Summerslam 1990
Date: August 27, 1990
Location: The Spectrum – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Announcers: Vince McMahon & Roddy Piper
The Setup
The card was built around a double main event featuring Hulk Hogan avenging his stretcher job from months earlier against the undefeated Earthquake. The Ultimate Warrior also defended the WWF Championship against Rick Rude inside a steel cage after a months-long house show program. While the title match went on last, Hogan’s return from the injury angle that gave him time to film Suburban Commando was the biggest draw and the show’s main focus.
The Business
The show did approximately 507,000 pay-per-view buys, almost doubling that year’s Royal Rumble and comfortably beating Survivor Series 1990. It didn’t do a lot worse than Warrior vs. Hogan at Mania VI, either. Attendance at The Spectrum was 19,304, a sellout, resulting in a $338,452 gate.
The Results
Power & Glory beat The Rockers in 6:00 **3/4
IC Title Match: The Texas Tornado def. Mr. Perfect (C) in 5:15 *1/2
Sensational Queen Sherri beat Sapphire via forfeit NR
The Warlord pinned Tito Santana (5:28) **1/4
Tag Team Title Match: The Hart Foundation beat Demolition (C) in a Best 2-out-of-3 Falls match in 14:24 ***1/4
Jake “The Snake” Roberts beat Bad News Brown in 4:44 via DQ. 3/4*
Jim Duggan & Nikolai Volkoff beat The Orient Express in 3:22 *1/4
“Macho King” Randy Savage pinned Dusty Rhodes in 2:15 NR
Hulk Hogan beat Earthquake in 13:16 via countout. ***
WWF Title Steel Cage Match: The Ultimate Warrior (C) def. “Ravishing” Rick Rude in 10:05 **1/2
Notable Happenings
They teased throughout the show that Dusty Rhodes couldn’t find Sapphire, only to reveal that she had sold out to Ted DiBiase and left the arena with the Million Dollar Man. That’s why the Dusty-Savage match was so short, and this led right into a Dusty-DiBiase program. Sapphire did a few vignettes with DiBiase, and Virgil revealed in WWE Magazine that DiBiase repossessed all her gifts, and she quietly left when her contract was up.
Hogan blasted Earthquake with a chair in the back so hard in their match that it immediately started swelling up and bruising.
The Legion of Doom made their first-ever WWF pay-per-view appearance, running down to the ringside during the tag team title match to stop Demolition from cheating, costing them the titles, and setting up the long-awaited LOD vs. Demolition program.
They did an injury angle with Shawn in the opener with Hercules’ chain because Shawn had a real knee injury, and they were thinking about breaking the team up and teaming Marty with Shane Douglas as the New Rockers. Shawn would have gone solo about eighteen months before he actually did. Marty worked 95% of this match as a result, but everything also made Power & Glory look like stars.
Best & Worst & Underrated of the Night
Best: The Hart Foundation vs. Demolition. In two of the first three Summerslams, these two teams had the best match, although this time it was Crush & Smash, as Axe recovered from an allergic reaction to shellfish that nearly killed him.
Worst: Jake vs. Bad News Brown. As if the possums posing as Harlem sewer rats weren’t stupid enough, we also got an awful match with a lame finish to boot. This feud was fucking awful. This run with Bad News might be Jake’s worst feud in his six-year run with the company.
Underrated: Tito Santana. I’m sure I liked his match with Warlord more than most, but he carried Warlord to a perfectly competent big man-little man match underneath on a show that needed some help. Even in 1990, Tito could still go.
Backstage Notes
Brutus Beefcake was finally scheduled to win the IC Title against Perfect at this show, but had a tragic accident on the beach with a parasailer that crushed his face and almost killed him. Tornado had only recently debuted on TV, so they gave him a rocket push, but Kerry was a shell of himself and plagued by personal problems, so he never really reached the level the company hoped for.
This was Rick Rude’s last WWF PPV as a wrestler, as there was a money dispute when the WWF used his name while injured to headline house shows against Warrior, but didn’t pay him as such. He wouldn’t appear on WWF PPV again until 1997 as a part of DX with Shawn and Hunter.
Rating: 5.0/10.0
This show was solid, but also slightly flat. The show-long storyline of Sapphire dropping Dusty for DiBiase was pretty well performed by all involved, but it would also have been better suited to television than to making their fans pay for it. Following the early Summerslam trend, the bad in the ring was kept relatively short, and Earthquake was an underrated Hogan opponent. The Tornado win was a fun surprise, but nothing on the level of Warrior in ‘88, either. This was the weakest of the early Summerslams.
Prior Summerslam Reviews
The Video
Available on Netflix
Back Then Wrestling 