Monday Night Raw – March 10, 1997: The Skeleton of Greatness
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Night Raw
Date: March 10, 1997
Location: Centrum Center, Worcester, Massachusetts
Attendance: 4,088
Commentators: Jerry Lawler, Jim Ross
During the opening video, we can hear Finkel telling the fans to make some noise.
Opening sequence.
Rocky Maivia vs. Tony Roy
Heavy Metal/Pentagon/Pierroth vs. Latin Lover/Hector Garza/Octagon
Lover dives off the top onto Pierroth, Metal dives onto both of them, and Octagon dives onto that big pile. None of this is acknowledged by the announcers until Garza does his big corkscrew plancha onto the five other guys. As we look at a double feature, Metal rolls up Lover for the pin.
Wrestlemania ad.
Roy Raymond vs. Ahmed Johnson
New Blackjacks vs. Owen Hart/British Bulldog
Preview of the Slammys, which used to be a separate show and far more memorable, as well as right before Wrestlemania.
Leif Cassidy vs. Miguel Perez
Hour #2 begins.
Billy Gunn vs. Aldo Montoya
Goldust vs. Tim McNeedy
Mankind/Vader vs. Undertaker/Sycho Sid
Mankind comes in and drops an elbow but Sid crawls over and makes the tag a few seconds later. Well that missed tag was pretty worthless. A chokeslam gets two on Mankind as Sid and Vader fight on the floor. Sid hits his partner by mistake and the champ gets chokeslammed, setting up a modified Taker Dive, only to have Sid lay Undertaker out with a powerbomb, giving Vader the pin.
Rating: D. The chinlock just killed this match and it never had the chance to recover. Not that it mattered though as this was much more about angle advancement than the match itself. Undertaker was starting to get ticked off near the end there and angry Taker breaking stuff is all kinds of fun. Also, I had forgotten the Taker Dive had debuted at least six months before Ground Zero.
Sid breaks up a post match Vader Bomb and Undertaker beats up Vader for a bit.
Bret promises to win the title to end the show.
Overall Rating: C+. This is a case where the good is REALLY good but the bad is horrible. It was clear that they had no interest in the midcard at this point other than maybe HHH vs. Goldust, because other than the main event and Austin vs. Hart, almost none of the wrestling stuff was worth a thing. Lawler vs. ECW was more about ECW than anything else, but it was really cool stuff to see back in the day. The core is here though and once they fill in the details, this company is going to blow Nitro out of the water.
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