Your favorite Great American Bash

[JN News 0]

I've been watching my special DVD copy of the GAB 1987 video that was sent to me by a friend in Florida, and I love it. Bash '87 is officially my favorite Bash ever, with GAB 1986 coming in at a close second.

 

 

 

So, what's your favorite Bash, and what are some of your favorite matches?

 

 

 

Mine are....

 

War Games 1 & 2

Flair vs. Garvin

Luger vs. Kolloff

Rhodes vs. Blanchard for 25 Grand. (I believe)

[Diamonddust 0]

I've been watching my special DVD copy of the GAB 1987 video that was sent to me by a friend in Florida, and I love it. Bash '87 is officially my favorite Bash ever, with GAB 1986 coming in at a close second.

 

 

 

So, what's your favorite Bash, and what are some of your favorite matches?

 

 

 

Mine are....

 

War Games 1 & 2

Flair vs. Garvin

Luger vs. Kolloff

Rhodes vs. Blanchard for 25 Grand. (I believe)

 

I know a lot of people will say it, but 1989. The more I go back and watch it, the more I enjoy it. It's also considered one of the great wrestling PPV's ever. You got Flair vs. Funk, Muta vs. Sting, Luger vs. Steamboat, plus a Wargames match as well.

 

Runner up would be Bash '90, only for Sting's title win. Granted, everyone and their brother knew in advance Flair had no chance of winning that one.

[cabbageboy 0]

Yeah but are those 1989 and 90 PPVs actually considered NWA GAB shows? Technically Turner owned the company by then and it was drifting into WCW.

[JN News 0]

I'm actually talking about the original NWA GAB summer tours by Jim Crockett Promotions, back in the 80's. But, I hear that '89 & '90 were good as well.

[Diamonddust 0]

Yeah but are those 1989 and 90 PPVs actually considered NWA GAB shows? Technically Turner owned the company by then and it was drifting into WCW.

 

Good point. I'd consider the 1989 one more NWA than 90, but you are right... Turner was in control. Still, it was technically the NWA until the official change over in 1991.

[Diamonddust 0]

I'm actually talking about the original NWA GAB summer tours by Jim Crockett Promotions, back in the 80's.

 

Gotcha... I guess that does strike 89 and 90 out of the discussion then. With that in mind, I'd put 87 on my list due to it being the debut of WarGames.

[JN News 0]

I'm actually talking about the original NWA GAB summer tours by Jim Crockett Promotions, back in the 80's.

 

Gotcha... I guess that does strike 89 and 90 out of the discussion then. With that in mind, I'd put 87 on my list due to it being the debut of WarGames.

 

 

Yeah, I do hear that there were many cards and matches as part of the summer tours, but didn't make the cut for NWA home video.

[spman 0]

I like 1991!

 

Seriously though, 1987 is a fantastic show, the first War Games match is one of my all time favorites, but 1989 is the overall better show.

[Rendclaw 0]

1987 for sure. WarGames was such an innovative match for its time, and had ten of the best wrestlers in the world in the match.

 

Well, nine and Lex Luger. You can say what you want about Dusty and his physique, but he was a damn good wrestler.

[cabbageboy 0]

This might sound strange but when exactly did the NWA cease being involved with WCW? I recall the NWA stuff lasting until sometime in 1993, which was insanely confusing since they had 2 different world titles in the promotion and there was no brand split like with WWE.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

C&P from Wiki:

 

WCW under Ted Turner

 

To preserve the inexpensive network programming provided by professional wrestling, JCP was purchased outright by Turner on November 21, 1988. Originally incorporated by TBS as the Universal Wrestling Corporation, Turner promised the fans that WCW would be the athlete-oriented style of NWA. 1989 proved to be a turnaround year for WCW, with Ric Flair on top for most of the year as both World Champion and head booker. Flair helped bring in Ricky Steamboat and Terry Funk, and his pay-per-view matches with were financially and critically successful. Young stars such as Sid Vicious, Sting, Scott Steiner, The Road Warriors, Brian Pillman, The Great Muta and Lex Luger were given major storylines and championship opportunities.

 

Despite this influx of talent, WCW soon began working to gradually incorporate much of the glamour and showy gimmicks for which the WWF was better known. Virtually none of these stunts—such as the live cross-promotional appearance of RoboCop at a pay-per-view event in 1990, the Chamber of Horrors gimmick, and the notorious Black Scorpion storyline—succeeded. Behind the scenes, WCW was becoming more autonomous and slowly started separating itself from the historic NWA name. In January 1991, WCW officially split from the NWA and began to recognize its own WCW World Heavyweight Championship and WCW World Tag Team Championship.

 

Both WCW and the NWA recognized Ric Flair (who was by now no longer the head booker) as their World Heavyweight Champion throughout most of the first half of 1991, but WCW, particularly recently-installed company president Jim Herd, turned against Flair for various reasons and fired him before The Great American Bash in July 1991 after failed contract negotiations. In the process, they officially stripped him of the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. However, according to Flair's autobiography, they refused to return the $25,000 deposit he had put down on the physical belt, so he kept it and brought it with him when he was hired by the WWF at the request of Vince McMahon. Flair then incorporated the belt into his gimmick, dubbing himself "The Real World's Champion".

 

WCW later renegotiated the use of the NWA name as a co-promotional gimmick with New Japan Pro Wrestling and sued the WWF to stop showing Flair with the old NWA World Title belt on its programs, claiming a trademark on the physical design of the belt. The belt was returned to WCW by Flair when Jim Herd was let go and he received his deposit back plus interest. It was brought back as the revived NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

 

 

Final split with the NWA

During the period that WCW operated with its own World Champion, while also recognizing the NWA's world title, Flair left the WWF on good terms and returned to WCW, regaining the title from Barry Windham in July 1993. Immediately, the other, now smaller, member organizations of the NWA began demanding that Flair defend the title under their rules in their territories, as mandated by old NWA agreements. The title was later scheduled to be dropped by Flair to Rick Rude, a title change which was exposed by the "Disney Tapings", the months-in-advance taping of WCW's syndicated television shows at Disney-owned studios in Orlando, Florida. The NWA board of directors, working separately from WCW, objected to Rude and WCW finally left the NWA for good again in September 1993.

 

However, WCW still legally owned and used the actual belt which represented the NWA World Heavyweight Championship (Rick Rude even defended it as the "Big Gold Belt") but they could no longer use the NWA name. WCW realized that the title belt, because of its rich in-ring history and visual impact, was highly sought after and respected in Japan, a fictional subsidiary, dubbed WCW International, was created to inject credibility back into the belt. It was made up of promoters from around the world, essentially their in-house version of the real NWA. The title thus became known as the WCW International World Heavyweight Championship (as the World Heavyweight Championship as sanctioned by WCW International). WCW claimed that WCW International still recognized the belt as a legitimate World Championship. For a short while, there were essentially two world titles up for competition in the organization. Sting eventually lost the WCW International Championship to WCW Champion Ric Flair in a unification match on June 23, 1994 when the experiment was jettisoned. The Big Gold Belt was then used to represent the lone World Title in the company. It was used as such until WCW's closure in 2001

 

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

WCW later renegotiated the use of the NWA name as a co-promotional gimmick with New Japan Pro Wrestling and sued the WWF to stop showing Flair with the old NWA World Title belt on its programs, claiming a trademark on the physical design of the belt. The belt was returned to WCW by Flair when Jim Herd was let go and he received his deposit back plus interest. It was brought back as the revived NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

 

It's nitpicking, but I don't think this is actually correct. WCW didn't sue because of the physical trademark, but actually over the "goodwill" of the belt. They had no issue with Flair keeping big goldy, but by showing up with the title he was assuming all history of the title with it. WCW claimed that the actual lineage and history of the title belonged with them and not to Flair.

 

The reason I bring this up is that it's a good case study for debates over title belts and their lineages. The court ruled in favor of WCW, citing that they owned the goodwill associated with the title and that Ric Flair could not represent himself as having a title that represented that lineage. Hence the whole pixeling.