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.
The whole Goldberg deal was always going to fall flat. AS long as he could just go in there and kick, punch, spear jackhammer in 30 seconds he was cool. But he couldn’t wrestle for shit and would always be exposed, especially bad as that period was when EVERYONE thought they were a supersmark. I remember a Goldberg-Saturn PPV match that wasn’t just a squash, and thinking how terrible it was, but some people liked it. Likewise Goldberg-Hogan was historically important but blew as a match. I also recently (re)watched the Goldberg-DDP match on the WCW DVD, and could not understand how anyone, even at the time, could have thought it was great. A lot of people go on and on about Nash and Starrcade 1998. But there’s a reason the DVD didn’t show the ending of that match, as it would have shown pretty much everyone in the building that night popping like crazy for Nash’s win, which would undercut the WWE propaganda. Once Goldberg was exposed his mystique, aura, whatever was gone, and everyone saw it was just a big muscular dude getting rammed down the fans’ throats. Also refusing to work with Jericho and his bragging to the legitimate media made him look like a jerk to boot. Regal didn’t make Goldberg look bad. Goldberg was just bad period.
Lots of wrestlers have had the ‘undefeated’ gimmick. Most of the time, it flops, but in certain cases fans can get really behind the undefeated gimmick. Goldberg and CM Punk come to mind. Sure they wrestled in endless squash matches, but it was the fact they made simple squash matches entertaining that got them over so Goldberg wasn’t all that bad. The Goldberg/Glacier match series are perhaps the most entertaining 1 minute matches you’ll ever see.
Goldberg wasn’t a great wrestler, but if you look at his earlier matches, you would see that he had a ton of potential, but due to ego or whatever, he never improved past that.
Oh and Goldberg-DDP match was and still is great.
Kurt Angle’s undefeated gimmick for his first couple months in WWF was perfectly done. It got him over, allowed them to give Taz a big debut and by the time he took his first pinfall loss, it was against the company’s biggest star (Rock). Of course Angle was talented enough that he could enhance his heat after the loss but that was the perfect way of booking an undefeated streak.
I was in attendance for the Goldberg/Nash match and the fans would’ve popped for anything at that point. We had to sit through Norton/Bryan Adams vs. Finley/Flynn, Ernest Miller vs. Saturn and see WCW again screw over the fans by having Bischoff bloody and beat Ric Flair. Seeing Nash win was the first real exciting thing that happened that night. Goldberg kicking out from the taser/powerbomb and winning would’ve generated the same pop.
You actually went to Strracde 98?
ugh, Im so sorry. I watched it on ppv, and i feel asleep after the 3way (Eddy/Rey/Kidman… THEN Eddy/Kidman) and then Goldberg/Nash, which was bad… but at least it had the crowd, and the big match feel.
I dont know WHO THE FUCK was booking that shitball of an event.
I did like DDP/Giant for some reason.
Yeah it was pretty awful. The crowd did wake up when DDP hit the Diamond Cutter on The Giant though.
Interesting note, after the initial pop for Nash’s win, walking out of the arena I heard lots of people echo the sentiment of, “WTF, a cattle prod? That was stupid. Must be a way to give Goldberg the belt back tomorrow.”
I actually liked the Goldberg-Nash match, but I’m a Nash fan anyway. I always saw the cattle prod as a way to give Nash a legit pin, but not make Goldberg look weak doing it.
Yeah, actually I thought the cattle prod was a nice bit of good booking… if you are going to book the end of Goldberg’s streak, don’t go and do it in typical WCW fashion with a high-heeled shoe to the face, or a weak Hogan chairshot, or a Randy Savage love-tap with the megaphone that causes you to blade buckets. The whole Scott Hall as a security guard thing was maybe a little too cute, but overall I thought it was well done (the match was pretty bad though and the aftermath obviously)
You forgot about the FOLGERS CRYSTALS OF DOOM! I think Flair tried that against The Giant during the match when Giant won the belt.
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I honestly can’t disagree with you. Though as others say, I do believe Nash’s pops were largely the result of a terribly booked PPV, but the fact is I find almost every extended Goldberg match to be very difficult to get through. The only “long” Goldberg match I still like is his against DDP. I think that was another case where he and his opponent were given a significant advantage with the crowd because so much of that PPV leading up to the main event was horrid. Not to say it wouldn’t have been big anyway, but that definitely helped.
Goldberg had a couple of decent “long” (5-10 minutes) matches with Raven. The match where he won the US belt and then they had a world title match on Thunder a few months later. I really liked when Raven tried to leave through the crowd and they had “fans” throw him back into the ring. That was a pretty neat spot.
OMG I have that Raven match on tape after Spring Stampede 98. The fans were absolutely rabid for him! I thought that was the GREATEST NITRO IN THE HISTORY OF OUR SPORT TONY!
Macho lost the title the night after he beat Sting. I never understood why Macho never went into business for himself against Hogan. Very masochistic IMO.
Regal was not fired “right after the match,” either. He wasn’t fired for another year or so.
Sorry, I actually meant “suspended”, not fired.
Actually, Regal/Goldberg happened in February 1998. Regal was fired shortly thereafter because he showed up on Raw in June of 1998, right after KOTR. He then disappeared for the summer then came back in the fall as the Real Man’s Man before being fired by WWE in early 1999, then he went back to WCW for the rest of 99ish until they let him go. He went down to Memphis and popped up at the Pillman Memorial in 2000, which of course led to him getting his job with WWE in the fall of 2000, which he holds to this day.
I watched the Regal/Goldberg match for the first time on 24/7…Regal does make Goldberg look good at countering holds…but the match goes a few minutes too long because the crowd gets restless. The announcers did a good job putting over Goldberg as adapting and the crowd still went apeshit crazy for the spear and jackhammer.
The thing with Goldberg is that he always had IT…he didn’t just squash guys, he did it with a certain flair and regardless of the retconning…it was the WCW fans who got behind Goldberg way before the WCW hype machine did.
I think Goldberg absolutely had the talent, I think he showed that unlike most of the WCW main event guys that he wasn’t lazy about adding moves to his repertoire, I’d draw many more comparisons with a green but developing Lex Luger than I would with Hogan and Warrior who were mostly stagnant as far as moveset, plus he was far more athletically inclined than either of them. In some ways, he was “the guy” WCW had been searching for to replace Flair since the NWA days, someone who could wrestle in a generally power style like Sting or Luger, but that could actually draw unlike either of them. It’s too bad they messed it up so bad.
He certainly had fair share of sloppy moments, but nothing too unusual or embarassing (ok aside from the kick to Bret Hart) for someone who’d just started out wrestling and shot up the card very fast on a huge national TV show. He had some nice MMA style submission moves to go with his power stuff, and he did it all with so much intensity that it made it entertaining.
As others said, I think he was mostly limited by his “destroy them in 5 minutes or less” booking. Faulting him for having a sucky match with Kevin Nash is like blaming Chris Benoit for having a sucky match with Nash… has anyone has had a good match with Kevin Nash since 1995?
HBK had a pretty good brawl with Nash at Good Friends, Better Enemies PPV. Of course that’s 1996 and with a member of the clique. The only other decent match with Nash is HIAC vs. HHH with Mick Foley the guest referee. But that had more to do with Foley and HHH’s long running feud than Nash bringing the goods. And again its with a member of the clique.
That’s a good point RE: HBK, but I would say — who didn’t have a good match with Shawn Michaels in 1996? even Sid had a **** match with Shawn at the 1996 Survivor Series (!). I do enjoy that match though, although more for HBKs off the chart bumping abilities more then anything Kevin Nash did, but I’ll give him credit for being part of a good match there, as much anyways as I’d give Dustin Rhodes credit for being part of the awesome Rhodes/Steamboat vs Enforcers match at Clash 17.