Yes, this is the one that you’re waiting for me to revisit, isn’t it?
The one with Jay “Big Jaw” Leno.
You know, contrary to past claims, I’m not quite as dreading this revisit. It’s been well over a decade since I last touch this thing. On the one hand, I don’t expect this to be a better show. If anything, I’m expect this to be as bad as I remember it.
On the other hand, though, I have seen considerably more WCW material in the past two years alone and certainly enough that I might have something more to add to this show longer after my last viewing. Does the additional exposure to WCW in recent time, thus making some of this stuff as fresh as it was back in the day, does that give me new appreciation for this show and perhaps see in softer eyes? Or is it the same old shit that I perceived it to be ages ago? Or… maybe it’s gotten worse?
Only one way to find out, I suppose.
So a bit of backstory here – this show is following the Bash At The Beach PPV that featured the main event of Hollywood Hogan teaming up Dennis Rodman to face the duo of Diamond Dallas Page and fellow NBA player Karl Malone. That match was atrocious, but since WCW was on a celebrity kick, they decided to book another celebrity tag match. This time, Hollywood Hogan would team with Eric Bischoff – yes, Eric Bischoff would book himself in a PPV main event… just like any other wrestling promoter would during their lifetime, let’s be honest – against Diamond Dallas Page and his newest tag team partner… Jay Leno.
Yes, we went from Karl Malone – a basketball player, but still an athlete – to Jay Leno – a comedian with nigh an athletic bone in his body. I’d imagine Jay being a car guy had something to do with his being here… or maybe they just wanted to do a guest spot on the Tonight Show or something.
I do recall watching the build up for this thing, where Bischoff would built his own Tonight Show set and do his take on Jay Leno’s comedy bits. This would lead to a bit on the Tonight Show where Hogan and Bischoff would appear to “take over” the real Tonight Show, but then DDP would come in to save the day and ask Leno to be his tag partner for the upcoming PPV. This would include a training montage of Leno getting beat up by DDP and some wrestlers while band leader Kevin Eubanks was just chilling out or something. These are bits I recall watching and… hey, I’ll admit it; the appeal of seeing Jay Leno take several in the chin was not lost on me. And even if the match turned out to be bad, as long as they get a few licks on Leno, it’d be worth it.
Well… let’s not go THAT far, shall we?
Opening match sees Meng (a.k.a. Haku) defeat the Barbarian with the Tongan Death Grip. It was two big fuckers clubbing each other for a bit before the finish. Granted, it’s not the most exciting piece of business, but they at least gave the biker crowd big fuckers to rev their engines over… so they’re learning something, I guess. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen Meng try to get pushed as a big tough guy – presumably because people often consider him to be one of the legit tough guys in wrestling and they assumed that would translate into people giving a shit about him on screen – and then nothing comes of it. Nowadays, anything involving Haku/Meng is memeworthy via backstage stories and such, but despite being a big guy with a cool looking nerve hold, he never really amounted to much more than a foil to be built up and eventually fall to whoever the champion was at the time.
The Public Enemy (Rocko Rock & Johnny Grunge) defeated The Dancing Fools (Disco Inferno & Alex Wright) in a match where they try to have a wrestling match and it kinda sucks because Public Enemy was an ECW act that got over on garbage brawls… so they pivoted to having a garbage brawl and Disco gets tossed through a bunch of tables for PE to get the win. This went on for fifteen minutes for some reason; shave off five minutes, drop the pretense at having a wrestling match, and just go for the hardcore stuff – THEN you’d have a good use of Public Enemy and the pleasure of seeing these dancing idiots get treated like the trash that they deserved to be.
(I’m speaking as gimmicks, of course. The workers, I’m sure, got their pay from this.)
Perry Saturn defeated Raven and Chris Kanyon in a no-holds-barred triangle match, which is basically a hardcore three-way with lots of weapons and plunder being used. I can’t get over how painfully obvious the dubbing over of Saturn and Raven’s entrance music happens to be. I get not being able to use the actual band musics, but not even the covers? For shame. Anyway, this was a fun little hardcore match, even if the biker crowd couldn’t be bothered to give a fuck. Three shows in and these crowd still hasn’t gotten the hint. What hint, you ask? Fuck if I know.
Rey Mysterio Jr. defeated Psychosis in what I would generously describe as a perfectly acceptable but quite slow-paced Lucha match. I suppose there’s only so much you can do to try and get a crowd of bikers to care about your match when both participants are small and foreign, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. I compared this to a then-modern WWE Divas match and yeah, this is as close to piss break as you’re gonna get with this show.
WCW World Television Champion Stevie Ray (well, not really; Booker T’s the champ, but since he’s injured, Stevie was filling in for him) defeated Chavo Guerrero in a short match to retain the title. This is following Bash At The Beach where Chavo and Stevie had a match, Chavo offered a handshake, Stevie accepted, and Chavo immediately gave up. So now Chavo comes out, wants a match with Stevie Ray, and decides on a handshake. Stevie Ray then beats Chavo up for a bit, pins the guy, and beats him up some more until Uncle Eddie comes along to make the save… Stupid. Just stupid.
There was supposed to be a Steiner vs Steiner match, but Big Poppa Pump hurt himself while trying to learn the English language, so the match is called off. JJ Dillon comes out and reschedules the match for Fall Brawl, declaring that if Scott doesn’t show, he’s barred from wrestling FOR LIFE. This causes a miraculous recovery as Scott jumps from his seat and flees his brother Rick. This would lead to a match at Fall Brawl 98 that had a… let’s just call it an “underwhelming” finish and move on.
Steve “Mongo” McMichael beat Brian Adams (no, not that Bryan Adams) in a match so bad that it made me wish I was watching a David Arquette WCW World Title defense. I’ve said this in my original musings for this show ten years ago and it still applies today.
Juventud Guerrera defeated Cruiserweight Champion Chris Jericho to win the title and basically graduate Jericho to a slightly higher level, as he would eventually win the World TV title and “attempt” to start a feud with Goldberg that… well, let’s not get our hopes up, shall we? The special referee for this match is Dean Malenko, who was feuding with Jericho, but was not allowed to challenge him for the title. After what seemed like a long time coming, we have an genuine, honest-to-goodness great match at one of these Road Wild shows… so much so that the crowd overcame their prejudice of small people who are not Americans and actually showed their approval for this match. What do you know? Chris Jericho can pull off a miracle every once in a while.
So our semi main-event is touted as a battle royal between four members of nWo Hollywood (Curt Hennig, Scott Hall, Scott Norton and The Giant) and the four members of nWo Wolfpac (Kevin Nash, Konnan, Sting and Lex Luger) in the battle for “brand supremacy” or some bullshit like that. Somewhere along the way, somebody figured out that “Oh shit, we forgot to book Goldberg on this show… you know, Goldberg? Our reigning WCW WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION?!”
“Oh, FUCK!”
“Yep.”
“OH FUCK! OH FUCK! OH FUCK!”
“So, what do we do?”
“Um, um… I GOT IT! Let’s put him in the nWo Battle Royal and we’ll have him win it! That’s eight wins to his win streak right there!”
“Um, Eric. That’s not how win streaks work.”
“They do if you still wanna work here.”
“Yep.”
And in this battle of supremacy between nWo Hollywood and nWo Wolfpac, the winner of the match ends up being GOLDBERG… who is neither Hollywood nor Wolfpac… and is also your reigning World Champion who happens to be in this nothing happening battle royal because nobody had anything better for him to do on this whole fucking show.
A nice piece of business that I mentioned years ago, but it bares repeating here. I do like the way Goldberg is handled here. He’s the solo act while these two nWo sides are feuding with each other, so rather than go after an random name, he just surveys the lay of the land, picking his moments to strike. There are times when some wrestlers will just rest in the corner while others do their spots, but Goldberg always being attentive to what’s happening without making it look like he’s taking a breather. It shows that behind all that brawn, there’s a bit of brains in that hard chrome of Goldberg. It’s a little touch that I like and wish more battle royals implemented.
But yes, Goldberg slams the Giant and pins him – because this is one of those battle royals where you can either eliminate someone over the top or pin them. I mean, it’s stupid, but so is not booking your World Champion in anything significant on a major PPV. And yeah, maybe Goldberg was being a dick in not wanting anything to do with Jericho, but him having nothing squash matches with guys like Jerry Flynn or some other random job guy wasn’t exactly a good use of the guy, either.
And in the monthly celebrity main event, Diamond Dallas Page and Jay “Big Jaw” Leno defeated Hollywood Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff when Leno pinned Bischoff after Tonight Show bandleader Tony Eubanks did a Diamond Cutter on Easy E… that the crackshot WCW editing team almost cut away from. The heels try to get their heat back, but then Goldberg comes out and to save the day and… well, if you can’t book your World Champion in anything meaningful, then a pointless cameo is… I don’t know… better than nothing, I guess. This match was what it was; whenever Hogan and DDP were going at it, you had two workers working a watchable (enough) wrestling match, while whenever Leno and Bischoff went at it… well, it went about as well as you would expect… that is to say, pretty badly. That having been said, the match itself is fairly harmless, you got a few photo ops out of it when Leno and Hogan doing some stuff.
That, and the night after, Jay Leno got a rare laugh from me when he said something along the lines of “This past weekend, I lost about 250 pounds. But enough about Hulk Hogan.”
After the wrestling show concluded, there was a Travis Tritt mini-concert. The WWE Network version that I recorded onto DVD-R years naturally excluded this from their airing. I don’t think that I would have missed a thing if I’m being honest.
Road Wild ’98 is not a good show. Once again, a large part of it has to do with a largely pathetic crowd that simply did not give a shit about the show. There are times when blaming the crowd for a bad show comes across as somewhat petty – if something doesn’t work for the crowd, you should be able to pivot towards something else – but for the third year in a row, they held a show in Sturgis that – again, I like the look and feel of the show because it’s something different and also it’s a nice outdoor environment, but this crowd was simply not buying into what WCW was selling. The fact that they popped for a CHRIS JERICHO match is something I would describe as a modern miracle and I don’t say that to diss Jericho because nobody else got the reaction he did here.
So after this, we have one more Road Wild show before the experiment comes to an end. Will we have a banger of a show or does this die out in failure?
Here’s a hint: it’s WCW circa 1999.
Don’t hurt your brain thinking up an answer.
Later.
dtm666 