I finished watching Fall Brawl 1994 recently. No Hulk Hogan at this PPV, because he realized he could wrestle a lot less and still get paid. Must be nice to be him. The Roanoke Virginia crowd boos when his name is mentioned, by the way. Also no Ric Flair here. The main event instead is Team Rhodes vs. Colonel Parker’s Stud Stable in a Wargames match. No Hogan or Flair. Gee, I wonder why this PPV had about half the buy rate of the previous one.

The voiceover says there will be two championship matches tonight…then proceeds to announce three championship matches. Ah, WCW. Can’t you even get that right?
The singer of the national anthem is some bumpkin country music singer because it’s WCW.
Tony Schiavone and Bobby Heenan are the announcers with Gene Okerlund doing interviews.
They announce that Ricky Steamboat, who was supposed to defend his US Title against Steve Austin, can’t go due to injury. I’m sure they knew this long ago and decided not to tell the people paying for this match, which doesn’t seem right to me.


First Match is for the TV Title: Lord Stephen Regal (champ) w. Sir William vs. Johnny B. Badd.

I really enjoyed this match, but then I expected to because I like both guys. Badd wins when he hooks Regal’s arm on a European uppercut attempt and backslides him for the pin. I can’t believe he won on a backslide, but this was a good match. And we finally have a new TV champ! Aside from a couple of weeks when Larry Zbyszko was champ, Regal has held this title for about a year. An impressive run.


Next match is Kevin Sullivan w/ Evad Sullivan vs. Catus Jack in a Loser Leaves Town match.

Loser leavers town. Please win this, Jack!!!

For those in the know, Mick Foley has basically been driven out of WCW by their stupidity, plus I guess both Ric Flair (who is the booker at this point) and Hulk Hogan (who is the de facto ruler of WCW at this point) don’t like him. So guess who’s going to win. That’s okay. Mick Foley has no talent anyway. Nothing will ever come of him. Sigh.

The only reason this match was decent was because of Jack and the amazing bumps he took. At the end, after about 6 minutes, Jack crashes into Dave on the apron and Kevin rolls him up for the win.


Next match is for the US Title. This is supposed to be Ricky Steamboat (champ) vs. Steve Austin (whom he’d beaten for the title at the last PPV) but Ricky comes out in street clothes, with a legit career ending back injury, so he’s obviously not going to wrestle. Commissioner Nick Bockwinkle hands the title to Austin (without a match? Doesn’t make sense to me) and Austin is celebrating, but then Bockwinkle says that he must defend the title tonight, and that Gary Michael Kapeta will announce the challenger. And the challenger is…Jim Duggan. Oh sh!t.

Steve Austin vs. Jim Duggan.

Oh. My God. My worst nightmare come true. I hate you, Hulk Hogan. Anyway, Austing refuses to fight, but Bockwinkle says he must or he will forfeit the title. So the bell rings, Duggan backdrops Austin (who is still holding the belt), flops on top of Austin, and pins him. And we have a new champ. This is the worst, and stupidest match I’ve ever seen. I know Hogan will take WCW to new ratings heights eventually but right now it looks like he’s killing WCW as his good buddy Duggan gets a major championship 5 minutes after joining WCW. What has he done to deserve a title shot? Heck, he hasn’t even wrestled in WWF in probably more than a year. This match lasted about 8 seconds. They officially listed it as something like 30 seconds but that’s nonsense. It was literally just a backrop then the pin. Abominable.

So, between Foley and Austin, we have two extremely talented guys being forced out of WCW by the company’s stupidity and shortsightedness.


Next up is the tag team championship match with Pretty Wonderful (champs) vs. Stars & Stripes.

Pretty Wonderful are of course the Pauls (or Paulas) Orndorff and Roma while Stars & Stripes are Marcus Alexander Bagwell and the Patriot.

The crowd start a “USA” chant to support Stars & Stripes, but of course good ol’ WCW have the camera on an Orndorff supporter at that time. Sheesh.

Pretty Wonderful win when the Patriot is tagging Roma, but the ref tells him he’s not the legal man because he didn’t see the tag, but Patriot doesn’t seem to get that concept, meanwhile outside the ring Orndorff piledrives Bagwell then rolls him back in so that Roma can tag him. Personally, I thought this was a decent match. Nothing great, but not bad.


Next up is match #1 for the number one contender to face Hogan for the WCW championship. They’re calling this a triangle match for some reason, though it’s two matches and there’s no triangle abot it. It’s more like a mini-tournament, but whatever. Vader, Sting, and Guardian Angel (Big Bossman, and I think Heenan screwed up once and called him that) all come into the ring. They each toss a coin, and the odd man gets a bye. The other two face each other, with the winner facing the other guy. The winner of this mini-tournament gets to face Hogan for the championship…except that that never happens, so I don’t know why they’re wasting our time. Anyway, Sting flips the odd coin, meaning he gets the bye. So our first triangle match is:

Vader vs. Guardian Angel.

I find it very surprising that it wasn’t Sting vs. Angel here. I know that would mean a face vs. face match, but you know that the final will be Sting vs. Vader, and I have to imagine that Sting is a lot more capable of wrestling two good matches than a big guy like Vader. Plus, good booking says that the face should be the one who has to overcome more difficult odds, not the heel.

The match was decent. Guardian Angel (not bothering to wear Guardian Angel garb now – just black tee shirt and pants) does his Bossman Slam but the ref got bumped (which seems to happen in every WCW match) and does not see Angel’s pin nor does he see Harley Race headbutt Angel, allowing Vader to cover for the win.


Next up is Vader vs. Sting. Winner becomes #1 contender, supposedly. Considering that the champ is a babyface, gee, I wonder if the heel or the babyface will win this #1 contender match. Hmmm.

Anyway, yet another great Sting-Vader match, though certainly not their best. First, I should explain the stupid and ridiculously, unnecessarily complicated rules. There’s a 15 minute time limit, then if no one has won, there’s a 5 minute overtime (why not just make it a 20 minute time limit??) then if there’s still no winner, it goes to sudden death overtime, which means that the first guy off his feet loses. Of course, we go to sudden death overtime. Sting gets Vader off his feet, but for some reason the ref is outside the ring, going after Harley Race, who is accosting the Guardian Angel. Then, the same masked man who smashed Hogan in the knee at the last PPV does the same to Sting here, and Sting goes down. Then, Vader gets up, and the ref conveniently comes back and sees Sting down and declares Vader the winner. So Vader is now the #1 contender. Also, at the end of the first overtime, Vader powerbombs Sting and is covering him. This started with one or two seconds left, but the idiot timekeeper didn’t ring the bell in time so the ref had to declare the match over without the bell ringing. Seriously, can’t WCW even get ringing the bell at the end of the match right? They’re doing the countdown so we know the match should be over, and the guy can’t just ring the bell when he’s supposed to. Also, I don’t think the crowd liked the dumb overtime rules, and I don’t blame them. I don’t see what the point of that was. Dumb booking trying to ruin another classic Sting-Vader match.


We get a promo with Hogan and Flair talking to each other on the phone, both guys on the screen via satellite. Hogan challenges Flair (who has declared himself world champ in spite of not really being the champ, and carrying around a bogus belt, completely ripping off what he did when he joined WWF) who has sort of “retired” I guess, to a match. In order to entice Flair to wrestle him, Hogan said if he loses, he will retire. First, they rip of Flair declaring himself the “real” world champ and running around with a duplicate belt, then they rip off when Flair challenged Vader and said he’d retire if he lost. Let’s get some originality, WCW! It would be nice if Hogan lost that match, but we all know how that’s going to wind up. Also, this promo went on waaay to long I think it must have lasted 15 minutes. But that’s Hogan for you.


The main even is War Games – Dusty/Dustin Rhodes/Nasty Boys v Terry Funk/Arn Anderson/Bunkhouse Buck/Colonel Robert Parker (w. Meng).

Meng was supposed to be in here but for some reason WCW decided that Meng couldn’t wrestle and Colonel would have to wrestle here instead. This also doesn’t make much sense, and we all know that the faces will win by making Parker submit. This stupid stipulation made this too predictable. Also, I have only seen a few WarGames, but this was definitely the weakest one of the ones that I’ve seen.

And yes, Parker submits when Dusty gets him into the figure four then the Nasty Boys repeatedly elbow drop him.


All in all, sort of a weak PPV, IMHO. The opening match (Regal-Badd) was very good, and so was Sting Vader of course (even WCW can’t screw that up), and there wasn’t much I cared for after that. The Pretty Wonderful-Stars & Stripes match was decent as well. But there was a lot of wasted time here as far as I was concerned.