So we’re going to do something special this month?
Yes, I’ve already did musings on all these shows. Hell, I did musings for both this and Road Wild ’97 roughly THREE YEARS AGO and honestly, there’s not much that I could add in terms of context. However, I haven’t seen Road Wild 98 (the one with Jay “Big Jaw” Leno) in a decade and Road Wild 99 was last touched on in 2018… so I figured, why not give these things another watch with a fresh set of eyes.
So yes, the first event was called Hog Wild, but licensing concerns with the Harley Davison group prompted the next event to be called Road Wild. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the poster/VHS cover for this show, which prominently featured a red-and-yellow clad Hulkster flexing on his bike – something that would be a stark contrast to how Hogan would appear in this show.
So this was the first WCW event to take place at the biker rally in Sturgis and this would be a thing for the next four years while Eric Bischoff was still in power – because, as one internet writer put it, “he loves motorcycles.” And for whatever it’s worth, I do like the overall lay of the land. It makes for a unique appearance and the one thing I will say about WCW is that they’re never afraid to experiment with different locations for different looks and feels to their wrestling shows. It’s honestly something that I miss with the big time wrestling shows these days. Sure, seeing WWE hold events in big stadiums with loud, enthusiastic crowds is a sight to behold, but once you do enough of those shows, they start to lose their appeal and feel like every other show. I, for one, wouldn’t mind if WWE broke from the mold and held the show at a juice bar for the sake of being different… but then they wouldn’t make as much money in bloated ticket sales, so I can clearly see that’s something they won’t be following any time soon.
That having been said, while the visual setting of having these wrestling matches in the middle of a biker rally seemed like a neat little thing, the actual crowd is another story. These are bikers, after all. Apparently, they were freeloaders and so this wasn’t a typical wrestling crowd. If they saw big, tough guys, they cheered. If they saw anything but, they either didn’t care or shat all over the smaller folks. This gets to be pretty evident with this first card and it doesn’t quite go away over the course of the PPV’s four-year history.
Case in point – the opening match featured WCW Cruiserweight champion Rey Mysterio Jr wrestling Ultimo “The ULTIMATE” Dragon in a good little lucha-style match to a largely apathetic crowd. It’s two small guys in silly Halloween masks and neither of them are American. Fuck these guys. That’s the attitude you get from this crowd. I make a point to mention that sometimes, blaming the crowd for a bad show is often a poor excuse for the fact that you booked a bad show or failed to read the room. Maybe kicking things off with a lucha-style match on your biker rally wrestling show is probably not the smartest thing to do, but hey, there was a mild pop when Rey retained the title, so that’s something, I suppose.
On the flip side, you had a match between Scott Norton and Ice Train; two big fuckers beating the fuck out of each other is bound to be a fun time, except Ice Train’s shoulder was apparently hurting and the whole match was Norton working the shoulder before submitting Ice Train with an ARMBAR of all things. Train got a brief bit of offense, but this was one sided and boring. I’d call it the longest five minutes that I’ve ever sat through, but that would be a grave over exaggeration. Those would come along later.
Next up, Madusa defeated Bull Nakano via getting hit with a backdrop suplex and the ref counting while both women had their shoulders on the matt, but then Madusa lifts hers up at the last moment – thus she wins the match and gets to smash Bull Nakano’s bike, which got the crowd revving up their engines in approval (or is it anger because they didn’t want to see a prize motorbike get smashed to bits needlessly? Does it ease the pain a bit because it’s an American Woman smashing a Japanese Woman’s motorbike? Kinda? Sorta?)
Our next match has Chris Benoit in a match with Dean Malenko that ends in a 20-minute time limit draw. And so when the match went on for another five minutes, the crowd BOOED because… fuck, when are we getting Hulk Hogan, you bastards? And of course, after some interference from the ladies that allows Benoit to roll-up Malenko for the pin, the crowd continues to not give a shit.
By the way, for anyone wondering, Chris Benoit is flanked by Miss Elizabeth and Woman… as much as I can stomach anything involving Chris Benoit these days, there are some things that don’t sit quite as easily with me these days. This is one of those cases. It’s going to be a bit of a struggle if I decided to go deep into the 1997 WCW PPVs where you have the whole Benoit/Sullivan feud happening because… eh, I’m gonna stop there right now before I need to take a dump of biblical proportions.
WCW Tag-Team Champions Harlem Heat (Booker T and Stevie Ray) defeated the Steiner Bros. to retain the titles, much to the disdain of the biker crowd who don’t like their colored wrestlers. I seemed to recall liking this match the first time around, but on a second look, this seemed a bit slower than I recall it being. I would call this a perfectly acceptable tag match, but not much more than that. Harlem Heat would eventually lose the belts to the Outsiders.
United States champion Ric Flair defeated Eddie Guerrero to retain the title in a match that saw Guerrero get his fair share of offense in before Flair uses the figure four for the PINFALL win… as in Eddie just lays there while in the figure four and gets pinned. I may have undersold this match a bit the first time around because this was great. Leave it to Flair to move heaven and earth to make Eddie look like a million bucks in defeat.
The Outsiders (Scott Hall & Kevin Nash) defeated Sting and Lex Luger when referee Nick Patrick fell on Luger’s knee, thus clipping him and allowing Hall to score the pin. The finish was kinda lame, but given that Nick Patrick would eventually be the nWo’s official crooked official, I suppose you could call this the planting of those particular seeds. This wasn’t a great match by any means; it was slow, it was plodding, and at times, it was a bit boring. Despite this being positioned as something of a big deal, it never really got to that point. There were no real stakes to be had here.
Prior to this show, Sting and Luger were tag-team champions and at some point, they dropped the titles to Harlem Heat. I’d imagine that if they had kept the titles and dropped them to the Outsiders here, it might’ve felt like a bigger deal… but then again, maybe they didn’t want to throw away all their big angles on a throwaway biker rally show with a zero dollar gate. Eh.
And in the main event, Hollywood Hulk Hogan defeated WCW World Champion THE GIANT to win the title via copious amounts of outside interference; something that would be a staple feature of many nWo matches going forward and would be used as a crutch for every wrestling promotion under the goddamned sun. Whether it’d be contextually at the time or in hindsight, it’s pretty clear as day that Giant was walking in to drop the belt to Hogan and there was nothing anyone could have done to really change that perception. Nothing against Paul Wight; he had a good rookie run and he’d go on to have a long career ahead of him, but there is no way in hell that I’m seeing a young Giant going over the newly-heeled and totally reinvigorated Hollywood Hogan. It wasn’t happening… nor should it have happened.
Again, part of me feels like this could have been a bigger deal had someone else been the World Champion… maybe give it to Sting and have him be the last hope for WCW before he ultimately sucumbs to the nWo shenanigans. Such a defeat would probably put him over the edge and move his character towards a darker place… perhaps an alternate route towards the eventual Crow version of the Sting character who would brood around for a whole year until the eventual rematch where he’d challenge Hogan for the title and get his redemption. It probably would’ve made for a better story.
Giant, on the other hand, was just a guy. A big guy, sure. But he was a nobody, especially in the eyes of these bikers. Despite being a heel, Hogan was the more cheered guy on the show and it’s probably a good thing because he was still doing a lot of his usual Hulk Hogan schtick, as though he hasn’t quite figured out this bad guy thing yet. Once the match is over, we get the overly long post-match Hogan promo, which includes the spray-painting of the WCW title, an overly long and rambly Hogan promo, and beating up ol’ Brother Bruti for good measure when he tries to suck up to Hogan… all of this while Giant is laying on the ground, motionless… throughout this whole mess… the man is more talented than people give him credit for.
Yeah, this isn’t what I would call a particularly good show. There’s a historic moment in the main event, but if they upload that match onto Youtube along with the whole post-show shenanigans, then that’s really all you need to see. The rest of the show can take it or leave it.
dtm666 