Hogan-Sting signing airs during movieHogan loses to Piper clean in bizarre cage match, moves right into Sting feud next night during Nitro
Hulk Hogan headlined WCW’s Sunday night pay-per-view against Roddy Piper. The match ended in a clustermess of an angle that no one has figured out the logic of yet. Everything went as planned, supposedly, with Piper kicking out of Hogan’s legdrop and eventually putting Hogan to sleep to win the match — a non-title match, by the way. Just before Piper put Hogan in the sleeper, Savage ran to the ring to help Hogan. Savage could have climbed through the cage door, which was open throughout the cage match — defeating the purpose of having the cage match — but chose to climb the cage to enter the ring. He leaped off the top of the cage and, wisely, was more concerned with not breaking his leg than making the move look good. The move didn’t look good as he accidentally hit Hogan. Piper then applied the sleeper and Hogan’s arm dropped three times for the win.
Then Savage and Hogan handcuffed Piper to the cage. Word had leaked during the week that WCW was excited about the finish they had designed for the cage match. It appeared for a moment the finish was going to be the cage being raised with Piper attached. Instead, the match seemed to be interrupted by a fan with white facepaint who got past security. The fan climbed up the cage and down into the ring. He was tackled against the fence by a phony Sting who had been thrown out of the ring by Hogan a minute earlier. Then Hogan and Savage walked up to the fan and began throwing worked punches and tried to ram his head into the side of the cage. It began looking like a work at that point. Security then entered the ring and held down the fan. Piper remained handcuffed to the side of the cage. Then, anticlimactically, the show went off the air.
The next night on Nitro, they showed a brief scene of Hogan and Savage beating on Piper and Hogan gloating about still being champion, but otherwise there was no follow-up on the angle. Apparently everything that happened came across as it was planned. The scenario was booked by Hogan and Bischoff. Hogan, along with Kevin Sullivan, has been criticized for having a broad vision or larger than life angles but no patience for paying attention to details. There were a lot of details that weren’t tended to that left the match ranked as one of the worst in PPV history.
No one can answer why a cage was hanging above the ring at the Oct. 20 Nitro when there was no cage match. And no one can answer why they would ruin the gimmick of a cage match — that no one can interfere or escape — by having wrestlers enter and leave the flimsy cage at will during the Nitro-ending angle. At Halloween Havoc itself, Hogan and Piper left the cage to brawl at ringside. When the WWF booked the cage match sequence where Shawn Michaels and Undertaker left the cage to brawl at ringside (and eventually on top of the cage), they devised a detailed scenario where the cage door was unlocked in order to get an injured photographer out of the cage. As soon as possible, Michaels and Undertaker were back in the cage and the door was locked again. In WCW’s case, there was no excuse for Hogan and Piper to so easily be able to escape the cage, but when they did, the match should have ended. Both men’s legs touched the ground, but one of them touched first — and he should have been the winner — but that point was quickly glossed over. Then not only did Savage easily enter the cage, but so did a fan. If a fan can so easily scale the side of a cage, looking like Spiderman in the process, then what’s the point of having cage matches without roofs in the future? It hurts the long-term effectiveness of cage matches, but it’s not an issue that concerns those who were behind the booking of the match.
It wasn’t just the poor booking, but it was the terrible lack of athleticism, a point that wasn’t lost on the WWF. The next night on Raw, while WCW was trying to move on from the debacle the night before and shift the focus from Piper to Sting, the WWF addressed the situation. Jim Cornette’s latest rant focused on Halloween Havoc.
“The pinnacle of this icon garbage came at last night’s cage match between Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper to determine in their minds only who the real icon is. WCW had the gall to say that it was the greatest cage match in history when it was only the greatest in three weeks since Hell in the Cell. But here you’ve got a 46 year old bald movie star wannabe who looks like Uncle Creepy with a good build taking on a guy with an artificial hip that hasn’t wrestled a full schedule in ten years. It’s a tribute to the massive egotism in my mind of both men and an indictment of WCW’s promotional policies that this match even took place much less being the main event when that card was probably the best WCW is capable of having. By the ten minute mark they were sucking wind so bad the first three rows passed out of oxygen deprivation. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. Well, I’m sick and damn tired of hearing guys claim to be the icon, especially when it usually comes from guys who just didn’t know when to quit. Roddy Piper was my idol when I was a teenager. That was 20 years ago. Hulk Hogan during his best years was 50 percent media creation and those are long gone. This match was a slap in the face to every wrestler that takes pride in his profession.”
On Nitro, meanwhile, WCW did an effective job of shifting attention to Hulk Hogan’s movie and Starrcade’s main event of Hogan vs. Sting. In fact, it’s all they talked about for the last 45 minutes of the program. The next night, during a commercial break for the premier of Hogan’s movie, “Assault on Devil’s Island,” a contract signing took place for Starrcade. The pre-taped segment lasted all of 15 seconds and included a brief (obviously) staredown between the two.
