Saturday Night Digging in the Crates: Lightning Kid vs. Wellington Wilkins Jr.

The purpose of this project is to do a deep dive into the muck of the internet and pull out the hidden gems. Find a match which hasn't really been talked about and shine a light. This match is on one of Goodhelmets yearbooks, but outside of that it is pretty much unknown.




Lightning Kid v. Wellington Wilkins Jr.  PWA 11/90

ER: Man this match was such a blast. Wilkins is a stocky cruiserweight who's built like Backlund and spends 20 minutes ragdolling Waltman around the ring with awesome throws and weird matwork. Not many people in wrestling history have played the role of ragdoll better than early 90s Waltman. Wilkins is a guy who I admittedly have not seen much, but this match has me excited to break out all my M-Pro and see how he roughs up guys much tinier than Kid. Here he takes the full 20 minutes to stretch and smash Kid, starting with all sorts of trippy leg and arm grapevines, like Volk Han crossed with how you thought Dean Malenko actually worked when you were a teenager. Then he goes into all these wild bridging suplexes and powerslams that must mean he has the neck strength of a gorilla. He would just grab Kid by a convenient appendage and toss him, sometimes into a crazy bridged suplex, another time into a nasty over the shoulder backbreaker. Kid is always a good comeback worker, and here he gets to break out a bunch of desperation strikes, and if any of them whiffed he was great about selling a limb that Wilkins had just worked over. Awesome find, this.

PAS: I love a violent torturer as a heel gimmick. Wilkins is nicknamed "The Mystic" and is basically working as Olivier in Marathon Man. He is just ripping and tearing at the joints and muscles of a 14 year old Waltman and it periously close to watching child abuse. Waltman is actually a heel coming into this match but is a such a great sympathetic babyface that he turns himself during the match. The fact that this was a draw bites into it a bit, as the Kid just looks like a badass for surviving this beating but it doesn't build to a crescendo. Still incredibly violent and compelling for a random US indy match in 1990.