Gimmick Some Lovin': WarGames

The Match

The Road Warriors' chests are apparently as indestructible in professional wrestling as Samoan wrestlers' heads.

What sinks a lot of "bitter rivalries" in professional wrestling is the big match itself; while the men have been attacking each other and scrapping for weeks, months, even years, the very nature of a professional wrestling contest drains some of that bitterness by imposing the ballet-like traditions of a match on that hatred.

War Games is all hatred. It's all bitterness. Before the timeline ticker on the WWE Network hits three minutes, blood is already flowing from multiple men; by the end of the match, at least 60% of its combatants are shedding some of the red stuff. Announcer Jim Ross's voice is so hoarse once the finish arrives, I'm sure he'd have been coughing up a few pints himself.

Any photo from this match could be the poster for bloodborne illness prevention.

Most of the offence in this bout consists of punches, kicks, and the walls of the cage itself being turned into weapons, but even workrate marks couldn't complain at the artistry with which it's done. Suplexes and rest holds were not going to get the job done here. This match needed brutality, which it delivered in spades.

The two rings setup put a fantastic spin on traditional heel-face heat spots, giving extra ammunition to technicians like Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard who, in tag team wrestling, were masters of cutting a single ring in half; a second ring earns an exponential increase in audience hatred for their actions. On the babyface side, meanwhile, Road Warrior Animal hits a beautiful flying shoulder block from one ring into the other early on, while he and Hawk would use the rings to isolate J.J. Dillon towards the end to their masterful (and crowd-pleasing) advantage.

Speaking of the crowd, their reactions are one of the best elements of the match. Every single time a babyface evens up the side, the fans react like a dog greeting its owner home from a business trip. Each and every time the Road Warriors or ex-Soviet Nikita Koloff proved themselves to be impervious to Flair's signature chest chops, the pop we discussed last week with Steve Austin's entry into the Raw title match gets put to shame.

Seeing the Horsemen attempt again to break Dusty's leg, and seeing Dusty getting his hands (and his Bionic Elbow) on The Nature Boy was too much for this crowd to handle.

The closest thing to a fault to find in this match is the anticlimactic finish, which begins with the final two entrants into the contest: managers Dillon for the heel team and Paul Ellering for the faces. Dillon looked like the stereotype of the soft, privileged rich kid, down to his high-waisted briefs and pale, hairless body; the crowd literally salivates when he approaches the door because of the pain he was set to encounter. Then, with Ellering joining the fray, The Match Beyond commenced.

Ellering introduces the Road Warriors' decorative spikes as a weapon, and both heels and faces increase the bloodletting while the LOD demolishes Dillon in a separate ring. Hawk and Animal hit an improvised version of their traditional Doomsday Device tandem finisher; because of the low ceiling, the pair were unable to hoist Dillon to their shoulders or hit a true flying clothesline to knock him off, and Dillon hits the mat with a sickening thud.

As the battle commences around them, the Road Warriors continue to work Dillon against the side of the cage, before an official makes his way over on the outside and accepts Dillon's surrender to give the babyfaces the victory. Later War Games contests would more definitively end the contest with a dramatic submission finish, but this one strangely fizzles out before it becomes official (and the other seven combatants don't seem to get the memo at first that the bell has rung).

The drama, however, preceding that finish is so fantastic that picking apart those final moments is almost like finding the one or two camera angles in The Godfather that might have been slightly better.