A Bad Bash

25 years ago today, WCW put on a rather bad version of The Great American Bash in Baltimore

It’s rare when you attend a professional wrestling show that you realize just how bad the show is while you are sitting there in the stands. The 1998 Great American Bash on June 14, 1998 at The Baltimore Arena was one of those shows.

The Bash, of course, was a legacy event dating all the way back to the Jim Crockett Promotions era of WCW Wrestling. But long gone were the Buckhouse Stampedes, War Games, or lengthy Ric Flair title defenses.

Instead, we got a preview of what WCW would look like on their way down into the gutter.

The show actually started with two pretty good matches. Booker T and Chris Benoit had the final match in their best-of-seven series to determine the #1 contender for the World Television Championship. These two would have a fantastic match, which of course was expected: they had been working against each other extensively that spring, and had already traded the TV title back-and-forth for four-straight days in early May.¹ This show was the TWENTIETH Time they had w…