Since we have been looking back at the career of Ric Flair, it’s important to remember the valleys as well as the peaks. And what the horrible, disgusting people in charge of WCW did to piss all over his legacy, and ensure that he would become a legend in WWE — something unthinkable in 1990 — and remembered partly as a WWF/E icon.

When Ric Flair’s career ends at WrestleMania, for months to come, we will undoubtedly be deluged with thousands of hours of Ric Flair footage from years past to celebrate his great career. Most likely, though, this match will not be among them, one of the events that eventually drove him out of WCW. Ric Flair was actually given one of the shittiest gimmicks of all time in WCW: The Black Scorpion.

Well, sort of.

At the time (1990), Sting had just beaten Ric Flair for the World Title. Since WCW sucked at booking, led by Ole Anderson at that time, they had no one ready to step into that top contender spot vacated by Ric Flair. So they decided to create a completely new masked character out of thin air to challenge Sting — The Black Scorpion.

The Black Scorpion was supposed to be somebody from Sting’s past. He performed low-rent magic tricks on TV, like turning a man into a tiger, supposedly to scare Sting. He was shown in vignettes (through camera tricks) to be about 7 feet tall. They even used the same speech distortion box for the Black Scorpion that they would later use for Le Shockmaster.

I will leave it to JHawk to explain the rest of the story:

There was only one problem. Ole had the Angel of Death in mind to play the part of the Black Scorpion, but he didn’t actually bother to sign the Angel prior to starting the angle. What followed was probably the biggest flop of an angle in wrestling history.

With Sting defending the NWA World Title against The Black Scorpion at a live Clash of the Champions, a series of vignettes had aired where Scorpion promised to unmask if he didn’t win the title. So of course, Sting wins the match, but not only doesn’t the Scorpion unmask, but the Scorpion Sting was wrestling was a fake! In fact, the real Scorpion, easily 3-6 inches taller than the one who just wrestled, was standing on the ramp looking at Sting after the match. Supposedly the Scorpion that wrestled that night was former World Class Champion Al Perez, who hadn’t been seen in a year and hasn’t been seen since.

The angle got progressively worse, with Scorpion conducting “black magic” to get into Sting’s head over the next few months. These bits were mind-numbingly stupid, particularly when they turned the one guy into a “tiger” that looked more like a leopard…and the trick was so mind-numbingly blown that members of the crowd were actually pointing to the plant to tell Sting where he disappeared to.

With no real blow off plan in place, they finally blew the angle off at Starrcade 1990, revealing the Scorpion to be Ric Flair playing mind games all along. Which might have worked had they not made it obvious by pulling Flair out of his scheduled tag team title match with Doom that had been scheduled to blow off that long-running feud.

Of course it is never explained why Ric Flair is 1 1/2 feet shorter than the Black Scorpion, or how Ric Flair can be “someone from Sting’s past” when they had just wrestled like the day before. But then again this was WCW in the 1990s, which made current WWE look like Upstairs, Downstairs in terms of coherent writing.

Funny enough, there is still some entertainment value in this match. The ending where 1,190 different Black Scorpions run into the ring and beat the shit out of Sting is pretty surreal, even by today’s standards.

Bonus feature 1: commentary by good old JR, and Paul Heyman in his Paul E. Dangerously days, pre-ECW (and pre-pre-shitty ECW).

Bonus feature 2: cameraman sitting on top of the cage and his sneakered feet dangling into the ring during the action. I guess hiring a magician to perform stupid magic tricks badly on WCW Saturday Night tapped out the budget, and they couldn’t stick a camera on a rafter somewhere.

Bonus feature 3: special referee Dick The Bruiser, dressed like he just woke up, got a surprise phone call to come and referee a match, and showed up without changing. Also, not being familiar with popular referee pin-counting conventions despite being an ex-wrestler.