10 Awesome Wrestling Matches On Otherwise Terrible WWE Shows
1. Steve Austin Vs. Dude Love - Over The Edge 1998
WWF Raw was on white-hot form as a must-watch, multi-tentacled beast of an episodic TV show.
Austin Vs. McMahon was a sensation and, before it became very broad, was done very elegantly. That word somehow did belong in the context of the lite beer-soaked college campuses that the Fed played to in 1998. Every building felt like Woodstock '99, but McMahon producing saccharine vignettes putting over the WWF as a mom n' pop purveyor of gentle Americana was such great, deluded heel work.
The problem is that the WWF had to do a wrestling show every month and expect fans to pay for it, and the talent roster was mostly abysmal between the ropes (or yet to find their feet). Literally everything beneath the main event was below average. Nothing even reached passable, and Triple H ominously prophesied his main event run by going 19 excruciating minutes in an endless six-man DX Vs. Nation of Domination tag.
But what a main event, the genius of which was that it channeled the breathless twists of the TV product and fused that method of storytelling with a world-class brawl. McMahon's relentless attempts to screw over Austin were thwarted time and time again with just outrageously cathartic physical set-pieces in which obsequious old men, the sort of smug jobsworth you deal with at work every day, were blasted through tables.
Windshield spots, suplexes on concrete, a maelstrom of heat and catharsis: Eric Bischoff must have watched all that and knew he was completely knackered.