This match is for Ric Flair’s World Heavyweight Championship at Fall Brawl 1993, although exactly what that championship was called had suddenly become complicated. Flair had beaten Barry Windham for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship at Beach Blast, but WCW split from the NWA shortly before Fall Brawl and kept using the Big Gold Belt, eventually rechristening it the WCW International World Heavyweight Championship. Flair himself had only returned to WCW earlier that year after his WWF run, while Rude had just come out of his long rivalry with Dustin Rhodes over the United States title. Their feud was wonderfully stupid wrestling stuff: Rude went after Flair’s maid Fifi, forced a kiss on her during A Flair for the Gold, attacked Flair, and eventually showed up at Fall Brawl with Fifi’s face plastered across the front of his tights. Flair and Rude were nevertheless two of the most accomplished wrestlers WCW could put together, and they were given more than thirty minutes to work.

I’m genuinely conflicted. The reputations of both men don’t quite add up to what they were doing here, although I could see that they were trying to do something. I wanted to like it because there were some elements here they did beautifully, but they also flubbed some key things.

Take the early minutes that lead to a brief Flair control segment. Rude quickly puts Ric in a headlock to aggravate his ailing neck. It’s a lively performance as both men jockey for control and position, with Rude trying to maintain his dominance and Flair looking to reverse. Flair breaks it up by sending Rude running to the ropes, who immediately counters with a returning shoulder tackle. He then hits the downed Flair with two falling elbows and proceeds to climb up to the top turnbuckle, where he attempts a falling knee, which misses horribly and creates an obvious opening for Flair. Flair, ever the watchful hawk, tries to put Rude in the Figure Four, but Rude manages to reach the ropes for a break. Both sides throw some strikes and Flair gains control and starts working on damaging Rude’s arm.

Now, how Flair works the hold isn’t the problem. I like the work itself. Flair looks so manic and relentless with how he keeps torquing Rude’s arm. It’s actually exhausting to watch him shift stances and positions as he constantly recalibrates the pressure he’s applying. I even appreciate how Rude briefly fights back and, for a moment there, you think he might regain control from Flair. This is all good. I also liked how Rude eventually resorts to an eye rake to free himself from Flair’s armwork. It’s a small bit of good wrestling because Flair has been putting so much effort into controlling that arm, constantly adjusting his position and torquing away whenever Rude tries to do something about it, that you can appreciate why Rude would eventually get fed up with trying to wrestle his way out of trouble and just go after the man’s eyes. Fuck it, that’ll do. And it does! Flair has made the conventional means of escape sufficiently difficult that Rude has to resort to cheating, which is a nice little reinforcement of their characters in this match. The problem is that, for all the work put into it, including some good classic selling from Rude, it never haunts the rest of the match.

The match feels like it was trying to tell two different stories at once. You have Flair doing a throwback NWA-style match by surgically attacking Rude’s arm early on. Rude even does a good job of selling its consequences when he fails to deliver on slamming Flair (nice touch, me likey). But then Flair inexplicably foregoes his tactical high ground by crossbodying Rude out of the ring. Rude had no offensive momentum, you were winning the match on your own terms, why throw yourself out to the side of the ring? I can entertain the possibility that Flair’s anger is getting the better of him here. Rude had been tormenting Fifi throughout their feud, and Flair certainly has enough reason to want to beat the shit out of this guy. There’s a perfectly good story to be told about Flair allowing his temper to compromise his superior wrestling, except I don’t think they’ve done nearly enough to establish that he’s losing his composure. Up until this point, Flair’s been wrestling a remarkably disciplined match and a very effective one at that. So then the story shifts from that throwback sort of technique-based storytelling Flair was doing to the more conventional babyface-heel drama, with Rude doing his heel control segment to build up to Flair’s babyface comeback.

Not only is the narrative shift jarring, but stylistically the wrestlers change up how they work, and the change wasn’t for the better either. Rude’s control segment revolves principally around an awful-looking chinlock on Flair, which is especially irritating because there is every reason in the world for him to be using it. Flair has a bad neck coming into the match, something Rude himself had aggravated during their feud, and he’d already made it clear in the opening minutes that he was perfectly interested in exploiting that weakness. He’s sitting on Flair in the most lackadaisical manner possible, and the way he cups Flair’s chin is so passive and weak that the whole thing would have collapsed had Flair just grabbed Rude’s wrist or…slightly turned his back to topple Rude to the side. There’s hardly any struggle going on, and Flair doesn’t look like somebody whose attempts to escape are being actively frustrated. Compare that with how much effort Flair was putting into maintaining his arm control earlier, and you can see that it’s truly awful! It’s a sinfully egregious resthold.

The rest of the match devolves into this weird whack-a-mole situation where a different idea of the match rears its head but the players never manage to hit it. There are bogged-down technical stretches where Rude has Flair in a bearhug or where Flair homes in on Rude’s hurt leg so that it leads to a more decisive employment of the Figure Four, and then there are these faster action-entertainment sequences where Fifi gets involved in the finish or when both men churn out weightier offense and strikes.

I will give them some credit for the finish, though. Flair finally gets the Figure Four on Rude, Fifi becomes involved and occupies the referee’s attention, and Rude takes the opportunity to blast Flair with brass knuckles. That’s actually a pretty decent way to bring the personal feud into the wrestling, especially considering that Rude has already demonstrated his willingness to cheat when he finds himself in a difficult position. I can buy him taking the easy way out when Flair has him trapped in a submission, and there’s something wonderfully aggravating about watching a man survive all that wrestling through a bit of opportunistic villainy. The frustrating thing is that they could have been doing more of this throughout the match. They clearly understood how to establish a problem and provide a satisfying response to it, as we saw with Flair’s armwork and Rude’s eye rake, but somewhere along the way, all these interesting little developments stop informing what happens next.

In all that conceptual back and forth, a lot of the essential things that would have made this match work get lost in translation: the damage to Rude’s arm, which becomes irrelevant when he starts attacking Flair with axe handles and a DDT; Flair’s neck, which honestly should have been Rude’s fixation for the entire match; as well as the pace of the match, which they could never settle on. The finish does make an effort to bring some of these ideas together, and I appreciate that, but it comes after so much wrestling that seems to have forgotten what the earlier work was supposed to accomplish. The match introduces so many things but fails to bring them together for a more organized structure.

Again, it’s like watching two matches meet in the middle but never merge ideally.

★★★ — 3.00 | Complete Pro Wrestling