Found Footage Friday: SUDDEN IMPACT~! VS~! DISTURBING BEHAVIOR~! IN A CAGE~! WITH DOUG GILBERT~!

Sudden Impact vs. Disturbing Behavior NWA Main Event 6/23/01

MD: The gameplan was to watch the one set up match and then the cage match, but then I realized this was actually a better set up match since it led to the Doug Gilbert save, so now we're just giving the week up to this stuff. I liked this a lot though, probably even more than the cage match. It was a non-title street fight (Disturbing Behavior were the champs). The heels took almost all of this, with Renesto just tossing his opponent into a wall to begin. He'd play crowd control whenever Lane started to fire back on Daniels, which was often actually; there was a real Jamie Noble style pitbull attitude he had here.

The match opened up when Renesto chucked a chair off the top rope to the floor and took out one of Sudden Impact. From there, they were both consistent and creative (but in a basic and straightforward way) with the violence. Gatlin took a great skidding bump, head first, into a chair lodged in the corner. They also absolutely took his head off with a knee drop off the second rope with his head stuck in the chair. Lane would channel that fire and eventually come back just long enough for them to get a fluke crucifix win. Post match continued the beatdown with Gilbert making the save to set up the cage match. My big takeaway is that I want to seek out more Renesto. Daniels was solid (and had a great elbow drop in this one, for instance), but Renesto came off like a scuzzy star, one of those guys that probably just needed a break to become a cult favorite on the undercard of a national promotion.

Doug Gilbert/Sudden Impact vs. Ricky Murdoch/Disturbing Behavior (cage) NWA Nashville 6/23/01

MD: Thirty minutes of footage, half of which was Doug Gilbert, bloodied and battered, holding court in the center of the cage and goading heels to run into his fist and back body drop. Not a bad thing certainly. The match itself felt like a throwback. There were almost no set spots in here, maybe one or two big crotchings from off the top of the cage onto the top rope. Almost everything was violence and guys getting tossed into the cage. There wasn't even the normal sort of ebb and flow you'd expect out of it where one side holds advantage and the other comes back all at once. At times it felt like multiple singles brawls going on at once, with the advantage mixed. On some level that might have made it seem more real or natural or organic, but I don't think it made it more narratively compelling. I will say that some of was because of Ricky Murdoch's superior size. Compared to everyone else in there, he had a certain WALTER size and shape to him, at least relatively. He was still more than happy to go flying into the cage and bleed. He was mostly paired with Sudden Impact, with Renesto and Daniels more than happy to have their punches blocked and returned again and again by Gilbert. It got a little repetitive after a while but it was something I didn't mind seeing over and over. About midway through they started trying to climb over which is almost never the way you want a cage match to turn, but it led to a great post-match mauling where the heels had Gilbert alone in the cage and were just destroying him. That led to Doug's big homecoming promo and him getting revenge on his terms. This was solid chaos even if you won't necessarily remember much of it later other than what Doug did and maybe Murdoch hefting himself into the cage repeatedly.

Disturbing Behavior (Jeff "The Crippler" Daniels/Tim Renesto) vs. Sudden Impact (Chris Gatlin/Steve Lane) NWA Main Event 2011

MD: Bryan Turner posts a lot. He's a boon to the community. You should go out of your way to support him. He posts tapes as he comes across them though, so sometimes things are out of order or you don't get the build. Moreover, it's hard to get a sense of what to check out and what not to. If a name isn't entirely familiar sometimes it's tough to know when to dive in given limited time. Full disclosure here: I wanted to watch the cage match with Doug Gilbert but I wasn't sure exactly who I was dealing with in Disturbing Behavior and Sudden Impact, so I figured I'd check out this ten minute TV match.

Usually with these, you get a commercial break, maybe it comes in JIP, and they almost never give away clean finishes on TV (and well they shouldn't!). They didn't here as this ended shortly after the hot tag with interference. Everything about these indies at this time was to build to the live card and the TV was just a vehicle to get there. It means that it's often worth watching but not often worth writing about. Disturbing Behavior was Jeff "The Crippler" Daniels and the Modern Day Assassin Tim Renesto, Tom's son. He wrestled as Tim Tall Tree throughout most of the 80s, including a NJPW tour in 1981 (the third guy in an Inoki/Choshu/Fujinami vs. Billy Crusher/Hogan tag). Daniels was enhancement for Memphis and Smoky Mountain in the 90s.

The two of them, together stand out pretty well as a journeyman tag team in 2001 Nashville however. They take most of the footage we have here and are scuzzy and credible, just like you'd want, laying in shots, cutting off the ring, beating up the young guy. Daniels had more size and the sort of stomp-punches/kicks that feel like comfort food, but Renesto stood out more with a wiry explosiveness, looking like a strung out 70s prog rock bassist ready to skid across the ring with a legdrop or toss his bony frame into a guy in the corner with full abandon. I don't have a ton to say about Gatlin and Lane here, though I think Gatlin was the FIP in there and he did a good enough job crawling for the ropes and garnering sympathy throughout. Maybe we'll have more takeaways from the cage match.