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[1992-12-26-WCW-Saturday Night] Battlebowl Feature / Interview: Rick Rude


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Badd is hilarious in contrast to everyone else. So is Barbarian, who does nothing but grunt and offer one-word responses.

 

Rude is still being hyped as Simmons' Starrcade challenger, even though they had to know by this point that he wasn't able to go. Still a good focused promo from Rude, though his post-PPV feud with Erik Watts is also talked up, which doesn't speak much for his chances of winning the belt even if healthy.

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So you've got the King of Cable Finals, Battle Bowl and the Lethal Lottery all on one show. Plus the WCW World Title and the NWA World Title being defended. There is so much going on here that everything seems meaningless. WCW has some good stuff going on in-ring wise, but Watts has WCW in a shit hole right now.

 

You've got a mid-carder World champion defending against a mid-card tag team wrestler that the fans don't care about. Why? Because Watts had success with JYD so he tries to throw every black guy he can at the proverbial wall to see who sticks, and because Watts has always had a fascination with big bruising athletes like Williams (probably where Jim Ross gets it). It doesn't matter at all what the fans want. I really liked the idea of Watts coming in and always felt like he got a bad rap, but he wasn't going to be successful and for everything he did that was good, he did just as much that was garbage.

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I'm not sure if this Rude interview on the yearbook is the one from the same episode of SN where he tells Simmons that he's "the power in WCW," and Rude will "fight the power--by any means necessary!" But that is deliciously evil, and a lot smarter and less eyeroll-offensive in 1992 than their usual ancient race baiting.

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Who else would you have rather seen Simmons wrestle, DR? And Vader isn't an answer; he's already in the King of Cable finals. Doc was Watts' protégé and took the match at Starrcade to do Watts a favor when he (Watts) was in a bad spot; he could lose clean to Simmons and it wouldn't matter, since he almost exclusive to All-Japan by now. That said, you have a point about too many things going on at once; the Lethal Lottery should have been a tag team tournament on a separate pay-per-view, and Battlebowl (which, hype aside, was just a regular battle royal) should have been scrapped. If Sting-Vader plus two World singles title matches and a World tag team title match isn't enough to sell a card, that card (and the promotion running it) is in big, big trouble.

 

The video was good for what it was, and everyone was a serious as they knew how to be (which wasn't very serious at all in Mero's case). At any rate, it's better than endless Survivor Series promos and the circumlocutions they use in order to shoehorn the word "survive" into every last one of them, whether it fits or not.

 

Why did some guys know their partners (and, in at least one case, their opponents) while others didn't? It doesn't mean a whole lot in the end, I guess, but wouldn't it be more fair (in a kayfabe sense) for either everyone to know their partners or no one?

 

Rude's promo on Simmons delivers, even though, as Pete said, Rude probably knew by now that he wouldn't be able to wrestle. As for Erik, think about this: Rude's injury may have saved us from one of the most egregious overpushes in wrestling history. Erik Watts, who hasn't even been on TV for three months, as a potential US heavyweight champion or (for all the fans knew at the time) World champion? Would the Cowboy really have had the guts to go through with something like that, even if Erik didn't end up with any belts? I don't believe that he was that poor of a businessman, but maybe he simply didn't care about WCW's long-term future and wanted to give his son a title or two before he was inevitably fired.

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