[1990-12-16-NWA Starrcade '90] Sting vs Black Scorpion (Cage)

[Smack2k]

I hope they didnt pay a lot for that spaceship.

 

That about wraps this whole angle up in one sentence...

[garretta]

Let's start, logically enough, with the ending. In true WCW fashion, the whole postmatch just missed taking too long, which would have left the pay-per-view audience with no payoff. We never did see a real closeup of Flair's face, and JR had no choice but to spoil that the Scorpion was Flair while he still had his back to the camera and the mask wasn't all the way off yet just to wrap the whole thing up. The beatdown should have been a lot shorter, or at least left until the unmasking which was the whole point of the match and angle, not that anyone involved in this travesty cared one bit for logic.

 

If you want to know something scary, should Dusty have decided that he liked the angle and wanted to continue it, he could have, because we never saw definitively that the Scorpion was Flair. All JR would have had to claim was that he got mixed up in the rush to get off the air, and we would have been all set. The only change would have been that the Scorpion was now affiliated with the Horsemen. They could have even changed Scorpions and done this again at WrestleWar with Sid under the mask. (They couldn't have used Arn or Barry, since they were seen and identified in the beatdown, but Sid was nowhere in sight at any time before, during, or after the bout.)

 

As for the actual match, I'm absolutely serious when I say that this might have been one of Flair's best performances ever. To go out and wrestle an entirely different style than he's used to, not be able to bump the same way, not be able to vocalize even by accident, and still look like a credible challenger to the World title is a feat not many could have pulled off. Sting looked a bit lost, since he couldn't do any of his familiar spots with Flair and risk giving the whole thing away before the time was right, but he adapted as well as he possibly could. Dick the Bruiser was harmless enough as the referee; the fans expected him to get a bit physical, and he did without harming things too much. He also threw some decent punches in the postmatch brawl, but there was so much craziness that he wasn't noticed at all.

 

I liked Paul freaking out over the spaceship that brought Flair to the ring, and his reaction to the multiple Scorpions, even accusing JR of spiking his grapefruit juice. He analyzed the bout, and JR called the bout, as well as they could considering that at least JR knew damn well who was under the mask but couldn't even hint at it accidentally. He tended to guzzle Paul at times, but he does that to anyone not named Solie or Caudle. It's annoying as hell, but he's allowed to get away with it, fair or not.

 

This was actually not too horrible considering the limitations these guys were under, but I think we can all sigh with relief that the Scorpion is a thing of the past, as is 1990 (at least for me). Looking forward to '91!

[TheU_2001]

Short answer: Eddie Gilbert. The long answer involves a WarGames match with a new Horsemen of Barry/Sid/DOOM vs Flair/Arn/Sting/Luger at Wrestlewar, so we don't need to get into that.but yeah, Eddie Gilbert. No way Turner couldn't offer him enough to do it, even if he was living out his dream by being heel Lawler vs Lawler, basically.

Eddie is always who I thought it was going to be at the time, up until the match, you could tell it was Flair. But I actually thought they were gonna use Gilbert.

[dawho5]

Steamboat as Scorpion??? This has promise. Anyway, thank God this whole bullshit saga is over and Ole is out of town. Good luck picking up the pieces Dusty.

[WingedEagle]

On 1/16/2013 at 11:17 AM, Loss said:

This is an interesting match, if only to see Flair work nearly a half hour and try to work against every Ric Flair instinct. The end result is not a good match by any means, but I'm sure that was pretty difficult to pull off. As for the payoff, what a waste. I think it says it all about Sting that the crowd was chanting for Luger as soon as the Horsemen hit the ring. Sting only won here because he asked to at least win the blowoff of the feud before they shifted the title back to Flair, since the Black Scorpion program had bombed so horribly. What an embarrassing wrestling promotion. They are lucky they were in a great wrestling town, because Philly, for example, would have completely shit on all of this. This is pretty much the end of Ole Anderson's booking. In 1991, we have the return of Dusty Rhodes to that spot.

Is it possible they were chanting for Bruiser rather than Luger?