn…they really are closed” way) was an episode of Thunder with a multi-person cruiserweight gauntlet match (and please tell me if anyone recognizes this match…and even better knows where it’s at on YouTube) that was easily one of the bouts I honest to God have ever seen. It involved everyone awesome at the time (Mysterio, Helms, Chavo, Shannon Moore, Kidman…it was great) and it was indescribably perfect.

Of all of the weird, random, and just plain stupid crappy shit that WCW has put on (like with Tank Abbott in my WTF section below) during my heavy viewing in the late 90s, I’m glad that my mind hasn’t been so damaged that I don’t remember the actual good stuff that the company managed to put on my TV screen. So when one thinks about dumb crap like Kevin Nash laying down for Hulk Hogan via a fingerpoke, please also reach in the back of your mind and think about the cruiserweights, think about the Flock, and more importantly think about few good things that WCW managed to pull of their black hat.

For Your Viewing Pleasure
Jericho talking shit against Malenko…nuff said

Flock craziness…Raven vs. Saturn

The greatness known as “The Jersey Triad”

Bringing back cruiserweight goodness in the end

WTF?!?
Welcome ladies and gents again to another edition of “WTF”, the section that covers the weird and strange occurrences that I’ve observed in my close watching of wrestling in the last 10 or so years. From the Bananas in Pajamas wrestling in a battle royal to really random face and heel turns that make had made sense at the time but seem really strange now, I want to cover it all.

This edition with the inclusion of the positives that I’ve seen in WCW, I couldn’t resist pointing out at least one horrible WTF moment from the company. So below is the sad and hilarious sight of former UFC fighter Tank Abbott dancing and singing his ass off in his mercifully short stint in WCW.

Tank Abbott…Dancing Machine?!?…WTF?!?
I honest to goodness didn’t know all that much about Tank Abbott before he came to WCW. All I knew was that he was a super bad-ass that competed in UFC matches, looked like a psycho-biker dude that would kick my butt in two seconds, and supposedly had a killer right-hook. So with all of the hype I heard about him, I expected another possibly cool “Ken Shamrock” type of person to start kicking ass and taking names in the struggling WCW. But like most good potential things in the company, the powers-that-be found a way to perfectly f*ck it up and made the guy, who one thinks would easily be taken ALWAYS as a bad-ass just by his looks alone, was made to be a complete fool by having him dance with the boy-group parody, Three Count. While I totally did find it funny when Abbott eventually turned on the dance crew by randomly punching them all out at once during a routine (!), it was sad but equally gut-busting hilarious to see Abbott be so damn misused. Witness the horror below…