Dr. Wagner (Sr.) vs Manuel Soto 1979
MD: This was apparently the first round of a $100,000 tournament with the finals in Madison Square Garden but I'm not going to look it up and try to figure it out if that was actually something that happened. This is a rare look at Wagner, especially in a full match. It goes around ten minutes and was worked "gentlemanly" and primarily on the mat with a few escalations and those were usually armdrags and the sort. The wrestling was god though. Wagner wrestled interestingly in the first few minutes, very reactive, very defensive, a lot of counter-wrestling. Soto came off as a bit more fiery and won most of the escalations with Wagner basing for him. They never stayed in anything for long, keeping things moving even though it was mostly on the mat. I wouldn't say we learned a ton about Wagner here but you got the sense he could back it up with skill in a straight match like this. I have no reason, after seeing this, to question anyone who might say that he was great certainly. I just maybe don't have a ton of proof to verify a sort of greatness that would take him over the top either.
Austin Idol vs. Stan Hansen Memphis 9/12/83
MD: A wild almost nine minutes here. Stan ambushes Idol as he's coming over the guardrail and they never look back. He opens him up immediately and once they make it back into the ring and the bell rings, targets the wound like only he could. There's a bit early into this where he puts his heel right on the bloody forehead and scrapes and it's the simplest thing in the world but given how he does it, it's downright grisly. Beautiful pro wrestling. Idol fires back after a couple of minutes of it and the crowd goes nuts. Hansen is extremely giving here, bouncing over the ring, flailing limbs, letting himself get slammed. It builds to Stan tied up in the ropes, Idol pushing the ref away, and then Stan kicking Idol into the ref in one of the better ref bumps you'll see, and Hansen taking advantage, hitting a lariat in the ropes and winning by DQ. Hart's a great little nuisance throughout as Hansen has absolutely no regard for him.
ER: The face of the DVDVR 80s Memphis 100 has changed over the last couple weeks. We wrote about a tag a few weeks back that could have placed in the top 10, and now we have two more Stan Hansen Memphis matches. Stan Hansen worked one month in Memphis in 1983, in between All Japan tours. He showed up and kicked Austin Idol's ass over five matches, three of which were included in and underrated on the DVDVR set. Now we have the other two. All five of Stan Hansen's matches in Memphis, during that one month of 1983 directly after he won the PWF title from Baba, are now all viewable on YouTube and you could watch all four singles matches and the tag in under an hour. That's a thing we can all now do, any time.
Stan Hansen blew into Memphis one day and beat Tom Prichard's ass for the TV title and then hung around for a month before blowing out. Imagine how large Hansen must have looked inside the WLMT studio. If you were a fan of Tom Prichard in 1983, it must have felt terrible seeing this large man with no mustache show up and just beat your boy's ass the way he did and then make fun of the trophy that Memphis was using for their TV title. Hansen looked completely unstoppable in every way for 5 minutes and then came back a couple months later to beat the blood out of Austin Idol for one of the couple dozen titles Memphis had. This was full unstoppable Hansen but I like that it was very clear Idol was jumped. The official match time is about the same as the one-sided mauling of Prichard, under 5 minutes. But this 5 minute match is preceded by the out of ring beating that leads to Idol's incredible blade job. Hansen jumps Idol in the aisle and it's a beating that stands out as good in Memphis. He does this thing during the beating that's so perfect. It's a thing Hansen can do that any other big guy could do but doesn't have the intuition or charm to do. While bleeding Idol out on the floor, he rolls into the ring - there was no count, the bell hadn't sounded - and just runs the ropes a few times at full speed before going back out to bleed him some more. I don't think any wrestler understands the value in this, to look this aggressive and unflappable at the same time, knowing your opponent won't be getting up and leaving while you run the ropes.
Idol's blade job on this video quality makes him look like Hogan, the entire top of his scalp dyed red giving him the same blond horseshoe haircut. Hansen goes after that cut in some disgusting ways too, digging his heel into it and punching down at the cut multiple times, even doing his perfect kneedrops into the cut. He forces Idol into one of the most natural and effective ref bumps I've seen, shoving Idol with his boot so hard that it looked like Idol couldn't help but careen into the ref. Hansen's lariat in the ropes was as nasty as any he's hit in the middle of the ring. Idol did not go flying backwards to the floor, he absorbed it. There is a full arm smack as Idol is momentarily flattened between the ropes and Hansen and the crowd audibly reacts to the sound. Imagine seeing this monster destroy Austin Idol in his first night at the Mid-South Coliseum. Hansen could just show up in any room and any building and look like this, at any time.
Austin Idol vs. Stan Hansen Memphis 9/19/83
MD: This time, Idol attacks before the house lights come up. Great fire as he takes it to Hansen and Hansen gives and gives. He eventually gets an inside shot in as he is want to do when pressed and takes over. The transition is him missing a second rope knee drop and Idol soften him up for his leglock. I imagine Hansen couldn't keep doing a big miss bump like that as the decade went on, not with any regularity but it would have provided a bit of welcome variety to his usual open door to vulnerability in AJPW (the missed lariat into the post). Before the leglock can happen, Hart gets up on the apron and everything devolves into chaos. Post-match, Hansen says he's going to show him a thing or two about the leglock, brandishes a chair to injury him, Lawler makes the save and Ventura comes up to set up the next tag because Memphis booking is a never ending churn of great stuff. I know I didn't say much about either match, but they were simple, straightforward, primal, territory wrestling perfection really.
ER: This is the weakest of the four Hansen/Idol matches, if only because it feels the least complete, but has a completely different charm than those other matches. It was also weakened by having a completely spaced out Randy Hales on most of the call instead of Lance Russell, and when Lance joined in he kept throwing too often to Randy. Randy sounded like he had never spoken about wrestling to anyone before this match. This one is more of an Austin Idol match. Idol got blindsided and brutalized a week ago, now he's back and not going to make the same mistakes. Hansen in Memphis is amazing, but also might be one of the places that Stan Hansen wouldn't have really "worked". I love Austin Idol and I love his offense. I love Lawler, Dundee, all these guys. The Memphis set was my favorite of the 80s sets. But watching Austin Idol work strikes with Hansen, I'm not certain all of these Worked Strike Masters play as well off Hansen as they do off men who don't seem so large and indestructible.
I think Stan Hansen is a gifted seller. The way he drops to knees and gets staggered and backed up and the way he eventually falls is genuine talent, a real theatrical gift. His body control seems impossible for a man his size, but he does several degrees of staggering and lost steps that show he always knows the exact level of punishment he's supposed to be selling. Sometimes, however, it looks like he is selling almost too much. Idol was laying it in, but not laying it in for the level that is necessary to look like Hansen is actually taking damage. I don't know, maybe I'm up my own ass on this one. Hansen is just such an armored tank that the best worked punches in the world are only going to look as good as Stan Hansen can make them look. The missed knee off the top rope is a nutso spot for Hansen to use, like the John Nord kneedrop plancha a decade later. A man that size should not be able to jump off the top rope and land like that without blowing out his entire lower half. Hansen missing offense always seems to make more sense as a transition to his opponent, because again it just rarely feels realistic that someone is able to fight their way back into control. I wonder how often Hansen did a miss this spectacular. You have to have a finite amount of them. That's not a spot I'd seen him do - not like that - and I imagine the total number is low. Now we have one of them. Maybe it's the only one.
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