New Footage Friday: FINLAY!! MUTOH! 2 COLD!! RAMBO! BORGA!!

CWA Euro Catch Festival 12/16/95

2 Cold Scorpio vs. Danny Collins

PAS: This was a pretty basic mid 90s juniors match. There were a couple of nifty flourishes by both guys,  Collins had a nifty jumping rana and I always love Scorpio's standing flip leg drop. Still I thought most of this was relatively dull, I think I would still like high end 90s juniors matches, but the average ones are really not my speed. Always happy to get more Scorp footage, but this was mostly skippable.

MD: I'm a little bit higher on this than Phil, but just a bit. Collins got good effort marks at least, and had a lot of stuff, even if his ambition was sometimes bigger than his prowess. Scorpio was a natural in front of this crowd, coming out to his Slam Jam theme, dancing to Can't Touch This between rounds, etc. He was great at mixing his fighting from underneath with his selling, garnering both sympathy and admiration, but there's nothing new there. It's always nice to see it in a different setting. There were some stuff that felt off, both in Collins' execution, but also an arm drag or two that felt like they came way too late in the match. It was fine.


Ice Train vs. Big Titan

PAS: This was pretty fun, I am surprised that Ice Train never really went anywhere. He is big, agile and hit hard. I feel like he just got caught up in the churn of WCW, with too many guys under contract. Feels like the WWF might have been able to do something with him. I would have liked to see this run back a couple of years later with Big Titan as fake Diesel.  I especially liked Train's big second rope shoulder block, and Titan had a nice stiff clothesline.

MD: On a show with a number of big guys, Titan worked kind of small here, getting off his feet a lot on offense. I've heard him complain he was frustrated having to work like Diesel in the WWF because it neutered a lot of what he liked to do. I don't think it'd always have worked, but it did make for a nice contrast with Ice Train here. Train was still very green but charismatic with a couple of big memorable spots and a good act. I think he would have really done well ten years later, towards the end of the territories where he could go into a place for a few weeks as a special attraction tag team partner and move on before the act got stale.

ER: This was fine, but served more as proof that WCW really figured out how to present Ice Train. Ice Train matches in WCW were always 4-6 minute power sprints, so you got a big powerslam, big chops, big shoulderblocks, and then got the hell out of there. Here you see what happens with 10 minutes, and it's mostly Big Titan holding cravates and chinlocks. But this was fine! Because we also got a couple of great big man vertical suplexes, a couple of Train's big flying shoulder tackles, a beast of a standing lariat from Train, big missed splash from Titan, and Titan *did* have a nice cravat. I love the cravat variation of just pressing both palms against one side of a guy's head, rather than one hand twisting the chin. Here Titan just mashed palms into the left side of Ice Train's head, really introducing Train's right ear to his shoulder. Ice Train is a real heavy lander, one of the heaviest, and it rules. Other guys are bigger, but Ice Train lands with such weight that it really makes simple things like a standing splash or legdrop look colossal. And I also just realized that while Big E has the best standing splash of modern wrestlers, Ice Train probably had the best of his era. Big E is really working a spiritual Ice Train successor gimmick and that somehow makes me like both of them more.

Kama vs. Viktor Kruger

PAS: I thought this was a fine CWA heavyweight match. I am surprised that I liked Kama more than Kruger in this match. Kruger seemed a bit off, and Kama had a nice taped up right hand, and wins with a great looking huge spinebuster. I think I am more into C- heavyweight matches, then C- juniors matches like Scorp vs. Collins.

MD: Pre-match Kama came off like more of a star than he ever had in his career with any of his characters. He rode in on the back of a motorcycle to Thunderstruck and looked jacked (gassed?) to the gills. He juts seemed larger than life. The first minute or so worked out too, with him bumping around a bit. I think the reality of his bulk caught up to him after that, however. Kruger was disappointing. For a guy who clapped so much on the way to the ring, he really didn't seem to have any idea how to engage the crowd when working out of holds, and this match needed that badly.

ER: This was a pretty dull match with a very fun first 1 and final 3 minutes. Putting the best stuff in the first and final minutes at least makes it feel like a better waste of time, and saving big moments for the end is a smart structure for guys without a ton of big moments in them. I always forget how big Kruger is, as Kama is a huge man and Kruger matched him for size, basically Mike Awesome without any actual highspots. Kama routinely has heavyweight "pulling" matches, which are a time filler kind of heavyweight match that revolves around each guy just kind of pulling the other guy into things. Every transition is some variation of "okay I'm in the corner, now I'm going to pull you into the corner and now I am out of the corner, throwing slow punches at you, and then you kinda pull me into the corner and do the same" and you end up with a couple of giants just hitting soft shots and tugging each other around the ring for 10 minutes. But I loved Kama bumping for Kruger's shoulderblocks to start, and the big stuff down the stretch plays great: Kama's big Vader bomb into knees, Kruger's fantastic full steam lariat that sends Kama over the top to the floor, and Kama's high rotation spinebuster finish.

August Smisl/Tony St. Clair vs. Cannonball Grizzly/John Hawk

MD: The more I see Grizzly in these matches, the more I like him. He's a superheavyweight heel with a couple of good power spots that engages the crowd and that can go chickenshit and work vulnerable. That's one of my sweet spots if it works as a contrast to other things going on and here it absolutely did. This hit a lot of marks. Grizzly and Hawk controlled the ring well enough with plenty of cheating. St. Clair was fiery on the outside to screw his partner by distracting the ref. For the only tag match on the show, it was lacking a hot tag in the stretch. The first face win was off of a lightning power move reversal. The second one was off of a lightning cross body. There was a hot tag in the middle but so distanced from either of the finishes that it made the whole thing feel anti-climactic. None of the wrestling was bad. It just needed to be organized differently.

Fit Finlay vs. Franz Schuhmann

MD: This was excellent. Finlay was top notch here and Schuhmann was more than game in keeping up with him. Finlay was do-no-wrong beloved here which gave this a face-vs-face star-vs-star feel despite Fit absolutely acting like Fit, wrestling a merciless style and increasingly taking what advantages he could. He had a sort of shrugging charm that won the day. This went seven rounds with round three standing out especially as Finlay just moved from one piece of brutal business to the next, each one with purpose, always keeping the crowd engaged and active. It started with a powerbomb and ended with the reversal of one, telling a mini story within a few minutes. Schuhmann was able to get his revenge in the fourth (though it wasn't quite linear), with Finlay mounting an ambush at the start of the fifth and the two of them going back and forth until the end. The finish, with Fit stopping Schuhmann's momentum by catching him off the ropes and hitting the tombstone he was only able to attempt (and was reversed on) back in the fourth, was made all the better by Finlay waving his arms in elation right before he hit it.

PAS: I loved this too, mid 90s Finlay is pretty close to wrestling perfection and Schuhmann is a great dance partner. Schuhmann has really great looking suplexes, really popping his hips and dumping Finlay on the back of his neck. Finlay was a big bumper at this point too, he just flies over the top rope, and takes all of Schuhmann's moves in painful ways, Schuhmann applies maybe the greatest drop toe hold I have ever seen with Finlay looking like he tore his MCL going down. Of course he is an all time great offensive wrestler too, and we get some of the great Finlay signature spots, knees right to the nose, hard unforgiving bodyslams and an absolutely brutal hard tombstone finish. Rounds match can always be a bit choppy, but the actual wrestling in this match was tremendous.

ER: I honestly don't think there is another wrestler better at execution, illusion of violence, or selling than Fit Finlay. I think Lawler is his best competition, but 90s Finlay especially looks like my exact vision of perfect pro wrestling. This is one of his greatest performances (think of the ground that covers), and it's even better because this also happens to be the greatest performance I've ever seen from Franz Schuhmann. Finlay has this special ability of elevating nearly every opponent to his game, not necesarily working a match around an opponent's strengths, but actually getting his opponents to work up to him. If they don't they'll get left behind by way of cruel beating; if they're game, he rewards them by making their offense look better than ever before. In this match alone Finlay rewards a great dropkick by flying impossibly fast over the top to the floor, takes a bridged German suplex so perfectly that it should be motion captured, and takes a drop toehold and manages to make it look like Jaws was biting through his leg. This match could have been a total flop, and this drop toehold would have made it infinitely memorable. Schuhmann grabbed such a perfect grapevine of that leg, and Finlay sold it in a few nasty stages: Screaming out in anguish as it's applied, buckling a knee while fighting to stay standing, going down hard and grabbing for his leg when he realized his struggle could have injured him further. What a moment. His offense was as great as expected, one of the few men who can make a nerve hold genuinely look like the best way possible to bring a man to his knees in pain, grabbing Schuhmann's trapezius and forcing him to the mat, yanking his head back by the maxilla, and dropping a 12 to 6 elbow right across Schuhmann's nose. It's a classic Finlay sequence, and yet he never makes it look like he's going through any kind of motions. The tombstone Finlay finishes this classic with is one of the greatest I've seen, Finlay joyously catching Schuhmann and dropping hard to his knees, Schuhmann held cruelly at a bent neck angle before being left to flop dead to the mat. This was magic.

Keiji Mutoh vs. Jim Neidhart

MD: I'm not even sure how I'd classify this, maybe as an "overperforming, lost, late Neidhart performance." I really liked his presence here, coming out to Alice Cooper, chumming around with Kauroff, having Mutoh pull his beard, clubbering him on a table on the outside. It got a little hold heavy in the middle (though I was happy to see the Anvilizer, his Summer 1993 WCW finishing Cobra Clutch). This was ultimately more of a Neidhart match than a Mutoh match, though he got some of his stuff in at the end, but I'm not sure it would have worked any other way. Honestly, I think we all would have been better off with Collins/Neidhart vs. Scorpio/Mutoh.

Rambo vs. Ludwig Borga 

MD: Midway through this match (at the point where Rambo outright missed a jumping back elbow), I had the conscious thought "Well, at least Eric is probably going to go out of his way to watch the Finlay match too." This wasn't good. Rambo was more giving than I've seen him in this footage, but it didn't really matter. This had the same sort of dynamic as Finlay vs. Schumann, just with more of a heavyweight "clash of the titans" feel, but couldn't at all follow it. Too much of the crowd was behind Borga and while he laid in the cheapshots and eased into the heel role in the match, he just didn't go far enough with it for what they were trying to do. He neither lost nor excited the portion of the crowd that had been cheering him, so Rambo could only get so much support. It built into a few good nearfalls towards the end but then just sort of ended in a way no one in the crowd would even remember the next day. It probably could have used more violence on the outside as well. It just needed more sharply drawn lines, really just more volume on everything that it tried to do.

ER: I was actually really into this, and perhaps all the HBK tribute acts of all shapes and sizes have just made me more excited for slower paced 90s house show heavyweight style. I thought Borga was great here, really played a brick wall bully who still bumped for bigger Rambo spots. If you looked at the overall match you could think that Borga dominated this one, but there were key moments at the ends of rounds that showed Rambo may have been a victim of bad timing. Borga was much slower getting up at the end of the 2nd and 3rd rounds, the first after attempting to throw Rambo with a suplex while trapped in a headlock, and the second after eating a nice vertical suplex back into the ring. After two straight round breaks of Borga being slow to his feet, it's no surprise that he ends the next two rounds with cheap shots and warnings. You get the sense that Rambo could have beaten him had his timing and placement been a little more fortunate. But Borga's performance elevated this for me, as he works slow bruiser really well, making his strikes really resonate and allowing time for them to be sold. Big Borga hooks to the kidneys or breadbox look devastating, so I love that he doesn't make them useless with overuse, instead landing one big shot at a time, one big punch to the gut, one big downward strike elbow right to Rambo's chest, one big clubbing shot across the shoulder blades, really getting across the power of his strikes.

I liked the way Borga laid out big misses that sometimes later lead to big hits, like a big missed avalanche that gave Rambo an early opening, that we later got to see cashed in when Borga actually hits this big avalanche (getting enough height to also get tangled in the ropes, which made it look like the impact of the avalanche was really drove home); or, when he got brought back in the ring with that vertical suplex, and later walked Rambo over to the same location to give Rambo his own suplex, dropping him hard across the top rope with a front suplex. I even loved how Borga handled Rambo's awkward missed back elbow, as instead of selling it (which I imagine a missed leaping back elbow would almost always lead to both guys lying on the mat figuring out how to recover), Borga immediately drops down and grabs a nice grounded side headlock. Borga also showed tons of weakness on the floor, crashing into a table that gets shoved into the crowd, then eating an awesome ringpost shot (he and Lesnar really show that 100% of the guys who look like them, also take really great post shots), always going down for Rambo's biggest shots. The finish could have been better, as I kept expecting a Rambo final comeback, but instead they just had Rambo die a slow death. But even down the stretch I was into the attention to details from Borga, like his super low swinging missed clothesline, or the specific way he choked Rambo over the bottom rope, or how he just stepped right on Rambo's face as Rambo was trying to get back in the ring. That kind of stuff will always elevate a match for me, and Borga had plenty of that.

PAS: I am sort of in the middle on this match, don't dislike it at much as Matt, but think Eric is pretty severely overrating it. Borga is a guy who is always fun to watch and I will always be down for him bulldozing someone in the corner and unloading those beautiful hooks to the body. I am someone who always loved throwing body shots back in my boxing days, and Borga is really one of the only professional wrestlers ever to make a body shot look great. Rambo was real bad in this though, the best Borga matches have been him going to war with a fellow big hitters like Hashimoto or Vader, Rambo just had nothing on his stuff, and it was tough to watch Borga try to credibly sell for bad looking corner punches or lame bulldogs. He tried his best, but this was a one man show, and as much as I enjoy Borga he isn't pulling off both sides of a match.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE FIT FINLAY

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE LUDVIG BORGA