There’s this old, wonderful baseball field in Williamsport, Penn. Currently known as BB&T Ballpark at Historic Bowman Field, I spent a summer getting to know the place pretty well before a bank, which has since merged with another bank, cut a check to get its name plastered on signage. It was then known as Historic Bowman Field, a ballpark erected in 1926 to give Williamsport’s local New York-Pennsylvania League squad — which has existed for decades — a home.

The tiny city’s first team was known as the Williamsport Grays. Through the weirdness that is Minor League Baseball, where teams hop around in some form or fashion from city to city with different major league affiliates, the club that’s currently planted its roots in Williamsport is the Crosscutters, the short-season single-A squad belonging to the Philadelphia Phillies. Between my sophomore and junior years of college, I found myself desperate for something to do so my resume included more than “he had decent grades, and welp, see ya later.” I lived about 45 minutes away, and the team offered internships in sports, so during the summer months of 2012, I made that drive a few times a week and served as a Gameday Intern.

It was good, unpaid work, an oxymoronic phrase that is eerily familiar, particular for those in my generation. The bleachers needed to be wiped down before every game, the mascot had to be assisted around the stadium, college students and parents who did not know better had to be helped into and out of sumo suits for one of the many in-game promotions, tarps sometimes needed to be put on. The team wasn’t great, the players were a tight-knit bunch, the grounds crew made the diamond look good, and everyone who worked or interned there seemed to enjoy one another.

The Crosscutters are also an important part of the community in Williamsport, a generally baseball-crazed one by nature of being home to the Little League World Series (which, as an aside, rules and you should attend as soon as it is safe). This is why a report by J.J. Cooper of Baseball America on Tuesday stopped me in my tracks: Major League Baseball, in its quest to make The Numbers look a little better, might finally get its wish and have a handful of minor league squads shut down as part of negotiations toward a new Professional Baseball Agreement. The argument, as MLB makes it, is that despite its 17th consecutive year of increased revenue in 2019 — a cool $10.7 billion — MiLB as it currently exists just costs too dang much.

“From the perspective of MLB clubs, our principal goals are upgrading the minor league facilities that we believe have inadequate standards for potential MLB players, improving the working conditions for MiLB players, including their compensation, improving transportation and hotel accommodations, providing better geographic affiliations between major league clubs and their affiliates, as well as better geographic lineups of leagues to reduce player travel,” MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem said back in October.

Cooper indicates that MiLB plans to signal its agreement to the measure soon, meaning…

If both sides agree, it would mean as many as 42 current minor league teams would be lopped off by eliminating short-season and Rookie ball. Two independent league teams, the St. Paul Saints and Sugar Land Skeeters, would be added to affiliated ball. The two sides are working on a potential deal to ensure the majority of those 42 markets would have still have baseball with ties to MLB in a system that has long-term viability.

An important thing to stress here is that Minor League Baseball has called these reports “largely inaccurate,” releasing a statement on its official Twitter account that I only saw because it was retweeted by the Crosscutters.

This is not a particularly reassuring development, however, as this has seemingly been on league commissioner Rob Manfred’s list of things to do in an attempt to have any sort of memorial to his time in charge of the league vandalized for the rest of eternity. A potential idea that has been bandied about is a “Dream League,” which would keep teams in these cities but instead use unaffiliated players. Minor League Baseball previously called this a “shell game,” per the New York Times. The Athletic noted that minor league owners disagree with the feasibility of a structure that has franchises exist on their own “vehemently.”

It also hit home because Williamsport was one of the teams on the chopping block back when an initial list was circulated in November. There are 14 teams in the NYPL, nine of them are on that aforementioned list.

When this list was first circulated, Vermont senator and then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders met with the commissioner and went on a media blitz to put some heat on Manfred — Sanders’ office in Burlington is just down the road from Centennial Field, home to the Vermont Lake Monsters, another team which appears on that aforementioned list of 42 squads.

A Brooklyn native who recalled what it was like to watch his beloved Dodgers pack up their things and head to Los Angeles, Sanders is one of the several members of Congress from both parties who are against minor league contraction. Another member of the Senate, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, previously said “the antitrust exemption for Major League Baseball is at risk if they persist with this misguided, deeply unfortunate plan to cripple minor league baseball for more profits.”

The line from Major League Baseball is that reducing the number of minor league teams is a smart fiscal move, one that helps with Viability and Nimbleness and Flexibility and all the other words that look great on PowerPoints but oftentimes ignore any sort of real-world consequences. But as Sanders mentioned to the Los Angeles Times back in December, Minor League Baseball’s role is important because it is representative of a time when a thing’s value was measured beyond a bottom line.

“Some 30 years ago, I helped bring minor league baseball — it was a double-A team affiliated with the Cincinnati Reds — to Vermont,” Sanders said. “What I saw with my own eyes is what minor league baseball does to a community. It is especially gratifying to see kids go out to the ballgames, families able to afford the relatively low price of tickets, and kids get autographs from the players. There’s just a huge amount of excitement and community spirit.”

Fast forward to Tuesday, when the report dropped that Minor League Baseball, strangled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic that is impacting billions of people worldwide, was finally willing to agree to a reduction in the number of teams. Like all of us, MiLB — which Baseball America reports was ready to engage in “a public relations and political campaign” before everything came to a stop due to the virus — is not afforded the luxury of thinking about the future at the present moment. There is only now, there is only survival, and in its quest to stay afloat in a normally cold, cruel, crushing world that is quite a bit more cold, cruel, and crushing than usual lately, it reportedly plans to relent to what The Numbers indicate is best for Longevity and Feasibility.

This is not an uncommon thing, mind you. There is assuredly a restaurant, mom and pop store, movie theater, or some other institution near and dear to your heart has closed its doors in the last however many years, leaving you devastated as happy memories rushed back. You were probably in whatever soulless, hyper-corporate thing you settled on going to in a feeble attempt to fill that void while experiencing this. Or think of that website you loved so dearly, for whom The Numbers looked bad, so it shut down, and that person who wrote things in a way you particularly loved is looking into a Patreon while simultaneously considering whether it’s worth ditching journalism altogether to join a PR shop.

The Numbers have their place for informing major decisions, of course. Minor League Baseball’s entire appeal, though, is that it is a reminder of a time where sports were sports, not a vehicle through which you consumed ads while a game is going on in the foreground (that foreground, by the way, is sponsored by Burger King). For families that might not have much, the ones who are damned to a life of struggle due to circumstances outside of their control, taking an extra couple of dollars and buying some $10 tickets to a ballgame — everyone gets a hot dog, mom and dad get a beer — is worth exponentially more than what The Numbers might indicate. There is something particularly cruel about a multi-billion dollar organization like Major League Baseball deciding that people who already don’t have much deserve even less.

Minor League Baseball is one of the few remnants of American society that has survived our collective shift from viewing ourselves as members of communities much larger than ourselves to one of radical individualism. It serves an important function in the world of baseball, yes, but it serves a much more important function in the towns and small cities where 37th round draft picks who hit .187 and get to say they spent a year as a short-season single-A baseball player are propped up as stars — hell, as an intern, I wore a jersey with a name tag during most games, and I vividly remember a child shoving a baseball in my face with a sharpie and asking if I would sign it.

The sport is the country’s pastime, something as deeply ingrained in the American spirit as [insert whatever trivial American thing you’d like to make this simile work right here]. In MiLB, people from every single background are afforded the opportunity to experience a professional sport, or a night to remove themselves from whatever problems they’re dealing with. I think of the families that would come to games in Williamsport, or the elderly folks who have been coming to games at Bowman Field for years, because their parents brought them to games, and that’s just what they do. I didn’t always learn the names, but from June to September, those faces became recognizable, and I like to think they recognized me, too. I think of the children who joyously laughed on Sundays when they got to run the bases, or the smiles on faces during Saturday night’s postgame fireworks show, or the way that people would lose their minds when the team’s mascot, Boomer, acknowledged their existence. I think of the night where a bunch of Little League World Series teams from every corner of the world came and had the time of their lives watching one of the lowest levels of pro baseball that exists in the United States, because it was fun, and they are children, so of course they’re going to have the time of their lives.

These moments do not generate gobs of revenue, but their importance cannot be quantified. Minor League Baseball, at its core, is part of the soul of an increasingly soulless country. Taking that away from 42 communities would be a shame.

One year ago today, on Earth Day, Lil Dicky recruited some of today’s biggest stars to lend a hand on his charitable single “Earth.” The track saw verses from the likes of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, and Katy Perry. He even tried to call up Kanye West to be on the track but couldn’t reach him because the rapper had changed his number. Though the track came out a year ago, Dicky aims to continue the song’s philanthropic message by donating a large amount of money to assist in the fight against both climate change and the global pandemic.

Dicky has offered an impressive $800,000 in donations to benefit various organizations. Arriving across six grants, Dicky’s charitable act will benefit Amazon Frontlines, the Carbon Cycle Institute, Global Greengrants Fund, Quick Response Fund For Nature, Shark Conservation Fund, and The Solutions Project. Along with donating to specific charity groups, Dicky is offering over $200,000 to his newly-minted COVID-19 x Climate Response Fund.

In a statement, the rapper explained his reasoning behind the large donation:

“I’m very honored and humbled that we’re able to give this money to these organizations, and super thankful of all of the artists on this song who made this possible. And of course, thank you to every Earthling out there for listening and spreading the word. Unfortunately, the fight to save this planet isn’t even close to over, and we’re going to have to amplify our efforts way more to turn this thing around. Because pretty soon, it’ll be too late. Even though times have never been scarier with the COVID-19 pandemic, it has shown me something: that we can modify our day-to-day behavior to adapt to a crisis when it’s right in front of us. Even if you don’t feel the climate crisis at every moment, it is truthfully right in front of us.”

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Much of the second episode of “The Last Dance,” which aired Sunday on ESPN, centered around the hardship of Scottie Pippen’s upbringing and the ways it impacted his NBA career, including the infamous seven-year contract he signed in 1991. That has led many to revisit Pippen’s impact on those Bulls teams and place in the NBA hierarchy historically.

In an interview with Rachel Nichols on The Jump on Tuesday, Warriors coach and then-Bulls guard Steve Kerr praised Pippen mightily.

Aside from being “the best defensive player in the league by far,” Kerr said Pippen also was vital in the locker room. “Scottie was sort of the counter-balance to (Michael Jordan’s prickly personality),” Kerr said.

Another focus of part two of the series was Pippen’s decision to undergo surgery at the start of training camp rather than over the summer. Pippen made no mistake about the fact that the delay was intentional, as he wanted to enjoy the offseason rather than rehabbing. Kerr, however, insisted there were no hard feelings from the team.

“We felt his frustration with him,” Kerr said. “Nobody resented him for having that surgery later. We all just understood … Let’s give him his space, and he’s going to be there in the second stretch of the season for us.”

Whereas Jordan in the film calls Pippen “selfish” for making the decision, Kerr’s perspective is probably more representative of other teammates. Jordan understandably felt the weight of Pippen’s departure heavily, as the Bulls got off to a rocky start (which we also see in the second episode) and Jordan had to, as always, shoulder a heavy load. Still, the documentary is also built around the acidic atmosphere around the team due to the way Jerry Krause and Jerry Reinsdorf managed it.

Considering the financial circumstances and soured relationships around the Bulls at that time, Pippen’s decision to wait on his surgery is a relatively minor offense. And as Kerr says, Pippen had enough built-up goodwill from teammates and others within the organization that he was given the space to make his own decision rather than kowtowing to Jordan or Krause again.

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In case you couldn’t tell from the inevitable, uniform reactions from Los Angeles’ transplant population on Twitter, a 3.7-magnitude earthquake hit LA in the wee hours of the morning, prompting the aforementioned flurry of “Earthquake!” tweets. However, native Angelenos, who are well-accustomed to having the ground move at random points throughout their lives, didn’t even notice the tremors. One native who slept through the shakes was Snoop Dogg, who posted a hilarious reaction video to Instagram after discovering that not only was there an earthquake, but that his hair apparently felt it before he did.

“They said we just had an earthquake,” he quipped. “They said we just had an earthquake.” However, Snoop’s often carefully-manicured coiffure had come undone, prompting him to wonder, “The f*ck happened to my hair?” This led to the theory that, “We must’ve had an earthquake because my hair didn’t look like this when I went to bed. My hair must’ve got scared and gathered itself up to protect itself from the earthquake.” However, despite all this apparently happening in his sleep, Snoop maintained his insistence that he remained unaffected. “I didn’t feel it… I’m going back to bed,” he declared.

While Snoop was more than willing to joke about the shakeup on Instagram, some of his fellow famous people seemed a bit more… shaken. Cardi B wondered, “Who felt that earthquake?” while Chrissy Teigen combined both reactions into a single tweet: “You’re telling me the earthquake busted in mere minutes after it becoming earth day?? An icon.”

Watch Snoop’s hilarious reaction above.

When Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores whispered “Welcome to the end of the game,” to Ed Harris’ frazzled William, Westworld fans were quick to theorize that season three would bring a surprise ending to the robot series. Guess again.

The HBO original has been officially renewed and will continue its technological war between humans and hosts into a fourth season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Not only that, but the series is apparently far from finished as the showrunners, husband and wife team Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, have plans for a season five and six, which means Westworld is only halfway through its full story.

“From the Western theme park to the technocratic metropolis of the near future, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every twist and turn from the minds of master storytellers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy,” HBO programming president Casey Bloys said in a statement announcing the pickup. “We can’t wait to see where their inspired vision takes us next.”

Considering the series has a history of long gaps between its seasons, it probably won’t come as a surprise that a season four release date has yet to be determined, and production delays from the current pandemic will almost certainly be a factor. In the meantime, it will be surprising to see if Harris reprises his role as the Man in Black after he recently told THR that he wasn’t exactly thrilled with his season three storyline.

First of all, I really enjoyed playing the Man in Black, right? Then all of the sudden, he’s the Man in White. So I wasn’t the happiest camper to tell you the truth, because I really enjoyed the part I was playing, and I was hoping that he, the Man in Black, would continue to somehow be prevalent in the story.

Harris went on to say that the sudden character change was “jarring” and “hard to enjoy” before repeating once again that he wasn’t a fan of William’s arc. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “I still don’t. But that’s my problem.”

(Via THR)

Muffet McGraw is among the most legendary women’s basketball coaches of all-time, having accrued 936 wins in her career, including 842 in her 33 years at Notre Dame. During that time, the Irish went to nine Final Fours and won a pair of national titles, most recently in 2018, and McGraw was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017.

On Wednesday, McGraw and Notre Dame announced that she would be stepping down as head coach of the Irish in a move that stunned the hoops world. McGraw said “the time has come to step down,” and issued thanks to Notre Dame’s leadership, the fans, and players she coached over her tremendous 33-year tenure in South Bend.

Not only was McGraw a tremendously successful coach, but she also used her platform to speak out about issues of gender inequality and the need for more women in leadership positions not just in sports but across politics and business. Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick also issued a statement of appreciation for McGraw and for how much she cared about not just helping the women she coached become better basketball players, but also developing skills beyond the court.

“It is inevitable and appropriate that as we mark Muffet’s retirement from coaching today, much of the focus will be on the remarkable record of competitive success that makes her a Hall of Fame coach,” Jack Swarbrick stated. “But my reflections go more to her as an educator, friend, and role model. Every time I had the privilege of stepping into her classroom, be it at practice or courtside during a game, I was struck by how much she cared about her students and how important it was for her to use basketball as a vehicle to help develop future leaders.

“Winning over 900 games and two national championships make Muffet a legendary coach; nurturing “strong confident women who are not afraid to use their voice and take a stand” makes Muffet a teacher who made a difference in the lives of every student-athlete she taught. While we will not have the benefit of Muffet as our coach going forward, we will make certain that through her ongoing work with Notre Dame Athletics we continue to enjoy all that she has to offer as an educator, friend, and role model.”

McGraw retires ranking sixth among D-1 coaches in wins, fifth in Final Four appearances, fourth in NCAA Tournament wins, and won three National Coach of the Year awards. Former Notre Dame player, assistant coach and, most recently, assistant coach with the Memphis Grizzlies, Niele Ivey will take over as the Irish’s new head coach.

Last year, Netflix released the explosive documentary chronicling the failure of the high-profile Fyre Festival. The festival landed the founder Billy McFarland in jail and Ja Rule in hot water. But the documentary also generated viral success for Andy King, who quickly became a meme after revealing what he almost had to do to save the festival. King now aims to flip the script and bring people together through a virtual festival experience.

King is hosting the livestream music festival Room Service, a three-day live event with an eclectic lineup of musicians. Boasting acts like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Gallant, Mxmtoon, Yungblud, and more, the entire festival benefits charity. Room Service is free to view, but virtual attendees are asked to donate to funds which will benefit the non-profit organizations Feeding America and Sweet Relief to provide support to those in need during the pandemic. The festival goes down from Friday, April 24 to Sunday, April 26, which is almost exactly three years after Fyre was scheduled to take place.

In a statement, King detailed his excitement about the virtual festival: “I’m beyond thrilled to host Room Service this weekend and bring everybody some well-deserved joy and distraction. This festival gives us a chance to translate the anniversary of Fyre into some real good that’s needed in the world right now.”

Watch the Room Service Music Festival trailer above and check out the full lineup below.

The three-day festival kicks off 4/24. RSVP here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

MIAMI – It’s slightly jarring seeing Usain Bolt sitting. The world’s fastest man has a frenetic energy about him, placed somewhere between a coiled snake and Sonic The Hedgehog in a ball. And yet, there’s a calmness to that conservation of energy, as he peers beyond the horizon at any given time. He knows he can escape, he knows he has an exit strategy, he knows at any moment, he can teleport. Even motionless Bolt doesn’t fade; instead, there’s a glow, a rolling boil that brings you in and welcomes you.

There won’t be an Olympics this summer. That date has been pushed into 2021, and those seeking medals and the sort of fame that Bolt captured with his eight Golds over three games will have to wait. Everyone watching to find new heroes has to wait. Everyone’s waiting for something now. Bolt’s astounding run has been given new life on NBC Sports Network as they replay the best of the most recent games, and the fastest man alive seems even faster now, in motion as everything else is frozen.

UPROXX Sports got the chance to speak with Bolt the week of the Super Bowl from the Gatorade Bolt24 lounge, as he contemplated meditation, what’s next, and how sitting still just isn’t in his DNA.

Martin Rickman: I was just reading something this morning about Tyreek Hill potentially trying to do some Olympic qualifying. It had me remembering again that discussion about whether or not you would play wide receiver, way back.

Usain Bolt: For me, I told them especially if [Aaron] Rodgers called me, because I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. If he called me and said listen to me, one year, two years, I’m ready. I’ll do it. I’ll try. I’m a fan. I’m a Green Bay Packers fan so it would be good.

I’ve talked to Michael Phelps about this not too long ago that the hard thing for guys is trying to find that balance between training but also enjoying your life. And for him, he said it’s taken him years to almost de-program himself.

Yeah. I think, for me, I couldn’t survive that. I remember me and my coach when we started, we butted heads on the same thing because he wanted me to be on it, on it, on it. And I was like, coach, I can’t do this. If I don’t get a break from this, I’m going to go crazy.

So we kind of understood each other where he would let me, I would train, but I’ll do my own thing a little bit. And when he needs me to get serious, he was like, listen, we need these few months to be focused. And then I was, alright, cool, and I shut everything down, and I’ll focus on this work. So to be honest with each other, where it gave me my space to live a little bit at a certain time of the year. But I know where he’s coming from. It’s hard cause at some point, this is why at the end of my career, people wanted me to go on to this Olympics. And it’s hard because all my life, all I knew was track and field. I’ve been doing it since I was 10 years old. All I knew. So now I’m retired, I can live, I can do things, I can travel, I can go on vacations finally, and do things that I really want to do, man.

When you’re the fastest man in the world, slowing down isn’t always the easiest thing.

I don’t think I’ve actually slowed down. I think I do more work now, but I do have more time to, I can pick my schedule here. I can say this is when I just want to stay in Jamaica and chill, work with who I need to work with, or go on vacation with my girlfriend. We can chill, but it’s still busy.

That energy doesn’t stop. You don’t destroy energy. You just transfer it.

Transfer it, right.

My parents were down in Montego Bay not too long ago, and they were saying pictures of you are still everywhere. What does that mean to you to basically be carrying that flag with you everywhere you go?

It feels good. When you work as hard as I did to get to where I wanted to be, it’s something that people really appreciate the work that I’ve done, and they show their love. Even now, I go there, people I deal with appreciate what you’re doing. People are trying to get me back into track and field. “You should go back. Keep running.” So it feels good to know that people really appreciate me. It feels good.

Aside from traveling, what are some of the things that you like to put your energy in now? And what have you learned about yourself in this process of starting your next chapter?

I try to focus more on my charity work. I got more time than I had to do a lot more things. I can pick my schedule. It’s much easier. There’s so much going on in the world right now, especially with kids. It’s hard for them. So I try to help kids as much as I possibly can.

Yeah. I know you’ve been known to get on that Peloton bike every once in awhile. Do you have an instructor that you like?

Ally Love. Yeah. That’s the only workout I do really. I’ve tried a few at the start, but I think the reason why I got into it is because she’s kind of Caribbean. Every now and then, she gives me the nice, Caribbean vibe. I like it. I do it all the time.

Yes, it’s funny. So Phelps does it, Cam Newton does it, a few of the other guys I’ve talked to over the years.

It’s good. It’s right in my room. You just get up and get on it. For me, that’s why it’s so good. Because I think when you retire, it’s hard to get back into the gym because all you know all your life is work, work, work, work. So to me, having this in my room works out very well because you get up and you go, I really don’t want to work out today, but you go it’s there. Just give it 30 minutes and so it works out.

It’s taking control because working out can be work. But it’s also life, and it’s been life for you for so long.

Yeah, you got to keep fit. I noticed that I put weight on quickly now that I’m retired. I’m not working out. Nah, I need to work out. It’s strange just putting weight on. Every time I go on the scale, it just keeps going up. I say, no, I can’t do this. So now I’m taking control trying to stay fit so the Peloton works real well.

Recovery is so important when you’re doing what you do, but especially after you’ve been at this level and now you’re bringing it down to a certain place. What types of routines do you get into for recovery?

It’s not as stressful now. It’s just all about hydration. You’ve got to stay hydrated because I’m not competing at high levels. I don’t have to stretch out, I still get massages. At this point, it’s all about exactly the regular people now. You feel like you don’t need to hydrate, but you do. Especially if you live in hot-air climates, because a lot of people get dehydrated, and you don’t even know it. You need to keep drinking through the day. Water helps, but Gatorade helps a lot. For me, electrolytes are very important. No sugar, no artificial flavors. It’s what you need so I always try to get people, especially my friends, they go, you could just drink water. You can drink water all day and you can still be dehydrated. I said, I will explain something. The reason the Gatorade works is because of the electrolytes. You get back your energy, and then you feel good. They’ve learned [to listen to me] over the years.

It doesn’t hurt that it’s got your name on the bottle.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t hurt that I get free Gatorade. And they get the benefit. [Laughs.]

Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: Eric Bischoff got the black parts of his hair shaved off, revealing the grey kiwi underneath. Scott Steiner started stalking Kimberly Page, a camera man fell in love with David Flair’s rippling physique, and Kevin Nash began his season of throwing Rey Mysterio at the ground.

Click here to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network. You can catch up with all the previous episodes of WCW Monday Nitro on the Best and Worst of Nitro tag page. Follow along with the competition here.

Remember, if you want us to keep writing 20-year-old WCW jokes, click the share buttons and spread the column around. If you don’t tell them how much you like these, nobody’s going to read them. It’s almost time for Superb Rawl. It’s Lou Rawls’ greatest hits album. I think I’m reading that right.

And now, the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for January 25, 1999.

Best: A Serious Professional

Before I talk about anything else, yes, this is the episode with the infamous “El Dandy” promo from Bret Hart. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve included it above and expect you to watch it immediately.

He had better and more important promos, but for me, this is quintessential Bret Hart. All you really need to know is that Ric Flair is expecting Hart, the United States Champion and current sufferer of “a groin pull the likes you’ve never seen in your whole life,” to wrestle Booker T on Nitro and defend the championship at SuperBrawl against an opponent to be named later. Hart, in his full “fuck you, pay me” WCW glory, claims that Flair’s still holding a grudge against him from forever ago, and that Booker T is a [extreme Canadian accent] LOSER [end extreme Canadian accent]. He “axes” Booker a question: does Booker know that his VERY LIFE is on the line tonight? “All the little kids at home, they’re gonna watch me tear you up and break you into little pieces.”

“Let me tell you who deserves a shot at the United States Heavyweight Championship; I’m the champion, I oughta know. Ya know, I’ve been sizing up guys since I came to the WCW, and I think the one guy that stands out the most, the guy that I think has earned the title shot, El Dandy … I think you’re a heck of a wrestler, you’re a great technician in the ring and you’re a jam up guy, I don’t see any reason-“

In case you aren’t up to speed, El Dandy is the winner of the Lou Ferrigno Lookalike Contest for 1998 (per Chris Jericho) and arguably the seventh or eighth most important member of the Latino World Order. For a look at how big of a threat he might actually be to Hart’s United States Championship, look at the faces Hart and Gene Okerlund make about it. Now the stage is set for this timeless exchange:

“Wait a minute, El Dandy has been wrestling in the cruiserweight division here, please.”
[deadpan] “He’s a great wrestler.”
“Great wrestler, but goodness sakes, a fifty pound difference.”
“Who are you to doubt El Dandy? Because this guy’s a serious professional.”

Gene is definitely not considering what a JAM UP GUY both Hart and Dandy are. With Dandy doubted, Hart says he’ll give a title shot to “Hypnosis,” which is what he thinks Psicosis’ name is. It is now, forever. Hypnosis is a, “highflyer of the highest magnitude,” and Gene, who is mean, continues to balk at the idea of cruiserweights getting title shots instead of just wrestling each other over and over — Eddie Guerrero had a point — and talks the champ into “playing hurt.”

“Make no mistake about it, on February the 21st, in Oakland, you’re gonna be facing somebody, and that U.S. title will be on the line, Mr. Hart.”
“…. whatever.”

Magnificent. While Hart continued to advocate for the match on Backstage Blast, Hart and Dandy never did have that one-on-one match for the United States Championship. Probably for the best, though. If a Jam Up Guy faces a Jam Up Guy, that jam’s going too far up.

The philosophical crater left by the question remains, however. Who are we to doubt El Dandy?

Best: Surprise! Nitro Is Better Than Raw Again (For The Moment)

Between the raging anticlimax of Starrcade ’98, the writing on the wall of the Fingerpoke of Doom, and the stunning awfulness of Souled Out, it’s easy to get nihilistic about World Championship Wrestling. Bad things are coming. But what they don’t tell you on WWE Network revisionist history shows is that WCW’s spring of ’99 actually gets pretty good, with Spring Stampede ’99 being (for the most part) the high point. At the very least, they’re putting on a good show every now and then and remaining just as reliably inconsistent as Raw.

This week’s Nitro is considerably better than this week’s Raw. Take, for instance, this 15-minute Bret Hart vs. Booker T match they decided to drop into the middle of the show. Booker’s out there making himself a star, showing he can go a full quarter-hour with The Best There Is et al. Bret’s giving him everything he’s got to give, while (1) you know, actually wrestling, which is something WCW never seemed to figure out he could do really well, and (2) showing the audience that he’s not the Bret Hart they know but actually a total coward scumbag who tried to duck Booker in a NON-TITLE MATCH and had to cheat to beat him. He gives him the bell spot from the WrestleMania 13 match with Stone Cold Steve Austin, but with the United States Championship belt in place of the bell (pictured).

You know what Raw programmed against this? A Shane McMahon promo, D’Lo Brown shopping for tampons as part of a fake miscarriage blackmail angle, and Test vs. Val Venis. Just saying. Remember: wrestling has always been very good, and has always been very bad.

When You’re Down To The Last Of Your Quarantine Groceries

The major story coming out of Thunder is that the nWo Wolfpac can’t be arsed to show up — maybe Eric Bischoff will suspend them and then feud with them for six months — so they leave nWo VINCENT in charge. Yes, folks, Manservant Virgil not only joined the Wolfpac, he led the entire New World Order. His platform is based on two important issues:

• changing his name from “Vincent” to “Vince,” in case the previous nomenclature was too subtle for you
• promote TAG TEAM WRESTLING

The nWo’s big four (Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Hollywood Hogan, and Disco Inferno) have been actively ruining matches in the WCW Tag Team Championship tournament and have made clear that they don’t want the tourney happening at all. They just want the title belts to default back to The Outsiders, which is … something that happens fairly often in WCW. I don’t know how championship bureaucracy works. Vince hasn’t been paying attention, so he announces that Brian Adams and Horace Hogan will represent the B-Team in the tournament. He also announced a six-man main event where he’d team up with Stevie Ray and Scott Norton to take on the goddamn Four Horsemen, which results in them getting completely skunked and embarrassed. Now the WCW announce team can scream “VINCE SUCKS, VINCE IS THE WORST,” with impunity!

Anyway, it turns out the important nWo members were spying on the terrible ones via a hidden camera and quietly judging them. Not sure why they needed the hidden camera when they had a TV camera back there airing live footage straight to TBS all night, but maybe Hogan’s limousine doesn’t get cable.

Before Nitro, the nWo B-Team’s two most accomplished members, Stevie Ray and Curt Hennig, get together in secret to plot a coup. I say “two most accomplished” assuming Scott Norton was focused on New Japan and only followed WCW by reading Angelfire blog recaps. Once the show starts and the important characters arrive, Stevie immediately runs to Hogan and narcs on Hennig. The turncoat has become the turncoated! We find out that Stevie Ray threw Mr. Perfect under the bus trying to get a promotion from nWo Garbage to nWo Valuable, but it doesn’t work. Vince is already back to wearing black and white, and Hogan — seen here in a rare nWo Elite shirt that looks like he bought it at an artsy New World Order pop-up — politely and indirectly reminds Stevie that the only black guy allowed in the nWo front office is Dennis Rodman. But thanks for being an informant! Otherwise they never would’ve guessed that Curt Hennig was planning to turn on them.

There’s a silver lining here, though. Now that Hennig’s out of the nWo, he can focus on his true love: hating rap music.

Still stuck doing gopher work until Flair’s 90 days as President are up, Eric Bischoff is forced to work the merch table. At one point he tries to shortchange someone who paid with a 20 by pretending they gave him a 10. I’ve got to say, Bischoff taking a WCW fan’s money and not giving them enough in return is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor. It’s WCW’s equivalent of that time Vince McMahon stood in the middle of the ring on Raw and screamed I DON’T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU PEOPLE WANT at the crowd.

Side note: this stand is selling the Monday Night Jericho t-shirt I seriously looked for at WCW events for like a year and a half and never found. I guess rural Virginia and North Carolina didn’t get the full merch spread. I least I could always buy a shirt with a long haired guy in sunglasses with “SEXY” under him or one that says “BANG” across the chest and get made fun of at school!

Having been thoroughly embarrassed at home and abroad, the nWo decides to put together a Big3 team of all-stars and get revenge on the Horsemen. So instead of Ric Flair, Chris Benoit, and Mongo ‘Steve’ McMichael going 3-on-3 with Virgil, Crush, and Scott Norton, they’re up against Hollywood Hogan, Kevin Nash, and Big Poppa Pump. Ric Flair was secretly the God of six-man tags in the ’90s — see also the time he teamed up with Roddy Piper and Kevin Greene at Slamboree ’97 and had one of the most fun matches of the year — so this is also good while it lasts. Highlights include the retroactive absurdity of Chris Benoit wrestling Hulk Hogan, and Hogan whipping Benoit in the face with his weight belt. Oh, if only we could go back and pivot this into a Benoit vs. Hogan program.

Anyway, seeing as how this is a WCW Monday Nitro main event, you know how this ends. First comes the disqualification. Flair has Hogan in the Figure Four, but before he can bridge into the Figure Eight, Eric Bischoff shows up with some suspicious foam fingers attached to 2x4s from his merch stand. Nash, not content with the knowledge that a 300-pound man’s 7-foot-tall stomp would hurt worse than a brittle board with some foam around it, swats at Ric and draws the DQ. Bischoff (in a hat with a wig attached, Undertaker style) still wants to shave President Nature Boy’s head, but Flair is saved by his friends: the Horsemen, the luchadores he freed from the socially oppressive Latino World Order, and Chavo Guerrero, whose punches are definitely hurting Kevin Nash.

Mike Tenay insists that this is the show of unity for we’ve been waiting for from World Championship Wrestling. It’s not, but it’s nice to say. Aw nuts, fans, we’re out of time! Join us this Sunday for the ROYAL RUMBLE World War 3? SuperBrawl wait no SuperBrawl is still almost a month away … church?

In Other nWo News

By the way, Scott Steiner isn’t allowed to follow the Nitro Girls into the bathroom and harass them anymore, so he simply sits at the announce table and watches them dance, seething with horny rage. These are the social skills you develop when your brother argues with possessed dolls and your best friend won’t stop airbrushing his face onto top hats.

Disco Inferno is a BEAST all of a sudden. He wins a squash match strong with his finisher (well, Steve Austin’s finisher) and the canned crowd noise goes WILD, marking the only time in history that Disco has been better than Al Green.

Early in the show, Bam Bam Bigelow calls out Scott Hall for a ladder match with a low-key brutal promo. It’s basically a Jumpin’ Jeff Farmer promo, except the guy delivering it looks like a fire demon from a biker bar in Hell instead of the Kirkland Signature Flyin’ Brian.

“When I first came on the scene here at WCW I had one objective … one primary mission. And that was to be — defeat Bill Goldberg, and take him out. And I’m not gonna stop until that mission is accomplished, but lately there’s been a lil’ EAR-FERENCE… a little static, a little static lick-lick-lectricity so to speak, and that’s you Scott Hall. Because if you think for one second, one iota, one [brain goes blank] idea that you can zap Bam Bam Bigelow and get away with it, you’re dead wrong.”

He ends it with, “You put up, Scott Hall, and you shut up! Cause I will show you exactly what hardcore and extreme is tonight!” Before the promo’s even over, Nash is in picture-in-picture quoting The Elephant Man in a funny voice.

The match Hall and Bigelow end up having is far superior to the one Hall had with Goldberg at Souled Out, mostly because Bigelow is an actual professional wrestler and not a raw, screaming football nerve, so he can do more than one thing. The Souled Out match ended with Hall using a taser on both Goldberg and Bigelow, so the Nitro version ends with Goldberg using the taser on Bigelow and Hall. The run-in follow-up to a run-in needs to end with a third, unrelated run-in, so Scott Norton shows up and attacks Goldberg from behind. You know where this is going.

BEHOLD! The incredible agility of Bill Goldberg!

Goldberg wins because powerslams don’t hurt him, which we’ll call a reverse WrestleMania 36.

The nWo B-Team tries to jump him after the match, but he easily dispatches them. Still, to help defend him from additional waves of New World Order cronies, the ring fills up with all the celebrities and athletes in attendance. Goldberg’s got a DIRECT-TO-DVD summon, I guess. The Goldberg Gulch Gang is, from left to right:

• Chuck Norris, whom you may know from memes, or from the time he karate kicked Jeff Jarrett to help a necromancer avoid being above-ground buried by a sumo champion
• one-dimensional NHL great Brett Hull, who was more or less the spoiled rich kid from your favorite children’s hockey movie who joins the team and is really good but doesn’t get along with anybody
• 1988 Kumite champion Frank Dux, attempting to maintain some level of anonymity by posing as Belgian action star “Jean-Claude Van Damme”
• then-recent NFL retiree Herschel Walker, seen here proclaiming his allegiance to Roc Nation

The fact that SuperBrawl didn’t feature Goldberg, Chuck Norris, JCVD, Brett Hull, and Herschel Walker in a 10-man tag against Vince, Brian Adams, Scott Norton, Horace Hogan, and Stevie Ray is unforgivable.

Best: The Dungeon Of Dudes

If you’re wondering where that “WCW roster” that ran out to make the save for Ric Flair in the main event came from, they were in the building as security lumberjacks for the Tag Team Championship tournament match between the Faces of Fear and “Finlay and Taylor.” Finlay and Taylor is my third favorite singer-songwriter duo from the 1970s. Order is maintained and the match goes to completion, with the most notable thing being Jimmy Hart’s attempt to rebuild a Netflix Marvel version of the Dungeon of Doom.

Meet Jimmy’s “First Family,” a Continental Wrestling Association throwback that includes Meng, The Barbarian, The Laughing Man HUMOROUS, and eventually both KARATE MAN Jerry Flynn and one of the Nasty Boys getting a singles push. They never retrieve any butt-humping mummies from the north face of Mt. Everest and never any monster truck battles on any arena rooves, but at least their entrance theme is a Scorpions rip-off. In a better world, they kept The Giant from leaving WCW and got the band back together for one more run at Hulkamania.

Oh No, Someone Booked Norman Smiley Against A Man In A Dress

Someone looked at a list of current WCW gimmicks, saw “Perry Saturn wears a dress” and “Norman Smiley pretends to have sex with peoples’ butts” side by side, dropped their coffee mug like in The Usual Suspects, and immediately booked it.

Near the end of the match, Norman realizes that his regularly scheduled fit of phantom humping will be even more dynamic if he’s able to flip up his opponent’s skirt for total pantomimed sexual dominance.

Saturn beats the shit out of Norman for the indignity and attempts a Big Wiggle of his own, which looks less like aggressive buttsex and more like a cat trying to cover a turd with litter.

Meanwhile, disgraced referee Scott Dickinson sits in the crowd in a plain khaki hat like a complete serial killer and loudly complains to anyone who’ll listen about how it’s actually the referees being screwed by WCW, not the wrestlers. I guess he’s never watched the last five minutes of any Nitro ever. Ask not for whom the Big Wiggle wiggles, Scott; it wiggles for thee.

Next Week:

Hardcore icon The Sandman makes his WCW debut and immediately loses, because WCW. Plus, Hollywood Hogan does another segment where he hangs out with the Hell’s Angels to look cool, Eric Bischoff spends the night in a worked parking lot dunk tank, and the legend LASH LEROUX makes his first Nitro appearance. See you next week, when we laissez les bon temps rouler!