WCW Starrcade, Washington, DC
Why this match on the year’s flagship PPV in a company overwhelmed by its amount of big name, big contract talent? Because half the big names are hurt or otherwise absent or maxed out on dates or whatever. Here’s these guys!
Norman Smiley had become a cult favorite for the WCW audience by this point, which is a cool thing we don’t really see anymore in big league wrestling. Iaukea is a former WCW Television champion, which was kind of a fluke win that he managed to defend a few times before dropping it back and then going back into general irrelevance on the roster before he got the “Artist” gimmick, which gave him…something, anyway.
Crowd chanting “boring” pretty quickly into this. There is no reason for this match, by which I mean no feud/angle/whatever at all, so that means nobody in the crowd paid to see this match. There were also some scattered “boring” attempts during the CW title matches before this, but they didn’t pick up at all. These pick up enough that Smiley gets annoyed while he’s in control.
The match continues going nowhere interesting, but there is a small moment where Smiley is working on the arm on the mat, and Iaukea palm thrusts him a few times in the temple to get free; if you stuck that on a 2016 “BritishWres” show MFs would have been online, likes, “Yes, this is ‘The Graps.'”
They do try here, to be fair, but Smiley’s actual style and personality without emphasis on the comedy just wasn’t ever going to get over on a large scale in America. Crowd express some relief when this ends on Norman’s crossface chickenwing.
It’s an OK match in the work, some slop but some cool stuff from Smiley mostly, and Iaukea does a couple neat things, but they never even had the crowd close to engaged on anything other than expressing their boredom, and it hurts the match. And for once, the commentators mostly called this instead of focusing on letting the action happen in the background and talking over it about Nash or whatever, which they did a bit but honestly maybe not enough. Going over 11 minutes was probably not a good idea either, and frankly Norman could have wiggled more.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 
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