One of my biggest gripes with a longstanding, incorrect wrestling narrative is the notion that Lex Luger didn’t draw. He did at times, but whenever Lex heated up, booking ran him into the ground where he couldn’t succeed. That’s so fucking odd because both major companies wanted and needed him to be “The Guy” at different points, and both booked him unspeakably at times.

What’s impressive is how well Dusty used him in his first year in the company versus the end of Dusty’s run as booker, because it’s almost like two different people booked them. Putting Lex with the Horsemen in 1987 as a heel gave him a top spot in the company, a chance to learn from heels that were some of the very best in the business at all aspects, and to work programs with their top two babyfaces, Dusty and Nikita.

The Horsemen split in December 1987 was awesome, with Luger refusing to give JJ Dillon a Bunkhouse Stampede win and effectively quitting the group. The Miami crowd went fucking nuts. Dusty couldn’t bear to give Lex a win in the Bunkhouse Stampede PPV cage battle royal the following month, which was undoubtedly fucking stupid, but not a killer. Plus, they put him with Barry Windham, which pretty much wiped the slate clean.

Yes, the original Twin Towers, Lex and Barry, reunited their old Florida tag team. They were young, cool, and over AF. When they won the tag team titles at the first Clash, grown men leapt to their feet like children. So what did Dusty do? Split them up the month after winning the titles and then had them work no real program immediately (other than a few house shows). At least it added another layer to Luger’s beef with the Horsemen since Barry filled his spot, but they should have milked that team for longer. They were so good and so over. The tag match where they lost the titles back to Tully and Arn was even better than their Clash match. Man, they left a lot on the table.

Let’s dive into the numbers in Lex’s first main event singles program against Ric Flair for the NWA title in 1988. The Great American Bash ’88 in Baltimore on July 10th was the infamous match where they did the old Dusty finish with Luger, eventually losing the title on blood stoppage after appearing to win. That show did 190,000 PPV buys according to Wrestlenomics. That ends up being the last PPV for JCP, but WCW didn’t top that number for two years until Sting finally won the world title from Ric Flair at Bash ’90, and that’s nine PPVs down the road. That also means Lex challenging for the title did better business than anything the following year with Flair vs. Steamboat or Flair as a babyface versus Terry Funk. Lex wasn’t Hogan, but JCP wasn’t the WWF, either.

The Dusty finish hurt so many towns over the few years before the Bash, but not here because the fans THIRSTED to believe that Luger would win the title. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they believed THIS was different, and their loyalty was repaid with the mighty and stubborn tone deafness that plagued WCW almost its entire existence.

A historical misconception is that the finish to the Bash match killed Luger, but that’s not true. The first round of Flair v. Luger rematches did great box office for the dying promotion, but fans bought tickets to see Lex win the rematch and the title, and he never did. There were some markets where they came back with that match for a third or fourth time (if you include the PPV) and still had shitty DQ finishes, and the fans gave up by then, but here are the available attendance results from their first matches in cities after the PPV:

We must always discuss numbers in context, not without analysis, so let’s look deeper. The average of 9,717 is already very good, but it is even more impressive when given some background.

The Flair vs. Luger matches in Norfolk and Richmond had the highest reported attendances in those cities all year, at least with the figures available from nine other shows. The Omni attendance is super impressive at 13,700 and was only beaten once in 1988 in that building (Flair vs. Sting, Luger & Ole v. Tully & Arn). However, it did beat their big annual New Year’s Day show with Ole Anderson making his big return to the Omni as a babyface teaming with Luger against the Horsemen. The 08/27 Charlotte number was undoubtedly helped by the show being the first one held at the new Charlotte Coliseum. Still, you can see from the other numbers at different arenas that it can’t be attributed solely to that. They made fans think Lex was going to win the title!

The Derroit figure was also the highest in that market all year, outdrawing a show where the local legend, The Sheik, teamed with Dusty in the main event. Even in Baltimore, where the fuck finish at the PPV occurred, the rematch did a tremendous 11,000 coming out of it. Houston was an awful town for Crockett in 1988. The 3,000 number they did for Luger vs. Flair was only beaten once that year, for the US title tournament built up for weeks on their television. Where they killed Luger was him not winning the title in one of the house show rematches, not the PPV, and it showed when they came back around the loop with second or third matches because the rubes knew Luger wasn’t winning the title, and the ticket buying stopped.

Lex should have won the strap either at the PPV or one of the house shows, and honestly, if they kept him and Barry together as tag team champions and Barry eventually turned on Lex and became a Horsemen because they had to forfeit the tag titles after Lex beat Flair, that could have been your Starrcade main event. Flair had been booked so horribly for the last few years that he could have taken a breather from the title, eventually turned babyface, and feuded with a heel Windham. Still, I guess all of that is moot since Flair was on his way to the WWF in summer 1988 unless Turner made him a good offer. He probably wouldn’t willingly drop out of the main event scene, even briefly. But man, the scenario above gives us more Lex and Barry as a tag team and offers a fresh title program with two young guys you should be building the future around.

The scary thing is that after all the bullshit, and for a program that was ice cold on television by the time Starrcade rolled around, Luger vs. Flair did 150,000 PPV buys for Starrcade ’88, which one PPV beat out of five the following year in 1989. The fans paid for it because they still wanted to see Lex win the title. They didn’t get it at the Bash and trusted the promotion enough to repurchase it at house shows. The promotion still didn’t deliver. Now, this PPV, just like the first time and all the other times, the company didn’t pay it off. Flair cheated to beat Luger in a match where Flair would have lost the title if he were DQ’d. That’s right – They made you think there was no way Flair could win, and they still refused to pay it off. They did not pay it off and exhausted the feud with two PPV matches and multiple matches around the loop. If you’re going to fuck him, I guess just fuck him as hard as humanly possible.

This half-year should have been the death of Lex Luger, but we will cover 1990 in our next installment because eventually, they managed to do it again after he heated up in another main event position. Poor fucking Lex.