All Japan Motherload - The Funks vs. Bruiser Brody/Jimmy Snuka - AJPW 12/2/87

ER: In which two men - both of whom will find themselves on different ends of the murder controversy spectrum - team up against two vacationing brothers who have likely not murdered any humans in their life, but have likely had many experiences putting down assorted dogs and livestock. Four men. Four men who have been around DEATH AND MURDER their whole lives. Four men who start a tag match with 10 minutes of a side headlock on Jimmy Snuka. Four men recorded on a handheld camera by some person in the crowd (this match supposedly aired on TV but this is certainly not the TV recording). Yet overall, this match was good! Brody and Snuka were the two best men in the match. You may not believe that. It intrigued me on paper because I saw "Terry Funk" and "1987" and I thought...I don't recall seeing those two things together. And sure enough, in 1987 he and Dory just worked this one AJ tour and a match in Puerto Rico against the Road Warriors. I don't think Terry worked at all in '88. So them deciding to lock on 10 minutes of headlocks to start this match is not entirely unexpected. Please imagine with me, Terry greeting Baba after landing in Japan, and saying in his Terry Funk voice "Baba I don't know just how much I'm gonna be able to do this run". You know that you just read that in Terry Funk voice and you also know that you love reading things in Terry Funk voice.

So we get those 10 minutes of side headlock, and they aren't entirely boring. Terry is a guy who is usually pretty fun working holds, working anything really. It's never quite as mechanical or mindless as other guys, and there's that added excitement of "any second know he may just do something entirely Terry Funk". Snuka is not bad at being a guy in a headlock. I felt his frustration. Dory is unlike Terry, in that much of the time he cares not about making holds interesting, not just in his work but in his face. I don't believe I've ever seen a person more bored with what they are doing, than when I looked into Dory's eyes during various tag matches. His faces are almost Kikuchi-like in their long term selling, as you really believe that just the act of being a professional wrestler is physically draining his lifeforce. You really believe that he is trapped in this cycle of needing to continue wrestling, while it's also destroying him from the inside. You see people at the DMV enjoying their job more than Dory Funk. But things pick up when Brody sees Snuka's frustration, develops his own frustration, and comes in to boot Terry with one of the harder front kicks you've seen Brody unleash. Snuka takes over and grabs his own headlock, but awesomely punches Terry from the side headlock, Nolan Ryan style. He sat in that thing for 10 minutes, and now he's showing what HE would have done with that same side headlock. He plants Terry with a great piledriver and Funk hilariously won't allow Snuka to turn him over for the pin. Funk straightens his body as if to sell some sort of locked up paralysis, but as Snuka keeps trying to roll him over for a pin Funk keeps his body straight and clearly fights getting rolled over, for a long and awkward amount of time, in a really blatant sorry not sorry kind of way. I would have been pissed if I were Snuka, and I personally am not a man who has ever been driven to murder, so Snuka must have been REAL pissed. Brody was fun, lighting up both Funks with stiff yakuza kicks, and blasting Terry's chest with chops. Even over the poor fancam audio those chops sounded brutal. Brody also takes a wild bump into the crowd that really belies his selfish rep. He and Terry brawl to the floor and Funk takes a piledriver on the exposed mats, then eventually a chair joins the ring and this gets thrown out. The headlocks were shockingly not bad, and after that was gold. 1987 was a weird year.