5 Minutes with Chris Hamrick

Chris Hamrick vs. Dr. Feelgood MCW 8/5/98

ER: This was so cool, and reminded me a lot of the Vic Grimes/Erin O'Grady WWF tryout match. Now, that match happened at a sold out Raw taping and this match happened in a small building in lovely Smyrna, TN, but the vibe of putting all of your coolest moments into a tight 5 gave it that spiritual tryout match feel. Hamrick's pants were resplendently tasseled, the best kind of gear for a dynamic bumper like he and I liked Dr. Feelgood's terrible gear too. I'm not sure how many official years of medical school or training that Dr. Feelgood went through, but he's got the Caduceus on his tights and the smock shirt of perhaps a phlebotomist-at-most or RN-at-likeliest, and he would have stood out as more of a bumper himself if he weren't opposite one of the all time greats. 

These two packed so much lunacy into this. Hamrick pulled out a springboard plancha and this awesome springboard stomp, hanging Feelgood over the middle rope and springboarding into that stomp, boot smacking him precisely across the face as Hamrick landed in a knee slide like he was doing a Chuck Berry guitar solo. This felt like a dance they had both perfected, and the only one who wasn't clued in on what they were doing was the cameraman. I would have been furious at this guy if I was Hamrick, as the camera kept zooming in on Hamrick and mostly missing all of his craziest moments. The camera pulls in too close on the plancha, misses half of the classic horizontal Fuerza bump to the floor, and then completely misses the somersault bump off the apron to the floor. We catch the aftermath and Hamrick holding his back, but this is an unforgivable cameraman sin. The reality is that Chris Hamrick had such unseen and unexpected bumping and offense that camera people hadn't yet caught up to what he was doing. Dr. Feelgood had some big stuff of his own, like a fucking top rope powerbomb (!), a really cool pop-up atomic drop, a doctor bomb, and a nice tilt a whirl backbreaker. Somehow the blond bombshell powerbomb is not the actual finish, but it comes back for the finish when Feelgood goes for another and Hamrick leaps off the top rope to snare him with a super rana. The leaps of faith that Chris Hamrick takes are almost unparalleled. He had such excellent form on his big moves; a man who knew how to fall in ways that nobody else could.