One of the most historic matches in the history of World Championship Wrestling for both the right and wrong reasons. Given that it’s WCW, the wrong reasons are catastrophic to say the least. Goldberg’s WCW World Championship match with Diamond Dallas Page was the main event of the 1998 Halloween Havoc pay-per-view, but due to the broadcast running longer than expected, the PPV feed cut off right before the main event was supposed to start, leading to thousands of people receiving refunds for not getting what they originally paid for. However, in what is quite possibly the most WCW scenario ever produce, the people who had their feeds cut missed out on one of the greatest WCW main events of all time.
Goldberg as a wrestler is someone who needed one thing more than anything to succeed; structure. If you shut your eyes and thought of any Goldberg match from his undefeated streak in WCW, it would 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 fond of the idea of being steamrolled in less than a minute, Goldberg’s matches needed to be longer, have more drama, but ultimately suffered because the structure that got him over wasn’t being used. Enter DDP, a man 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 end up getting a breezy 10 minute match that doesn’t attempt to go overboard on the theatrics, it just tells a simple, well paced story. Goldberg is still 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. After all, Bill is still relatively green at this point, making DDP’s plan even more believable, which is hammered home by the commentary team.
Even at just over 10 minutes, the fans are rocking by the end 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, resulting in Page hitting a Diamond Cutter to a thunderous response. The champion kicks out, and upon trying to go for what looked to be a jackhammer of his own, DDP ended up being hoisted into the air and slammed down for Goldberg to get the victory.
Thanks to 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 any other match in WCW history, with over 10% of people with cable watching the bout. What those people watched was one of the rare WCW main events worth checking out, and quite possibly the greatest match that Goldberg has ever had. It’s not a technical masterpiece, but it is a damn fine professional wrestling match.
Written by Sam Palmer
