5. Barry Windham & Arn Anderson vs. Doom (Starcade, 1990)
Modern fans unfamiliar with Doom really only need to know this: Ron Simmons and Butch Reed were like an unholy combination of the Road Warriors and the APA, and they specialized in killing fools. At Starrcade 1990, the fools they were scheduled to kill were Arn Anderson and Ric Flair, but Thedore Long, Doom's manager, dressed up as a chauffeur and drove the Nature Boy to the scary part of town, where he was carried off by vagrants (!). As a result, Barry Windham was subbed in, and the match became a street fight. The announce team claimed that street fight rules favored Doom because WCW was kind of racist, but the Horsemen invented wrestling gang violence and these four guys just wound up murdering each other. Each team had a dedicated medic circling the ring to prevent permanent injury, and fully half the participants were bleeding like stuck pigs by minute three. Both teams kicked out of finishers and chair shots when things like that manifestly did not happen, and Jim Ross and Paul Heyman's commentary makes it sound like someone is literally about to die. The official end of the match came when Windham and Simmons simultaneously scored pinfalls, but all four guys decided to disregard that decision and fight all the way up the ramp and to the dressing room. It's still a great match today, but must have been unreal to a mainstream crowd in 1991. Paul Heyman was certainly taking notes.
