In 1997, as the WWF tried in vain to get the upper hand on WCWNitro, Vince McMahon reached out to a plucky little indie promotion with a rabid following and nationwide notoriety. And while the ECW invasion of WWF Raw didn’t turn the tide of the Monday Night War, it certainly got people talking.
After teaming up with a cutting edge promotion on the rise, the WWF’s next logical step was to bring in an obsolete promotion that had dropped off the face of the earth at least six years earlier.
For weeks, Jim Cornette cut shoot-style promos, airing his grievances with both the WCW and the WWF. In the one, you had a bunch of old guys hogging the spotlight. In the other, you had a wrestling show with barely any wrestling.
Satisfying as these diatribes might have been to the smart fans, there wasn’t really much point to them besides stirring up controversy. That all changed in late December, when a fed-up Cornette vowed to bring “tradition” back to the WWF in the new year.
And so Jim Cornette came to the ring with, uh, two guys. Guys in suits! Scott Hall showing up Nitro, this was not.
Cornette spoke at length about the NWA, how it used to be important, and how together they would bring back the kind of tradition that was sorely lacking in today’s WWF.
Naturally, their first order of business was to strip their current champion of the North American title and give it to the winner of a single, unadvertised match.
After saying the nicest things about Barry Windham he could think of…
…Cornette immediately swerved him, clocking him with his tennis racket so a fallen Jarrett could cover him. Match time: three and a half minutes.
Stone Cold then ran in and gave the new champion the Stunner.
Tradition!
Other highlights of the NWA’s debut were Michael Cole explaining to fans that it was an actual promotion, not made up…
…Jim Cornette name-dropping William Muldoon in a lengthy lecture on the organization’s relevance…
…and Dennis Coralluzzo making sure the cameras got a good shot of the belt.
The parade of champions continued the following week, when Cornette trotted out the old Rock-n-Roll Express.
Yes, the Rock-n-Roll could still work, but they looked positively ancient.
Their haircuts alone made them look old in two completely different ways.
Driving home the sheer tradition of it all, Cornette ended the match by disqualification in under 2:30.
Soon (as in, two weeks after getting screwed out of the title by Cornette), Barry Windham turned on his Blackjacks partner to join the NWA.
It seemed the old-school Jim Cornette had finally gotten his way in the Attitude Era, except that everything was clearly booked by Vince Russo.
In February, it was finally time for Bob Newhart and Weird Barbie to defend their titles. And the only man trustworthy enough to officiate was veteran NWA referee Tommy Young.
Now, this invasion might have had its issues, but classic wrestling fans surely appreciated the WWF putting in all these callbacks to the NWA while showing how much it sucked.
Sure enough, Young enforced the traditional NWA rules…
…stopping mid-count to disqualify the Headbangers for throwing Robert Gibson over the top rope. At last, after weeks of Russo-style bullshit finishes, here was a good old-fashioned NWA-style bullshit finish!
The next week, however, with a WWF referee in charge, the Bangers won the titles via multi-layered shenanigans; Jim Cornette hit Thrasher with his racket, causing Thrasher to fall on Ricky Morton and pin him by accident.
(Call me naive, but I think Thrasher would have pinned him anyway)
The rants returned, and now Cornette complained about the WWF audience, or, as I wrote in Art is War #247, “the fickle fans who were all behind him when he promised to bring back tradition…
…then booed when it was exactly the same as all the other matches on WWFRaw but with wrestlers no one cares about.”
Cornette also took shots at WCW for falsely claiming the legacy of the NWA. An NWA invasion of WCW might have actually made for an interesting storyline…
…but the nWo invasion, in my personal opinion, was more lucrative. Fight me on it, I don’t care.
The Headbangers vs. Rock-n-Roll feud carried on in a series of two-minute classics airing on Raw or, when cut for time, the long-forgotten Superstars (because Shotgun couldn’t spare any time, either).
Along the way, Jeff Jarrett ditched his NWA affiliation for something significantly less dated (a country singer gimmick).
The NWA promptly took their North American belt back, and it was never mentioned on TV again (WWF TV, that is. NWA had no TV show).
NWA World Champion Dan Severn filled the void temporarily, bringing an undeniable legitimacy to his woefully dull matches. But he too fell out with James E.
Now without a championship in his whole camp, Cornette brought in the Midnight Express. The New Midnight Express.
Bombastic Bob and Bodacious Bart’s first order of business was to beat up the Rock-n-Roll Express and kick them out of the stable.
Their next order of business was to win the NWA tag titles.
Somehow, their to-do list did not include changing their stupid, stupid nicknames.
The New Midnights did battle on pay-per-view with the Rock-n-Roll Express…
…in a match no one cared to advertise.
Jim Ross, rapidly losing patience with the entire NWA boondoggle, labeled the bout, “a piece of nostalgia”. He was being nice; there were a lot of words besides nostalgia that he could have used.
You might remember the New Midnight Express challenging the New Age Outlaws at King of the Ring ’98.
You therefore might assume that there was an actual feud involved, or that the Midnights had been named the number-one contenders. In fact, the previous week’s Raw featured a tag team Royal Rumble for that very purpose; Bob and Bart were the very first team eliminated.
So irrelevant were the New Midnight Express, they weren’t even mentioned until their ring introduction – not by the commentators and not by the Outlaws themselves during their pre-match promo.
Howard Finkel even got their names wrong, calling them “Bodacious Bob and Bombastic Bart”.
It really isn’t that difficult:
- Bob is bombastic, because they both have the same vowel sound.
- Bart is bodacious, like a cowboy (the kind not welcome high in the Custerdome)
Yet it took Jerry Lawler over a minute to realize the mistake, which Jim Ross promptly ignored; the debate persisted during lulls in the match.
After a looong finishing sequence, the Outlaws put the Midnights away.
With nothing on the horizon, Bob and Bart fought each other in a Brawl-For-All tournament match, the stress of which drove Jim Cornette to quit as their manager (we were told).
And with that, the NWA contingent was no more.
(Barry Windham had left the WWF to little fanfare months earlier, but admit it: you’d already forgotten about him over the course of this induction)
The NWA finally got a smidgen of benefit from this angle when Bob Holly and Bart Gunn actually showed up to an NWA house show and dropped their titles to the Border Patrol, Maxx and Gunn (no relation).
Ultimately, the NWA invasion (actually more of a trespass) flopped because the constant DQ finishes and quickie matches were the exact thing Jim Cornette had railed against. That, and absolutely no one cared about the NWA or any of the wrestlers in it.
New WWF fans didn’t know what the NWA was, older fans might have known what the NWA used to be, and fans who actually liked the NWA would have been watching WCW anyway.
The NWA itself came off as desperate to do anything to get their name on TV. According to Jim Cornette, Coralluzzo had actually granted the WWF the rights to use the NWA name in perpetuity.
The WWF, meanwhile, was increasingly not desperate, as its ratings had surged thanks to the likes of Stone Cold Steve Austin.
The only thing more baffling than the WWF’s decision to start the angle was how long they took to end it.