At Bash at the Beach 1996, Hulk Hogan turned heel and aligned with the Outsiders to form the New World Order. Let’s see how the nWo shaped the World Heavyweight Championship picture in the beginning.
August 10, 1996 – Sturgis, South Dakota
Hollywood Hogan def. The Giant {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Hogg Wild. This was absurd, and completely devalued the Giant. I’m not sure if he still had credibility at this point, but it was gone after this. In what universe should Hogan have been straight overpowering the Giant? On commentary, Dusty Rhodes struggles to make sense of the story in the ring, and that’s because it doesn’t make sense. It felt like Hogan wanted to work his Ultimate Warrior WrestleMania match, but here neither guy was a super popular babyface (though the kids in the crowd still cheered for Hogan) and Giant and Warrior’s appeals were completely different. Giant hulks up, but it’s lost on this crowd of non-wrestling fans. At least he got to do it in front of an appreciative crowd four years later. The Outsiders interfere in front of the referee. The ref does nothing about it and Hogan hits Giant with the title belt for the win at 14:56. Wow, that was astonishingly bad. After the match, Hogan celebrated his birthday (which was the next day) and spray painted nWo on the title belt. ½*
August 4, 1997 – Auburn Hills, Michigan
Lex Luger def. Hollywood Hogan {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Monday Nitro 100 as they called it, though on the WWE Network it’s the 99th episode. Hogan didn’t quite get to hold the title for a year this time, but don’t get too excited as Luger’s reign lasted something like six days before Hogan got it back. Nothing stupid here, just a boring ass match. The finish was wild, as Luger single-handedly fought off the nWo and made Hogan tap to the Torture Rack in a few seconds in 8:58 (shown). This was exactly what you expect work-wise from these two. Most points go to the hot finish. **
August 9, 1997 – Sturgis, South Dakota
Hollywood Hogan def. Lex Luger {WCW World Heavyweight Championship}
From Hogg Wild’s equally disappointing baby, Road Wild. This was exactly the same boring match as on Nitro, but twice as long. Hogan’s weak imitation of Flair when he cowers away near the end of a match is lame. At the end again, Luger fights off the nWo. This time however, it makes no sense for him to do so. When he was trying to win the title he didn’t want Hogan getting disqualified, but here he should have let one of them get a shot in because Hogan wasn’t playing fairly and deserved to be disqualified and lose his shot at the belt. Someone in a Sting mask hit Luger with a bat behind the referee’s back and that gave Hogan the win at 16:15. I don’t know who the masked Sting wound up being and I don’t care. ½*
December 28, 1997 – Washington, D.C.
Sting def. Hollywood Hogan {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From the 15th Starrcade. Every Hogan match is exactly the same, even ones that are the culmination of crazy long feuds where the babyface should go over strong. Hogan makes all of his opponents look like total crap for the entire match. Near the end, Hogan hit the legdrop for a normal three count. Bret Hart came out to stop the timekeeper from ringing the bell and tried to tie the thing to the Montreal Screwjob from the month before by saying it was a fast count, but it was very much not a fast count and WCW was just terrible. String then put on the Scorpion Deathlock and Hogan quit at 12:53. Hart was the one who called for the bell. Just awful stuff that was every bit as bad as people said it was at the time. A week and a half later, Sting was stripped of the title because of how shit that finish was. *
February 22, 1998 – Daly City, Florida
Sting def. Hollywood Hogan {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
Because Starrcade was so botched, this was the redo for the vacant title at SuperBrawl VIII. Not sure why they waited two months to get the title on String after stripping him of it. This was bizarre in its pacing, but I can’t deny that it was a lot better than the Starrcade match. If they’d done this in the first place then Sting would have been sitting pretty on top. As it is, it was too little too late and nobody cared about the feud anymore. The finish here sucked, but not as much as at Starrcade. Hogan knocked out a second referee (Nick Patrick who turned babyface during the match), and the nWo swarmed. Sting fought them off and Randy Savage ran out to hit Hogan with a foreign object. Sting got the pin off of that at 16:33. Nobody is allowed to get strong pins on title changes in WCW! **
April 19, 1998 – Denver, Colorado
Randy Savage def. Sting {WCW World Heavyweight Championship No Disqualification Match}
From the third Spring Stampede. People have made fun of Tony Schiavone on commentary here because of the way he tried to make strands of hay seem like a dangerous foreign object to the eyes and to breathing. It’s especially silly because the big ass bale of hay that Sting threw at Savage looked more devastating than all the stupid trash can shots that litter pro wrestling, so why not just talk about its weight? I can’t say how it worked in execution, but the storyline of Savage challenging Hogan for power in the nWo and needing the title to be dominant is a good one in theory. After a decent brawl, Elizabeth and Hogan interfered but that just brought things back to zero. Kevin Nash came out to hit Sting with a Jackknife powerbomb and put Savage on top of Sting for the win at 10:08. That finish was a bummer, because the match was the best title change since Flair vs. Giant up until that point. **¾
April 20, 1998 – Colorado Springs, Colorado
Hollywood Hogan def. Randy Savage {WCW World Heavyweight Championship No Disqualification Match}
From Monday Nitro 136. Hogan came into this acting paranoid that the only member of the nWo on his side was the Disciple. The match was the same old boring Hogan bout, with the challenger dominating and making Savage look like a chump the whole time. Why did Hogan use a Figure 4 Leglock in this match? What does that move have to do with anything going on here? Disciple, Nash, Eric Bischoff, and Hart all interfered. Savage, who had to sell a stunner from Disciple of all people for a lifetime, lost when Hart turned heel and put Hogan on top of him at 15:36. Wow, that booking was just straight trash. That match was straight trash. This era for the title is garbagio. After this, Savage feuded with Hart and then disappeared for a while, returning to wrap up his WCW career with Team Madness. ½*
July 6, 1998 – Atlanta, Georgia
Goldberg def. Hollywood Hogan {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Monday Nitro 147. The same night that Hogan won back the title, an undefeated (let’s just say that was true) Goldberg won the WCW United States Championship. HIs streak continued, and in July he got this title shot. After literally five years of the title bouncing around from ‘80s star to ‘80s star (and the Giant), WCW finally pulled the trigger on someone new. Compared to just about everything I’ve watched leading up to this in this era, this wasn’t half bad. It wasn’t good, but Goldberg looked strong through all of Hogan’s blatant cheating and won rather easily. Of course, WCW couldn’t help themselves and had Curt Hennig, Carl Malone, and Diamond Dallas Page came out to distract the crowd from Goldberg kicking out of two legdrops. That should have been a huge pop but it was nothing. Luckily, Goldberg followed that with the spear and Jackhammer to beat Hogan clean as a sheet at 8:11. Totally decent stuff. **¾
This chunk of title history was a major bummer. Watching guys i’d enjoyed as a kid sleepwalk through main event matches with just the dirt worst booking was tough. Much like I didn’t understand the appeal of ECW’s main event scene, I certainly don’t get how this was competition the stuff going on in WWF at the time. Blows my mind. Next up we’ll take a look at the stinky end of Goldberg’s reign and the Diamond Dallas Page experiment as WCW gets boring enough that they look to the absolute worst person in wrestling to save them.
From Diamond Ring Kensuke Office Changes. They emphasize that Nakajima beat Dragon Gate wrestler Kenichiro Arai 
From Dynamite 131. This is a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation tournament. Joe debuted at ROH Supercard of Honor, saving Jonathan Gresham from Jay Lethal (whose soul searching apparently led him to turn heel) & Sonjay Dutt after the main event. And now that ROH and AEW are the same thing, that seems worth mentioning. Caster’s pre-match rap was cute. This was real squashy, with Joe needing only two minutes to put Caster down with the Muscle Buster at 2:52. Lethal & Dutt pop up on the big screens and Lethal says he’d been trying to get a hold of Joe during his difficult soul searching time, and Joe never picked up. They have a present for Joe next week. N/A
From Dynamite 132. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt were in the front row cheering on Joe. Sarcastically, probably, as they brawled with Joe at ROH Supercard of Honor XV. 
From Rampage 39. 
From Dynamite 137. 
From Dynamite 138. This is a 
From Double or Nothing. 
From PWF York Cougar Football Fundraiser. I didn't know that this match happened until over a month after the fact. This started out as a non-title match, but we'll get to why I've listed it as a title match in a moment. FTR have Mick Foley in their corner while their opponents have Bill Behrens. I’ve never actually seen Behrens do an on-camera gig before. He's holding a tennis racket, presumably as an Umaga to Jim Cornette. But it's confusing because there was actually a tennis player named Bill Behrens. They announce this match as having a 20-minute time limit. Only 11 minutes in, they say there are three minutes remaining. Until then, this was as run-of-the-mill as a modern FTR match gets. But the announcement snapped everyone out of their heat-on-Wheeler funk and forced them to go for desperate pins. They announce ten seconds remaining a couple of times, but no one can get the roll up pin they're looking for. The 20-minute time limit expires at 1
From NXT UK 183. McGuinness started by essentially saying that Fraser is going to pee or poo himself during the match. Unnecessary. Had Shawn Michaels been game to have a good match against Vader, this is what it would have looked like. Actually, a more appropriate and modern analogue is Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins from SummerSlam. Much like that match, Frazer used quick strikes and avoided his larger opponent’s signature big move to stay alive. Here it was the powerbomb whereas there it was suplexes. Here, Frazer also successfully damaged WALTER’s knee, which slowed the big man down and made it hard for WALTER to hit the powerbomb. Unfortunately for Frazer, WALTER was able to bide his time and clothesline Frazer’s legs out from under him. An inevitable powerbomb followed and won the match for WALTER at 14:02. I hate to say this because I’m happy that he’s healthier, but the way WALTER has slimmed down has taken some of the magic away from his aura. At least for me it has. That said, dude can clearly still go as well as ever in the ring. ****
From NXT 659. Strong was feeling it here, which is thanks in large part to the crowd being maniacally loud from the get go I’m sure. His whole game was fast and devastating stick and move attacks. That worked pretty well, as WALTER was dazed from time to time. But as with all good WALTER matches (which is pretty much all WALTER matches), everything WALTER does is devastating here so it takes very little for him to take back control. And eventually he did just that and hit the powerbomb for the win at 9:46 (shown of 12:18). After the match, WALTER gets on the microphone and says that his name is Gunther now. I did not think WALTER would be a victim of the renaming curse this far into his run. What will they rename Strong?! ***¾
From NXT UK 185. Andy Shepherd helpfully announces from inside the ring that the reason for the stipulation is that the feud has gotten so violent that it wouldn’t be safe to have fans around. Devlin says during the match that it’s because he thinks Dragunov could only muster the energy to win if he had the crowd behind him. I like that explanation a lot more. The only real reason I could think of to do this without fans is that there was a scheduling conflict with one of the wrestlers for the regular TV taping date and they needed to get this thing filmed. We just had such a long stretch of empty arena NXT UK episodes that I can’t imagine anyone was dying to get another taste of it. This aired the day after Adam Cole vs. Orange Cassidy in a match that was also no disqualification and falls count anywhere, and this served up everything I felt was missing from that match. Now you might say, “Brad, Cassidy is not the same kind of character as Devlin or Dragunov, how could you expect the same level of violence or intensity?” To that I say, when Cassidy started his match by breaking his own sunglasses and rapidly punching Cole, he was indicating that level of violence and/or intensity. And instead the match was mostly wacky. Anyway, this was not wacky. It was stiff and intense and featured weapons that made sense and spots the didn’t take forever to set up. Dragunov got in trouble when his eye injury acted up. Devlin took control and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t wild about how meek Dragunov was when Devlin was zip tying his hands, but I did like that in the end it turned out to be an error on Devlin’s part anyway because Dragunov’s finisher requires no hands. And indeed, a bound Dragunov jumped off the steel steps (which had been brought into the ring) and hit the Torpedo Moskau on Devlin for the win at 21:43. NXT UK is still sneaking in these dope matches that no one is watching. Y’all should watch them. ****¼ 
From AAA Triplemania Regia. FTR come out with Vickie Guerrero. This was supposed to be explained at an earlier AAA taping but FTR and Guerrero all missed them. AAA is notorious for having this kind of luck/being incompetent lately. FTR is also wearing Eddie Guerrero tribute tights, with American flags on one side and flames on the other, I suppose to pay homage to his Gringos Locos and Latino Heat gimmicks. This match mostly sucked, but one cool spot saw FTR tie Pentagon’s mask to the ropes and force him to unmask with his hands over his face to stop them from climbing the ladder. That would have been a very meaningful moment to lead up to the Lucha Brothers winning the titles back, but unfortunately instead it led into nothing. He just got his mask back and the match continued on in its lame, derivative way. At one point, Pentagon was the only man standing, but instead of climbing the ladder he grabbed a table from the floor. So the titles mean enough to him that he’d unmask to stop his opponents from winning, but not enough for him to get the titles when he had a clear path to do it? Vickie powered Pentagon, causing him to voluntarily jump through the table and Harwood grabbed the belts at 12:12. This was abysmal. *
From AEW Full Gear. Silver was hamming it up a lot more here than he was the year before in New York. That said, this had stronger just-a-match vibes than the aforementioned match. After Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets, Cassidy turned up the heat and these guys put on a middle of the row undercard match. Not bad by any means, but nothing memorable either. Cassidy hit the Beach Break rather out of nowhere for the win at 9:42. **¾ 
From the second Honor Reigns Supreme. The commentators sold this as Gresham getting a big shot against a top ROH guy after being an also-ran in the Television Championship division for a while. This was terrific. Both guys did a fantastic job selling their respective targeted limbs, and Gresham in particular played the role of the tenacious underdog perfectly. He didn’t just watch to see where Lethal would have trouble executing his finisher because of the damage he’d done to the former ROH Champion’s arm, he pressed the assault whenever he could, taking out the arm to make sure the Lethal Injection would never come. But what he couldn’t do was stop Lethal from battering his knee and ultimately winning with a Figure 4 Leglock at 17:54. ****¼ 
From the second Masters of the Craft. Columbus has way more Gresham fans than Concord did. That’s a neat little advancement to the plot, innit? They both went after the same limbs that earned them dividends in their previous match. And then they went ahead and built an incredible match out of that story. At first it seemed as though Lethal wasn’t going to be able to get Gresham’s leg to give out. But about halfway through the match, Gresham’s knee was in trouble. Gresham was able to escape the leglock this time by using the momentum of Lethal pulling him away from the ropes to shift to an armbar. But Gresham’s focus on the arm bit him in the ass. Lethal went for the Lethal Injection and collapsed again, but when Gresham went for a roll up after that Lethal cut back on it for the win at 18:27. This is one of the best American examples that I've seen of a match building on the match that came before. Rather than try to outdo the maneuvers from their first meeting for the sake of a big crowd reaction, they adjust their game plans in logical ways that, to me, were just as exciting. I think this match is slept on, by virtue of the fact that I’ve never heard anything about it before watching it. ****½ 
From ROH Wrestling 364. In real life, 
From Death Before Dishonor XVII. Gresham and Lethal had been teaming, but Gresham grew frustrated and started heeling. Ultimately, he turned on Lethal. It took them a little while to get there, but once they got into a groove this was exactly what I wanted from this match. It was back to their old tricks, with Lethal targeting the leg to set up for the Figure 4 Leglock and Gresham targeting the arm to block the Lethal Injection and set up for his Octopus. In the end, Lethal tried the cutback trick that worked for him in Columbus, but Gresham countered to a pin and then put on the gnarliest Octopus for his first win over Lethal at 17:20. This is the best kind of wrestling series. And none of it felt stale because it was a year after they’d wrestled last and because they found ways to energize the old tropes. And that’s not to mention Gresham busting out what I can only describe as a sumo-style assault. Gresham and Lethal make up after the match. ****
From ROH Wrestling 500. During the pandemic, ROH made the most of their empty arena shows by kicking them off with a tournament to crown a champion for the revived Pure Championship. Gresham won the tournament, and this was his fourth defense of the title. Lethal and Gresham were still allies here. In an interesting move, the other match on this milestone episode was two other partners fighting in Jay and Mark Briscoe. They cut to a commercial break about six minutes in, though the action didn’t get beyond (admittedly fast-moving) mat wrestling until the 10-minute mark. That had me thinking this was going to go long, but things took a different turn. Both guys had abused the other’s shoulders, and Lethal used that to his advantage best. He forced Gresham to use his first rope break to stop a pin, and his second to escape a crab. Then, he used the failed Lethal Injection to bait Gresham into a crossface, forcing the champ to use his final rope break. But he made the mistake of giving Gresham a breather and was quickly caught in a head scissor takedown giving Gresham the winning pin at 14:06 (shown of 16:40). For an empty arena match, this held my attention. It was totally different than their previous matches while still using a couple elements from the rivalry to elevate it just a bit. Not essential viewing, but if you’re working your way through their series you shouldn’t skip it. ***¼ 
