WWF 305 Live: Boss Man! Akeem! Earthquake! Hillbilly Jim!

Earthquake vs. Hillbilly Jim WWF SNME 4/28/90 - FUN

ER: This was the last "major" Hillbilly Jim TV appearance, and it's a pretty cool sendoff. It's not talked about as a sendoff, other than Jesse frequently referring to Jim as an idiot (a thing he did a lot during Jim matches). This is a 2 minute match so there's not going to be a lot of development, but it wasn't worked as a straight squash. It's better that way because it meant we got to see Hillbilly back up Quake a few times. WWE has been so overproduced for the last 15 years that it's wild they were just throwing big Hogan-feuding heels out there with only a big blue singlet and matching boots and letting him just stomp out to the ring with a sloppy fucking beard. They assemble stars so differently now, and whenever I watch Tenta I just wonder where all the big fat Canadian 42 year old 27 year olds have gone? 

Hillbilly Jim is really really big but never treated as if he was the same size as Big John Studd for some reason. Seeing how big he looks opposite Quake is so cool, and he had nice body shots and a great fired up babyface cartwheel. Hillbilly Jim: He had a really good cartwheel. Earthquake didn't quite have his WWF formula and pacing down here but you know he's cool because of how hard he still committed to hitting those ropes. His big leaping elbowdrop is even more impressive than the Earthquake Splash, but Earthquake jumping before the splash is iconic and really adds to the effect. Four jumping stomps is right. Three would be too few. 

Big Boss Man vs. Akeem WWF SNME 4/28/90 - VERY GOOD

ER: We didn't get any kind of full satisfying blowoff to the Twin Towers, only smoke blowing off the Chelsea Piers. We got about 5 total minutes of Boss Man/Akeem between this match and the WrestleMania match earlier in the month, and maybe that's fine. We were never going to get any kind of Boss Man/Akeem match to rival the 1987 UWF Big Bubba/One Man Gang match, but surely there's some middle ground we could have landed on. Nevertheless, this is a fun 3 minutes and a great Akeem show. Either he's bumping around for Boss Man - including a major spill when he's backdropped over the top and then flipped into the ring the hard way - or he's throwing some awe-inspiring overhand rights. The best part of the match is Akeem throwing single punches at Boss Man's head, sending Boss Man reeling into the ropes each time. 

Boss Man is huge guy who can work rope rebounds as smoothly as Bobby Eaton. Now when you hear somebody has great rope work, it typically means they're good at finding new ways to spring off them. Not enough guys use them to slump into, to catch their fall, to send them back into the scrum like someone hitting the edge of a mosh pit. Akeem keeps rocking Boss Man, and Boss Man gets sent leaning wayyy back into the ropes, thrown back into another of Akeem's fists whether he was ready or not. 

Maybe the best part of this was Akeem's completely rhythmless jive dancing to the unquestionable greatest WWF entrance theme of all time. Or, maybe it was Akeem's standing splash that doesn't get a single fucking inch of air. Worry not, Akeem is such a mountain that he can squish a guy just fine even if he only goes up on his tiptoes for a splash. Dibiase interrupts before we can get a finish (bookending the way he ambushed Boss Man before the WM6 match), but not before Akeem can take the lowest hang time Boss Man Slam you have ever seen. It looked like a Rock Bottom that Boss Man had delivered it from his knees.  

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE WWF 305 LIVE

Read more!

WWF 305 Live: Twin Towers Explode! Hogan Battles Afa!

Hulk Hogan vs. Afa WWF All Star Wrestling 4/14/84 - FUN

ER: There's no good reason this couldn't have been a couple minutes longer. Almost every 305 match that I've rated FUN/SKIPPABLE have only been rated that low due to lack of time. This match is two minutes long, and you can only do so many fun cool big man things in two minutes. Give any two large men 4-5 minutes in a ring, I will almost always love it. The biggest guys moving around each other is always fun! But there's no reason Afa should only be able to last two minutes against anyone, especially with Albano and Sika interfering at ringside. Afa bumps big for Hogan, and the crowd loves every second of Hogan bumping him around, and Afa was bumping so big so early that I was just waiting for that ankle grab from the floor so that he could take over for awhile. Instead, that didn't happen, and Hogan punched him a few times, hit the axe bomber, then the legdrop. After, he punched Sika and Albano off the apron, knocked Afa to the floor, and punched Albano and Sika again. Also, Afa was announced as Samoan #1, and Okerlund kept calling him Samoan #1 on commentary, while Vince only referred to them as Afa and Sika. I don't know what was going on. Match narrowly avoids SKIPPABLE status just because Hogan and Afa had really good chemistry. Wish we could have seen more of it. 

Big Boss Man vs. Akeem WWF WrestleMania VI 4/1/90 - FUN

ER: Here's another in WWF's weird habit of keeping big men to 2 minutes when they were more than capable of going longer. This show had WAY too many matches and the entrances took way too long because of the size of the Skydome, so you wound up with several sub 3 minute matches on a WrestleMania. Akeem looks incredible doing his One Dance, swimming in place on the ring entrance cart while Jive Soul Bro blares (Jive Swimming?). Boss Man gets jumped by Dibiase and takes a great beating on the floor, with a hard back bump off a Dibiase lariat, takes a hard bodyslam, and gets tossed hard into the barricade (no small feat as the ring was up on that big show stage and Boss Man had to cover the gap). It's a drag that the match proper was under 2 minutes, as the two minutes we got were filled with smooshing. Boss Man comes back with a great atomic drop (and an atomic drop isn't the kind of move I expect from two 350+ lb guys so I really loved its use here) and a Boss Man slam gets the easy pin. This was one of the matches on the show that actually had storyline reason to be happening, with a two year tag team now on opposite sides and a big Dibiase revenge mission against Boss Man, so it's brutal that it got less time than something like Rude/Snuka or literally every other match on this card. Bad time management robbed us of an excellent 6 minute Twin Towers explosion. I wanted to see the full collapse and implosion of the Twin Towers and this would have been the perfect place for it. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE WWF 305 LIVE

Read more!

WWF 305 Live: Akeem vs. Hogan!

Akeem vs. Hulk Hogan WWF SNME 1/7/89 - GREAT

ER: This is a real important show in my personal pro wrestling history, as it was the first episode of Saturday Night's Main Event that I saw. It reminds me of that great feeling when you're a kid and you discover that a thing like Pro Wrestling exists, and you learn about new wrestlers every week, and you piece together information about all of them and mentally fill in their histories. At this point I had discovered WWF weekend AM TV shows Superstars and Wrestling Challenge, but I didn't realize SNME was a regularly scheduled special event. This was the first one my dad taped for me, meaning this was a show I watched a ton. I didn't know who half the people were on this show, but I came to be very familiar with all of them (and this was probably my only tape, for a long time, that had a Ron Bass match on it). I had no idea who Akeem was before this show, but I remember that Akeem dancing his way through selling for Hogan strikes was a huge hit with me. 

Akeem looks massive here, vibing his way to the ring with a never bigger Boss Man, then dance selling his way through the match. He did terrible moonwalks on offense, hit Hogan with clubbing arms, and did variations on the electric slide while taking many Hogan right hands. Akeem is great at waddling around a ring and making faces like a mammoth Dom Deluise, then takes some big flat bumps off Hogan axe bombers. Boss Man and Slick were working overtime too, with both taking big bumps off the apron. Giving Hogan several targets that all fall in spectacular ways is a smart way to organize a Hogan match, keep him busy and constantly battling enemies, crowd stays hot, etc. Boss Man seriously takes three different big falls off the apron, with the best being Hogan running Akeem into Boss Man. Boss Man gets hit and holds the top rope while doing a huge power squat, butt hanging way over the edge of the apron, before hitting the floor with a big splat. 

This whole match was so dominantly Hogan, that when we hit our mid-match twist the crowd gets furious at how much the Twin Towers are running the board. Akeem pulls Hebner into the way of another axe bomber, Boss Man nails Hogan with the night stick, and then we get a couple glorious minutes of the Twin Towers falling repeatedly onto Hogan like he was an NYC firefighter reliving the worst day of his life. Akeem doesn't so much do "standing splashes" as he gets a couple inches off the ground before horizontally flattening Hogan. Over and over, two fat monsters just splashing Hogan, as garbage starts to rain into the ring. Now of course we get a Hulk Up and Akeem runs into the big boot in an amusing way, but Boss Man draws the DQ which saves Akeem from a legdrop. I need to find any of the Hogan/Gang singles matches from 87/88 to see how they hold up to our only existing Hogan/Akeem match. Those likely won't have any dance selling so they are probably worse.  

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

Read more!

WWF 305 Live: Festus! Dusty! Akeem! Big Show!

Akeem vs. Dusty Rhodes WWF Wrestling Challenge 11/19/89 - EPIC

ER: Damn. A truly legendary showdown, a literal DREAM match! How often have we ever had the reigning American Dream vs. the reigning African Dream? Showdowns between Dreams are a rarity. This match here was everything. It was every single thing. Who among us knew when I started this project that it would already yield fat boy perfection a mere 3 posts into the project's existence? We are truly blessed. Dusty had the best theme music in wrestling, and there was nobody in wrestling who could move like Dusty to his music. That alone makes this era Dusty extremely worthwhile. Akeem was such a big giant goon, Richard Moll who got fat, and such an awesome wrestler. Dusty and Akeem have a dance off and it's exactly what I wanted out of my pro wrestling at that precise moment. Dusty had the best moves, and if this wasn't even a match at all and instead just Dusty shaking his ass while Akeem sways his hips and swims through air, this was going to be the greatest. Is Dusty the greatest dancing babyface of all time? Watch him here and you might think so. The best part is, outside of the dancing, is we get two huge dudes clonking each other in the head! Akeem bumps around for Dusty, throws some great shots of his own, yells at the not-yet-named Sapphire, attacks Dusty after getting counted out and bumps big to the floor again. This was all about movement, big guys moving with rhythm, Dusty an absolute legend.

The Big Show vs. Festus WWE Smackdown 1/30/09 - GREAT

ER: We as a people have collectively forgot about how great the brief Festus singles run was, and this will maybe remind you. This was not even 3 minutes, but this was everything that anyone could have wanted. This was a condensed sprint that opens with Festus trying to pick up show for a big double leg, getting him off the mat, and then getting absolutely SPIKED into the mat on a DDT. I mean Festus' head was tucked and he landed bad. He sold it like my parent's cat when it ran straight into the freshly cleaned sliding glass door. Both guys threw big shots here, like Big Show's cool punches buried into Festus' gut, or Festus getting caught off the ropes with an overhand chop right to the throat. The best strikes in the match were Festus unloading two rights and a left out of the corner, really cracking Show with nice shots, before...well, they attempted a tornado DDT, and this is arguably the most combined weight we've ever seen doing a tornado DDT spot. Show breaks out his awesome alley oop facebuster, and Festus really whips his melon into the mat. Big Show's Big Punch sends us home just shy of 3 awesome minutes. Festus, baby!!


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE WWF 305 LIVE!

Read more!