The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 Lex Luger Moments

Lex Luger is an unusual icon in the history of professional wrestling. Few wrestlers have ever rivaled his look. Moreover, paired with the right opponents in the right circumstances, he could put on some very good matches. There were periods during which he was quite arguably the top guy in WCW as well as in WWF. And yet, history doesn’t look all that fondly on Luger who, in retrospect, didn’t demonstrate a consistently great work rate, and shoot interviews have revealed wasn’t always a pleasure to deal with backstage. Moreover, at those moments when he was “the man,” he was more often than not trying not and quite succeeding in the effort to fill big shoes, whether it was the top face who wasn’t quite as over or good as Sting, Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, or Magnum TA in WCW, or trying to pick up where Hulk Hogan left off in the WWF.

All that said, in no small part because he received a number of opportunities, Lex Luger did take part in his share of memorable moments—winning matches, winning championships, launching major turning points in his high profile career. This week, I’m looking back at seven of the most auspicious moments in his career.

#7. Challenging the Steiner Brothers at SuperBrawl 1

The Steiner Brothers vs. Sting and Lex Luger was a dream match in its time—two teams of elite faces squaring off at the dawn of new super show. While Ric Flair and Tatsumi Fujinami battled title for title, these four were arguably the next four biggest names in the company and the match represented an unlikely battle between kayfabe allies. While Sting and Luger were more clear-cut main event level talents at that stage, it was nicely balanced by the Steiners being super over as a team. Add onto all of that that all four men were arguably in their primes as in-ring workers and you have the recipe for a lost classic.

The result was about as good of a twelve-minute tag match as you can get, full of flurries of offense from both sides. While the match arguably loses a few points for its indecisive finish—Nikita Koloff attacking and costing Luger and Sting the bout—the finish protected everyone involved and forwarded Koloff’s issues with Luger and Sting, thus showing some good foresight. All in all, there’s a real argument to be made that this was the single best match Luger was ever a part of.

#6. Agreeing to a Chicago Street Fight

This likely seems like an odd pick but it’s one of those moments from my youth as a wrestling fan that has stuck with me, and one of the first times I remember recognizing the ways in which comedy could inflect and further a serious angle. At the time, Lex Luger was just a few months returned to WCW, and was playing uneasy ally to Sting—a true tweener who feuded on and off with Hulk Hogan, while maintaining his friendship with Sting. Sting and Luger played their parts perfectly—Luger arrogant and largely oblivious; Sting the loyal friend who just the same grew increasingly exasperated with the situations Luger put him in.

This dynamic came to a head on the February 26, 1996 episode of Nitro in which Sting and Luger successfully defended their tag titles against The Road Warriors, but did so via questionable means as Luger used a foreign object to pick up the pin on Animal. Afterwards, The Road Warriors sought to settle the score in a Chicago Street Fight at the next PPV. Luger quickly accepted, before going on to ask what’s a Chicago Street Fight? Sting sold incredulous nicely, realizing his buddy had just unwittingly committed them to a war. This was the height of Luger as an upper card talent who was also a doofus with a big ego–a role that he played to perfection before he’d get more serious in the months ahead.

#5. Winning His First WCW Championship

It’s a signature moment for any wrestler when he wins his first world championship (if he ever does achieve that milestone). In Luger’s case, behind-the-scenes machinations make the accomplishment murkier—hence the choice not to rank this moment higher than five (and their were drafts of this list in which it didn’t make the countdown at all). On his way out the door to the WWF, Ric Flair did not pass the torch to Luger (Flair was adamant that Barry Windham deserved the strap), and instead vacated the title, so Luger was left to win it against fellow top contender Windam.

Luger-Windham was the penultimate bout of a very, very bad Great American Bash show, during which fans spent much of the encounter chanting for Flair. It was a lukewarm match, which culminated in Harley Race coming to ringside, giving Luger orders (though not really helping in any meaningful, much less truly heelish way, to turn Luger heel and instate him as the top heel in the company.

I wound up putting this moment on the list in large part because of what it meant in the larger scheme of Luger’s career and legacy—that this was the point when, ill-advised as it may have been, WCW gave Luger the ball to run with and positioned as ostensibly Ric Flair’s replacement as “the man” for the months to follow.

#4. Questioning Sting’s Loyalty

Before the nWo grew totally unwieldy and the defections were out of control, a part of the intrigue, and a major source of the angle’s early success was the question of where anyone’s loyalties rested at any time. Hulk Hogan, the face in professional wrestling went rogue to launch the new stable. Then The Giant joined their ranks. There wasn’t any particular reason to think Sting would follow suit, but when the nWo incepted the idea, it did seem possible.

That Luger—Sting’s best friend—would suspect him of treachery, turned a screw. Sting had not only been a consistent face for the length of his WCW tenure but also, as noted earlier, had been the one to stand by Luger when he was making poor decisions and no one trusted him, and yet Luger was not prepared to return the favor. Thus, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So, the stage was set for Fall Brawl 1996 in which Luger, Ric Flair, and Arn Anderson were suspicious of their War Games teammate Sting. But Sting would remain true. He entered the cage last and proceeded to dominate and decimate the field of his nWo opponents before turning his attention back to battered and beaten Luger, and ask him is that good enough for you?

Sting walked out of the cage and the nWo would take control again ultimately using a combination Scorpion Deathlock and chokehold to do in Luger. Out of all of this, Luger emerged as the closest thing WCW had as a clear-cult leader to defy the nWo insurgency, while Sting would recede to the shadows and the rafters—a long-term champion for the forces of good, but one who wouldn’t engage in combat on TV for over a year.

#3. Returning to WCW on the First Episode of Nitro

In 1995, WCW appeared a little nutty when it launched Nitro—a weekly wrestling broadcast to air directly opposite the WWF’s flagship show. While it would take some time for Nitro, and WCW in that era to find its footing, the first step toward the more adult-oriented, fourth-wall-breaking, shock-TV formula that would come to define the show was when Lex Luger appeared live, so fresh off his WWF contract that no one—according to some reports, not even the WWF—even knew that he’d been a free agent and that he was anything other than Davey Boy Smith’s tag team partner in the Allied Powers.

Luger’s return to the WCW fold established a sense that anything could happen on Nitro, besides immediately shaking up the main event picture with a volatile new player who could easily play face or heel (and walked the tweener line beautifully for the better part of a year). It was a rare occasion when the spotlight was not only squarely on Luger, but organically so—not because he’d been thrust into a brand new All-American patriot gimmick, or suddenly turned heel—but just by the very act of showing up as an immediate heat magnet and main event player.

As a side note and bonus, Luger’s return was something of a precursor for Scott Hall showing up less than a year later—another surprise appearance by a hitherto WWF mainstay, even accompanied by similar commentary from the play-by-play man, questioning what he was doing there.

#2. Body Slamming Yokozuna

Let’s clear the air on this moment first, because as much as I’m going to argue it’s worthiness for coming in at number two on this countdown, I will openly concede, too, that it is a deeply flawed moment in WWF history.

After vanquishing Hulk Hogan to claim the WWF Championship, Yokozuna and Mr. Fuji looked to prove the USA’s inferiority, and chose to do so via challenging anyone in the WWF to try to body slam Yokozuna on the deck of the USS Intrepid on Independence Day 1993. Many tried, and Scott Steiner and Crush even got Yokozuna up in the air, but no one could get the job done, until the arrogant heel, The Narcissist Lex Luger choppered in, made the slam, and suddenly launched a patriotic gimmick that the WWF would push to the moon for the rest of the year, and that Luger would ultimately ride out his WWF career in.

There were ways in which this angle could have been nuanced. For example if Luger still were an arrogant prick after the slam, and more gradually turned face over a period of weeks, his character might have been both more interesting and more believable. Heck, if he’d gone on to have any character besides just super-loving America, the gimmick might have had more legs. And then, even if you are a mark for Luger in this era, there’s the argument that during that brief period when he did look to catch fire, the WWF should have committed and given him the title to see what he could do at SummerSlam, rather than having him beat Yokozuna by count out, with the assumed eventual payoff of taking the title at WrestleMania.

Despite all of its problems, let’s move on to the good, which has more to do with what Luger did have within his control and the isolated moment of the body slam. Under The Narcissist gimmick, Luger was inoffensive, but bland, kept steady in the upper mid-card without much real direction or any memorable moments to his name. The WWF rolled the dice here and put Luger’s two greatest assets—his strength and his look—to immediate, practical use. Not everyone could body slam Yokozuna, so in doing so, Luger was immediately over as the WWF’s supreme powerhouse, and it helped that he had the physique to further that gimmick. Maybe he wasn’t as jacked as Hulk Hogan in his heyday, but he was more ripped, and totally believable in the super hero gimmick.

Cheesy and contrived as it clearly was, Luger slamming Yokozuna on the Fourth of July was a fitting launching pad for an American hero. And for all of the logical holes and shortcomings of the angle to follow, the moment of the slam itself—particularly from a child’s eyes—was pretty spectacular.

#1. Racking Hogan, Winning the WCW Championship

By the summer of 1997, the nWo angle had been running for a full year and I would argue that it had reached a good, comfortable spot. As a lead villain, Hogan had gone from equal parts heat magnet and cool heel, to pure heat magnet who the fans were rabid to see get his comeuppance (which is arguably what a heel always should be), but wasn’t yet the top heel people had grown sick of, as he would become in 1998.

The writing was on the wall that Hogan and Sting would eventually have a showdown at Starrcade, so the prevailing logic at the time was that WCW was more or less filling space in between. Luger had been one of the top guns for WCW throughout the nWo angle up to that point, and made sense as a challenger, though I don’t think anyone really expected him to make in impact on the world title scene.

Yet, on August 4, 1997, Luger got a world title shot on Nitro, a few days ahead of his scheduled shot at the Road Wild PPV. It was the hundredth episode of Nitro, and after a serie of Luger-centric video packages, and WCW actually allotting time for a proper main event at the time of the show, it looked possible something special could happen.

And then it did.

For unlike Luger’s anticlimactic and largely nonsensical first world title win over Barry Windham, and unlike the two-thirds of a year when he languished and ultimately lost his luster to preclude a WWF Championship run, this time everything worked out with Luger trapping Hogan in his signature Human Torture Rack finisher, scoring the clean submission in the main event of the show, and celebrating in front of crowd that was one-hundred-percent behind him.

Luger would ultimately drop the title back to Hogan at Road Wild and never get his hands on it again, but the moment of this victory still stands out as one of the most iconic and satisfying in Nitro history, and of the Monday Night War in general. It was Luger at his very best.

Which Lex Luger moments would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.