The
Dusty Finish is a particular type of
screwjob in
professional
wrestling.
Most screwjobs, you see, will just have a wrestler run to the ring and
injure one of the participants to allow his friend to get the pin.
Sometimes, it's just one of the wrestlers in the match cheating to cause
a disqualification or other lame ending.
Dusty Rhodes, in his various runs as booker of the NWA and WCW,
elevated the screwjob to a perverse art form known as the Dusty Finish.
You see, Dusty believed that everyone should go home happy from an event.
So, particularly in title matches, the babyfaces nearly always won.
Since it would be suicidal in the long run for the faces to win all the
matches, an official would then run out and reverse the finish based on
some obscure technicality--maybe one wrestler cheated behind the referee's
back, maybe part of the ring broke, maybe the bogus Maryland State Athletic
Commission noticed that one of the wrestlers was bleeding. Yes,
that was an actual match ending (Great American Bash '88). Fast
forward to the next house show or taping, and the babyfaces would win the
titles again--only to be screwed over again by another Dusty Finish.
This may have temporarily made the fans pop, but after a while it absolutely
killed crowd heat for the good guys--the fans began to expect the babyface
to win but then get screwed out of the title. Dusty nearly ran the
NWA into the ground by doing this as booker for all of 1988 before he
was thankfully turfed out.
So, the moral of the story is never to let Dusty Rhodes book, and
I mean EVER.