Greatest JCP/WCW Match Wrap-Up
After last year's Greatest WWE Match, I was really excited to watch a ton of WCW and NWA matches for a project like this. Admittedly, I haven't seen a ton of WCW stuff. We were a WWF household my whole life, and as far as I can remember, I only ever watched WCW live once in my entire life and maybe because of that, I don't have a ton of positive memories about this stuff. In fact, my sense on the WCW, and especially the JCP, fandom is that it has a very strong "please like my sport" vibe. I'm a big hockey fan, and there's a subset of hockey fans who always want to prove how tough hockey players are compared to other athletes, how exciting hockey is, how more people should be watching it. It's sort of the same deal here. Sure WWE is more popular, more successful, more discussed, but they weren't WORKERS, they weren't WRESTLERS. That's just my opinion, but after watching a ton of these matches, hundreds of them, I still think that's true. I'm not sure there are that many great WCW matches, like I don't think there are a ton of matches on this list that would crack the WWE Top 100. There are some for sure, but the bottom 50 on this list, its a lot of FUN stuff, or stuff with a hot crowd, and not really anything that I find all that compelling. Then there's the finishes, and a ton of them just stink. Blood stoppages, ref decisions, constant interference, and these are matches that are supposed to be all-time greats, but they just have terrible endings.
When the final results are tabulated, I'll go over the matches I was highest on and lowest on, but I wanted to get some of these things out of the way while these matches are still fresh in my mind. So, like the WWE list, I'll go over wrestlers who appear more than once, and see if there are any trends that I can tease out.
Wrestlers appearing more than once:
26 Appearances: Ric Flair
18 Appearances: Ricky Steamboat
14 Appearances: Barry Windham, Sting
11 Appearances: Arn Anderson
10 Appearances: Bobby Eaton
9 Appearances: Vader, Dustin Rhodes
8 Appearances: Tully Blanchard
7 Appearances: Larry Zbyszko, Brian Pillman, Rey Mysterio, Stane Lane, Cactus Jack
6 Appearances: Steve Austin, Terry Funk
5 Appearances: Scott Stener, Rick Steiner, Ron Garvin
4 Appearances: Rick Rude, Brian Knobbs, Jerry Saggs, Shane Douglas, Jushin Liger, Lex Luger
3 Appearances: Nikita Koloff, Greg Valentine, Eddie Guerrero, Ultimo Dragon, Dusty Rhodes, DDP, Juventud Guererra, Steve Williams, Terry Gordy
2 Appearances: Roddy Piper, Psicosis, 2 Cold Scorpio, Dean Malenko, Great Muta, Hawk, Animal, Tommy Rogers, Bobby Fulton, William Regal, Ron Simmons, Ricky Morton, Michael Hayes, Jimmy Garvin, Don Kernodle, Randy Savage
Obviously, Flair stands out here based on sheer volume. He's scattered all over the list in all sorts of iterations. You've got golden era heel champion Flair, Horsemen Flair, old standard bearer Flair, and the supremely underrated face Flair. He's the straw that stirs the drink for this promotion and he's on over a quarter of the list, he could be on it more. Contrast this to the WWE list, where Bret Hart lead on my list with 12 appearances. It's a different ballgame to compare the two, but its obvious just how much Flair meant to his promotion over the 20 or so years this list covers.
Steamboat is one here 18 times, with 6 matches with Flair. Those matches and that feud have been discussed to death, but what puts Steamboat over the top is that he's got a ton of great tag matches; with Shane Douglas, with Eddie Gilbert, with Dustin Rhodes, with Jay Youngblood. It's one of my big takeways from this project, just how good he was outside of his high profile single matches.
Among the names that standout to me most are Larry Zbyszko and Bobby Eaton. It's almost entirely due to the Dangerous Alliance run, although both have multiple matches outside of that run. That group was such an integral part of the company for a fairly long time, and they delivered a ton of quality matches in a short period of time. At the same time, I do think it says something about the kind of matches on this list that there quite a few random multi-man tags from B and C shows on this list, and not, big PPV main events or title changes.
Somehow the Nasty Boys are on here four times, which is sort of surprising. All the matches are great, and have a reputation to that effect, but the Nastys being on here 4 times and the Rock N Roll Express being on here only once, in an 8 man tag, isn't exactly what one would expect.
On the topic of Ricky & Robert, there are two RnR matches, against the Russians and Raging & Ravishing, that have a lot of fans and I think they are both just bad. They are long, interminable "heat" segments and I have no time for that sort of wrestling. For a legendary team, there's not a lot to see in WCW or JCP, and I watched a bunch to make sure.
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