Up until now, things have been bad. They’ve been boring and at times they’ve been confusing. They’ve sometimes even been mystifying. But they haven’t been batshit crazy. That’s about to change. Vince Russo and Ed Ferrera have been hired as the head writers of WCW and things are about to get downright stuuuuuuuuuuuupid.
October 24, 1999 – Paradise, Nevada
Goldberg def. Sting {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From the 11th Halloween Havoc. Earlier in the night, Hulk Hogan’s scheduled rematch against Sting ended immediately when Hogan, in street clothes, whispered into Sting’s ear and then laid down for him. Sting wanted a real match so Goldberg was a mystery opponent for him in the main event. Goldberg had won the U.S. Championship from Sid Vicious earlier in the show, but came out without it. The commentators seem confused and angry about whether or not the title was on the line. Goldberg was announced as champion after winning at 3:09 (dumbfounding the commentators), though this isn’t recognized as a reign for him. Sting was stripped of the title the next night for attacking the referee after this match. This was very emblematic of what Russo’s WCW tenure would hold. The last minute of this three-minute match was actually a lot of fun, asinine circumstances surrounding it aside. Bobby Heenan’s, “Don’t look at me!” confused exclamation summed up how everyone was feeling about this terribly produced PPV. *½
November 21, 1999 – Toronto, Ontario
Bret Hart def. Chris Benoit {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From the inaugural Mayhem. This was the finals of a tournament to decide the new champion. These guys had put on a hell of a match a month earlier in honor of Owen Hart on Nitro. This was quite different, as a few minutes into the match Dean Malenko interfered and attacked Benoit to zero fanfare and zero impact on the match. Then we got a bit more wrestling before the Outsiders interfered and attacked both guys. Goldberg ran down to fight them off. The crowd didn’t care about any of that and again the match went on as if nothing happened. Thankfully, we got some good rasslin’ after that, ending with Hart countering the Crippler Crossface to the Sharpshooter for the win at 17:44. Too bad for the insane and meaningless overbooking ruining what could have been another great match. Vince Russo sucks. ***¼
December 19, 1999 – Washington, D.C.
Bret Hart def. Goldberg {WCW World Heavyweight Championship No Disqualification Match}
From the 17th Starrcade. This match is infamous as it’s universally blamed for Hart’s retirement from wrestling. A superkick from Goldberg and a konking of his head on the floor during a ringpost Figure 4 Leglock have been credited for the head injury that took him out of the business. But there are other scary moments too. Goldberg rams Hart’s head into the steel barricade early on really hard, and you can see Hart’s shock afterwards. The head bump on the floor doesn’t look bad because he landed on the mat, but Hart does appear to be in a great deal of wincing pain when it happens, despite not having taken a move he should be selling. The superkick doesn’t look any more insane than most you’ve seen, and Hart’s penchant for great selling makes it impossible to know if this bothered him more than usual. But the fact is, Hart was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome after this and retired after a few more matches save for a handful of bouts ten years later. Roddy Piper came to the ring just as Hart was putting Goldberg in the Sharpshooter and called for the bell. Then he walked out with the title before reluctantly giving it to Hart. So that’s three years in a row of Starrcade, the biggest show of the year, ending in a Montreal Screwjob scenario. Lame, though the match leading up to it was perfectly fine. **½
December 20, 1999 – Baltimore, Maryland
Bret Hart def. Goldberg {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Monday Nitro 222. Okay, this is ridiculous. So the figurehead at the time is Vince Russo, heard shouting from offscreen and known as the Powers That Be. Piper admits that Russo told him to screw Goldberg as a peace offering to Hart. You see, Russo knows that Hart blamed him for Montreal, so he thought this would make up for it. Hart, apparently an avatar for the audience, calls that dumb and calls Russo a piece of shit and vacates the title. Russo made this match for the vacant title in spite of Hart. So not only was Russo obsessed with shoehorning WWE into WCW storylines, he was also obsessed with shoehorning himself into moments in WWE history in which he played no part. Vince Russo sucks. Hart won the Nitro main event in 5:44 with the help of the Outsiders, forming nWo 2000. The plan was probably for this feud to continue and for Goldberg to eventually win the title. But Hart had to retire and Goldberg ripped his arm apart smashing it through a car window on Thunder a couple days later so both guys were gone. Goldberg never got a second run with the title thanks to terrible booking and frequent injuries, but he did save us from Russo’s wrestling career by injuring him in a match. Anyway, this was short and they didn’t put much effort in, probably because they knew how it’d end. *¼
January 16, 2000 – Cincinnati, Ohio
Chris Benoit def. Sid Vicious {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From the fourth Souled Out. Russo has been fired (for now) and Kevin Sullivan is booking, so for obvious reasons having Benoit win this match wasn’t going to work long-term. Hart was meant to face Vicious for the title, and Benoit was meant to face Jeff Jarrett for the U.S. title. But with Hart and Jarrett injured, they just mashed the two matches together for the vacant world title. Arn Anderson was the special referee here. There wasn’t a lot to this one. Benoit worked the leg a bunch, but then ended up winning with the Crippler Crossface. There wasn’t much compelling here, but it wasn’t bad. The finish was bad, as Benoit was saved from a pin loss by getting his foot under the ropes, but then immediately after at 14:53 he tapped Vicious while his foot was under the ropes. I suppose they might have said Anderson was on the take for Benoit, but Benoit left the company the next day and showed up on WWF Raw a couple weeks later so the storyline and whatever feud Benoit was going to have with Nash was dropped anyway. **½
January 24, 2000 – Los Angeles, California
Sid Vicious def. Kevin Nash {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Monday Nitro 227. The night after Benoit’s win, Anderson said the title was vacant because of Sid’s foot being under the ropes. Nash became WCW Commissioner at Souled Out also. He booked himself into this match and made Sid beat the Harris Brothers earlier in the night to earn his title shot. He also banned powerbombs from being used in this match. The match was short, and Vicious was in it. Those are the nice things I can say about it. The commentators make a big deal about Nash’s devastating punches, which is dumb because they’re all whiffing by a foot. Sid actually did this cool thing while he was in a sleeper where he let his right arm drop three times while raising his left arm to show the referee he was still alive. Rather, it would have been cool had it been used to trick Nash into releasing the hold, but it wasn’t. Jeff Jarrett’s failed interference led to Vicious hitting Nash with a guitar for the win at 6:20. For the fifth time in a row, the champion lost the title by having it stripped or vacating it. Five times in a row. Five times in a row. I honestly can’t believe I’m typing that. It’s especially wild because this fifth time was a purely creative decision (actually, three of the five were purely creative decisions) and Vicious just ends up getting the title back two nights later on Thunder. And why was the title vacated? Because Sid pinned the illegal Harris brother during his handicap match on Nitro and when the match was restarted he was counted out, all during a commercial break. Why wouldn’t the commentators have mentioned that, since they were watching it all go down in the arena? Kevin Sullivan sucks. *¼
January 26, 2000 – Las Vegas, Nevada
Sid Vicious def. Kevin Nash and Ron Harris {WCW World Heavyweight Championship Triangle Caged Heat Match}
From Thunder 97. Nash had awarded himself the title and Vicious won it back here. How is that more interesting than Nash stacking the deck against the new champion while he was champ? Just convoluted nonsense. Caged Heat is Hell in a Cell. It’s a three way match but Vicious could only win the title by pinning Nash, and the powerbomb was still illegal. The worst part is I have to watch a match featuring an actual neo-nazi. Kevin Sullivan sucks. Supposedly Harris is a born against Christian now, so I wonder if that tempered his nazi tendancies or exacerbated them. Internet buzz suggests he’s not a white supremecist anymore, so that’s good. Anyway, the match is goofy and boring, as Nash and Harris just try to desperately dogpile Vicious. Nash had joked earlier that Vicious didn’t have any submission moves, so Vicious tapped him out with the Crippler Crossface at 7:05. The finish was kind of clever, the rest of the match was absolutely nothing. *
Vicious remained champion for three months, defending against nWo 2000, Tank Abbott, and a Master Blaster. Sullivan, as we’ve established, sucks hard, and was fired in April. He was replaced with Russo and Eric Bischoff, who basically just said fuck it and rebooted the whole company. We’ll check out the reboot in the next part.
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 
