Found Footage Friday: WOLFIE~! JAMIE~! WOLFIE~! JAMIE~! WOLFIE~! JAMIE~!

Wolfie D vs. Jamie Dundee 8/14/92

MD: Here we have a pretty green Wolfie and a Dundee who had gotten his start a couple of years earlier. They're two very young wrestlers given a ton of rope. I look at this relative to, let's say the Waltman vs. Lynn matches that were happening during a similar time, and I see two young guys that were trying to express their vision of wrestling and use all that rope that they were given.

The vision is different though. Waltman and Lynn were watching tapes. Wolfie and Dundee were channeling what they grew up with. They were pushing it to a certain limit. Wolfie was bumping big. They went up to the top. They had some fast exchanges. But he was also hiding the chain and stooging into the post. Dundee was selling big and had honed a pretty good punch that he channeled with proper babyface fire. It was rough around the edges, but the general shape of it was sound and the direction it was headed had a lot of substance and value to it. As time went on (even as this series of matches went on), they'd start to layer in their own particular interests and affectations, but at this early point, they were mimicking what they knew and were only starting to make it their own. It was a worthwhile effort overall, however.

ER: Look at these sweet baby boys! Jamie Dundee looks like early Billy Kidman, if Kidman had a rattail instead of a 12 year old boy's haircut. Rookie year Wolfie D scrambles and stumbles to the floor selling a punch like prime doofus Buddy Rose, looks incredible getting run face first into every top turnbuckle (with no kind of padding on any of them) and getting his lights put out by a Dundee right. His backdrop is the height of an instant Memphis legend. When Dundee throws a stomp, he throws it straight down across Wolfie's mouth and of course Wolfie D takes an fantastic ring posting, and goes over the top to the floor with even more gusto. Dundee has a baseball slide dropkick that lands and his punches get better the longer the match goes. Several young men smoke cigarettes all around ringside. This is really great. Rough around the edges, like Matt said, but with that same energy as teenage Briscoes matches, where they feel like kids copying moves they'd seen, but knowing exactly what and why they should be copying those things. 

Wolfie D vs. Jamie Dundee (Chain Match) 8/21/92

MD: They came back with a chain match and the pre-match promo from Wolfie made you think that this was supposed to be the blow off. It's a chain match with no blood, with few chain-assisted punches, with some mishaps of the chain coming undone from Wolfie's wrist, but they still kept it full of animosity and this worked for me overall.

There are different ways to be a heel, of course, but maybe nothing works quite so well as presenting a dissonance in the minds of the fans. Wolfie talked trash coming out. He had won the previous match (albeit with help). He had a clear size advantage over Dundee. Yet the second he hit the ring, he tried to avoid putting the chain on, and while Dundee used the chain in big sweeping motions, utilizing it to move Wolfie around the ring, to pull him out of it, to cut the distance between the two of them so he couldn't get away and so that Dundee could lay in punches, and increasingly as the match went on, as a direct instead of indirect weapon, Wolfie barely seemed to want to use it at all. He took over with eye pokes. When he was able to sneak his way to being on top, he was fine with the chain falling off and laying in boots instead, even when there was a weapon right there waiting for him. When he did use it, it was to choke, something close up and easy and familiar. Dundee was open to all of the violent possibilities of those rings of metal and Wolfie, craven heel that he was, was terrified of them despite all of his tough talk.

Given their relative youth, I have no idea if that was a conscious decision or just an unconscious one but it ran through the match, a match where Dundee took far more of it, but where you still always had the sense that Wolfie's size and lack of regard could turn the tide at any moment. As I said above, there was a lot to like about this, but what it needed, what I would have loved, would have been for Wolfie to really take over and open Dundee up before they went to the same clever "throat shot counter on Wolfie as he came flying off the top" finish. If this had even a couple of minutes of bloody heat in the midst of everything else they were doing, that would have taken it over the top. Maybe the venue didn't allow for it though. But if that's the case, maybe don't do a chain match? It's great that they leaned into so many of the spatial possibilities inherent with the gimmick, but when you leave the most important element on the table, it's hard not to look past.

Wolfie D vs. Jamie Dundee 9/10/92

MD: This went about six minutes and felt like it was transitioning to other things. They slapped hands after the start (Wolfie had gotten his heat back after the chain match with an attack) but Wolfie almost immediately went for the eyepoke and tossed Jamie out. Jamie skinned the cat and that led into the shine. This is a pretty small sample size. It's worth noting that there's nothing for either guy on cagematch for this year at all. It did seem like Wolfie was more developed into who he'd be in 1993 here than at the start of the series. He had a bit more swagger, a bit more flow. In the first match, he reminded me of a heel Jeff Gaylord or something. By the end of it, you saw a little more of who he'd become.

I still liked the dissonant heeling. The venue had rafters very close to the top rope, allowing for steadying or even getting just a little more height. A lot of the transitions and big spots were set around the top rope, either with people getting crotched or actually hitting things. Wolfie finally hit a top rope clothesline and that's when he decided to use his second for a ref distraction and get a pair of knuckle dusters, when he was in complete control. That's the sort of cowardly heeling driven by a lack of faith in one's self by the character that you have to appreciate on some level, that is, if you find it believable in the first place. Dundee had the crowd here and a lot of that was a preternatural sense of timing and his selling, though some of it was his last name too. The finish had a masked man come in to try to stop the cheating, but ultimately getting Dundee disqualified. By this point, it's pretty safe to say that these two were on their way.