WWF MSG House Show 6/12/93

 Full 6/12/93 Show

Tito Santana vs. Papa Shango

ER: Great reaction for Tito from the large MSG crowd, still a guy who was a great attraction on a card and should have had a chance to be on more through the 90s. He was a less heralded Bret of this year, a guy who could have a cool 10 minute match with any heel on the roster. And this was great, but also because House Show Papa Shango is a thing I always get a kick out of, because you have an evil voodoo priest working like a Memphis house show heel. He bumps into the ropes, misses elbowdrops, waves his arms to try to prevent going over on a sunset flip (and then coming up from the sunset flip with a big lariat). He buries kitchen sink knees into Tito's ribs and works like a Dogcatcher and it rules. Kids really react to Shango and he knows it, love him yelling at kids on the floor. He really needs to scare kids more, really go for the jugular and get close. Fans love the finish, when Tito finally reverses one of those kitchen sinks and flips over the leg to schoolboy him. Fun 10 minutes to start the show.

MD: Tito and Shango are not guys that I think of as being around this deep into 93. Tito would last another month or two and Shango a few more after that. Anyway, it's always a good time to comment on these shows with Eric because he and I are usually not too far off taste-wise. Watching Shango interact with the crowd was the most interesting thing here and while, in general, I'm glad he did it and did it so emotively, it came off as more braggart than voodoo monster. I'm not sure if that was because he was cycling towards the end of the gimmick or what. We didn't get as standard a Tito formula as usual here, no lengthy shine and a quick, slick roll up. My second favorite thing on this one was either Shango's cut-offs which for the most part felt huge, or Tito's neat little drop down elbow smash to the back of the head when Shango put his head down (which isn't something I remember him doing very often but had a very Matador feel to it).


Shawn Michaels vs. Razor Ramon

ER: This starts with Howard Finkel receiving a note that Shawn Michaels refuses to come out unless his music plays first, which is a fun pointless thing for a heel to do on a house show. Our cameraman gets a cool zoom out when Michaels first gets into the ring, strutting and fluffing his hair. It's a cool pull back shot to show the size of the crowd, framed really well. Razor Ramon gets a really loud, wild reaction, and starts the match by throwing his toothpick at Michaels' face, which Michaels of course sells as if he got slapped. And this was a great house show match, a match you could use to argue Michaels as the best on the roster in 1993. He looks like he loves nothing more than getting a heel reaction from the crowd, and making sure Razor gets the biggest reaction possible. Michaels has a huge bump night, really treating a match in the Garden as importantly as his King of the Ring match the next night against Crush. He flies far off punches, gets whipped hard into the turnbuckles multiple times, gets kicked off the top rope and takes a huge free fall bump to the floor, all while working these great cheating spots to transition to his bigger pieces of offense. He works a couple of eye pokes in at smart times, hits a big springboard lariat (which Razor bumps for, stands up, and does a great dangerous no-look backwards stagger out through the ropes). Both throw great punches, Michaels works a choke by flattening out his body over Razor, getting his feet hooked on the ropes multiple times for leverage and drawing heat with it. It all builds to a huge moment of Michaels actually taking the Razor's Edge to a huge crowd roar, but Diesel pulls him out before Razor can win the title. Nothing but action, a ton of effective work in under 10 minutes.

MD: In my head, watching this, it felt like 1993 Michaels was very intent to prove himself, as every Shawn Michaels iteration is. But in 1993, he still thought the way to do that was to make his opponent look amazing instead of making himself (and to a lesser degree, the match) look amazing. In other words, he was out to prove to management that he was a top heel in the company by making the babyfaces look like a million bucks while still having the fans care about him. Some of that was the pre-match shtick, some that he was carrying the belt, some of that he had Diesel with him, some that he escaped at the end. His offense had that manic Randy Savage sort of feel, flying this way and that at someone with stuff that wasn't too out of the norm, just hit from a higher angle and with more oomph. It all works and it makes it a shame that Michaels' goals shifted so much in the years to come.


Bret Hart vs. Bob Backlund

ER: This was so great. Hitman works a 30+ minute match with Backlund the literal night before he works a total of 60 minutes across 3 matches. Just an incredible weekend of work for Hart, and this Backlund match looks great when compared against those King of the Ring matches. I think it is clearly ahead of the Bam Bam match and could see an argument for being better than the Razor match. Either way, it's great, and completely different from any of the three PPV matches. This match is all about Backlund being presented as a serious competitor in 1993 WWF, in the venue this man sold out more than almost every other man. Before this he had mostly been fighting Mike Enos and Damien DeMento on house shows, he obviously wasn't working like a guy in any kind of upper card mix. Backlund had wrestled a couple of times at MSG since his return, but this was Backlund working a Bob Backlund Match in the Garden, and it really split the crowd in entertaining ways. It really felt like his true return to the Garden.

Bret Hart didn't really work as the heel, and he didn't need to. Backlund was treated as a serious threat, and the longer it went you had more and more believers shifting their allegiance from Hart to Backlund. There was really only one tiny minor heel story that was paid off by Hart, with Backlund being tentative to accept Hart's frequent handshake requests after breaks in grappling. Backlund treats each handshake like he suspect's Hart of having a joy buzzer, and the crowd doesn't quite know what to make of it...until they get the sense that Hart really DOES have something planned. There's no real reason for them to think that other than Backlund's unfounded suspicions...but they start to believe Hart is going to pull a fast one, and around the 15 minute mark Hart finally turns a handshake into a quick go behind. It doesn't really get him anywhere, but it confirms suspicions, and even though he doesn't do a single other underhanded thing in the match it gives the crowd every reason to root on a Backlund upset.

The grappling in the match is nice and tight, with Backlund working some tight headscissors spots, engaging slow build knucklelock spots, and some very cool leverage work around a Hart hammerlock. Backlund gets to work his classic main event slow burn minimalist matwork again in the Garden, and seeing the crowd slowly won over by the style as the pace quickens is really exciting. Backlund has a great attempt at the one arm lift, getting way down in a squat and getting Hart up, but Hart rolls him back into the hammerlock. When Backlund does finally get the one arm lift he places Hart on the top, Hart hits a big crossbody, Backlund kicks out and then deadlifts Hart into a back suplex. There's a great spot where Hart has his hammerlock and leverages Backlund into a pin, and Backlund reverses by going into a wild splits that made them look like they were playing Twister, eventually reversing Hart's leverage into his own pin. It looked like something that Timothy Thatcher should steal, and the crowd kept getting more and more into Backlund as he slammed into Hart with shoulderblocks. Once Hart nailed his backbreaker and especially the elbow off the middle rope, the crowd clearly thought that was the finish, and when Backlund kicked out there wasn't a bored fan in attendance. It's a great 30 minute build and the payoffs the match builds to are worth it.

In addition to a great match, we get a burgeoning stepdad/son or mother's boyfriend/son relationship between the guy recording this show and an 11 or 12 year old with a lot of questions. You can really hear the kid bonding with this videographer the longer this match goes as the kid shows genuine interest in taping video matches, the guy teaches him a couple of things, answers his questions about wrestling, and they both get involved in the match that neither of them thought could have gone on this long. The man explains some wrestling stuff to the kid, talks about what a big deal Bob Backlund used to be a decade before, and once the kid finds out this man is into Backlund then Backlund immediately becomes the kid's favorite wrestler. "I like Bret, but I like Bob more" is a thing that probably no other 11 year olds said in 1993, but this kid saw a resurgent Bob Backlund as his in, and it worked! Our videographer has an adult friend who tries to talk about Kobashi and Kawada and All Japan, but the kid knows how to shut that down by asking all the right questions about Backlund.

The man explains to the kid that Backlund used to have long matches all the time when he was champ, and they were great. "I have some of them on tape, they're really good." "I'd like to see those! Can we watch them together?" My heart melted. It's adorable. The match is laid out so well that you can hear both of them get really invested in a potential Backlund upset. The man even starts talking about Backlund working his way back into the main event ("Could you imagine Bob Backlund on Raw as champion? In 1993?") and the kid sincerely gets into Backlund's ring work. "He's really strong!" the kid says, after Backlund does his one arm power lift out of a Bret keylock. And the kid only gets more impressed with Backlund's strength as he sees the deadlift back suplex and the atomic drop with Bret held on his shoulder for 8 seconds. The man even teaches the kid some life lessons and is never dismissive with him, actually spending time explaining some things. The kid says some unintelligible insult and the man says "Yeah you shouldn't say that, you could offend somebody." "But I don't understand what's offensive about it." "I'll explain it more later but for now just don't say that." They even go through a routine that you can tell the kid loves, when the man is explaining that the security guard KNOWS he is recording the show, and he goes through a whole "he knows that I know that he knows that I have a camera" and they both keep adding on qualifiers like it's a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It's always a treat to hear kids bonding with father figures, but bonding over Bob Backlund in 1993 is extra special.

MD: I saw this one years back and knew it was something special, but it's been offline for a while so I'm glad it holds up. It definitely tends to be an underrepresented match. To point, my pals Marty and Pete just did a podcast where they went over their top 25 WWF matches of this era and while both talked about different Bret vs. Backlund matches, neither mentioned this one. There's no other WWF match like it from the 85-95 period, not with the time it gets, with the commitment to matwork, with the slow build. I'm not sure Bret has another match like this on tape. There's the extended Backlund headlock segment, in and out, Bret spending a lot of the match working the arm (and because he's Bret, it's not that he works the arm for a bit and then works another limb, even like Backlund, who later goes to the leg; he just keeps working that arm). It has such a build for Backlund's eventual deadlift out of the (rolling) short arm scissors, and yeah, all the while, you have this kid with his accent going from complaining about the long headlock to getting more and more into Backlund. My favorite bit here might be the handshakes, the first of which Backlund really milks accepting (and why wouldn't he accept a handshake from Bret?) and then the second with Bret getting a go behind from and Backlund outwrestling him before Bret goes to the arm. It didn't come off as heelish so much as aggressive and determined by Bret, which is a tricky line to walk but one that he could manage easily in front of that crowd. There were some boring chants early during the headlocks but they didn't seem to last to the end. It's a hell of a performance, a very unique Bret match that broadens his case in general, and yeah, super impressive he did it the night before KOTR 93.


The Undertaker vs. Giant Gonzalez

ER: God if I could have been a kid seeing Giant Gonzalez at a house show. I would have been one of those kids standing there mouth open, in awe. The freakshow aspect of pro wrestling always appealed to me. Seeing the very large Undertaker being completely dwarfed by Giant Gonzalez would have been incredible to me, and while I don't think there are any actual good matches between the two (I wonder what would even be considered the best Giant Gonzalez WWF match?) but it's a crazy spectacle that I will always love. It's mostly clubbing, and it's mostly clubbing that doesn't look great, but Gonzalez had an incredible wingspan and those arms look COOL when he is swinging them way over his head and dropping tree branches onto Undertaker's back. The fans love when Taker fights back with uppercuts, and there are a couple of very cool Gonzalez cut off spots. Gonzalez hits a double chop block into Undertaker's throat and Taker goes down hard, then does a nicely timed zombie sit up, and we get Gonzalez smashing him with a chair. Harvey Wippleman's involvement only adds to the excitement, and the finish is Taker grabbing the chloroform rag from Wippleman. Gonzalez used the chloroform on Undertaker at WrestleMania, and apparently TWO MONTHS later these guys were just killing each other's brain cells on the nightly. Wippleman is driving town to town with a huge bottle of chloroform, has a garbage bag full of rags, and two men totaling nearly 750 lbs. are trying to vaporize each other's nervous systems. It's incredible.

MD: Yeah, this was actually a pretty effective piece of business and it's a testament to WWF as an entity and the crowd as well that they could go from Bret and Backlund working holds for half an hour to this without even blinking. The visual of Undertaker punching up looked great to the point where I was disappointed we didn't get a good look at the last couple as Gonzalezes' body was in the way. The nervehold was fine because Taker worked it well from underneath and the crowd was into it. They kept it vaguely interesting around it too, with Gonzales moving fairly well with the kick and clothesline over the top and Taker creation motion with the whip into the stairs. The most unsettling thing was the extended angle of the nerve hold making me look more closely at the rear end of Gonzales' gear than I ever had before. Some baffling artistic choices there. The chloroform deal is pretty baffling given the size of these guys. That was the "Dr." Harvey Wippleman, bit, right? Somehow I feel like it would have worked better with Big Bully Busick if they worked a "Guy who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby" gimmick with him.


Bam Bam Bigelow vs. Tatanka

ER: Great match, a real hidden gem. This would have been a memorably hot main event match on Raw, and the MSG crowd reacts loudly for both men. I find that even more impressive because this has been a card STACKED with good matches so far and this crowd is showing no signs of burnout. It's uncommon for crowds to get tired and react with low energy to a good match, and this crowd has already seen the biggest babyface in the company work a 30+ minute match. But Tatanka's crowd reactions in 1993 cannot be denied, and Bigelow makes sure they stay strong by constantly jawing with the crowd, keeping them involved. This whole match I kept thinking "man what a great Bigelow performance" but I enjoyed the match so much I went right back and watched it again. And then the whole time I kept thinking "man what a great Tatanka performance". Turns out it's just a great match and both add to that. Bigelow's offense looked really good, loved a series of headbutts Bigelow is really great at occupying himself selling for Tatanka's tomahawk chops, knows how to hold his head and stagger into place really well to give Tatanka time to surprise him with a crossbody or flatten him with a clothesline. Bigelow bumped big for Tatanka, but not too big. He would absorb several tomahawks and then go down hard for a clothesline, or take the chops and then take a bigger chop to fly backwards over the top to the floor incredibly fast (great way to set up the count out finish).

He made Tatanka look very powerful, but his cutoff spots kept people loudly engaged. There were three really REALLY great ones, all of which shut the Tatanka cheers off immediately, and all were so cool that the fans also reacted in the way that they knew they were seeing something cool. The three moments: 1) Bigelow taking chops and reeling while Tatanka ran into the ropes for a lariat, only to be stopped dead by a perfectly timed BBB dropkick. 2) Bigelow lifting Tatanka off the ground into a fireman's carry, and Tatanka wriggling out of it into a sunset flip that Bigelow sells perfectly off balance for a couple seconds...before just crushing Tatanka by sitting down hard on his chest. Bigelow looked so cool in this moment that I half expected the crowd to treat him like the babyface. 3) is expertly placed right after Tatanka started his war dance, hitting a couple chops and dancing around the perimeter of the ring, and Bigelow puts him down with one of his best timed enziguiris I've seen. He nailed Tatanka so well that not only did he come off like the coolest guy in the room (helps when you look, dress, and are shaped like Bam Bam Bigelow) but the crowd instantly seemed convinced that Tatanka was OUT. Great house show match, the kind of match that would be a memorable TV or PPV or Coliseum Video match had it aired there, and not merely recorded by a true saint.

MD: While it's another one I haven't seen in years, I remember being a fan of their Royal Rumble 1994 match, and this makes me think I was probably correct in that fandom. Everything hit here and the crowd was more than happy to come along for the ride. Eric covered this really well so I'm not sure what I can add on specifics. I mean, I primarily want to just talk about the sit out on the sunset flip and how the fans went completely nuts for it. I'll say that Bigelow stood out a little more to me than Tatanka, but that's primarily because he was in control of the match and probably because he was just a big looming presence. That was Eric's first impression too and I think if you're going to just give this one watch, what you'll note too. It wasn't just his offense which was so impactful, but the way he reacted to things, whether it be selling his head after cutting Tatanka off or the exasperation for Tatanka's comebacks after he thought he had him down in the stretch (like after that picture perfect timed enziguiri). 

There wasn't a moment that Bigelow wasn't completely invested in the match and the happy marriage of that investment and the larger than life presence of this monster of a man facing off against someone who obviously believed in himself and his character as thoroughly as Tatanka did made for a crowd that was just electric. You could nitpick that they maybe shouldn't have laid it out to come out of a chinlock after the Taker/Gonzales match did something similar with the nerve hold, but it worked so that's all that matters. Past the squash and the reaction it got, the other moment I loved was Tatanka's final comeback. I love monsters who resort to eyepokes to keep control (like Hansen was apt to do) because of the inherent dissonance of this huge heel having to cut off the babyface that way. The first time Bigelow did it, it worked, but the second time, later in the match, it led to the hulk up. That attention to detail is something they don't need to stick in their matches, but I can assure you that crowd remembered the first eyepoke with derision and when Tatanka no sold the second, they went absolutely nuts.


The Headshrinkers/Afa vs. Kamala/Smoking Gunns

ER: Another strong match, the exact way a trios with these guys should have been worked. It doesn't waste any time and doesn't go any longer than it needs to (just under 10 minutes) but gets great reactions the whole time (a running theme on this show). Things blow up quick and I loved seeing the Gunns and Kamala run wild on the Headshrinkers, with everyone all occupying the same space at once. Fans were very into babyface Kamala, and it was clear he had that same Hacksaw Duggan charisma. Duggan was the easiest to book man of the last 30+ years of wrestling, a perpetually over babyface regardless of his booking. Kamala could have easily been kept as a babyface getting great house show reactions through 1996 at least, and in matches like this he comes off as an actual major star. The crowd (and especially the kid sitting next to our director) is in love with every single movement of the Ugandan savage, and why shouldn't he be? 

The match settles down into the Headshrinkers taking apart Bart Gunn, and Bart can take a nice beating. He gets thrown to the floor and takes a nasty bump, hanging up in the ropes and hitting the apron on his way down. Later he takes a backdrop bump (getting tossed by both of them) that would make Rick Rude take notice. Afa is really great playing his part, choking Bart in the corner from the apron, and it all builds to a really satisfying babyface hot tag. Billy is a good hot tag, loved his reverse bulldog (basically the way you'd take down a calf at the county fair) and when it comes down to Kamala cleaning house and landing his big splash the crowd is losing their minds. I like the house show finish of Kamala getting the visual pin after the splash (pinned stomach down of course) and then getting schoolboyed after getting distracted by Afa. A Headshrinker winning a match with a schoolboy is a little silly, but when it's jungle savage vs. jungle savage you get out of there any way you can.

MD: I actually wish this was on Mania instead of a HH because while the crowd was great, I really wanted to see more of Kamala reacting on the apron and Afa in general. You could mainly spot Afa from his hair here. The Gunns must have been working the Headshrinkers a lot because some of Bart's exchanges (like the jumped over drop toe hold bit that led to a payoff of one later) were pretty sharp. The highlight here was probably when Kamala and the Gunns ran the heels off early and everyone went nuts for it. Afa was moving pretty well for a guy you rarely saw in this sort of situation by this point. I wonder how much Doink turning and becoming a harmless mid-card babyface act hurt Kamala in the long run. You could see him the next year as part of a Quebecers/Polo trio, for instance, or the year following in a mix scenario against the Bodydonnas and Sunny, and so on.

ER: I LOVED Bart hopping out of a drop toehold, glad Matt remembered to mention it. 


Lex Luger vs. Mr. Perfect

ER: Another real treasure, and I sincerely think it is the best Narcissist Luger match we have. Narcissist Luger is really great, a criminally short 4 month run that was cut abruptly and foolishly short. WWF had so many hot acts in 1993 that there was really no reason other than post-Hogan fear to abruptly turn Luger. In hindsight it seems so easy to just keep Duggan/Savage/Yokozuna going through Summerslam, and have Luger beat Bret in the finals of King of the Ring. Duggan was insanely over in 1993 and deserved a reward main event, and a Summerslam match with Yokozuna would have been memorable. Hart still gets to have three great matches and KOTR, Luger obliterates Hart with a loaded forearm to win the crown, you go as far as you want with Hart's comeback match with Luger (Hart in a face mask is optional but Hart beats Luger at Summerslam), Luger gets to wear a crown a look impressed with himself in mirrors for two months, it all writes itself so easily. Their TV (and house shows from what we have) was filled with a ton of over acts, the hot acts were almost equally babyface/heel, the only way to stop this momentum was by suddenly turning any one of these naturally growing acts.

So here we get Luger in full Narcissist mode just 3 weeks before the bodyslam heard round the world, and it's a great coda. The pre-match is filled with great Luger moments, like him pointing out poses to Howard Finkel in the mirror, or his reactions when Finkel announced that Luger's forearm would have to be covered...unless he wanted to pay a $25,000 fine and face a 6 month suspension. Perfect has his own great pre-match moments, spitting his gum at least 10' across the ring at Luger, then getting into a quick nose to nose with Luger. Luger slaps him, Perfect attacks him with his unthrown hand towel, hitting a towel lariat. Luger is a great heel bumper, maximizes fast back bumps and takes them athletically without letting the bump get too flashy. He gets kicked around the edges of the ring by Perfect and takes versions of Perfect's signature rope flip bump without the flip. He's great at being chased around a ring, great at begging off, and we could have had at least 12-18 months of him as the King Narcissist before turning him.

Perfect bumps big for Luger's control, which sounds like an obvious thing to expect, but I think is made much more unexpected (and more impressive) by Perfect knowing he would be working three physical matches (including an arguable match of his career against Bret) the next night. So Perfect taking a huge bump getting through over the top to the floor or hard whipping bumps into turnbuckles felt like much more of a risk knowing he'd have to do it all night next night. Luger drops nice elbows and keeps simple offense snug, throwing an especially nice clothesline that Perfect bumped legs out. Luger is an all time great at late kickouts, and he consistently gets LOUD reactions for late kickouts, really getting people to bite with perfectly timed shoulder lifts, arm shooting upward. The match benefits from its distraction finish (it was going to be either that, a DQ, or a count out), as Shawn Michaels (with Diesel) is very good at being a distraction. Michaels comes out wearing white overalls and sunglasses and gets up on the apron, a genuine distraction that allows Luger to blaze into frame with a potential 25K elbow. Luger gets the pin and well...what might have been.

 
MD: There are a few little things I'd tweak here or there on almost all of these. I'd have Perfect's music hit as Luger was posing. I'd have Luger use some submission targeting the back instead of the chinlock again as he'd been focusing on it for a bit. I'd have Perfect take a few more bumps when Luger was in control. I'd have Perfect survive a forearm with the pad on, maybe. In general though, you judge the match you do get, and this one was a good match. Perfect still had to get revenge from Mania (as they hadn't been to MSG since then) and he came in hot with Luger kept on the run. Probably the best thing about 93 face Perfect is that he got his AWA offense back, and had three or four ways to hurt Luger's leg before locking in a deathlock. If he had a bit more time he would have been able to get the full foot-pressing-into-knee Gagnelock but Luger knocked him out of the ring first. The crowd was big for all of Perfect's comeback attempts, be it a punch on the floor or working out of the chinlock into a top wristlock attempt later, and when he did finally come back, it was beautiful stuff (the kneelift, the neck whip, an awesome leapfrog/turn around/dropkick spot). Michaels' distraction was built off of Fink announcing that they'd be wrestling in a cage on the next card (which we don't get, by the way: it's the elimination 6 man with Shawn/Diesel/Bam Bam vs. Perfect/Jannetty/Tatanka), but it was all timed really well as an excuse for Luger to hit the forearm. We really were robbed of a long Luger heel run in 93.

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