Classics on demand has the nitro up where Steven Regal fought Goldberg in the infamous stiff match. Was there something so controversial about the match because it looked like a really different match than Goldberg was having up until that point. He didn’t look lost or anything but they were doing reversals and stuff that nowadays would be considered a good match but I remember that Regal got into trouble over this. Why?
Short story: Regal made their soon-to-be top guy look like a human being, but actually got fired for worse stuff.
Long story: There’s actually two versions of this but I tend to believe Regal’s. He told the whole story on an episode of Wrestling Observer Live a couple of years after the incident occurred, and it was interesting stuff. The backstory for the match controversy was that Regal was discovered while working county fairs in England, basically doing real old school carny wrestling shows. He was a ringer who would challenge big guys in the audience to “rasslin'” matches and offer X amount of money if they could beat him in a “real” fight. So he’d get these tough-looking rubes and would basically carry a worked wrestling match against them, doing all the work and leading them through old-style reversals and mat wrestling without giving them any leeway to actually do anything back to him. Then he’d either win or lose depending on what the outcome was supposed to be. It was an elaborate con game, in other words. So anyway, back to 1997, and they send him out there with Goldberg and tell him to give him a good match and make him look good. Regal interprets this as “Carry him through an old style carny match” and he goes out there and leads Goldberg by the hand through this mat-based match, which was 100% different than the total squash that WCW actually wanted. However, it’s a misconception that Regal got in trouble over that. The actual trouble was for the drugs and pissing on stewardesses, and the match was in fact the least of the problems he got fired for. It just happened that he got fired right after that match, so people put 2 and 2 together and assumed there was something funny going on.
In his book, Goldberg offhandedly mentions that Regal “made him look bad”, but doesn’t seem to harbor much grudge otherwise.
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