[1992-10-25-WCW-Halloween Havoc] Barry Windham & Dustin Rhodes vs Steve Austin & Steve Williams

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

I've watched this match enough times that I don't feel like I have to watch it again to refresh myself. My thoughts from my last viewing:

 

Is there a reason this isn't talked about more? I know there are a few issues with it, namely that the heels aren't really all that heelish and there's some overly complicated booking toward the end of the match. But this is really an excellent match in spite of that - really stiff with some really great spots and sequences. Watts pushing the tag teams as hard as he did lead to some pretty good matches within the division, this being one of them. The team he chose to be the top heels and run roughshod over everyone may not have been the best choice in retrospect, but it's easy to see where he was coming from at the time. Austin matured a lot as a wrestler in 1992. 1991 and early 1992 Austin was still pretty good considering his experience level, but he needed someone to guide him to have a good match, and he was much better at taking bumps than he was being on offense. You can really see the change start when he cut off the long hair and dropped the valet and focused on becoming more serious. He must have been listening to Rude on the road quite a bit. He does some really awesome powerslams and lariats and even some good leg work here -- all explosive heavyweight offense that really suited him. Doc was also on the verge of peaking at this point, and physically, he's pretty amazing as well, with his floatover vertical suplex and those hard clothelines.

 

This is on a Barry Windham comp, but he's really not the featured wrestler of his team here. He plays FIP briefly, but even then, it's more about Dustin saving the team than Windham's resilience, and there are some great moments with Dustin/Doc and Dustin/Austin. Austin and Dustin had chemistry long before either got really good, but you can see differences and improvements in both since the Havoc '91 match a year earlier, at least in terms of confidence and being comfortable in front of a live crowd. The lariat battle and football spots early on between Dustin and Doc are pretty cool too.

 

I'm talking mainly about offense and stiffness here, primarily because the match layout is really the worst thing about this match, and it's what keeps this from peaking higher. Physically, this is just as intense and spirited and hard-hitting as an All Japan tag match from the era, but the way the match is laid out detracts from that. Dustin and Windham go back and forth playing FIP, but neither does it for any real length of time until Dustin finally stays in toward the end of the match. There were some really awesome nearfalls, but none of them really played to as much heat as you'd think because they weren't really built up all that much. I loved this match - quite a bit in fact - and I do think everyone should give it a view. But it's not as great as it should be, and that's kind of unfortunate, because you can see hints of the great match these four are capable of underneath the weird match layout. Very good tag team US pro style heavyweight spotfest.

[Tim Evans]

This would have been better if it was shorter and didn't have that awful finish. I mean did they really have to go to a draw? The work in between is real good though and Austin really held his own as a replacement for Bam Bam. I guess Gordy no showed?

[shoe]

I thought this was another strong tag bout in WCW for the year. I think people sleep on it because the show was bad. Though I don't think the show is as bad as people claim. Windham and Rhodes was a strong team. Austin was really developing this year. Doc's work was very in your face and believable.

[El-P]

Good match for 20 minutes, much better than I remembered it actually. Very much a WIlliams/Gordy style go-go-go match. Austin is clearly over with the Philly crowd, and Williams looks great. That said, the last ten minutes shows the match slowly loses his pace and dynamic, and the finish is really terrible and confusing. Good match hurt by poor booking.

[PeteF3]

This is a strong match that was just too long for its own good. I know the Gordy no-show or firing or whatever threw everybody off, but the draw simply wasn't necessary once he was out, and putting yet another 30-minute draw in a PPV tag title match was a little much. I actually liked the IDEA of the false finish, because I like it when tags and legal men are accounted for and the concept in general is respected. But the execution was pretty lousy on all fronts. On the plus side, this was probably Dustin's most complete performance to date--he matches up well trading shots with Doc and he works a strong FIP segment even if it goes a little long. All four guys came to play but Dustin and Austin were clearly working ahead of their partners here. Dustin and Doc worked great together, to the point where now I want to see a singles match between the two.

[WingedEagle]

This had a lot of bright spots -- Dustin & Williams working together early, Windham being sneaky quick and agile for a guy his size, and Dustin's offense following the hot tag. Unfortunately these moments were built around an unnecessarily long match. Would've been a lot better with 10-12 minutes chopped off and a finish.

 

**3/4

[DR Ackermann]

This started out alright and slowly turned really good before it dropped off again. It becomes apparent after a while that this going to go the distance and the wrestlers were just killing time. If they had cut 10 minutes this could have been great. Even after they lose the audience they gain them back briefly with about 2 minutes before they stop caring again. Hat Guy looks really bored & Williams seems really motivated. I never got the hype about him before this yearbook but I'm starting to really like him.

[Loss]

Previously at PWO:

 

Steve Austin & Steve Williams v Barry Windham & Dustin Rhodes - WCW Halloween Havoc 1992

Is there a reason this isn't talked about more? I know there are a few issues with it, namely that the heels aren't really all that heelish and there's some overly complicated booking toward the end of the match. But this is really an excellent match in spite of that - really stiff with some really great spots and sequences. Watts pushing the tag teams as hard as he did lead to some pretty good matches within the division, this being one of them. The team he chose to be the top heels and run roughshod over everyone may not have been the best choice in retrospect, but it's easy to see where he was coming from at the time. Austin matured a lot as a wrestler in 1992. 1991 and early 1992 Austin was still pretty good considering his experience level, but he needed someone to guide him to have a good match, and he was much better at taking bumps than he was being on offense. You can really see the change start when he cut off the long hair and dropped the valet and focused on becoming more serious. He must have been listening to Rude on the road quite a bit. He does some really awesome powerslams and lariats and even some good leg work here -- all explosive heavyweight offense that really suited him. Doc was also on the verge of peaking at this point, and physically, he's pretty amazing as well, with his floatover vertical suplex and those hard clothelines.

This is on a Barry Windham comp, but he's really not the featured wrestler of his team here. He plays FIP briefly, but even then, it's more about Dustin saving the team than Windham's resilience, and there are some great moments with Dustin/Doc and Dustin/Austin. Austin and Dustin had chemistry long before either got really good, but you can see differences and improvements in both since the Havoc '91 match a year earlier, at least in terms of confidence and being comfortable in front of a live crowd. The lariat battle and football spots early on between Dustin and Doc are pretty cool too.

I'm talking mainly about offense and stiffness here, primarily because the match layout is really the worst thing about this match, and it's what keeps this from peaking higher. Physically, this is just as intense and spirited and hard-hitting as an All Japan tag match from the era, but the way the match is laid out detracts from that. Dustin and Windham go back and forth playing FIP, but neither does it for any real length of time until Dustin finally stays in toward the end of the match. There were some really awesome nearfalls, but none of them really played to as much heat as you'd think because they weren't really built up all that much. I loved this match - quite a bit in fact - and I do think everyone should give it a view. But it's not as great as it should be, and that's kind of unfortunate, because you can see hints of the great match these four are capable of underneath the weird match layout. Very good tag team US pro style heavyweight spotfest.

 

 

 

Here is my review of this match from back when we were doing Dustin of the Day reviews

Dustin Rhodes/Barry Windham v. Steve Austin/Steve Williams 10/25/92

Austin is a last minute replacement for Terry Gordy who I assume died a couple of days before the show. The opening section of this has Dustin and Williams square off, and they run a bunch of neat spots based around three point stances. They both do three point stances into shoulderblocks and neither guy moves, they try again and Williams leapfrogs him and hits a clothesline, Williams goes for another three point stance and Dustin meets him with a clothesline. I really want to see all of Williams football helmet matches now, it is clear he has lots of different football spots.

The opening parts of this match are really great, but the crowd is totally dead, I say to Tom "Man the crowd is shitty, where are they Philly?" and moments later we see a florid alcoholic face under a stupid straw hat sitting right in the front row. He seems to be looking around in vain for a valet to call a whore, and seeing none, seems to be trimming his cuticles.

Williams was clearly the fourth best guy in the title change I reviewed earlier, but he is awesome here, lots of good mat work with both Dustin and Barry, super nasty punches and kicks and nicely placed big moves. Barry does the Dustin missed clothesline, bounce out of the ring bump and they do a long face in peril section with Windham. The Dos Steve Williames have alot of nice stuff in this section, including an awesome amature hammerlock and ankle take over by Austin. Windham however is not nearly as good a face in peril as Dustin. Dustin is a great hot tag though as he even gets the indifferent Philly crowd into his punches and Dusty elbows on both guys.

Dr. Death cuts Dustin off and they go right back into a long face in peril section on Dustin. Williams really works over Dustin here, including some nasty forearms to his kidneys, and an avalanche which cuts Dustin over the eye. Williams goes after it and has some really nice punches on the cut. Dustin is really good at working towards tags and selling the kidney work, but I think some of his crowd heat is killed by the time announcements.

The first 25 minutes or so of this match is just great stuff, but the work is really hurt by the shitty booking. For some reason Watts has the face champions running out the clock on heel challengers. They even have a ref bump, and a second ref count the pin on Windham, before a Dusty restart. Then they go to a time limit draw in a match which the heels controlled 75% of. A time limit draw in PHILLY!!. People shit on Gabe's booking, but he knows that you run the time limit draws in the midwest where people care about wrestling, and when you get to the northeast you have the match go 20 minutes with alot of blood. Incredibly shitty match booking, the match is only saved by the great performances by all four guys.

 

[The Russian Daydream]

I really enjoyed this match. On one hand I felt it went too long and that going to time limit hurt it over all. On the their hand though, it felt a quick half-hour and my mind never wandered in the way it did in the Steiners vs Doc & Gordy from Beach Blast. It was all really snug action, worked at a good enough pace that it never felt like they were stalling to fill a long draw. Austin and Rhodes were the two stand-out guys here too which was unexpected. I guess Austin saw this as an opportunity to show off what he'd become and catch a break, which in turn perhaps motivated Williams to up his pace a bit. I think it was one of those times that the last minute sub actually led to a better match because I don't think Terry Gordy would have been as exciting as Steve Austin was here.

[garretta]

This match wasn't just hurt by poor booking; it was killed by it.

 

It was plain as day when we started getting time limit calls past twenty minutes that this was going to a draw. Maybe that was the original finish with Gordy in the match, and maybe it wasn't. In any case, why not just let it go? Why not one, but two false finishes, complete with bell? What did they accomplish? Nothing, that's what. This match was wrestled like a draw regardless. It was almost like someone came backstage at the twenty-minute mark and said, "Hey, the crowd is dead and the boys are moving like they're in quicksand. We need to do something", and that finish was the something. The Philly crowd crapped all over it, and rightfully so; I'm not sure who they would have rather seen win, but it's a sure bet that they wanted somebody to win.

 

As for the match itself, the four individual matchups were good, but the teamwork was lacking on both sides. One was understandable, the other wasn't. Even though both Dustin and Barry had to play FIP, they could have done it in a way that showed that they knew they were in a tag match. This may be the one match where I was looking for more false tags, or at least hotter ones. Austin and Doc looked good for a team that was together for the first time anywhere, but as Jesse pointed out several times, they weren't anywhere close to having their teamwork together on a championship level. I suspect that Austin was subbed in because of his past singles history with both Dustin and Barry, but this may have been a good spot for a veteran tag wrestler like Arn to help Doc out and make things look a bit more fluid, even if it meant cancelling another match or changing the card around.

 

JR mentioned the dissension between Dustin and Barry prior to the match, but the issue was shelved and not brought up again, I guess because Austin subbing for Gordy complicated matters enough. I was looking forward to seeing that storyline play out, or at least be mentioned more than once in passing.

 

JR and Jesse weren't at their best as a team, mostly because the match dragged on so long that Jesse fell back into his bad WWF habit of making smart remarks and expecting JR to play along when he should have known better by now. JR actually got off a couple of good zingers, especially the one about how working with Jesse gives him a pain in the neck so bad that he has to see a chiropractor. You can tell that Jesse legitimately respects JR because he doesn't reply; had that been Vince or Schiavone Jesse would have been off and running about sissies who know nothing about athletics (although he once tried to intimate that JR played croquet, which even my rather imaginative mind's eye simply can't picture). I also liked Jesse wondering why Randy Anderson doesn't want to be called Pee Wee, unfortunately, JR chose to no-sell that question.

 

On the wrestling side, I loved JR telling the story about how Doc got his nickname, and Jesse admitting that he and Adrian Adonis didn't always get along outside the ring when they were the East-West Connection, although I've always heard that they were close friends when push came to shove. As I said earlier, Jesse was the one who spotted the deficiencies in Austin and Doc's teamwork, and he had a point about the false finishes; they really should stand, at least more often than they do, if only because they way they're overturned looks sloppy more often than not.

 

I agree with Phil about Doc's football spots with Dustin early in the match. I also love his nickname for the team. It's not quite as graphic as Miracle Violence Connection, but for a team that only happened once that we know of, it fits as well as any other.

 

Line of the Night:

 

Jesse: Why won't you talk about your guys (Oklahoma) getting hammered by Kansas (in football) yesterday?

 

JR: Because it's not relevant to this match. (After a pause) I'm also a sore loser.

 

One quick word about the prematch promo: When Doc is the main spokesman for your team even though Austin's by far the better speaker, something's dreadfully wrong somewhere.