Thunder Results May 14th, 1998. Live/Taped: Live. Length: Two Hours+. Location: Durham, New Hampshire. Hosted By: Tony Schiavone, Bobby "The Brain" Heenan and Mike Tenay. Thunder's on? Whoops ... I watched that other thing on NBC. Good thing there's the replay ... Footage from the tail end of Nitro opens the show. In one of those NWO sponsored segments they show Eric Bischoff beating up a guy and challenging Vince McMahon. My thoughts on this are in the comments section below. They then play a few seconds of comments Randy Savage made about Bret Hart nearly a month ago. Mando Guerrero, in comments taped at his home, talks about the situation involving Eddie and Chavo Guerrero. Mando is Eddie's older brother. Eddie and Chavo Jr. hit the ring. Eddie says he realizes this is breaking up the family, and as a gesture of goodwill he's sought out a worthy competitor through which Chavo can redeem himself. Describing him as being the same size and skill level of Chavo, Eddie brings out Reese of the Flock. CHAVO GUERRERO, JR. vs. REESE Reese gets the quick and easy win after chokeslamming Chavo. Ultimo Dragon then comes out and he and Eddie go at it. The Dragon slaps on the Dragon Sleeper. This time Chavo just walks away, leaving Eddie in the Dragon's clutches. It's mentioned at some point that Eddie will face the Dragon at Slamboree. If the Dragon wins Eddie and Chavo's "agreement" will come to an end. They show a lengthy batch of clips chronicling Raven and the Flock being beat up in fan run-ins, as well as Raven's recent encounters with Diamond Dallas Page, leading up to Raven being assigned a squad of riot police bodyguards. Back on the live show Raven and his guards come to the ring. Raven challenges DDP to come out. Page shows up with his bullrope, but is jumped by the guards once he enters the ring. They help hold him down as Raven loops the rope around his neck and tosses him over the ropes, hanging him. The announcers are mortified that the guards helped Raven in the attack, when all they're supposed to do is just stand guard. Brief comments from Bret Hart are played. KAOS (w/ Rage) vs. FIT FINLEY A slow, plodding, long match, which Finley wins with a Tombstone Piledriver. Rage tried to interfere to little success. Randy Savage is shown in more old footage talking about Hart. A goofy looking guy in a suit of spiky armor comes out to hand out t-shirts tying in to the new "Quest For Camelot" cartoon coming out. They run a quick promo for the movie. Schiavone announces that Bill Goldberg will face the entire Flock in a match (or matches) at Slamboree. If Goldberg fails to beat them all he has to return his U.S. Title to Raven. I have nothing nice to say about this so I'll just move on. GOLDBERG vs. SICK BOY (w/ the Flock) Goldberg adopts a Lex Luger type strategy here and lets Sick Boy beat on him for a few minutes before he pumps himself up, earning win #84 in the usual manner. After more pretaped comments from Hart, Randy Savage heads to the ring. He wishes Buff Bagwell a speedy recovery. He says "Hollywood" Hogan is lucky to have his "NWO Wolfpack" Title. He then makes the boldfaced lie of saying that he's never wrestled Hart. He also gripes about Roddy Piper being the ref at his match with Hart at Slamboree. Hart then comes out and calls Hart a chicken. He accuses Savage of using his "bad knee" to make excuses (shades of Shawn Michaels). Security keeps the two apart. Saturn, in pretaped comments, gripes about Glacier claiming ownership of the Cryonic Kick. SATURN (w/ Billy Kidman) vs. CHRIS ADAMS Before the match Kidman asks Adams if he'd like to lose to the Death Valley Driver or the Rings of Saturn? They choose the Driver, with a Cryonic Kick to set it up. Hammer tries to run in but is held back by security. Saturn wins with the above mentioned combo. Adams looked plain awful. WCW Motorsports segment. Next week Nitro will be on at 7:00 PM Eastern for an hour, then another hour will air at approximately 11:30 PM Eastern. RAGE vs. CHRIS BENOIT Rage does a number of power moves. Benoit comes back with some stiff chops. He wins with the Crippler Crossface. You'd have to be pretty Canadian to have enjoyed this match. Eric Bischoff comes to the ring to make his challenge again. This is really getting old. A few signs aside, and some guy yelling "you go Eric!", the crowd booed him while he's in the ring. Bischoff reads a letter sent to him by McMahon's lawyer, which states that McMahon won't be at the Slamboree PPV. Bischoff belittles the letter, all in an attempt to cover his ass by making sure we all know McMahon won't be at the PPV (*wink, wink*). He then trashes all that by going on to outline how McMahon can get into the arena, how security will let him in, etc., clearly keeping the idea alive (in the minds of some fans, anyway), that McMahon or someone from the WWF might show up at the PPV. Hey, if I didn't have Internet access, and I saw what the WWF did on recent RAW's, I'd sure think that someone COULD show up! If that ain't false advertising, I don't know what is. (Sort of like how we all got the idea in our heads that Ric Flair might have shown up at "Unforgiven".) Scott Hall appears in an NWO t-shirt promo. This is his only appearance of the show, even though he's advertised as defending the Tag Team Titles tonight. Kevin Nash comes to the ring, then signals for Hall to come out. Hall doesn't appear. Nash says Hogan and Bischoff are keeping him off TV. (Let me play dumb for just a minute: somebody explain this angle to me. Why is Hall being kept off TV? Why does Hogan and Bischoff consider him "too dangerous for live TV!"? Ignoring the reality of the situation--personal problems, drug rehab, divorce, wanting to get fired, whatever--how does anything said by Nash and WCW over the last two months explain why Scott Hall has been absent? Wouldn't it have been just sooooooooo much easier to say he was out with a leg injury or something? I must get twenty E-Mails a week asking if Hall is headed to the WWF. Thirty asking about Ric Flair, by the way.) Hall then brings out Dusty Rhodes, who again guarantees that Hall will be at Slamboree. KEVIN NASH/DUSTY RHODES vs. PUBLIC ENEMY Nash does the three or four moves he knows en route to the easy win. Rhodes stays on the floor for most of the match, then tags in at the very end to get funky-like-a-monkey and drop an elbow, then cover Rocco Rock for the pin. Sure is nice to be a booker. RANDY "MACHO MAN" SAVAGE vs. STING The two trade punches for a few minutes until Bret Hart runs in with a chair. Savage meets him and bashes him against the chair. He then goes up top to drop an elbow, but is caught by the Giant, who just entered the ring. Kevin Nash then runs in to attack the Giant, but it's Sting who nails Nash to save his friend! The Giant then grabs a mic and tells Sting that after the two of them win the Tag Team Titles at Slamboree, Sting has a decision to make the next night on Nitro. He hands Sting an NWO shirt to make his point. Lex Luger then comes out, adding another layer to the intrigue. He starts questioning Sting as the Giant leaves. Instead of signing off then, they instead cut to the announcers, who spend a minute or so doing pointless wrap-up. The show ends with a replay of Bischoff's challenge promo from the top of the show. Next Monday: Two hours of Nitro split up. Next week: Nothing is announced. Comments: The usual show: leftovers from Monday, no good matches--everything we've come to expect from Thunder of late. (Well, lately Thunder hasn't been on, but you know what I mean.) This probably isn't the best place to do so, but I'm going to use this space to lay out my thoughts regarding Eric Bischoff's challenge, as well as the whole recent turn the WCW/WWF "war" has taken. Wrestling, for better or worse, has changed fundamentally over the last couple of years in regard to how each promotion deals with the competition. For years the strategy was to ignore the competition--especially in the WWF. The NWA only mentioned the WWF when it suited their needs. (Most minor feds, on the other hand, regularly mentioned the other promotions, hoping to cash in on the name recognition.) This all changed when WCW, seeing an opportunity to wrest the title of "Number One Promotion" away from the WWF, embarked upon a campaign of directly attacking the enemy. They programmed their new Monday night show against the WWF's already established Monday night show. They lured away talent, gave away results of taped WWF Raw's, and all the other stuff we've become familiar with. The WWF responded with the more original, sometimes funny, but often tasteless attacks on Ted Turner under the guise of the "Billionaire Ted" skits. WCW would go on to bring in Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, in the process giving the fans the impression that the WWF was "invading" their territory. That spawned a lawsuit from the WWF which to this day is still pending. From there the war was a quiet one, mostly waged behind-the-scenes, with only the occasional snide remark on TV or potshot on their hotlines being taken. The war again flared up when Jim Cornette was given the go-ahead by Vince McMahon to air a series of "shoot" comments aimed against Eric Bischoff--comments which were done in retaliation to statements Bischoff had made regarding the direction the WWF was taking and his overall predictions of their general demise. Pretty much everything Cornette said about Bischoff was true, though most argued whether or not he should have said them in the first place. From that point on last fall there's been a almost steady stream of regular potshots being taken back-and-forth between the two groups on TV, their hotlines, magazines, and at live events. Most of this was harmless and only served to energize the fans of both companies, while angering the fans of the oppositions. Then DeGeneration X "invaded" WCW. In two highly original (though not overwhelmingly amusing) installments the WWF sent a group of wrestlers out to make fun of WCW. Like the constant stream of anti-WCW potshots which preceded it, it was amusing to WWF fans, while it angered WCW fans: mostly because the WWF presented the first installment in a less-than-wholly truthful manner. Still, both segments were harmless and were done with one purpose: to tell the WWF's fans that "we're better and it's okay to be our fan!" It made fun of WCW without specifically attacking anyone in their company (though Eric Bischoff's name was mentioned in the course of both installments). It's because of this that Eric Bischoff took them so personally, and looked hard to find a way he considered appropriate to respond. He didn't look too hard, though, and went to the sources which he usually visits when he needs inspiration ... Vince McMahon and Ted Turner. Vince McMahon has made almost the exact same challenge on several occasions in the past, though in his case they were meant as jokes and the target was Ted Turner. Ted Turner himself has made almost the exact same challenge to his number one rival, billionaire Rupert Murdoch. McMahon has made his challenges in front of the media in response to nagging requests by Ted Turner to do a WWF/WCW co-promoted PPV. McMahon has brought up the notion of a fight between the two as a joke, and has since repeated it since the media got such a kick out of reporting it. McMahon was never serious about it and Turner, as far as anyone knows, has never bothered to respond to the challenge publicly. Sound familiar? Ted Turner, on the other hand, has made his open challenge to Rupert Murdoch for many years now. It's hard to tell how serious Ted is about it: not too serious, I'd wager, but he continues to make the challenge on a regular basis. The most recent occasion was just a couple of weeks ago at a broadcasters dinner, during which he bashed Murdoch for not giving to charity and the fact that his wife had left him. Real classy stuff. The feud between these two is so legendary that it served as an inspiration for the made-for-HBO movie "Weapons of Mass Distraction". Turner knows Murdoch will never accept the challenge and thus repeats it again and again in front of crowds sympathetic to him and his "side", all in an effort to continually stroke his own ego. Sound familiar? Eric Bischoff has now taken what started out as real life jokes and has brought them into the fantasy world of professional wrestling. There's only one problem: he apparently MEANS IT! And why not do so, as there's no way he or WCW can lose in the process. If McMahon accepted the challenge, all Bischoff would have to do is never air the footage, then claim McMahon chickened out and never showed. Or if they did show it, and McMahon beat up Bischoff, then we'd probably be looking at a lawsuit and criminal charges, while the PPV (if it happened to take place there), would probably be the most watched ever when word got out and people ordered the replays. And of course Bischoff might beat McMahon, which would be the quickest and most direct way for him to "win". He even wins if McMahon totally ignored the challenge, thought that option is already gone, giving Bischoff a minor win already. So why did he do it? Did he do it to make WCW look better than the WWF? Did he do it to say WCW's wrestlers are better than the WWF's wrestlers? Did he do it to show WCW puts on better matches, live events, TV shows, PPV's, etc.? The answer to all these is no--he did it to make himself look like a big, tough, cool S.O.B. That's why the only way this thing works is if you happen to believe his IS a big, tough, cool S.O.B. in the first place. In the real world civilized people don't challenge each other to fist fights: especially corporate executives. In the world of professional wrestling, though, this kind of thing happens every day. That's why Bischoff is able to get away with making this kind of challenge and draw some small measure of support from a few fans. In the real world Vince McMahon could ignore this. Pro-wrestling isn't the real world, though. His fans (if he has any) are now looking to him to see how he responds. WCW, meanwhile, is happy to sit back and let their fans put two-and-two together and come up with the assumption--despite Bischoff's half-hearted assertions to the contrary--that someone from the WWF just may show up at the PPV to answer the challenge. After all ... the WWF invaded Nitro, then invaded WCW's headquarters, then the CNN Center. Why not Slamboree next? Eric Bischoff, in my opinion, looks like a real jackass for making these challenges--just as Vince McMahon looks like a jackass when he tries to act tough as part of his angle with Steve Austin. At least there, though, is where the difference lies: with McMahon it's an ANGLE. McMahon is playing a part in a storyline. Eric Bischoff, on the other hand, really seems to believe in what he's saying. He really seems to mean it. Whether it's just a homicidal urge, or desperation over the fact that WCW is slipping from their position of superiority, Bischoff has this look in his eye which makes one nervous to watch. He just looks like he'd REALLY like to get his hands on Vince McMahon. Hell, I know I'd like to smack Eric Bischoff in the mouth if I somehow could, yet the reality is that if I ever came face-to-face with him I'd probably just smile, shake his hand, then tell everyone how cool it was to meet him in person. THAT'S reality. This ... these Thunder results, the Internet, wrestling itself ... that's all fantasy. It's a bit scary to think that right now Eric Bischoff may not be able to tell the difference between the two.