[1992-12-27-WWF-Worcester, MA] Ric Flair vs Bret Hart

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

I thought they tore the house down. Flair was not as consistent in 1992 as he had been in years past. He wasn't bulletproof anymore, and he needed a little booking help to present him the right way. Put him against Tenryu in Japan and he looks tremendous, on both occasions. Let him do promos in a suit where he's given some freedom to get the point across and you'll get results. Put him in an overly controlled environment where he's working against his instincts and you don't get the best of Flair. So that's probably why the more relaxed atmosphere of house shows showcases him well. Over focus on the "whoo", wearing the robe everywhere he goes and being accompanied by Heenan and Perfect wasn't really him, and didn't connect for me. In the 80s, Flair was the guy who could get just about anything over to some degree. In the early 90s, he still had something to offer, but was more limited. I think working under Watts in WCW would have served him well, as he would have been pushed in a way that would play to his strengths.

 

If the Ironman match tests your patience, you might like this match more. It's essentially a greatest hits version of that match. For me, it's not quite at that level because it is so abbreviated. There are a lot of fine points they have time to really run with when they have an hour. But they can still accomplish quite a bit with half the time.

 

While enjoyable, this is a step down from late 80s Flair matches. WWF matches just don't build heat the same way. Spots like Bret using the figure four in the opening minutes usually work better later in a Flair match. Here, they did them early. But these are two guys willing to sell who have a strong sense of timing kickouts for maximum effect, so this is good. I'd say it's Flair's best U.S. match on this set, and in the top handful for Bret too.

[Frankensteiner]

How did you guys select this match over the 4 or 5 other handheld matches available from this period? Were you going on recommendations or did you watch all of them and chose the best one. shoe brought up that 30+ minute match from San Francisco which got me curious.

 

I've seen the Indianapolis match from 11/29 but thought it was very similar to the home video title change match.

[Loss]

We weren't going to include them all but wanted to represent it, so we decided to just pick the one with the best VQ, figuring they probably worked the same routine every night anyway, as most Bret house show matches did.

[shoe]

I enjoyed this bout. It's funny how Bret puts over how great his Flair matches were Hennig, but if you compare house show matches vs Flair his Flair matches are better than the Hennig ones. A cool spot I really dug was Flair had been working over Bret's back, Bret goes for a back drop, Flair takes the bump, then Bret collapses from the weight his back took. Flair was awesome heeling it up for the crowd. Both guys sold beautifully.

[PeteF3]

I really think these two had a killer PPV match in them, but this definitely wasn't it. It was definitely very heated with the crowd, and Flair at house show speed is still pretty good. But there was an overreliance on ropes-for-leverage spots and jacking with the crowd on his part that I didn't overly care for. And this was very much a House Show Bret performance, though the closing stretch is worked fairly well. I was looking forward to the Ironman Match going into '93 but I'm starting to grow pessimistic and wary about watching a one-hour WWF house show match.

[WingedEagle]

Early control by Flair, then Bret reverses a suplex and begins working the knee including busting out a figure-four very early. Typical house show spots with Flair using the ropes for falls and going through his heel routine. Solid, by the numbers match. Flair kicks away from sharpshooter, goes for the figure four and Bret small packages him for the win. Good but not great.

 

***1/4

[garretta]

This match is better than the Royal Rumble, Loss? Not by a damn sight. In fact, I didn't like Flair here at all. I've seen the Flair house show routine back in the day, and if he's slipped this far, no wonder he was a joke just a few years later. How many rope leverage spots can one match have, for heaven's sake? After the first two, we cross the line from good heel work to complete laziness in my book. Maybe the WWF's house show schedule was getting to Flair like it had so many others, because he seemed to want to actually work as little as possible. Even his arguing spots really had no pizzazz to them, if movements and body language were any indication.

 

When Bret was in control, there were a lot of callbacks to the title change, including Bret going for the figure four first. This time he actually got two spots with it, which was a bit strange but very good. In general, Bret looked much crisper than Flair did, although an overactive referee might have had something to do with that as well. This is most obvious when Flair climbed to the top so Bret could throw him off. Maybe Bret needed an extra moment to pop up, but for whatever reason the ref blocked Flair's way up there for so long that when Ric finally made the climb, his timing was noticeably off. The ref in question looked like Joey Marella from what I could tell, but Joey's too good of an official to be that blatantly noticeable.

 

One Flair spot I liked that I haven't seen in a while was the multiple cover attempts, which he did on at least three or four different occasions. More wrestlers desperate to win a title should use that spot; it's better at getting that desperation across than most heel tactics.

 

This was better than the Savage-Shawn match on the same card. but not nearly as good as the title change. I hope these two have one more classic in them before Flair leaves, but if this match is any indication of what they're doing on house shows at this time, the Boston Ironman match won't be it. It's definitely time for Flair to go back to Atlanta.