Thanksgiving night, 1986. I didn’t get to watch Starrcade live, but that didn’t stop the buzz from reaching me like static through a radio dial. Every wrestling magazine, every promo on TV, every kid on the school bus was talking about it…Night of the Skywalkers. The Road Warriors were going to fight The Midnight Express on a scaffold twenty feet in the air on Thanksgiving night at Starrcade. Just saying it out loud gave me goosebumps. It wasn’t just a match, it was a dare, a stunt, a showdown that felt like it belonged in a comic book or a Saturday matinee. Even without seeing it in real time, the anticipation was electric. You could feel it in your bones, like a thunderstorm rolling in.
The big draw, the match everyone was talking about, was the scaffold match between The Road Warriors and The Midnight Express. Now, to a kid who thought climbing the monkey bars was high-risk behavior, the idea of two teams fighting on a narrow platform suspended high above the ring was both terrifying and thrilling. The promos leading up to it were intense. Jim Cornette, always running his mouth, promised his boys would send Hawk and Animal crashing down to the mat. The Road Warriors, all muscle and menace, growled back with promises of pain.
As soon as the VHS tape became available, my cousin Tim and I rented it and watched it at his house. When the match finally came on, it felt like the whole house held its breath. That scaffold looked impossibly high. The Midnight Express climbed up first, cautiously, like kids sneaking onto a garage roof. Then the Road Warriors stormed up after them, and all hell broke loose. Punches flew, bodies teetered, and every time someone slipped or staggered, I gasped. It wasn’t just a match, it was a daredevil act. And when Cornette took that famous fall, crashing down into Big Bubba’s arms and still managing to blow out both knees, it was the kind of moment that made you jump off the couch and yell.
While that match was the main attraction and selling point of Starrcade ’86, it wasn’t just about the scaffold. The whole card was stacked like a deck of firecrackers. Ric Flair defended the NWA World Title against Nikita Koloff in a match that felt like a clash of titans. Dusty Rhodes battled Tully Blanchard for the TV Title, and you could feel the heat from their feud crackling through the screen. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express took on The Andersons inside a steel cage, and it was as brutal and emotional as any match I’d ever seen. Ronnie Garvin and Big Bubba Rogers beat the crap out of each other in a Louisville Street Fight. And Wahoo McDaniel and Rick Rude had a strap match that felt like a backyard whipping contest gone nuclear.
Every match had a story. Every feud had been simmering all summer long, building through Saturday night shows and every other avenue in which they could get the word out. Starrcade was the payoff. It was the fireworks show at the end of a long, sweaty carnival ride. And for a kid like me, it was magic.
I didn’t know it then, but Starrcade ’86 was part of a golden age. Jim Crockett Promotions was firing on all cylinders, and the wrestlers felt larger than life. That night, wrestling wasn’t just entertainment, it was mythology. Heroes and villains, blood and glory, all wrapped up in a two-city broadcast that made Greensboro and Atlanta feel like the center of the universe.
Years later, I’d watch scaffold matches and cage matches with a more critical eye. But nothing ever quite matched the raw excitement of that first one. Starrcade ’86 was dangerous, dramatic, and just a little bit crazy. And for one eight-year-old boy, it was one of the greatest things I had ever seen to that point.
These days, when Thanksgiving rolls around each year, I rewind the clock to 1986 and fire up a bootleg DVD copy I have of Starrcade ’86 and watch it with a lot of the same excitement I had back then. I still sit on the edge of my seat, and for just a little while, I’m eight years old again and the biggest care in my world is hoping that the DVD player doesn’t break down.
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