#147 – WCW Pro Wrestling Chicago, January 12, 1991
This week Dre and Black Cat are joined by Disco Stu from the Awesome 80s Podcast to review a relatively obscure syndicated WCW show from Chicago broadcast on Saturday mornings in the early 90s on superstation WGN. Please support the Old School Wrestling Podcast by visiting oldschoolwrestlingpodcast.com where you can find links to all of our great products. We now offer all of our box sets and bonus episodes from all three seasons on our premium digital download site. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you…..at the matches!
Hey guys,
Love the show.
If I remember correctly, WCW packaged their WCW Pro Wrestling syndicated show in three different ways. You had WCW Pro Chicago and WCW Pro New York as you guys talked about on your show, but there was also just the regular WCW Pro show that aired throughout the rest of the country. All 3 had the same matches, but were packaged with different commentators and intro graphics.
As a kid, I remember watching WCW Pro Chicago on WGN at 10:00 (EST) and then turning to my local NBC affiliate to watch the exact same matches on the regular WCW Pro broadcast a couple of hours later. I had a long attention span and nothing else to do other than drink Mtn Dew go through my baseball cards, so watching someone like JW Storm take on Brad Armstrong twice in three hours didn’t phase me.
Minotaur’s real name was Steve DiSalvo, a.k.a. Billy Jack Strong.
this is what Wikipedia had to say about him:
DiSalvo was trained by Billy Anderson. DiSalvo’s career has taken him to the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada.
Fighting as Steve Strong in the 1980s, he was a main-event performer in Montreal-based International Wrestling, managed by Eddy Creatchman and brawling with the likes of Abdullah the Butcher and Rick Martel.
Moving on to Stampede Wrestling, he was known as “Strangler” Steve DiSalvo and was the top heel in the territory. Here, he feuded with Phil LaFleur over who had the better physique. DiSalvo would end up smashing a trophy over LaFleur’s skull on TV, leading to several matches between the two. In time though, the Stampede fans would rally behind DiSalvo in his battles against the hated Mahkan Singh, and when Don Muraco arrived at Stampede, DiSalvo would help Muraco win the Stampede North American Title from Singh.
DiSalvo moved onto the World Wrestling Council (WWC) promotion in Puerto Rico, where he again was known as “Sadistic” Steve Strong. Again, he had bloody brawls with Abdullah the Butcher, as well as company owner, Carlos Colón. Strong would win the WWC Universal Championship from Colón, only to lose it back to him soon after.
DiSalvo returned to the United States, this time for World Championship Wrestling, where he was named The Minotaur. DiSalvo has also had brief stay with the World Wrestling Federation, and also in the American Wrestling Association, where he wrestled as Billy Jack Strong. He became Steve DiSalvo again and drifted around the independent circuit before retiring. He now sells homes for a living.
Hope this helps.
It took me awhile to find this show on Youtube, but I eventually tracked it down. I’ve hardly ever watched any WCW, so a lot of the wrestlers were new to me, but I still found it quite entertaining.
Here are my thoughts:
A proper 80’s intro, even though it was well into the early 90s.
Larry Zbyszko is a Bobby the Brain wannabee and looks like an extra from Miami Vice.
Tim Burke looks like Hercules’s out of shape brother, not that I would want to tell him that.
The Barry and Arn promo was the best thing on the show and very NWO, before NWO (Was Clerks out about this time?). I was half expecting Stone Cold to turn up and call everyone “trash”
How many mullets? :O
I thought The Minotaur was having a heart attack.
The Renegade Warriors in-match promo cut across the end of their match?!?
Bring back Brickhouse!
Good solid match between The Z-man and Moondog, although Z-man was breathing out of his arse in the post match interview. Beautiful Bobby’s promo was awful! The guy can’t talk for toffee.
I want a copy of The wrestling wrap up with the Robocop cover.
Credit adverts haven’t changed one bit.
I never realised that Barry Horowitz competed in big matches in WCW. I only knew him as the job guy in WWF and when he had the feud with The Body Donnas. Konan looks impressive, but I had trouble getting passed the name. Does it have some significance in Mexico, or is it just a Conan copy?
What is real?
I wonder if Jim Ross just talks all about himself and his sauces, on the phoneline, like he does on his podcast?
Michael Wallstreet (or IRS as I knew him), looked super ripped and much bigger than he did in WWF.
I’m sure I played Total Recall video game. What a blast from the past! Although, it wasn’t as good as the Robocop game.
I’m not itching to try it.
Thanks for the WCW education, guys.
Was Clerks out about this time?
This promo was done 3 1/2 years before Clerks. I’d really like to know who produced and directed that segment because it was brilliant
I think Bobby’s Brainscan covered just about everything I was going to say. Zbyszko is a poor man’s Bobby Heenan. He’s got Heenan’s Chicago accent, but none of his razor sharp wit, humour or timing. It’s painful to listen to him stumble over his words during this broadcast. And he miscounted Michael Wall Street’s 3 count. How the hell does that even happen?
I’m not sure if I was watching WCW by this point in my life as it wasn’t broadcast up here in central Canada until we had gotten TBS with our cable package. Most of my knowledge of WCW and its wrestlers came from PWI and its sister mags I had started buying with money I earned delivering newspapers as a tender 14 year old lad.
Sadly, I do not have my issues of PWI, Inside Wrestling and The Wrestler anymore, but I do remember them shilling hard for WCW as a superior alternative to WWF’s ‘cartoonish’ sports entertainment. I remember the joyful anticipation of finally being able to see WCW for myself and being extremely disappointed by what I saw. WCW’s syndicated programming was a second-rate version of Superstars or Wrestling Challenge. It’s not like WCW didn’t have talent, they just had big problems letting the talent shine on their programming. I wanted to like WCW, and some of it I did like, but overall this was not a good period in their history.
But that Arn and Barry promo? Wow! Like Bobby’s Brainscan said, this was NWO five years before the NWO. Anderson and Windham are so good.
It was great to hear Disco Stu again and the talk of the hard plastic action figures made my eyes light up with the memory of the countless hours of my life (into high school) that was taken away by these nearly unbreakable WCW legends. The memory that sticks with me is the acquisition and torture of my Lex Luger. It was the summer of 1993 and I was attending Vacation Bible School with my best friend who had invited me. Somehow, we snuck into the basement of the church that housed the toys. After searching through the Lincoln Logs and stuffed animals, something caught my eye. It was the greasy haired, blue tight wearing, flexing Narcissist himself. We spent the next minute trying as hard as we could to move any part of his body. This didn’t work and for some heathen reason, I left the basement with Flexy Lexy in my pocket. Fast forward to the following summer and the annual visit to my grandparents trailer in Wyoming. While in one of hallway rooms, I decided to torture Lex using an old school exercise bike. I held his head to the wheel and rubbed off half of his head. This deformed action figure never left my collection and was used as Luger half of the time and any random ill-figured wrestler the half of the time. Great show once again guys and I always look forward to your insight and humor. Adios Brother!!!
Gents,
Before ’93-’95 is put back in the ground and kicked over with dirt, I just want to take a second to chime in one last time.
I’m one of those listeners you identified who first started watching the product around this period of time. As a suburbanite raised by the television, I had, of course, caught glimpses of WCW and the WWF here and there but, for whatever reason, they just hadn’t captured my imagination. That was until one fateful Saturday afternoon in late (I *think* September) 1992, 9-year-old me caught sight of something that would change everything. For some unknown reason, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was engaged in heated combat with a near-naked Native American while a short, garishly-attired man screamed at him through a megaphone.
It was awesome.
While I haven’t seen that footage since it first aired more than 20 years ago, I distinctly remember a particular spot that lead to one of the commentators – I want to say Gorilla – exclaiming, “You should never try to sneak up on an Indian!” (Zbyszko didn’t have a monopoly on outdated terminology) and my thinking, “well, of course you shouldn’t” and everything suddenly clicked. As soon as the episode wrapped, I had resolved that I needed to watch/know everything I possibly could about this weird little world. Luckily, between the local video stores and a collection belonging to a friend’s older brother, I was able to dive in relatively quickly and develop enough of an affinity for the product that I wasn’t too dismayed by the fact that a lot of those guys who had been around just a year or two previously had suddenly sort of disappeared from TV.
While things definitely got a bit rough there for a few years (bottoming out with ’95), there were still some fairly wonderful bright spots that deserve to be revisited. That I would sit through a fifteen minute house show match between Barry Horowitz and Sir Mo at a nearly-empty Fleet Center in Boston, MA and still turn on the show the next week is a goddamn testament to the fact.