Shining a Spotlight 11.06.08: The Craptacular Legacy of Halloween Havoc

I had been considering something for Halloween Havoc but Wrestling Doctor began his own look at each card. It’s not bad but it does remind me of the fact that Havoc quite often was a time when WCW would seem to do their best to put out some of the most idiotic stuff imaginable. When you look at the overall history of WCW from the time Turner took over, the question is not how they went out of business but how they lasted as long as they did. And for some reason, “Havoc” was a good example of that.

Don’t get me wrong, the card was often home to some great stuff. The very first one had a terrific Brian Pillman-Lex Luger US title match that elevated Pillman to US audiences and was capped off with the wild “Thunderdome” cage match with Ric Flair and Sting battling Terry Funk and the Great Muta (they really need to get that onto DVD sometime). Unfortunately, from then on in, the crap flew nicely year after year in some amazing ways:
　
1990: The Imposter Sting: You’d think a show with the wild Nasty Boys-Steiner Bros US tag title match would be redeemable but you’d be wrong. Sting was NWA World Champion at the time but his reign was marred by horrific booking which included Ole Anderson’s infamous Black Scorpion idea. Earlier in the card, Sting was doing an interview when the mysterious Scorpion came out, said a few impossible to understand words and then grabbed a “fan” out of the audience and proceeded to turn her into a tiger. Say what you will about WWE heels today, none of them are sinking to the level of Doug Henning.

That was all a big distraction for the main event of Sting facing Sid Vicious for the title. Now, Vicious was pretty green at the time (not that he would improve all that much over the years) but he was pretty over with the look of a guy who not only would kick your ass but enjoy it too. So it made sense to put him and Sting together. What made no sense was the ending as rather than try to help either guy, WCW instead came up with a way to screw over both them and the paying audience. After several minutes of action, Arn Anderson came out and Sting chased him into the back. A few moments later, Sting returned although something seemed a bit off: He was six inches taller, about thirty pounds heavier and bore a more than slight resemblance to Barry Windham with makeup. However, the announcers acted as if this was Sting, who came to the ring, was slammed and pinned by Sid. Just as balloons came down, another Sting ran out with a piece of rope around his arm.

The idea was that the Horsemen had jumped Sting, tied him up and sent Windham in his place. Of course, the fact Windham and Sting bore no resemblance besides blonde hair should have been the tip off (and I still love an old Apter mag article trying to give a logical explanation to the marks as to how the Horsemen could know not only what sort of tights Sting would be wearing that night but also what his style of face makeup would be). The match was restarted with the real Sting pinning Sid, an unbelievably overcomplicated ending that left the crowds with a sour taste in their mouth. The sourness would be greater if they knew the long, long history of such missteps WCW would make over the next decade.
　
1991: The Chamber of Horrors: 1991 was not a good year for WCW with Ric Flair leaving with their title, Luger failing to click as heel champion and cartoonish action coming to the fore. Even so, Havoc retains a place of shockingly low quality. The “set” looked like a grade school Halloween party with cardboard tombstones with lame jokes (“Here lies Fred, he fell on his head”) and the undercard featured Kevin Nash as the green-haired Oz with flying monkeys accompying him.

But the topper was the main event, the Chamber of Horrors, which was the old Thunderdome electrified cage. Now, it must have sounded good: After weeks of build-up, we’d get a big tag match with Sting, the Steiners and El Gigante (a last-minute replacement for an injured Barry Windham) facing Cactus Jack, Abdullah the Butcher, Vader and the Diamond Studd (Scott Hall). Sounds good, right? Well, WCW couldn’t leave it as just a regular match, oh no. No, they had to throw in the idea that to win you didn’t pin a man or make him submit. Nope, you had to throw a member of the opposite team into an electric chair in the middle of the ring and throw a switch. Yes, WCW, the organization long hailed as the alternative to the “ridiculous” WWF had a match where the outcome was determined by execution.

As you can imagine, the match was pretty much a cluster-frack of epic proportions with the slow Abdullah and Gigante pulling things down. At one point, the cameras caught the “fatal lever” pulled into the ON position without any effect and Jack had to put it back up, all on camera which the announcers ignored. Finally, Rick Steiner was placed into the chair but in the long climb to the switch, Jack missed him fighting back and putting Abdullah into it so Jack hit the switch, lights flashed, fireworks went off and Abudllah jerked about like a bowl of huge jelly. To top it all off, WCW had an EMT crew in ghoul makeup come out to bring Abudllah out on a huge stretcher. It seemed a fine capper to a horrendous business year for WCW and solidified Havoc’s place in the annals of Wrestlecrap classics. If you can, track down the nice “Legends of Wrestling” special from WWE 24/7 where Dusty Rhodes talks about how he came up with it all and he and Jack laughing about how bad it ended up.
　
1992: Spin the Wheel….: 1992 saw ups and downs for WCW. When Bill Watts was hired, things seemed to work okay quality wise with harder action. However, Watts was his own worse enemy as he hit workers with overly strict rules and keeping to kayfabe that led to a backlash against him. His attempts to shake things up with Ron Simmons winning the World title and Jake Roberts entering to attack Sting promised some good times but unfortunately, the execution left much to be desired.
Case in point was Halloween Havoc as the only guy Watts could conceive of as a challenger for Simmons’ title was lifelong midcarder the Barbarian (leading to a classic PWI Year-End top 10 list of the reasons WWF was better than WCW with three of the ten being “the Barbarian a world title contender?!) and the rest of the show wasn’t much better. The big event was going to be Sting and Jake in a “Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal” matchup highlighted by the first (but not the last….oh, Lord, not the last…) mini-movie that took a simple match and tried to sell it with a badly acted and expensive vignette. of Jake and Sting in a bar with seedy bikers chanting “Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal” and lasers shooting out of their eyes.

As bad as that was, the actual match was worse. With some terrific choices (first blood, barbed wire, bullrope, Texas death), the wheel landed on…a coal miner’s glove match. Where the point was to climb up a pole in the corner, retrieve a glove loaded with something to use on your opponent. It’s actually not as exciting as it sounds. It’s debatable whether this meant the wheel really wasn’t rigged or if Bill Watts was that out of touch with audiences, really hard to tell with Watts.

Anyhoo, the match was pretty rough as it was clear Jake was back to battling his personal demons. After various rough starts, Sting finally got the glove to clobber Jake, who fought back and tried to unleash his pet cobra on Sting. Instead, Sting struck back with the idea the cobra would bite Jake back. However, the cobra (who apparently hated the whole thing as much as fans did) refused to cooperate so, in one of the most comical sights ever seen in a ring, Roberts had to hold it to his cheek as he mimicked screaming while Sting rolled him up and kept right on obviously holding up the cobra as he left. It would turn out to be pretty much Roberts’ only WCW match as he left due to personal reasons right afterward, having put his stamp on a horrendous show.
　
1993: …Make the Deal, Amnesia Jack: This one is less the actual card and more the build-up, yet another example of WCW’s amazing ineptitude. In a battle on WCW Saturday Night, World Champion Vader brutalized Cactus Jack in a bloody battle that ended with Vader power-bombing Jack onto the concrete. It was a huge moment, many fans truly believing it was for real that Cactus was injured when he was taking a few months off to heal. It was a classic set-up of Jack coming back ready for blood to take on Vader for revenge.

Leave it to WCW to muck it up with the now-infamous “Lost In Cleveland” bits which had a ditzy “reporter” tracking Jack down in the alleys of Cleveland where he apparently had amnesia. After weeks of goofy shenanigans (including hiring an actress to portray Jack’s wife as they thought his real wife was too attractive), Jack did return, announcing the whole amnesia thing had been a mind-game on Vader. Of course, announcers kept on playing the amnesia bit for real, causing even more confusion.

So once again, Spin the Wheel was used, this time falling on the actually good Texas Death match. The two then went at it in a hard-hitting battle where everyone expected Jack to win to justify the injury and the horrible angle that followed. Instead, Vader controlled the bout almost totally, ending with a DDT on a steel chair on the metal ramp way and Jack, after all that build-up, couldn’t get up at the 10-count. A good battle but it was another example of how WCW took a perfectly simple angle and made it ridiculously overcomplicated, which was becoming a Havoc trend.
　
1994: Flair Retires….Kind of: I’ve known a lot of die-hard WCW fans who say the day Hogan signed on was the day the spirit of WCW died seven year early. Make no mistake, Hogan’s arrival, with a litany of his old WWF running buddies, was a huge shift for the company who were so desperate for some money-making that they let him do what he wanted. So Hogan was allowed to beat Ric Flair for the WCW World title in his very first match. Reportedly, the plan was for Flair to regain the belt at an August Clash card but Hogan flexed his creative control and came up with an angle of him being hit in the leg by a masked man yet still coming back to beat Flair by countout an hour later.

It was pretty clear to everyone that WCW just wasn’t big enough for the two of them and since Hogan was the one with the massive contract and control, it was simple who’d come out on top. So it was announced they’d be doing a cage match with the stip that if Flair lost, he’d have to retire. Having Mr. T as the special referee should have been a tip-off as to what would happen. The match was a wild affair, actually one of Hogan’s better bouts despite liberal outside interference from Sherri Martel and his refusal to sell for Flair. In the end, Hogan won and fans truly believed Flair was leaving for good. This led to even more traditional WCW fans turning on the company, even more so when the masked man attacked and was unmasked to be revealed as Ed Leslie, setting up yet another “old friend of Hogan’s betrays him” storyline. In that night, WCW made it clear they were willing to change their entire long-time model of business just to become another WWF, a move that would mean massive effects down the road.
　
1995: Monster Mash: Oh, this is pretty much hitting rock bottom. By 1995, Flair had returned but was still treated badly by both Hogan and Randy Savage and despite the debut of “Nitro” and Lex Luger coming back, WCW was still Hogan’s show. So much so that he decided to try and recreate one of his biggest feuds by getting Paul Wight to come in as the Giant, boasting he was the son of Andre out for revenge. For once, you can forgive the WWF legal team for blasting WCW with threats of lawsuits if they kept this up so Wight was soon just the Giant. It’s actually fun going back and seeing how light the man was; not only was he thinner but he was also able to throw dropkicks, really impressive for someone his size.

So you had a good matchup of Hogan and this massive heel with the Dungeon of Doom thrown in for fun, sounds simple, right? Well, think again. WCW decided to give it a push with an incredibly ridiculous angle of the Giant crushing Hogan’s motorcycle with a monster truck. So Hogan got his own big yellow and red monster truck to challenge the Giant to a monster truck battle. So the card had at its mid-point, these two trucks on the roof of the Cobbs Hall going at it and Hogan refused to job even there.

The stupidity continued as Hogan and the Giant fought outside the trucks with Hogan finally shoving the Giant off the roof of the arena. The announcers seemed hushed and concerned as Hogan came to the ring for his match but then the Giant arrived, no sign of injury and no explanation as to his survival (although the story goes that they wanted him to come out with a fish in his tights to indicate he’d fallen into the river by the arena which would have been some explanation). What followed was a horrendous match with Jimmy Hart getting Hogan DQ’ed but then aiding the Giant (the explanation later being that Hart had negotiated the contract so if Hogan was disqualified, he’d lose the belt). Luger also joined in the attack and then a gigantic mummy who the announcers called the Yeti (don’t ask, I don’t get it either) attacked Hogan from behind and ended one of the all-time worse main events ever, even by WCW’s lofty standards.
　
1997: Age in the Cage: I’m skipping ‘96 because that was actually not too bad a show (well, by WCW standards) no horrendous stuff. The next year kicked off nicely with the Eddie Guerrero-Rey Mysterio Cruiserweight title match that remains one of the greatest WCW bouts ever. Unfortunately, the rest of the show was downhill, no more so than the main event of Hogan vs. Piper in a non-title bout cause, after all, who wants to have their world champion defending in the main event of a big show? At first, it seemed it was like WWF, whoever left the cage first won. However, the two soon found themselves fighting outside the cage and the match kept on going, quite badly as both men clearly showed their age. Savage did attack with a leap off the cage that might have been good had he not been horribly off-target and Piper hit a sleeper to get the win only to have a bunch of fake Stings rush in. To top it all off, an actual fan ran into the cage somehow so the former Megapowers beat him up as the show quickly ended. Sort of acts as a metaphor of WCW against the classic wrestling fan if you think about it.
　
1998: Hogan vs. Warrior II: It’s hard to top what’s already been said but ten years later, still notable to see how horribly WCW blew this one-time dream bout. You can understand the thinking: Getting their butts kicked in the ratings by WWF, they figured signing on the Warrior of the rematch fans always thought about would be great. Unfortunately, they failed to take into account the….eccentric ways of the former Jim Helliwig. His big arrival was with a long-winded promo that went all over the place and made little sense and he left with a “Warrior Signal” in the sky and actually saying “tune in same Warrior time, same Warrior channel!” He would then kidnap Ed Leslie and turn him to his side before appearing in Hogan’s mirror where everyone but Eric Bischoff could see him.

That led to the big matchup at Havoc which proved just how important Pat Patterson had been in creating their 1990 matchup. The two had horrific timing, no connection with the crowd and no sense of logical flow to the match. To his credit, Hogan actually admits how bad he messed the whole thing up on the Warrior DVD, especially the bit where he tried to create a fireball but only singed his eyebrows that sent the crowd into laughter. Finally, Horace Hogan ended the horror by hitting the Warrior with a chair, allowing Hogan to pin him. Incredibly as it sounds, WCW actually made things worse as the card went a half hour longer than PPV companies thought it would so many failed to see the Goldberg-DDP main event that salvaged the show. So WCW spent millions for one horrible match with the Warrior and then lost viewers with the loss of the main event. And you wonder how this company went out of business.
　
　
1999: The Russo era begins: Vince Russo did not single-handedly destroy WCW. He simply hastened the inevitable. WCW was already going downhill but Russo’s style did it no favors. Havoc was his first show and his touch was clear: Multiple interviews using “ass”, DDP making masturbation cracks, Dean Malenko turning on Chris Benoit during the latter’s match with Rick Steiner, Flair ruining an Eddie Guerrero-Perry Saturn matchup, and Buff Bagwell doing an in-ring promo at a PPV. Then came the Hogan-Sting title match as Hogan, after a few false starts after his music played, came out in street clothes, said something to Sting and then lay down to let Sting pin him. Hogan left and after a Sid-Goldberg match and a Flair-DDP strap match where the whole Flair family was beaten down, Sting came out to issue an open challenge to anyone. Out came Goldberg and a match that could have been a good main event for Starrcade was a three-minute squash of Goldberg no-selling three Stinger splashes before hitting him with a spear and a jackhammer for the title. Except it was later announced Goldberg wasn’t champ because the match wasn’t sanctioned. It was only the first sign of the Crash TV style that would help put WCW into the grave.
　
2000: The Fake Sting part deux: By late 2000, the writing was on the wall for WCW with the bad ratings, sinking PPV rates and dwindling crowds. Still, Havoc managed to outdo itself in stupidity with its main event. Sting was facing Jeff Jarrett with Jarrett doing some bits where he’d dress up as Sting and mock him as no longer having passion for the business. Okay, that sounded good but they went way too far with the actual match as Jarrett came out calling Sting to the ring. The two began only to have a guy dressed as Sting in 1989 come out. Sting quickly dealt with this imposter but then more came in one by one: a 1990 Sting in that “Sgt Pepper” jacket; a 1997 “Crow” Sting; a Wolfpac Sting; and another 97 Sting in Trenchoat who dragged the real Sting out of the ring. After all these hijinks, what was the payoff? Jarrett hit Sting over the head with his guitar to get the pin, making the whole ridiculous thing just a waste of time and money, which can fit quite a few WCW events.
　
　
Don’t get me wrong, there were some great moments to Halloween Havoc over the years, good matches and such. But sadly, the legacy it leaves is one of crappy moments, angles, matches and blown opportunities that show just why WCW eventually fell apart. Not many treats as the company would end up tricking itself right out of business in the end.
　
Also around 411mania:
　
The Fink books Edge’s return
　
Up and Under talks the changes in ROH

Chin talks the Importance of Spin the Wheel

The Bard asks who’s the best monster in wrestling

Evolution Schematic continues its look at SHIMMER

The Shimmy does a report card on Matt Hardy

Tim does his Take on the loss of 60 minute matches

Scripted Through Sin does a great examination of the economy and wrestling

The Wrestling Doctor wraps up his own Havoc look

Thoughts from the Top Rope talks change on RAW

The Piledriver Report wraps up its HBK retrospective

Brooklyn Brawling discusses HHH’s title reign

Don’t forget Column of Honor, Triple Threat, 3 R’s, Ask 411, Fact or Fiction and the rest.
　
Next week, I look back at some of the best authority figures in wrestling. For now, the spotlight is off.