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  • 4 weeks later...

Last few minutes. This crowd is on fire. Sherri, who has completely changed her look from earlier in the night, comes out to interfere and ends up taking a bump into the ring, and gets thrown outside. Savage breaks the scepter over his head before they take off, then Slaughter pins Warrior to win the title. The crowd is stunned. I am sad that we didn't get Savage attacking Warrior with the light fixture. I was thinking that was close to the finish, but it wasn't I guess. And with that, the top two WM matches are set. This was a ballsy title change, I will give them that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Fired up the whole match because I wanted to see if it held up to the other high-end Warrior matches. Adnan ranting in Arabic in the pre-match interview while we get a shot of a burnoose-wearing, bug-eyed Slaughter nodding his head is one of my favorite images ever. Adnan and his flag are there and Slaughter makes reference to turmoil in the world today, but his promo is otherwise refreshingly free of world event talk and is almost back to the "America needs a new leader" rhetoric from the summer. Warrior blithers about foxholes in the desert but is kind of okay in response.

 

Warrior counters an attempted clothesline with the Iraqi flag and rips the flag apart to class this whole feud up a little bit. It certainly gets the crowd going, though. Sarge bumps like an absolute loon for Warrior's pedestrian offense which keeps things going, until a made-over Sherri runs to the ring. Sherri grabs his leg and Warrior stupidly chases her to the back, where Savage levels him with a clothesline and engineers one of the greatest mid-match beatdowns in history, complete with the light standard to the body which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Warrior slooowly makes his way back to the ring while Sarge keeps breaking the count, which is a pretty nice attention to detail. Slaughter does a lot of kicking with the pointed boots while mugging at every opportunity. It's a bit pedestrian of a heel control segment but it's all nice and focused on the back to set up the camel clutch. Standard Hulk-Up comeback, interrupted by Sherri and Savage, and a scepter to the head leads to the shock title change.

 

Don't ask me why I wrote up a big recap of this match of all things. This isn't a great match but it's another bout on the level of the Main Event stuff that Warrior had with DiBiase and Rude, with Slaughter doing a great job of feeding for a routine Warrior performance. I can't deny that the pre-match stuff really galvanized the crowd or how deflated they seemed after the title change, either. It's incredible that Sarge went from being utterly washed up to being WWF Champion in the span of about 6 months. I talked earlier about this but it bears repeating how this run was a personal triumph for Slaughter even if it was a failure on business and taste levels.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Earl Hebner with awful ring positioning until finally getting Slaughter to break the Camel clutch. Here’s Sherri to interfere Warrior drops her on her head and then launches her outside to Savage below. Poor Sherri. Savage takes out Warrior with scepter. Crowd not liking that finish. Seemed silly that both Piper and Monsoon were shocked at Fink announcing Slaughter as the winner when they clearly saw him get pinned in the ring. Best part of match was left out when Savage completely blind sided Warrior near the entrance earlier in the match.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
  • 1 year later...

I'll say this one last time: This title change should never, ever have happened once we actually went to war. If Vince didn't want to fire Sarge, he should have had Warrior squash him in thirty seconds flat, then take out Adnan for good. After that, let Sarge be the new Duggan, taking on the midcard foreign menaces and shilling GI Joe, IcoPro, and whatever other stuff they can think of for the next five or so years. Maybe Sarge and Duggan could have been a nice midcard tag team. I don't know how you do the Savage turn in that case, and Warrior/Savage is a hell of a bout to lose, but the title had to not go on Slaughter, no matter what damage it did to the WWF's future plans.

 

What we saw of the match was below average, as Sarge looks shot in the ring. Honestly, Savage does ninety percent of the work; reading Pete's recap, I remember Savage attacking Warrior in the middle of the match, and that's what sets the table for Sarge. He doesn't do much on his own at all. Even his bumps (which we don't see here) are nowhere near championship caliber, never mind what they were when Sarge was in his prime or just past it. Not for the first time or the last, Vince tries to shove a square peg into a round hole, and loses a 100,000-seat Mania at the LA Coliseum with a hot potential main event in Hogan/Warrior II and has to settle for the LA Sports Arena, which they couldn't even sell out, if I remember correctly.

 

I know all the carny bullshit about only the money and the miles being real, but if I'd been Sarge, I'd have rather headlined a high school gym card in Dog Crud, North Dakota in front of a hundred fans than take Vince's money this way. Surely he could have stood to be just a little poorer and kept his self respect, especially since he was booked in such a way that Hogan had to totally destroy him when they finally met. Of course, Vince being who he is, we not only didn't get that, we got another pay-per-view main event where Hogan just may have been the soundest worker out of the six participants, including the guest referee. But that's another story for another day.

 

I almost forgot about Gino. I love the guy, but he has a tendency in his later years not to live in reality. Sell shock and disgust as best you can; that's what Vince is paying you for. But don't tell me that the pinfall I saw wasn't a pinfall, and that Earl Hebner saw what he clearly didn't (and wasn't supposed to) see. Piper calling for more referees to reverse the decision was a better reaction, although we all knew that it wasn't going to happen. It took until after Howard announced Sarge as champion for Gino to finally accept it, and by then he was parroting Piper, who was excellent here. I would have loved for him to be able to get in the ring with Sarge during this run to take out some of his anger; unfortunately, his hip was going bad, and he was headed for replacement surgery.

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  • GSR changed the title to [1991-01-19-WWF-Royal Rumble] Sgt. Slaughter vs Ultimate Warrior
  • 1 year later...
On 2/3/2013 at 1:42 PM, s1rweeze said:

Didn't Slaughter promise Savage he'd get the first shot at the title if he won? Did they ever end up explaining that away, or did they just forget about it?

They brought Savage up as a potential challenger for Slaughter in the Tunney interview on The Main Event, but that was the last we heard of it. I would have just had the match air on Superstars, but before they even make contact, have warrior run in and beat up Savage and cause the match to get thrown out, that way you keep the Savage/Warrior feud going and give both men some extra motivation.

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