RIP IRON SHEIK~! The BEST 80s WWF Tag You've NEVER Seen~!

Iron Sheik/Nikolai Volkoff vs. Sgt. Slaughter/Junkyard Dog WWF 10/13/84

MD: If you haven't seen this one, I'm going to implore that you do. It's an all time Slaughter performance and an absolutely fearless performance from Sheik. The last big WWE show I ever went to was the 2015 Royal Rumble in Philadelphia and that Philly crowd has absolutely nothing on this one. Sheik had to endure not just the less than melodic stylings of Volkoff but had to stand there as stoicly as possible as every manner of object came flying at him from the stands. And that was just during the pre-match. He started the actual match by spitting at Slaughter, before getting bounced around the ring for the next few minutes. He recoiled a little at the trash flying at him, yeah, but Sheik wrestled so big and over the top that he sold the rapid fire loogies like they were bullets.

And then, when they took over? Slaughter bled huge. He didn't have to, the fans were already over the top. Any normal person at that point would read the room and bring things down with a chinlock maybe, take it up and down, build to some hope spots, cut them off, let the hot tag happen. This was JYD's first ever match in Philly, maybe cool it down and make it out of the building alive, right? Not Iron Sheik. He started right in on the wound with those jagged shots meant for the very last row to see, and then started gnawing on Slaughter's forehead. Along the way they kept things moving, kept the pressure on, and he even hit his picture-perfect gutwrench suplex. 

When the comeback - the deeply earned, hugely dramatic comeback - finally happened and Slaughter made a hot tag that blew the roof off of the place, they found a way to start in on Dog as well! The fans were denied, the heat was intensified, it was great. The story shifted to Slaughter slowly peeling himself up off the floor, to the apron, and finally into the ring to toss everyone about, Dick Woehrle included, drawing the double DQ. Slaughter stands tall even though Sheik escaped the Cobra Clutch, and set the stage for them to do it all over again the following month. What an absolute spectacle, as larger than life as pro wrestling can possibly be.

ER: I had not seen this tag match, so Matt implored me to do so, and I am also going to implore you to do the same. This is a fantastic long form WWF tag match with a big long celebratory babyface run building to an impeccably sold heat segment that builds to a double DQ finish that is fiery in a way that made it feel like a classic Mid-South tag. This match had a ton of heat the whole way through. The Spectrum was on fire for all of Sheik and Volkoff's bullshit, and they sustained it curtain to curtain. On it's own, it doesn't seem like an impressive feat that Sgt. Slaughter and Iron Sheik were able to draw heat in Philadelphia, but it seems like a downright incredible feat when you put yourself into the shows of a typical Spectrum attendee. When these people were getting Puerto Rico loud for two foreigners singing a national anthem that they didn't recognize, it feels impossible that they would have any kind of energy to even go to the bathroom. At this point in their Saturday evening they had already endured 10 minutes Rene Goulet and David Sammartino matches, Steve Lombardi vs. Ron Shaw, and still had Tony Garea and Sal Bellomo matches to come. Sitting through all of those guys consecutively would be tantamount to having methyl propyl ether pumped into the arena, and yet these fans get UP for this entire match and it's beautiful. 

Iron Sheik is one of our great Weird Body wrestlers. 1984 Sheik was gassed up and shaped like no other human being, with that big round belly that was somehow distended while also having no fat; his arms looked small from one angle and then he would turn 5 degrees and have absolute guns. His head was perfectly shaped, and we can only presume extreme jingoism as the reason that he never got the same kind of universally eponymous signature mustache that Rollie Fingers enjoyed. Sheik moves like a man who has always had trouble moving. Sometimes when he bumps, none of his limbs move. It's so weird. He is at times the world's most muscular turtle and I love how his curled boots look up in the air as Sarge and Dog beat his ass around the ring for 10 minutes. WWF tags from this era had a habit of veering straight into Heel in Peril stretches that often played awkwardly, but Slaughter and JYD are so charismatic and Sheik and Volkoff so cartoonish that it never veers into Heel in Peril territory despite Slaughter and Dog never being in a single second of trouble. The pace was constantly rolling and the action always moving forward, which is an important factor in never settling into any side's Peril. 

Everything turns suddenly with Slaughter's huge running stomach first bump into the top rope, the first time anything had gone wrong in any way for him; his big bellyflop into the turnbuckle, whipped from one buckle to the other is even better, and Sarge uses the distraction of the big impact stomach into buckle to blade himself from his head "going into the ringpost". Sheik had been an inelastic stooge for the entire match, and when Slaughter is bleeding he gets suddenly vicious and goes after Slaughter's growing cut, throwing him up into the post again, kneeling and punching into the cuts with each great punch making the noise in the building swell. Slaughter takes a backdrop bump as high as the highest Rick Rude backdrop, with Sheik shoving through with his entire body to get him that extra height. Their timing is impeccable, and we get one of wrestling's great hot tag near misses when Slaughter fights back to hit a big vertical suplex on Sheik, but misses the tag to JYD by a literal inch, with every person hitting the exact right mark at the exact right time so that the spot looks sincere. Nobody needed to alligator arm the tag, all limbs were tagging, Sheik made the perfect cut-off. 

Dick Graham, with the best call of the match: "Oh man, this is gory! This is a mess!"

When Slaughter did make his eventual hot tag Sheik returned that really high backdrop bump when he gets thrown to the sky by Junkyard Dog, and our great twist of Dog not just running through the foreigners and instead getting worked over while Sheik keeps punching Slaughter off the apron. Slaughter had an incredibly sold big dramatic apron acting performance during all of this, falling all over the ropes and dragging himself up to his feet each time. There was an excellent camera shot of Dog seeing how bad off Slaughter was on the apron, face showing that he knew that tagging out was not an option to be considered and he was fighting this one alone. When Slaughter finally dragged himself up off the floor and laid waste to everyone, it was the climax that the Spectrum 100% wanted. Sheik got launched over the top to the floor, just an awesome bump for an asshole to take, run across the ring and thrown exultantly over the top like they were the final two in the Royal Rumble. Dick Woehrle, age 54, may have taken the biggest bumps of the match, getting shoved off and thrown across the ring three different times, selling them with the pain and goddamnit facial expressions of a 54 year old man who had no idea he was going to be thrown violently across the ring midway through a Spectrum show.