Loosely Formed 1998 WWF: Mark Henry's First Great Performance

Mark Henry vs. Owen Hart WWF Raw 3/2

I thought this was a really great Mark Henry performance. The first great Mark Henry performance. A great performance from a man who literally all of us missed on for four years. You can see here how great he was at taking all of Owen's offense AS a superheavyweight (important), selling everything appropriately and to the degree it needed to be sold. 

Henry's bump through the ropes to the floor on a spinning heel kick looked was so well done, and it's the way he leans into Owen's baseball slide dropkick and bumps back flat on the floor. Later he takes a similar bump off a nice Owen missile dropkick, taking it all with his chest and flying straight back. 

Criticizing Owen's ring work is one of my least favorite things, but man Owen had some bad looking offense here. Brother, it's just flat out stupid to do shoulderblocks to the stomach of a man like Mark Henry. Look at how ridiculous Owen looks trying to hold Henry in the corner while jamming his shoulder into his stomach! Why is he doing them? One of my least favorite parts of Owen's in-ring is the way he auto pilots his way through matches, and has these moments where he only knows how to do one thing one specific way, regardless of who his opponent is. He knows how to move a match from A to B to C, but he doesn't change his A to B to C to account for differences in opponent. So while it might make sense for him to throw shoulderblocks in the corner at Jeff Jarrett, it looks absurd against Henry. Henry is the one who should be throwing shoulderblocks, and when he does exactly that later in the match, it only makes Owen's look sillier. When he's kicking away at Henry's leg? Perfect. But come on, it looks ridiculous to put a man that size in the sharpshooter (even if I liked how Owen bumped when he got kicked off his sharpshooter attempts). 

If you compare their selling over the course of the match, it is not a favorable comparison for Owen. Henry builds to his bumps and knows how to sell the size difference, meanwhile Owen is the one taking a strong backbreaker and elbowdrop only to jump up to his feet like nothing at all happened to him when Henry misses his next elbow. Owen is working the match in segments, while Henry is working it as a complete match. When a segment is done, Owen basically claps his hands and moves on to the next section, ignoring everything that just happened. Henry is just out here working a full match. 

I loved the way Henry threw himself into his misses. The leaping elbowdrop miss was the best, but his missed charge into the turnbuckles looked great, better than Owen's. I love the Bret chest first bump as it always looked like it shifted his whole skeleton and usually lead to his opponent taking over for long control. Owen never uses it meaningfully, and seems to just do it because his brother did it. Henry's version actually makes sense within the match. Also, Henry's missed seated splash on Owen's sunset flip attempt (and the subsequent ass cheek sell) was sweet sweet icing. 

BUT maybe the coolest thing Henry did in the match, was the way he RAN toward Owen after whipping him into the corner, before throwing him with a belly to belly. The best wrestlers in wrestling history would have just let Owen recoil and stumble out towards them before hitting their move, but running to meet him right after the recoil and then waiting a beat before throwing him, now that's brilliant. 

I think it's safe to say that this is the first match where Mark Henry looked Actually Good. I don't think this level of performance keeps up through 1998, but this is like finding the good Tamon Honda performances from the 90s that nobody actually talked about in the 90s.