WWF 305 Live: Yokozuna! Kamala! Viscera! Prince Albert!

Kamala vs. Yokozuna WWF Raw 5/17/93 - EPIC

ER: This is the kind of match these projects are made for. Literal slapping meat and several staredown moments that made this come off like two walruses fighting over mating privileges. Two monsters eyeballing each other with confusion, square, and charge into each other. Then, after crashing together, both get back even farther to run in again with a bigger lead! Nearly this whole match is them on their feet, Kamala throwing hard overhand chops and Yokozuna fighting back with uppercuts and cross chops. Kamala runs the ropes a lot which looks cool with his size, and he has that way of running the ropes where he looks like he's about to lose his balance, like a toddler getting their legs and running for several steps before plopping gracelessly to the ground. Kamala flies into Yokozuna and I love the force he used to rain down chops. Yokozuna knocks Kamala to a knee, Kamala blocks an overhand chop and delivers one of his own to stagger Yokozuna, and it all plays BIG. Fans in 1993 were so damn into just the concept of a large man FALLING and you could hear that excitement in the crowd. This was already a very exciting night of Raw. There was still the upcoming Jannetty/Michaels match that was set up earlier in the show, and they got to see The Kid upset Razor Ramon, so the crowd is in a good mood. They've already seen a good simple angle and a majorly unexpected win, and now they're seeing two huge giants sprint belly first into each other and then ALMOST fall down. Who among us wouldn't be losing our shit? And they lose it, alright, enough to start a loud USA chant. Why they started a USA chant? Couldn't tell you, but they were united in it because of this match. Fuji grabs Kamala's leg to distract him and allow Yoko to hit two crushing hip attack avalanches in the corner. I wanted this to go even longer, but the visual of the Ugandan savage taking the banzai drop was great.


Viscera vs. Prince Albert WWF Sunday Night Heat 2/6/00 - FUN

ER: Quick match, not quite 3 minutes, but enough to highlight a great aggressive Albert performance. He really kept after Viscera the entire time, even though that meant plenty of things ended terribly for him. The collar and elbows were awesome, as Albert went in for one the second the bell rang and you got a real sense of these two using a lot of weight to push each other around. It's really cool when you can clearly see the power and not just guys casually getting into position. And Albert spends the whole match bringing everything right to Viscera, so the hits are cool and the misses are even better, as that means Albert gets crushed. An aggressive collar and elbow leads to Viscera putting him in the corner and backing into him, charging at Viscera leads to Albert getting dropped by a killer sitout spinebuster (think half rydeen bomb, half spinebuster), another charge leads to Albert eating a big Samoan drop, and Viscera stops *another* charge dead in its tracks by hitting another spinebuster variation (this one more half spinebuster, half belly to belly). Albert's aggression really fueled this, and I was bummed when Big Boss Man's interference on Viscera is what lead directly to Albert hitting his pump kick finisher. With not even a 3 minute runtime I was getting into the idea of where they were going to go with the finish, whether Albert would finally figure out how to not get crushed, or how many more times Viscera could have crushed him before winning. The interference robbed me of that joy, but these two gifted me with plenty of smooshing in the allotted time.


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