New Footage Friday: HOTSTUFF HERNANDEZ! RAGING FERNANDEZ! FUNK! WAHOO! ROCK N ROLLS! BADD CO!

Hotstuff Hernandez vs Terry Funk EWF 1/26/02

MD: I love the contrast here. Funk comes in trying to survive. Hernandez is bigger, stronger, younger. Funk's a man in his late 50s. The weapons are the equalizer. He comes right out of the gate by throwing a chair as Hernandez, young and brash, is preening. Then he follows up with one nasty shot after the next with chairs and tables, linking in his mastery of wrestling violence with a neckbreaker, and a pile driver and DDT on the chair. Hernandez has to get a foot on the rope, even so early into the match, after the pile driver, though he does manage to kick out of the DDT. Ultimately, Funk, really having no choice, leans too hard into it. The table he's used as a weapon, a lot like his own body, starts to break down and as it falls apart, he takes some collateral damage from a shot with it and Hernandez is able to come back. He doesn't go straight to weapon shots. He doesn't need to. Instead it's a clothesline and a toss into the corner. When he does go for a time, that gives Funk a chance to recover and toss another chair, taking back over. He's fighting against time, however, against youth and regeneration.

Funk throws everything he has at Hernandez, his own body, fists and head, but it takes a toll on him too. Hernandez is able to recover (and really all he has to do is throw himself at Funk to take back over), but his cockiness costs him once more as he misses a dive onto a table, something he absolutely did not need to do but very much wanted to. Funk comes back with a chair but leans into it too hard once more and eats a recoil shot. This time, however, instead of allowing to slow him down, he calls upon the very last thing he has left, the acceptance of his own mortality. Instead of pulling back, hesitating, recovering, he dives the rest of the way in, launching chairshots that bound off of Hernandez' head and onto his own, again and again and again, until both men collapse. Maybe it's the superior physical prowess and reflexes of youth or maybe it's the sad reality of an old man who'd used up all his luck decades before, but Hernandez falls upon Funk and takes the wholly Pyrrhic victory. Funk clears the ring after the match and basks in the crowd's respect for the effort they just witnessed and the memory of every effort that had come before.

ER: I'm not going to attempt to match the old horse poetry of Matt, but I loved this. If you were told there was a great Funk/Hernandez match out there, you would probably assume it was Funk/Gino, not Funk/Hotstuff. Funk is pushing 60 here and decides to take at least a dozen shots directly to the head, and this builds into one of the best matches of the last phase of Funk's career. This match was within the final 60 matches of his career (which I guess we can't officially call finished until the man is actually in the ground) and I think it ranks among the best of those 60. This was so much more of a big Funk performance than anyone could have reasonably expected in 2002, coming out throwing hard plastic chairs into the ring and starting the match proper with a chairshot exchange. Funk got his hands up on a couple of shots, but takes far more right on top of his head. Funk's offense looked strong, strong enough to believably put down a larger and younger man. His neckbreaker was tremendous, one of the more violent things in a match filled with chairshots and broken tables. He hits a nice piledriver and drops Hernandez with a DDT on a chair, and I loved that the placement of all of Funk's biggest pieces of offense were at the very beginning of the match, making it more believable that Hernandez was still fresh enough to kick out.

We get a great broken table spot in the corner off a Hernandez avalanche, Funk takes more shots to the head, and eventually Funk looks to only be standing by holding onto the ropes. Hernandez is just wailing on him with heavy chops, and I kept waiting for Funk to collapse in the ring. We get a huge moment of Hernandez missing a superfly splash through a table (with a perfect narrow escape from Funk, and the turning point where Funk just decides he's going to outcrazy Hernandez to psyche out the youngster is late career Funk brilliance. He misses a big chairshot that bounces off the top rope and recoils into his face, and it's one of the better versions of that spot out there. It's a spot that looks stupid at least 75% of the time, but with Funk it almost comes off as baked in. We're so used to seeing Funk hit by shrapnel and friendly fire that of course he's going to hit himself in the head occasionally. The finish is excellent, a bit of deranged theater that few could pull off, but naturally Funk is one of those few. He starts bashing Hernandez in the head with a chair, and then starts taking shots for himself, one for you, one to myself, over and over until it all catches up with him in an instant. Hernandez falls onto Funk like he's a vending machine that robbed Funk's quarters, pinning him under his dead weight. I loved this match.

PAS: Every Funk match we get is a total mitzvah. I don't think he has ever had a match that wasn't at a minimum worth watching. It's crazy the amount of punishment he was taking at this age, he certainly could have gone in there and played the hits, and everyone would have been happy. Instead he is taking multiple chair shots to the head, and getting speared into the ropes. The finish was a total joy, Funk chairshotting Hernandez and himself until they were both splayed out.  What a performer Funk was, and major props to Hernandez for putting him over so well.


Wahoo McDaniel vs. Manny Fernandez AWA 6/25/88

MD: This was pretty much what you expected it to be. Manny wasn't even 34 here (though he almost was) but he felt more like Wahoo who was 16 years older than him than Hennig who was just four younger. It felt like two old guys beating the crap out of each other. There was one fan who was heckling early on which got a rise out of Manny, and the match would have been more interesting if he had kept going. Also this is the only HH I've ever seen where the camera operator spent the first two minutes of the match trying to find someone else to film it. Premise was that Wahoo would get an advantage, Manny would go over the top/more vicious to get over on him and repeat, until Wahoo was fed up with it, scored a mule kick low blow, and they ended up outside for the countout. Nothing revelatory but one's going to complain about watching two great strikers beat on each other for 8 minutes. 

PAS: I loved this match up. One of my favorite things in wrestling is two fry cooks tossing spuds. Wahoo at one point just backhands Manny right in the face. This doesn't really go anywhere, but it is stiff as all get out, and Manny especially is a guy we don't have a ton of footage of and just watching him throw those backhand shots is nifty.

ER: This ruled, because it was Wahoo McDaniel vs. Manny Fernandez. I wanted to meaty dudes to welt each other up, and that's literally all the did. Some guy near the camera operator keeps trying to make fun of Manny's forehead. "Nice forehead! How's your forehead!?" As if Manny Fernandez has no idea that his gouged forehead looks like a topographical match of the Appalachians. Honestly I knew this match was getting high marks for me the moment Wahoo ran at Manny and threw one of his chops right across Manny's face. Wahoo knocks Manny straight onto his ass with a running backhand!! This is a high school gym crowd, and they got to witness a bigger backhand slap than I've seen in any Jack Hill movie. Manny drops to his butt and begs off, and this is a 5 star match. Wahoo is great and breaking Manny with knucklelocks, and Manny is great at being the guy brought to his knees by a knucklelock. And by the time this broke down into these two chopping each other as hard as humanly possible, I was in heaven. These are some of the hardest choppers in wrestling, and neither was holding back. They were throwing these chops HIGH too, aiming them no lower than the collarbones. We're talking the most painful sounding chops thrown right at the collarbones, neck, throat, and face. The guy stops recording while they're still kicking each other's ass on the floor, but this was a hearty meal of chops. Everyone needs these 10 minutes in their life.


Rock N Roll Express vs. Badd Company AWA 6/25/88

MD: Following the Wahoo vs Manny match is about half of a Lawler vs Hennig match. It's a shame we don't get more of it because Lawler had a lot of tools to work with there. The crowd's pretty goofy (more on that later) but it's intimate and full of some loudmouths. Hennig was super athletic and would bump like crazy for him. He had Madusa to play off of, etc. Just when it was starting to get good (missed fistdrop leading to Hennig limbwork) it cuts out. The tag match was good, if straightforward (short heat, single heat, quickly over after hot tag). Really, they were playing off the crowd and the homophobic loudmouths within it. That meant a lot of big bumping heel miscommunication spots early, a sense of Company really taking it out on Gibson when they took over, and Ricky never really taking things seriously which is why he launched a few low blows in the comeback just for the hell of it and to pop that one loud section of the crowd. That ultimately drew a DQ and a Dusty finish (I think that's what happened at least). It was, in a lot of ways, an expert performance of giving the crowd the sort of match they wanted, right down to Morton believably costing his team the match, and while that's important in examining all of these wrestlers across their career, what we end up with is me not wanting to go to 1988 Jersey City anytime soon (the whole thing was in front of a big banner stating pride in being JC students) and a match that probably wouldn't quite make the AWA set.

PAS: This is similar to Manny match, a pair of great teams kind of working their way through a formula match for a shitty crowd. Manny and Wahoo are going to stiff each other, and Pat Tanaka and Ricky Morton are going to pinball, and that is enough for me. I get the sense these teams have some stuff to have a really great match against each other, and I imagine it happened somewhere. This wasn't it, but it had enough professional shtick that I enjoyed it.

ER: Loud pre-match gay slurs aside (easily solved by a lowering of the volume for the match), this was a killer Pat Tanaka bumpathon. Badd Company don't really get much, as this is mostly the Rock n Rolls pinballing Tanaka around, but I'm cool with that. There are plenty of fun moments with teams this good, like Tanaka ducking away when he gets too close to Gibson on the apron only to turn around into a great Ricky clothesline (with big flipping Tanaka bump), just one instance of Tanaka treating this match like it wasn't at a Jersey City high school. I liked Badd Company's cheating, always love over the ropes chokes, and I loved Paul Diamond's ankle pick to prevent a tag. After the match Tanaka takes two of his bigger bumps, a nice backdrop (of course Tanaka had to get a backdrop bump in), and gets awesomely faceplanted on the ringside announce table. He and Ricky walked right onto the table, and Tanaka gets shoved down hard into it, belly flopping into that empty pool.