A Bad Bash
25 years ago today, WCW put on a rather bad version of The Great American Bash in Baltimore
It’s rare when you attend a professional wrestling show that you realize just how bad the show is while you are sitting there in the stands. The 1998 Great American Bash on June 14, 1998 at The Baltimore Arena was one of those shows.
The Bash, of course, was a legacy event dating all the way back to the Jim Crockett Promotions era of WCW Wrestling. But long gone were the Buckhouse Stampedes, War Games, or lengthy Ric Flair title defenses.
Instead, we got a preview of what WCW would look like on their way down into the gutter.
The show actually started with two pretty good matches. Booker T and Chris Benoit had the final match in their best-of-seven series to determine the #1 contender for the World Television Championship. These two would have a fantastic match, which of course was expected: they had been working against each other extensively that spring, and had already traded the TV title back-and-forth for four-straight days in early May.1 This show was the TWENTIETH Time they had worked head-to-head since the beginning of March. So they had quite a bit of time to work out the bugs and they put on a fantastic final match.
The next two matches were also matches of guys who were criminally underutilized by WCW. Kanyon defeated Saturn as part of the Raven’s Flock vs Blood Runs Cold feud. The creative was questionable (naturally) but the match was good.
The next match was an overbooked mess between Chris Jericho and Dean Malenko for the Cruiserweight title. We were denied a finish because Malenko beat up Jericho with a chair, after which Jericho left the building.
I left for a bathroom break for the next match: Juventud Guerrera against Reese. Guerrera won. I missed the whole thing. Mercifully.
Next up, Chavo Guerrero went over his uncle Eddie in a great fifteen-minute contest where everybody looked like a million bucks, as you would suspect.
Aaaand after that the show went off the rails.
Booker T won the Television title for the fifth time from Fit Finlay in the title match he earned at the top of the show. I’m a fan of both guys, but the match wasn’t that great, probably owing to the fact that Booker T had just wrestled Benoit less than an hour before.
Third from the top (in theory) was Goldberg defending against Konnanin a match that went a whopping 1 minute 57 seconds. I remember nothing other than the fact that Goldberg’s entrance was exponentially longer than this match, which was expected given Goldberg’s experience level. But this was not good. But the guy was over; this was about three weeks before Goldberg went over Hogan at the Georgia Dome on Nitro.
Speaking of Hogan, he was in the next match in a very confusingly booked contest where he and Bret Hart defeated Roddy Piper and Randy Savage. Neither Hart nor Piper were in the nWo, but Hart was aligned with the nWo. Savage and Hogan were, but Savage was nWo Wolfpack and Hogan was (obviously) nWo Hollywood. Never let anybody tell you that bad booking in WCW only started when Vince Russo showed up.
Anyway, the match was as bad as you would expect given the guys involved and their limitations. But for some reason, after Hogan and Hart went over, Piper and Savage then had to fight each other. Nobody wanted to see this and nobody understand why it was happening. What apparently was said on the show was that Piper and Savage would need to wrestle each other if they lost, which nobody in the arena knew about. Did anybody want to see these guys with their advanced skill set wrestle two matches in a row for a grand total of 13 minutes? Absolutely not.
Finally, in a confusing mess of booking in the main event, Sting defeated The Giant in a six-minute, 40-second match. Sting and The Giant were, naturally, the WCW World Tag Team Champions at the time, winning the titles after Scott Hall turned on Kevin Nash to jump from nWo Wolfpack to nWo Hollywood. The Giant was also in nWo Hollywood and won the titles with Sting, who shortly thereafter joined nWo Wolfpack.
As I said, a complete mess of booking that Vince Russo had nothing to do with.
Anyway, Sting won the match in a not-so-great match and that allowed him to control the WCW Tag Team titles and pick his partner. Which was Kevin Nash.
Coming off the heels of going to Starrcade, I was very excited to attend this show. But after this mess, I never paid to attend a WCW show ever again…
From April 30-May 4th, 1998 the TV title hot potatoes from Booker T to Benoit to Booker to Benoit to Booker to Fit Finlay. Only the win by Finlay was televised.