Some of the historic matches within the history of World Championship Wrestling for each the fitting and unsuitable reasons. Provided that it’s WCW, the unsuitable reasons are catastrophic to say the least. Goldberg’s WCW World Championship match with Diamond Dallas Page was the fundamental event of the 1998 Halloween Havoc pay-per-view, but as a result of the published running longer than expected, the PPV feed cut off right before the fundamental event was speculated to start, resulting in 1000’s of individuals receiving refunds for not getting what they originally paid for. Nonetheless, in what is kind of possibly essentially the most WCW scenario ever produce, the individuals who had their feeds cut missed out on certainly one of the best WCW fundamental events of all time.
Goldberg as a wrestler is someone who needed one thing greater than anything to succeed; structure. When you shut your eyes and considered any Goldberg match from his undefeated streak in WCW, it could probably look something like cool entrance, people chanting his name, spear, jackhammer, win, and leave in that order. So when he was the WCW World Champion, facing opponents who weren’t exactly keen on the thought of being steamrolled in lower than a minute, Goldberg’s matches needed to be longer, have more drama, but ultimately suffered since the structure that got him over wasn’t getting used. Enter DDP, a person famous for scripting his matches to the microsecond.
Combining Goldberg’s need for a strict script to follow and DDP’s attention to detail, you find yourself getting a breezy 10 minute match that does not try to go overboard on the theatrics, it just tells a straightforward, well paced story. Goldberg remains to be undefeated, meaning DDP knows the danger he’s in if he lets the champion get even a sniff of momentum, keeping his distance and frustrating Goldberg until he makes a mistake. In any case, Bill remains to be relatively green at this point, making DDP’s plan much more believable, which is hammered home by the commentary team.
Even at just over 10 minutes, the fans are rocking by the tip of things, with Goldberg spearing the ring post by accident but still hitting a spear, only to not have the strength to hit the jackhammer, leading to Page hitting a Diamond Cutter to a thunderous response. The champion kicks out, and upon attempting to go for what seemed to be a jackhammer of his own, DDP ended up being hoisted into the air and slammed down for Goldberg to get the victory.
Because of this match airing on “WCW Monday Nitro” the night after Halloween Havoc as a make-good for the technical difficulties, more people watched Goldberg vs. DDP than every other match in WCW history, with over 10% of individuals with cable watching the bout. What those people watched was certainly one of the rare WCW fundamental events value testing, and quite possibly the best match that Goldberg has ever had. It is not a technical masterpiece, nevertheless it is a rattling fantastic skilled wrestling match.
Written by Sam Palmer