Found Footage Friday: DOUBLE DUSTY~! MURDOCH~! SUPER DRAGON~! taro~! BOSS MAN~! IVAN & SHEIK~!

Dusty Rhodes/Dick Murdoch vs. Iron Sheik/Ivan Koloff GCW 4/3/83

MD: Another recent vault drop. It's a Texas Tornado match and it's a shame we don't have the whole card as it has Buzz vs Masked Superstar, Tito/Blair vs Arn/Borne, Larry vs Tommy, and Flair vs Atlas. BUT we will take what we can get. Heels have Homer O'Dell out with them. Dusty vs Sheik feels like a really unique match up. There's some great pro wrestling bs at the start as the announcer says that Sheik has requested the fans not chant USA USA.

The Outlaws are such a blast in this setting. A lot of it feels like Dusty doing his thing and Murdoch knowing exactly how to riff off of it. They'd throw double elbows or simultaneous punches or pingpong people between them or as part of a comeback. At one point they each took a leg and dropped an elbow (though Dusty didn't go all the way down which was funny). When the heels were able to pry one off and double team, Dusty was great at throwing himself to break up the pin (Sheik did that once or twice too). We don't have a ton of Outlaws footage and to see them conduct a crowd like this and the sheer fluidity in how they worked together is just magic.

This made good use of the rules by stressing that there were none. That meant that Murdoch could toss people over the top. It meant that at one point they grabbed a belt and used it as a weapon, just like that. It meant O'Dell could break up pins. And it especially meant that he could take Dusty out with a cane shot. Apparently he was taken to the back to get bandaged up though we don't see it. That left it two-on-one against Murdoch and he knew exactly what he was doing there too. Biggest pop of the match was him kicking out when both men were pinning him at once. He'd get comebacks but ultimately swept under, setting up the bandaged Dusty coming back and chasing the heels off. Wonderful stuff that set up the following month's bullrope/chain match as they couldn't get away then.

ER: This is from a new Dusty mixtape but it felt like it belonged on the WWE Vault's Dick Murdoch Mixtape that doesn't actually exist. Dusty is getting bandaged up for a long stretch, returning right at the end, which gives us a chance to see how great Murdoch was at working 1 on 2. We all know how great Murdoch was, but handicap matches are tough to work and most people aren't good at them. Murdoch could have been, if it ever made sense to put him in one. This was Texas Tornado rules and I think that format benefitted the pairing. I can't imagine a long Sheik/Ivan control segment would have been worth the hot tag it led to, so seeing the ebbs and flows of Murdoch and Dusty punching the hell out of these two lawless foreigners is the best version of this match. Murdoch knew exactly what to do as Dusty's partner in the TX Outlaws. During the first half there were all these little moments where each man was doing his own thing, and Dick would come in to add a little punctuation to some poetry Dusty had just finished writing. I love all Murdoch punches, but the best was when Dusty was setting up the Flip Flop & Fly without noticing Murdoch moving in, and as Dusty was throwing the payoff punch to Sheik, Murdoch landed one at the same time. Southern Synergy. 

Texas Tornado matches can often have too many instances of bodies getting in the way of other bodies, but Murdoch is a natural at moving through the chaos without slowing down. He was so good at little punctuations, like when Dusty knocked Koloff flat on his back, and as Murdoch casually walks out of the corner to go after Sheik, he stomps Koloff's face as he passes by. The 2 on 1 was really fun and led to Sheik bumping far bigger than I was expecting. The madman from Iran takes two big bumps over the top to the floor, and the guardrail was so close to the ring that his leg gets hung up on it as he's falling! When Sheik and Koloff were pinballing away from Murdoch throwing punch combos from his knees, it's perfect heel feeding and perfect babyface timing.  Murdoch is great at moving between the two as he fights to his feet, never leaving them standing and selling for too long, a man who always knows where he needs to be. 

Dusty makes his triumphant return with a bandage that makes him look like sassy Rambo, and everyone in the Omni loses their minds, except for depressed Omni Superfan Donald Sutherland, who holds the front row hostage every week with his arms folded, a man forever unmoved by the most charismatic wrestlers in history. 

Dusty Rhodes vs. Big Boss Man WWF (Toronto) 10/29/89

MD: There's a moment midmatch where Boss Man has on a hold which one might graciously call an "armbar." Boss Man is making a face that represented the exertion of effort and he was sweating enough that you bought into it. Dusty was making a face that showed the world that the world was painful. I am usually not a stickler for details such as this, but it was not a very good armbar, ok? But it didn't matter. Because Dusty simply turned his hand upwards, flexed his fingers a bit, asked the crowd to come up for him, to help him, to be there for him, to participate, to make noise, to be part of this match and this moment, and they did. 

It was enough. 

Because Dusty was Dusty. Because Boss Man was huge. Because they wanted to be there to see them. Because someone in the back row probably couldn't see the hold all that well but their eyes gravitated to the faces and the faces were larger than life. 

And he asked them. Dusty Rhodes, who himself was larger than life, flexed those fingers. There's some kid in that crowd, someone who had worked a full shift before dragging themselves to the stadium, some old lady who had seen cheered for Billy Watson decades ago.. and Dusty was asking them to come up for them.

And they did. 

And more and more as the match went on, he would reward them. Just as he rewarded them preemptively at the start by stepping on Slick's hand when it was on the apron pre-match. Late in the match he'd reward them by dodging an Avalanche so that Boss Man went careening into Slick. And at the end? As he sent Boss Man reeling, Traylor making up for the dubious hold with brilliant physical charisma as he bounced off the top rope and then the second rope, Dusty would send them over the top by diverting a Slick nightstick shot into Boss Man's head and picking up the win. 

Once upon a time I might have grumbled about this. Plenty of people still will grumble at it. Now? I see how it's so much more impressive to create something out of nothing than far, far less than the something Dusty created here out of far far more. 

ER: A much better match than their SNME match that was taped two days later. That match ended with a weak roll up and had unnecessary arm work instead of dancing, not enough of a big fat guy swaying from punches and elbows. Dusty was on fire here, and Boss Man was great at being a huge young guy setting up every Dusty strike. Boss Man had some material I've never seen, a real guy who keeps giving the more footage you watch. There's a lot of great Boss Man that's just hiding in plain sight, a gifted worker who has aged sneakily well. We've all seen the incredible All Japan 1993 but Traylor is a guy who looks really great through way more years than we talked about at the time. 

There's a fantastic rhythm to this match, like everyone took Dusty's lead and made this into Parappa the Rapper with elbows and a nightstick. When Dusty is dancing in the ring with Boss Man's stolen nightstick, Boss Man is so fed up and humiliated on the floor that he starts banging the apron while hopping down the length of the apron. Five big hopping open handed swats, bopping down the length of the apron, Slick and Boss Man banging out their own Robbert Loggia-Tom Hanks long piano. Boss Man tops himself later when he lands a swinging punch on the floor, punctuated with two lateral hopping apron slap beats before landing the punch on 3. I don't know that I've ever seen so much apron work from Boss Man and it's because NBC didn't want to let him show his rhythm. He rocks and sways for Dusty the effeminate snack charmer, the finish showing off Boss Man's legendary rope work. Dusty elbowing Boss Man into the top rope, into the middle rope, all the way across the ring into Stick's errantly swung nightstick. A flat on his back knock out ending on its biggest beat. 

Super Dragon vs. TARO LXW (New York) 9/27/03 - EPIC

MD: Traveling match as Dragon vs TARO take New York. Apparently TARO had no idea this was taped until it popped up a month ago. Fun (and as you'd expect, brutal) showcase in front of a crowd that probably didn't know what they were getting into. Lots of Dragon basing for TARO. Lots of body contact in general. We have endless reversal sequences now but these two had a way of chaining one attempt to a reversal to the move all while Dragon had TARO up or was catching him in mid air. It creates a different sort of effect where it's less do-si-do somehow, almost as if there's a better application of pro wrestling physics at play. 

Likewise there was a sense of escalation. Armdrags and headcissors to the start, strikes and grinding holds in the middle, a dive to change chapters, and bombs at the end. On the dive, TARO's button gimmick really did feel fifteen years too early. That would have been over huge in 2018. On the bombs, Super Dragon's buckle bomb hits so much better than anyone else's because he almost makes it a sit out with the roll back that follows it. I imagine the people in the crowd couldn't believe some of the kickouts and felt that the lariat that ended it might have been a little anticlimactic. At the same time, one thing I appreciated was the commentary going up for things like a dodged chop or Dragon just chucking him across the ring, even as much as some of the tricked out offense. The lines were less clear back then. If the crowd was at all thrown by the finish, they would soon get it over with the head crunching punctuation Dragon put on things after the match. I'd say that this was what they'd all be talking about in the car on the way home, but the next match was Corporal Robinson vs Necro Butcher so who knows. 

PAS: This as a touring match is pretty fucking crazy. There is something about Taro and Super Dragon doing this to each other in a warehouse in Southern California, as an attempt to start something, or change something, which makes sense. But to just take this on a tour? Do this as the third match on the card? Justin Credible in the back stretching and warming up (to wrestle La Parka, what the fuck was this show? As grody and violent as these guys ever got, nothing in wrestling was ever as sick as what Super Dragon would do to his friend Taro, and this match was loaded with stuff I have only ever seen in this match. A running liger bomb into the corner? A suplex using the horns of Taro's mask? A tapitia flipped into a powerbomb? Fucking hell. Super Dragon did a Psicosis corner bump as hard and fast as it has ever been done, in case you thought this was a one sided mauling. Unbelievable stuff, what a pair of demented psychos. 

ER: This Super Dragon YouTube channel has been such a great personal gift. As Segunda Caida's only ever West Coast representative, we grew up with completely different scenes and regional styles. Indy wrestling was at its most regional in 2001-2004, Bay Area style different from LA style, different from New Jersey style, different from Pittsburgh, different from Georgia, different from Kentuckiana. It was my incomparable favorite time to be a wrestling fan. I saw the West Coast style first hand in the best wrestling years of my life, and I bet Super Dragon was a guy I saw live more than almost anyone. Michael Modest, Donovan Morgan, RevPro/Early PWG guys, Boyce LeGrande, Bryan Danielson somehow, Jardi Frantz, Vinnie Massaro, Larry Blackwell. Those were my guys, who I drove my friends to see in my 1987 Chevy Astro van. 

This channel has given me back so many Super Dragon matches I was at with friends. It's given me back memories of Super Dragon matches I had somehow forgotten, like when I watched myself reacting to Super Dragon/Bobby Quance on the hard cam. I saw Super Dragon live at least a dozen times at the APW Gym, front rows only on three sides of the ring. I saw a Dragon/TARO match a year before this match, and I've seen plenty of tags with Super Dragon/TARO pairings. I love these two. The first RevPro tapes I traded for were shows from July 2000, and their earliest matches are just as good as their latest. TARO is one of those great regional finds from that special era. A flyer with great daring ideas and under a hundred matches; one of several guys who got talked into regularly letting Super Dragon drop them on their heads. He had to have been Dragon's most frequent opponent, and they had years of ideas for each other. 

Super Dragon had a Psicosis/Rey, SUWA/Dragon Kid level base for TARO's imagination, and their matches felt like nothing was off limits and real damage had to be happening. They were strong at placing the biggest spots of their matches, smart about match pacing and still surprising. There are consequences to the matches and the selling is perfect in the same way I think Jersey All Pro selling from the same time was perfect: the realism, stiffness, and the innovative ways to drop guys head first with suplexes was actually happening. They were enduring actual shit kickings. Whatever selling we were seeing, we were seeing a guy actually getting his nose smashed full speed into a turnbuckle, actually thrown unprotected onto his head and neck by the horns. Deranged, TARO, Orion, Nate Webb et al can sell any way they want. They were taking real life damage. Every TARO match is a reason why TARO had less than a hundred matches.  

There's so much to see, so many bumps, so many exchanges that never quite go the way you think they're going to go, so many things you may only see in one of their matches and never in anyone else's matches. This had a sitout buckle bomb that was so precisely and violently executed, a swinging fireman's carry splash mountain. and a suplex so damned it could only come from our early 2000s era of head drop innocence. Just like Jersey All Pro guys from the same era, they knew how to get to big moments in creative ways. TARO hit what had to be one of the earliest topes into a tornado DDT, but it came after Dragon had wrapped himself around the ringpost in that way he does, which was different from Cassandro's way, which was different from Psicosis's way. Setting up a big high spot with a big bump in stead of a big spot causing a big bump. They understand set up and payoff and escalation. There was a moment that felt like something Tully Blanchard would have thought up: Dragon prevents TARO from crotching him on the top buckle by bracing himself, but deservedly Mutumbos TARO and gets his legs swept out from under him into a worse crotching. I don't know if I ever loved wrestling more than when I was 22 years old.   

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COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SUPER DRAGON

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Found Footage Friday: BIG BUBBA~! ARNOLD~! HAMILTON~! MIGRAS~! FALCON~! HALCON 78~! TAKANO~!

Larry "The Missouri Mauler" Hamilton vs. Don Arnold Hollywood Wrestling 8/31/53

MD: This was 2/3 falls and went over 30. The first fall was clean and mostly hold based. Arnold would put on a hold (armlock, toehold, headscissors), and then after a great deal of struggle, Hamilton would get a counter (hammerlock, bodyscissors) and control with that for a while. Within five or six minutes, they were looking fairly haggard, just for how hard they were working the holds. Arnold was clearly the aggressor here, but Hamilton took it with his great "rodeo" headlock takeover, which has a big windup, enough to be a viable finisher. Second fall had the cracks start to show. Early on Arnold turned a legsplitter into a standing anklelock and the commentary called it a "Hackenschmidt". When he won the fall with an abdominal stretch, called as such, which he got on cleverly by ducking another windup for the headlock takeover, commentary called it a Billy Varga special. As the match went on the fans started to boo Hamilton as he kept going to the ropes to escape. It was subtle. He also grabbed the hair for a smaller headlock takeover and went for a toehold after a rope break too soon. It wasn't much but it was enough to turn the crowd. That meant when Arnold put on a long and fast airplane spin to pick up the win, everyone was pretty happy with the result. A lot to like here in between the formula of the first fall and how hard the holds were worked, the callback counter that won Arnold the second fall, and the subtle but definite heeling from Hamilton as things went on. 

Migra I/Migra II vs. Falcon/Halcon 78 WWA 9/19/87

MD: Los Angeles WWA with two teams that basically look alike. Cheat sheet is that Falcon has some extra flourishes on the sides of his mask. And Migra I is the more massive Migra. The commentators work with the ring announcer and spend the first three minutes of this trying to figure it out while the Migras just hug one another repeatedly to get heat. We only have the first two falls of this (best as I can tell) but they're fun.

Primera was full of fun stuff. Halcon clowned Migra I on the mat. Migra II kept going to the eyes and hanging on to Falcon's mask to keep a headlock on until he got shrugged to the floor and ended up punching the post. They had a pretty elaborate finishing sequence where Halcon and Falcon had to figure out how to avoid getting tossed into one another so they could get distance and lure the Migra's into a trap. Crowd-pleasing stuff. 

Segunda had Migras take over just by separating their opponents and leaning hard on Falcon. This ended up mostly mask ripping and wound work, but we like mask ripping and wound work. It seemed like they were going to end a caida once Halcon finally got past the ref to get in and they took him out too, including with a nice stump puller, but things kept going. At one point, Falcon, bloodied and sprawled on the ground was offered a drink by a kid through the guardrail so that's always nice. Eventually the ref just called it and the tape cuts after twenty minutes with the last fall still to go. Good for what we had though. 

Shunji Takano vs. Big Bubba AJPW 3/27/88

MD: Maybe the most fun four and a half minutes you'll have today. This was a Classics drop we're just catching up on. Takano, by 88, had a lot going for him. Size and fire. He'd grow into it even more in 89 before his career started to take weird turns. Looking at him here and he looked like the future of the company though. Also, oddly enough, Bubba looked like the future of the company too. He looked like a guy who could have toured as much as Doc and Gordy and fit right in. Yeah, he was a different size and shape, but he had such presence and could move. He looked like a million bucks here.

He pressed in right from the start with punches to the face and this great axe handle. Takano turned it around and dropkicked him out. He sold it with huge frustration, going after the guardrail, only to come back in and dominate. Lots of great power offense here, his spinebuster slam, back body drop, clothesline, and more great strikes, a headbutt and this beautiful sweeping chop. Then he got out the belt and started choking Takano with it, jarring, effective stuff. He climbed up to the top with it but that just let Takano come back tossing him off in a big moment. Takano followed up with a body press off the turnbuckles but Bubba turned it around for the Bubba Slam. It felt like a really refreshing WCW Syndicated TV match in a way AJPW very rarely does. Ah, what could have been.

ER: Shunji Nakano is a kind of under-discussed guy. Maybe people just hated Super Ninja, I don't know. His look was Larger Japanese Mike Awesome and he could really take a hit and throw a suplex. This is 4 minutes of Big Bubba dishing out hit after hit after hit and Takano had one suplex that might have been the biggest suplex bump Bubba had taken to that point in his career. Bubba is barely 100 matches into his career, in his 2nd match ever in Japan, a couple months away from WWF, just a baby. Boss Man was my favorite wrestler as a kid because he was shaped exactly like my dad. That same exact belly, dress shirt pulled tight, hugging his stomach because of the tuck. Never fat enough where they had to get larger pants and tuck their stomachs into their pants - that's what we call Ronnie P. Gossett fat - but incredible belly hang over the waistband of their slacks. Some of us have Bald Dads, some of us have Tall Dads, I was lucky enough to have a Fat Dad. 

How quickly did Bubba get this good? When was he Actually Good? He's a marvel here. Find me a single misstep, all match. It's the perfect 4 minutes of material. Every detail, every hit, every miss. Complete package. 15 year pros don't have a fast swing and miss clothesline as good as Bubba's. The speed he takes a dropkick bump over the top to the floor, and the anger he shows after (scaring a few ringside fans) is done with a veteran's confidence. He double axe handles Takano in the back of the head; the man hits a sidewalk slam with one suspender down like the world's largest Jeff Leonard. He tosses Takano so high with a back body drop, and the visual looks nuts because you never see guys Takano's height taking back body drops. Bubba throws his full weight into his falling clothesline, like a big fat guy STO. His enziguiri slashes across the face. The casual removal of his belt before choking Takano to his knees, climbing to the top rope for choking leverage, was like something you'd see a hitman do in an 80s Hong Kong action movie. 

And, while I'm not sure it needs to be said, I will say that the Bubba Slam clears the Black Hole Slam every day of the week. This isn't swing dancing. This stomach goes over the belt. 

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WWF 305 Live: Boss Man vs. Barbarian!

Big Boss Man vs. The Barbarian WWF Royal Rumble 1/19/91 - EPIC

ER: These two had at least 20 house show matches over the three months preceding this match, and you can tell they used that time to hone something special. Two big guys going 15 minutes, knowing exactly how and when to peak the crowd, keeping up an always-impressive pace the whole time. There's no way they could have been going this hard on house shows, hitting each other this hard, taking bumps this hard; but whatever they were doing in those 20 or so matches over 3 or so months, totally paid off. 

This fucking match was following the excellent Rockers/Orient Express opener! That tag is always talked about as one of the great PPV openers and it really does hold up as one of the best WWF tag matches of the 90s. That, and it was 20 minutes long. It was 20 minutes long, with a ton of action! Boss Man was leaner in 1991 than he'd ever been in wrestling, but it would have been crazy to have expected him and Barbarian to go out there right after and work another match with high action and fast pace. 

Speaking of fast pace, Barbarian stalls on the floor for well over a minute after the bell, a huge man in a He-Man fur loincloth and fur boots. His legs literally have the same shape as a He-Man figurine. His beard is grown as full as it has ever been grown. Son of Crom versus a Best Shape of His Life Corrections Officer is an episode of Deadliest Warrior that we never got to see, and it's worth the wait. Two behemoths stalling is always good, but two behemoths stalling and then beating the hell out of each other is among the greatest possible match types. Soon Barbarian is holding Boss Man by the collar and uppercutting him, before running into a the sole of his boot, and all is right.  

Boss Man is lean and his speed is incredible. When he clotheslines Barbarian to the floor, his impact is so fast and full that both fly to the floor too fast. Boss Man always carried a lot of "head of steam" speed at his heaviest -  a fat guy skiing down a mountain with his poles tucked to his sides - but whenever he leaned out he did every single movement with real speed. There's a spot I don't think I've ever seen him do, where he gets his leg stuck in the bottom and middle ropes so naturally that I had to rewind a few times to see just how he did it. It's either a lucky fluke or a tremendous magic trick, but there's a lot of evidence on his side that it was something he thought of and executed flawlessly. Fewer workers have been better at integrating the ropes into their matches. Here he got knocked to the apron with a strike and looked like he was just going to slow his descent by grabbing the ropes, settling on the apron to stop a bump to the floor. Instead, he managed to fall through to the apron while hooking his leg on the ropes in a way I haven't seen him do, perhaps feeling out a signature bump that would be a a new version of Andre getting his arms caught. Boss Man is truly one of the most rewarding wrestlers to reassess. I wonder why he doesn't get talked about to the same level as John Tenta by stock rising warm revisionists. Boss Man's work ages even better in every era, beyond just the incredible 1993 AJPW run. One of the true greatest wrestlers of the 90s. 

Barbarian's toolset was deepening by 1991, and he hung in with everything Boss Man wanted to do. When he repeatedly fell onto Boss Man with elbowdrops it always looked like a lot of weight hitting a lot of weight. They successfully gradually transition the match from fast paced big man war into big nearfall tiring fight: Boss Man throwing fatigued punches to come back, missing a hard chest-first charge into the corner, Barbarian's high bridge school boy an excellent close kickout nearfall. All of the nearfalls felt like plausible finishes. When Boss Man catches Barbarian in a delayed landing hot shot, the crowd clearly thinks it is the finish. Their shocked screams when Barbarian's foot barely finds the ropes is the reaction you hope to be in the middle of whenever you buy tickets to any wrestling show. The ending stretch is underwhelming when compared to the match as a whole, but it still managed to effectively convey a fight between weakening mammoths. When a primitive man in fur piledrives a humongous southern jailer, we forgive the sloppiness of the piledriver, and celebrate the danger involved in a 300 lb man dumping a 330 lb man upside down. The 1-2 punch of Orients/Rockers and this match stands high among any opening 1-2 punch of any WWF PPV. 

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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.  

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Found Footage Friday: WWF IN MLG~! HULK~! HAKU~! HENNIG~! RUDE~! BRUNZELL~! BOSS MAN~! SHARPE~!

MD: This last week there were a bunch of new MLG House Shows that showed up on Peacock, with never released matches on them. We plan on going through them now and again over the next several weeks/months.

ER: Would it have been too much to ask for Ted Dibiase/Koko B. Ware? Don't get me wrong, I couldn't be happier that we got Iron Mike Sharpe/Tommy Angel, but that one match is very conspicuous by its absence. 

WWF House Show Maple Leaf Gardens 9/18/88

Mr. Perfect vs. Jim Brunzell

MD: Hennig still had some remnants of Cool Curt here. No real holds. No real offense outside of punching, kicking, stomping, clotheslines, but there was a nice methodological way he went about things and he was definitely working the crowd. He also played king of the mountain a bit which is the most AWA thing ever. Brunzell is always competent but even Gorilla was ragging on him for not getting fiery enough soon enough. Hennig survived the dropkick by ending up in the ropes. Solid opener though Hennig wasn't quite established yet and no one bought Brunzell as a singles.

ER: Maybe I'm easy, but I thought this kicked ass. I love Cool Curt, and I thought this was a...well, Perfect...blend of late AWA Cool Curt and big bumping heel Mr. Perfect. It had a nice methodical build where Curt would just walk slowly, cockily around the ring, like someone with a back injury who couldn't bend down, or like someone holding something up their butt. This was barely 20 matches into Curt's Mr. Perfect run, and I love seeing early versions of famous characters, seeing what they were working on and what direction they were testing out, see what offense they were using that you know they wouldn't be using a couple years later. The build on this was strong, starting slow (slow enough to actually get a few Boring chants, in 1988 Toronto!) and leading to a great section of Hennig keeping Brunzell on the floor while he corncobbed around the ring, kicking Jim off the apron, punching him in the jaw, a long build with a great payoff of Brunzell fighting his way back into the ring and tossing Hennig to the floor (one of only "Hennig" bumps of the match). By the end of the match both guys were throwing legit potato shots to the face. I mean both guys were flat out slugging each other down the home stretch, and the Maple Leaf Gardens cameras give it this awesome "in the ring" feel where you could really see how hard these punches were landing. I don't think of Brunzell as a guy who punches people in the face, but he and Hennig had loaded fists that were cracking jaws in ways I wasn't expecting. Just look at how hard Brunzell was hitting Hennig with mounted punches, and how Hennig paid him back. No way you would expect that. 

Iron Mike Sharpe vs. Tommy Angel

ER: Canada's Greatest Athlete gets to pose and flex for his adoring countrymen, and I like this Sharpe/Angel pairing because it's a cool look at a mainstay WWF undercarder vs. someone who I think of as a perennial WCW job guy. Tommy Angel looks like the Cars' touring keyboard player and it takes Sharpe at least 3 or 4 minutes to finally lock up with him, and the more Sharpe goes for rope breaks and teases knuckle locks while WHOA WHOA WHOAing, the louder the fans get. It's house show beauty. This is all of the Sharpe greatest hits, and they all work. Everyone knows he's going to cheat when he backs up and begs off into a corner, the way he sells strikes verbally while mostly ignoring them physically, and they react when he runs headlong into arm drags. Sharpe is a big guy and a heavy bumper, and it's impressive that while he stalls a ton he can also be good at taking a big heavy bump and feeding quickly into another one. I think my very favorite piece of commitment from Sharpe is when he gets tied up in the top and middle rope like Andre, and after he manages to fend off Angel with a boot to the stomach he still demands the ref help get him untied. 

The commitment to do a silly spot like get tied up in the ropes and wailed on only works if it looks like you cannot actually get yourself untied from the ropes, and Sharpe understands that the bit doesn't really work if you just walk away after kicking your opponent off. No, this goofball who can't take a step without making noise understands that he is STUCK in those ropes, and him kicking Angel away only gives the referee time to help him finally do his job. Commitment to the bit is 90% of Sharpe's gag, so I always love seeing moments where he could have skipped a step but didn't. He's good at making Angel's nearfalls look like actual nearfalls, too: when Angel got a late match sunset flip there was a 50-50 shot that was going to be enough to walk away with a win, and Sharpe reacted like he knew those odds. For a guy who was mostly bullshit, Sharpe clearly understand what made that bullshit work, and how to pay that bullshit off. 

Brutus Beefcake vs. Ron Bass

MD: It's a new match and I thought maybe, just maybe, there might be some heat to it since it was after the X'ed out angle. Plus, Bass is more than solid all the way from 77 to 85 in at least a few territories. My professional review of this is that Beefcake maybe had one minute worth of viable stuff and then I literally fell asleep while watching it. We tend to find value in most wrestlers somewhere or another and Beefcake was over as a viable star with a connection to the crowd, but this was bad, at least the parts I can remember.

ER: Beefcake did look mostly bad on offense, and I'm pretty sure every single punch he threw landed somewhere past Bass's head. Whatever match there was, was made by Bass occasionally cutting Brutus off. Bass had a nice big kneelift and I liked how he popped Brutus in the eye with the handle of ol Betsy. Gorilla was already setting up the lawn trimmers vs. spurs hair vs. hair match that was still 4 months away, so that was kind of cool. It feels like we should have had more interesting Ron Bass matches from his WWF run.  

Powers of Pain vs. Bolsheviks

MD: It's always weirdly fascinating to see the Powers of Pain as a babyface act. The best part of it is always Barbarian doing sort of a primal scream with his arms out as part of a comeback or demolishing guys. They tried to make a real match out of this, which was a mistake. Barbarian let Warlord work most of it, not tagging even when you'd expect him to. Bolsheviks' only credible offense was shots off the second rope from behind as the ref was distraction. Part of me thinks that Barbarian could have had a singles babyface run but this wasn't quite meshing and it makes sense they do the double turn so soon after.

ER: Haters piled onto Gorilla Monsoon's commentary, but I think Monsoon spending 5+ minutes talking about the haircut choices of all the wrestlers in this match was perhaps the only thing that made this worth watching. It all started with Monsoon considering adopting Warlord's haircut as his own, since he "doesn't have much on top to work with any longer" and humoring Mooney's requests to also get a tattoo. "And Nikolai over there can't seem to decide whether he wants hair or wants to be completely bald," just really going through the benefits of a pronounced horseshoe vs. keeping two days of growth up there. It's bizarre to work this match in such a bland "these teams are equal" style, and more bizarre to have Warlord in there for the bulk of the match. The fans only really came alive during PoP's entrance and the match finishing Warlord powerslam/Barbarian diving headbutt (and Barbarian really flew 2/3 of the way across the ring on that headbutt), but the best parts of this were probably Zhukov's excellently timed axe handle into Volkoff's head, and Volkoff's fun bump over the top onto the ring announcer's table at the finish. Beyond that, enjoy marveling at how bad Warlord's kicks and stomps look. 


Jake Roberts vs. Rick Rude

MD: Sometimes it comes down to what they're trying to accomplish. Here, they wanted their cake and to eat it too and it wasn't nearly as good as if they just stuck to the path of least resistance. Rude was excellent here, every reaction just great. More than solid at leaning on Jake. He ducked the short arm clothesline early and took over for most of the match. The underlying story was that he'd pull down his normal tights for the Cheryl Roberts ones when Jake wasn't able to see, so you figure they're building to Jake finally seeing and then going nuts for a comeback right? Well that doesn't happen. They work it towards a more conventional comeback, then a ridiculous ref bump (he somehow got squashed *under* the DDT). A Rude Awakening got Rude a phantom pin while the ref was out, and then a quick roll up Roberts finish. It's only after the match when Rude doesn't care anymore that Jake sees the tights and rushes back in with Damien (the ref gets the snake in the chaos instead). By that point, Jake had already won, so while it's great for Rude to get menaced by the snake and all for the insult, everything would have been so much tighter and more visceral if they kept it within the confines of the match. Hell, have Jake lose it from seeing the tights, come back, get DQed for not letting up on Rude, and THEN bring the snake out to get over on both Rude and the ref. While the match was going on, there was a real sense of anticipation and build over a guy's tights of all things, so it's too bad that it didn't come to fruition. 

ER: Matt is spot on about this match and the one thing I want to add is more emphasis on just HOW stupid that DDT ref bump was. The referee just DOVE underneath the DDT before Jake executed it, and there is just zero reason for any person to do what the referee did in that scenario. I have never seen this done, and after seeing it here there's good reason for that. Jake grabs for the DDT, referee literally dives onto his stomach in between Rude and Roberts, Rude takes the DDT onto the ref. The physics of it don't even begin to make sense, the referee's motivation doesn't make sense, it just looked like a man who was actively trying to get another man to land on him. This referee was clearly a pervert who would see a woman readying herself to sit down on a chair, and then slip underneath real quick just so she would briefly sit on his lap. Derelict behavior. 

Big Bossman vs. Jim Powers

MD: This was for International Challenge so we might have had it before but it's found, if not new. It was very good too, with Bossman really asserting himself, and Powers trying to get shots in but getting cut off. Bossman had a ton of presence, jawing with his opponent and the crowd, shrugging off Powers' stuff, giving him just enough to keep up hope. Finally, Powers was able to knock Bossman back, stagger him, finally dropkick him into the ropes. When he went to finally knock him down, Bossman caught him in the slam and dropped him. This was balanced just right for what it was trying to do. Another point: yes, Monsoon spent a lot of the match giving Powers grief for trying too much power stuff against a massive opponent, but what he accomplished by doing so was making Bossman look big and forboding and unstoppable or at least very difficult to stop. He didn't make Powers look great, but Powers wasn't supposed to look great; Bossman was. He tore apart Powers' strategy but not the reality of what we were watching. It was because of that reality that he was tearing it apart. Just something to think about as we deal with grumpy announcers who manage to bury just about everything but themselves these days. Monsoon, believe it or not, was better than that here.

ER: Boss Man was so good. He really didn't have to give Powers a single thing here, and while he didn't give him anything big, he still treated literally every strike as something that he actually felt, something that at minimum moved him. Boss Man is so much larger than Powers, but I love how much offense he set up by being the one in motion. Powers wasn't sticking and moving so much as just moving, avoiding various Boss Man advances and sneaking in a punch. Boss Man would charge in and get punched in the face, and was so good at selling that a Jim Powers punch to the face would hurt even a gigantic man. Boss Man's timing and speed were so impressive, that when you combine that with high end physical selling it really makes a super worker. Not many were better at just putting the palm of his hand against their teeth and showing pain. Powers never had a chance in this match, but Boss Man made him look like someone who could at least leave a mark, and he did it while also making the middle rope nearly touch the apron when he threw all his weight over it and Powers. That finish run Boss Man Slam timing is the stuff of legend. 

Hulk Hogan vs. Haku

MD: Hogan was between his series of matches with Dibiase and with Bossman here. Haku had recently enough been made King. This was "War Bonnet" Hogan and Heenan was at ringside. It was a one off but it's a fairly unique house show match up. It's been a while since I saw the 88 Hogan act. It has a lot going for it: the reverberation at the start of Real American to get the crowd buzzing, the ridiculousness of the helmet but it also working as a prop to keep things different, and maybe some overall freedom since Hogan didn't need to be in title matches.

Hogan gave Haku a ton here. He wiped out both Heenan and Haku with the helmet pre-match (with a great Heenan bump and him being disheveled for the next fifteen minutes), but then got swept under by a bunch of Haku shots. Having not seen 88 Hogan for a bit, he was excellent working from underneath early, constantly crawling and scrambling back as he recoiled from the shots, retreating so as to try to create some space. Then, when he came back later, it was with a lot of hair pulls and cheapshots. It's all what you'd expect someone like Buddy Rose to do in that situation, but Hogan was a face. For all the talk of whether he was a bully or not, his physical actions here were very "heel coded" but they were also incredibly over with the crowd. He had three or four little hulk ups/comebacks in this but was cut off due to either Haku getting a shot in or Heenan interfering. They went into deep chinlock/sleeper land but they worked in and out of it at least a little bit. The finish, which had Hogan getting the helmet from Heenan and hitting the legdrop with it on his head felt pretty iconic for the time. I'd say overall this felt relatively fresh due to the unique opponent and showed at least a little reinvention for Hogan.

ER: Hogan vs. Haku from the SNME a month after this match was actually the first Hulk Hogan match I ever saw, and also the first episode of SNME I ever saw. I have basically no original memories of that match, but it's cool seeing an earlier, much better version of that match here. Hogan working from underneath is a much more interesting Hogan. Heenan is great at spacing out the distractions to keep Haku's control rolling, from his opening side flip bump after getting nailed by the helmet, to getting knocked off the apron with a punch, to coming in right at the finish and getting punched into the ring trying to get the helmet to Haku. Heenan may have been the best ever at using the ropes to facilitate his bumping. Haku's strikes looked a lot better than Hogan's, and I loved all of his trust kicks and big swinging arm attacks. Hogan had some nice stuff too, and I really missed his elbowdrop when he mostly dropped that from his offense by '89. Dropping two nice elbows and starting a third, only to wave it off and just scrape his boot across Haku's bridge is a great spot (whether it's heel-coded or not). His running elbows and clotheslines look light as hell but Haku gave them a lot of heft with his bumps. I think the best part of Hogan working underneath was it forced him to use speed, and it was cool seeing him move around real quickly here. His little blocks and reversals were really good, like early on when he blocked a 1-2 combo and threw punches of his own, or when he went with a Mongolian chop (!) after blocking a Haku strike later. This is a fully fleshed out, much better version of their SNME match the next month, and it's kind of amazing how different that Hogan was from this Hogan. 

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WWF Superstars 2/27/93: Three Maulings and an Under 5 Minute Classic

1. Yokozuna vs. Brian West

ER: This started with Brian West getting run right fucking over with one of Yokozuna's greatest clotheslines, and things didn't get any better for him. Yokozuna had two minutes to look like an unstoppable physical force, and he did it without breaking a sweat. He looked amazing in his white tights and black mawashi, and Brian West looked disgusting in his inverted singlet. West gets his ass kicked pillar to post while wearing a singlet where the straps go on the inside of the nipples. You never want to be out there in a dickey singlet top while a 500 pound man is throwing punches and headbutts at you. When the coroner is having your family identify the body, you don't want to be wearing something as stupid as Brian West. Yokozuna's legdrop is a thing of all time wrestling beauty: the form, the impact, the way he rolls off, the impressive safety of it all. He throws West with his belly to belly and sets up the banzai splash perfectly, running into West with another clothesline that drops him on his back, right into position. This was Yokozuna working with Terminator efficiency. Imagine a 500 pound Terminator chasing a kid through an arcade. Different ballgame. 

2. Nasty Boys vs. Mark Ming/Jim Gorman

ER: You always see people talk about the bad luck of showing up to your job duty and finding out you were opposite the Steiners, and that's valid. But the Nasty Boys are right there with them for most unfortunate gig worker opponent. Sometimes Knobbs and Sags show up with a literal lip licking intensity and desire to beat a couple guys up. It usually isn't unprofessional, and this match wasn't either. But there are levels of "professional" and a lot of them don't include elbowing a guy in the eye socket to start a Saturday morning. Maybe Mark Ming is a master salesman. There are several examples of Mark Ming doing weekend job work and maybe it would be worthwhile to examine his selling in those matches. So maybe Knobbs pulled his shot and Ming's selling is just so good that he slumped into the middle rope looking like a man who suddenly feared for his safety and was not expecting to be hit in the eyeball on this day. 

Knobbs looks so excited to beat Mark Ming's ass that he really had one of his best back alley ass kicking performances here, just a couple months before the Nasties' WWF exit. There are a lot of guys on this 1993 roster who are really busting their asses and wreaking hell on jobbers before the major spring roster transition. I love when the Nasty Boys throw out all civility and just fall on guys. Knobbs and Sags each do elbowdrops in this match that are real asshole older brother elbowdrops. They are big guys who just flop full weight onto other guys, leaping off one bed and onto the other with no regard for their younger brother or their bed frames. Sags hits an elbowdrop off the top so crushing that I would have rather had a couch thrown onto me. There's a shot of Knobbs standing on the apron at one point, leaning forward on his tippy toes over the top rope, wide eyed in almost childlike glee, licking his lips while Sags beat some dude's ass, and that shot kind of sums up the Nasty Boys. What's the proper term for an occasionally annoying asshole? Ask Rob Dibble or Norm Charlton. 

3. Doink vs. Big Boss Man

ER: This match is insane. It's Boss Man's last taped match of this WWF run, and it's a generous performance that helped Doink look like a very real threat. There's an alternate timeline 1993 where Vince doesn't panic after Hogan's long-forecast exit, and held steady through the year with Bret/Crush/Tatanka/Perfect/Duggan as the top babyfaces, and Yokozuna/Luger/Doink/Bigelow/Razor as the top heels, and every single person would have been better for it. Crush's feud with Doink killed his potential big run, but that's on WWF for unnecessarily keeping both men mired in it for half the year. If Luger stays heel, Crush slams Yokozuna, and Doink continues working amateur shootstyle matwork against guys 100 pounds heavier than he, THEN you have a promotion with a thriving summer. Heel Doink was an incredible role that Matt Borne played to perfection. People fondly remember the series with Mr. Perfect, the PPV gem against Bret, and weekend gems like his technical sprint with Bob Backlund, but I think this match against Boss Man was Borne at his aggressive bulldog matwork best. It being Boss Man's last WWF TV match for 5 years, and how dominant Doink was at the front end, looked like they were destroying Boss Man at his going away party. But the comeback came and showcased how at his best Boss Man was always just Dustin Rhodes, if Dustin was carrying an extra 100 pounds. I mean I don't remember Black Reign being anywhere near as good as Boss Man, but in theory.

Doink hits Boss Man upside the head with a cardboard box, which we are lead to believe was loaded, but either way Boss Man sells a box across the head as if someone cheap-shotted him with a pipe. It was almost shocking how dominant Doink was, but after a win over Tugboat and his mauling of Boss Man, this was the time to show how Doink could dismantle an opponent of any size. As I said up top, this match is insane. You don't often get to see a guy dressed up like a Spirit Store policeman working shootstyle amateur matwork with a clown, so this match had a deranged "technical street fight breaks out at a southern states Halloween party" feel to it. Doink twisted Boss Man's neck into a neckbreaker and dragged him to the mat with a drop toehold, then worked his legs into a fought for STF. It's so surreal watching a man in slightly rubbed off clown makeup work snug hammerlocks and half nelson grapevines against a man as large as Boss Man, and there's a moment where Doink traps Boss Man's arm and shoot turns him into a pin like he was Jack Brisco. Doink even plants him with a high back suplex and a tremendous fireman's carry takedown into an armbar! Doink completely eliminated the size difference while in control, making it look like Boss Man couldn't break these holds or stop these takedowns even if he knew they were coming. 

But Boss Man's comeback is believable and loudly received, as he press slams Doink off the top and goes on a real tear. I love when Boss builds speed and hits the ropes harder and harder, pushing the pace and throwing punches the entire time. He thunders into Doink with a corner clothesline and throws heavy corner punches, short uppercuts under the chin, a big boot, and slides to the floor with an uppercut after using his weight to see if he could break the ropes with Doink draped over them. Does the Georgia lawman get green spray paint sprayed into his eyes at the finish? Yes, but this was a fucking fight and it deserved to end dirty. 1993 Boss Man still had so much left in the tank. In his last couple weeks under contract he worked house show singles matches against Flair and Lawler, which I wish we had. We left a lot of fun potential Boss Man matches on the table that year, but in exchange we got the All Japan run that was probably the biggest gift his career gave us. Watch this match immediately.

4. The Narcissist Lex Luger vs. Jim Powers

ER: Luger and Powers matched up several times in short WCW singles matches a few years after this, Luger a major babyface and Powers with 40 extra pounds of muscle. Their March 1997 WCW match was their best competitive match, an entertaining babyface vs. babyface match. This one is a totally different dynamic obviously, with Luger as a freshly debuted top heel and Powers a babyface who was mostly working house shows. Powers looked like early career Rick Martel here, and four years later he looked like an American Gladiator.  Luger's work as the Narcissist was far and away the best work he ever did in WWF. His offense never looked better, his timing was better utilized, and it was a much more natural fit. He looked more at home taking apart Jimmy Powers in 90 seconds than he did in any 90 seconds of his All American Lex run. Powers was given some good offense in their 1997 encounters, but in 1993 it was all Luger, and he had a tight 90 seconds of material. 

I loved how they started this with Luger flipping out over Powers stealing a pose in his trifold mirror, blindsiding him with an awesome lariat and never letting up. He beats Powers up, and Luger is cool when he's smugly beating people up. He throws Powers chest first into the turnbuckles and lifts him high up for a back suplex, and the bionic forearm he hits would look like one of the sickest match finishers of 2022. Whoever was in production realized this, and we got to see that elbow from several different angles. Luger got up a real head of steam to hit the killshot, and it's a moved that looks as good in real time as it does in slo motion. The best slo mo replay showed Luger holding that elbow in tight to his body, fist to ear, Powers bumping it at the last possible split second. We got robbed of a two year Narcissist run, for nothing. Doctors get in the ring to attend to Powers after the match, Powers selling like he was knocked cold. They could have had Luger murdering men like this all year and built to a huge Bret/Luger title match at Summerslam. What might have been. 

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The 2002 WWF Royal Rumble Match: A Great Royal Rumble Match

ER: I had not watched this Rumble since it originally aired, and I was surprised at just how many specific things I remembered. I have real goldfish brain these days and yet I somehow remembered more about this Rumble than almost any of the 20+ that have happened since. I watched this one specifically for the 2002 Boss Man content. Boss Man was good enough in 2002 that it's worth checking out a 70 minute match for what is no more than a few minutes of Boss Man action. This was his final PPV match appearance before spending the next few months working compelling matches on Heat. Going out like a legend. But this match had a lot more value than just a few minutes of Boss Man. This is one of my favorite Rumbles, one with nothing but great punches and ass kicking. Goldust/Rikishi was a great starting two for this Rumble. Honestly, Goldust making his WWE return and looking this damn good is something that should be brought up every time you talk about Dustin career highlights. He and Rikishi were pacesetters for this, focusing snug punches, fast near eliminations and hard bumps, and at least 15 guys in this Rumble focus on the same. Boss Man is actually the third guy in this whole thing, and in a Rumble where half the men involved made a case for having the best punches in WWF, Big Boss Man made the best case for #1. 

Based on this Rumble alone, the 10 best punchers of 2002 WWF were:

1. Big Boss Man

2. Matt Hardy

3. Val Venis

4. Goldust

5. Perry Saturn

6. Mr. Perfect

7. Chuck Palumbo

8. Christian

9. Scotty 2 Hotty

10. Steve Austin

Goldust/Rikishi/Boss Man makes for a really great fast paced three way, with all taking big bumps and throwing stiff strikes. Goldust gets crotched up top, Boss Man gets whipped into Goldust's groin, and Boss Man slips Rikishi ass over elbow with a running forearm shiver. During his few minutes in the Rumble Match, Boss Man threw upwards of 16 different precise punches to Rikishi's and Goldust's body and face. 

He made the most of his too brief time, then took a real tough elimination: He was the matches' lone Stink Face victim, and it was a particularly aggressive and lengthy, just buried. What were they doing out there. How were we a baby step away from a wrestler being allowed to put his balls in his opponent's mouth or something. Boss Man staggered into a big bump elimination, Rikishi blasting him with a fully extended superkick and a freight train clothesline over the top. I still can't believe how great Boss Man was in 2002. 

Goldust has some of the best in-ring timing of any wrestler of the last 20 years, but we get blessed with an unintentionally hilarious Rumble moment where Goldust starts a corner 10 count punch sequence on Bradshaw at almost the exact same time the countdown clock begins, so you have 13,000 people colliding on numbers with everyone going in different directions. 

Undertaker clearing the ring, laying waste to everyone - Goldust claiming best elimination with his chokeslam bump elimination - was really well done. Undertaker felt like a real force and everyone in 2002 moved like they were somehow injected with extra testosterone. But the best past of Undertaker eating waste was Matt Hardy and Lita beating the shit out of him, and it only got better when Jeff Hardy came in because then all three of them kicked the shit out of him. I wish we got more of that before Taker made his comeback, but I just love the Hardys. The Last Ride on Matt was huge, and Jeff got to distract Taker enough for Maven to make him look like a bug eyed idiot. But they got a lot of good mileage out of the Undertaker/Maven brawl, with Undertaker beating the shit out of the never-eliminated Maven and then walking down the aisle to punch Scott 2 Hotty in the face before just walking back to continue the beating. Maven bleeds and gets dragged into the concourse area, security guards having to actively shove fans out of the way as they crowd in. 

There's a lot of star power, and the guys who get less of a reaction all do stuff to make the crowd pay attention. Christian, DDP, Scotty, Chuck Palumbo, Godfather, Albert, all worked hard for their 1-10 minutes, everyone of them throwing hands and bumping big. DDP had this great tumbling backwards bumps through the ropes after a Scotty superkick; Christian, Palumbo, and Perry Saturn all have a face punching challenge and we are all winners, with Saturn and Chuck especially teeing off on each other. 

The match can be divided up 65/35 between the build to Austin charming the big crowd by running the ring, and the comedown when Austin has to share the ring with HHH. Even though the entire Rumble has good parts, it is top loaded and I like how everyone filled time before HHH was in there. Austin is a great battle royal worker. That's no secret. I love watching him fill time and I loved the gag of him eliminating everyone too quickly, so needing to punch everyone back into the ring to eliminate them again. Austin runs through several guys and it's a weird call to have Val Venis show up for the first time in 8 months and be the first guy in the match to ice down Austin. Turns out, it was a good call. I liked the Austin/Venis stretch so much that I immediately checked for any singles matches they had, and now I'm definitely going to watch their 1999 Smackdown match. I don't think HHH is bad in this Rumble per se, but he's so fucking serious and it kind of spoils all the fun. He's a scowling frowning buzzkill who glowers and sucks the fun out of exchanges, and spends a lot of time lying down and catching his breath. The first 70% of the match is kids having a blast at a sleepover, and the last 30% is like kids still having fun, but it's on a field trip while a teacher keeps telling them to be quiet. 

I really loved this match as Mr. Perfect's last big moment. Making the final three, swatting his gum into the crowd while Austin and HHH try to eliminate. What a guy. Does anyone else swat their gum like they're Mr. Perfect? I think I'd be too afraid of it getting stuck to my hand or whiffing. It takes high levels of confidence to pull Curt Hennig's gum swat success rate. Do you remember the little buzz after Perfect came back after almost a decade? I was on those message boards. I was talking about how great the Perfect/Tommy Dreamer match was on Heat. I didn't know he wouldn't even work 20 matches after that one. Is the Curt Hennig Puerto Rico any good? What about the XWF that he recorded right before returning to WWF? It probably is, and I'll probably watch that along with the Austin/Venis match. This Rumble has a lot of fallout. The push to the finish of the match was exciting enough. Big Show looked really good in the double strap Bundy singlet. Kane lifting, walking, and tossing Big Show over the ropes to eliminate him was legitimately impressive, Kurt Angle had a lot of enthusiasm, the Austin elimination was fairly shocking, and you're left with a 70 minutes match that did not at all feel 70 minutes long. I think that counts as high praise. 

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2002 Big Boss Man Runs Into Bradshaw

Big Boss Man/Mr. Perfect vs. Bradshaw/Faarooq WWF Metal 3/23/02

ER: Okay well this is the match right here. This is the kind of match that makes me want a series, and  makes me mad that most of the Boss Man/Perfect team's existence happened on house shows. Everyone came off tough, a real hardscrabble match that was cooperatively stiff in the best way. Perfect really works heavyweight here, and while he takes the most bumps of anyone they aren't athletic stooge heel bumps, they're hard back bumps off a shoulderblock or powerslam. Perfect and Boss Man cut Bradshaw off from Faarooq, which wasn't the direction I thought this was going, and I liked it. Boss Man is great on the apron, doing his "gotten to" expression to the crowd the first time he's tagged in, stalking up the apron, letting them chant Boss Man Sucks. His feeding into the chant is always so good, because he shuts them up quick by going right in and always punching a guy. Those chants never continue on into the match, he makes sure to quiet them quick, and having a big punch out with Bradshaw is a really cool way to guarantee they stop.

Boss Man and Perfect hit Bradshaw with a hard double shoulderblock, and Perfect is the one that Bradshaw throws around, but not in any kind of dominant way. I dug how Perfect got up quick after taking the fallaway slam, as it actually makes sense that a rolling bump like that wouldn't be as impactful as a suplex bump, and there's a killer tangle where Perfect kind of stops short but Bradshaw snags him and turns it into a hardway suplex. I'm not sure if it was a miscommunication, but I don't think it was, and it just made the spot look way cooler. Faarooq was the big hot tag while Perfect was getting run into the ringside steps, and I like that Faarooq couldn't fully lift Boss Man. He hit a spinebuster but it wasn't clean, but still enough to put a big man down. The most intense moment of the match came right after, when it looked like Faarooq was actually going to hit the freaking DOMINATOR on BOSS MAN! He hits a powerbomb instead - which is great - but my mind was racing at how both of these men just might injure themselves doing a move that I am still stunned was allowed to be used at all. Knowing this match exists should excite you, and it delivered on its potential.

Big Boss Man vs. Bradshaw WWF Heat 4/14/02

ER: First things first, this match is 30 seconds long. Second, it's the greatest 30 second match in wrestling history. I love 4 minute Wire songs, but I also love 45 second Wire songs. I love 2 minute Minutemen songs, but I also love 30 second Minutemen songs. I would certainly love a 5 minute bruise filled good ol boy fight, but Boss Man will also put the same effort and story progression into 30 seconds. It's got everything: Stiff work, loud crowd heat with immediate Boss Man Sucks chants, 8 great punches, a sternum breaking chest bump in the corner, and one highlight reel worthy Clothesline from Hell. It's as much heat and fight and payoff as a 3 minute match. Greatest Hits Played Faster. Boss Man has phenomenal timing, and it makes spots like Bradshaw's missed elbow look that much better. Boss Man hangs into spots like that until the last possible second, Bradshaw committing all of his weight, and before long Boss Man is throwing punches like he's trying to bust Bradshaw's eyebrow. Boss Man got incredible steam on a missed corner charge while everyone in the arena let him know how enthusiastically he siphons, and he turned around just in time to be obliterated by the Clothesline. Big Boss Man: Ultimate Tik Tok Wrestler. 

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Back in Japan, Big Boss Man

Big Boss Man vs. Mighty Inoue AJPW 7/2/93 - FUN

ER: This was Boss Man's first match back in Japan after many years in WWF, and we got a short, simple match, a first night of the tour showcase for him. It's fun seeing Boss Man doing his thing, but even more fun seeing Inoue's brief burst of offense before he got put down. Inoue flubbed the timing on Boss Man's big slide out of the ring-big boot-uppercut combo, rushing in too quickly, so he ran right past Boss Man's boot (though he hit knee so it wasn't bad) and then kind of stood there awkwardly waiting to take the windup uppercut. But Boss Man didn't flinch at the timing injustice and the crowd was into his enthusiasm. Weirdly I think my favorite part of that spot is the missed clothesline that sends him into the corner. He always cuts it super fast, something that would really murder someone if they weren't careful. 

Inoue was not a guy winning singles matches at this point (unless he was up against Eigen or Momota) but it was a great moment when he hit that flying headbutt on the Boss, then another. Boss Man staggered around really great for it, going down briefly to a knee and wobbling before going down hard for the second. Inoue's fast rolling senton is one of the prettiest and coolest moves in wrestling, and I'm not sure anyone did one better than him (including hundreds of luchadors). It's a cool little World of Sport injection into King's Road. It was a nice little run for Inoue that Boss Man both sold well, and also appropriately, when he easily bench pressed Inoue off at 2. The win was never in doubt. This was a "hey we got Boss Man back in All Japan" opening tour match, but it was fun as hell.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE BOSS MAN IN JAPAN

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2002 Boss Man vs. Shawn Michaels(' cousin)

Big Boss Man vs. Michael Shane WWF Metal 2/23/02

ER: Sometimes you just need to see Big Boss Man punch Michael Shane and his weird neon Scott Hall gear around the ring for 3-4 minutes. Boss Man was smart about how to construct a squash match, where Shane wasn't really getting any offense, but his very limited offense built to something within the match. Boss Man worked a similar match against Hurricane, building to one Hurricane bodyslam that got a big crowd reaction, and here he builds a reaction for Shane without actually needing to. Most of the match is Boss Man throwing great knee strikes, using a kneelift to cut off potential charges, and later using a knee to the side of the head while Shane was getting up. 

He interacts with the crowd and encourages the Boss Man Sucks chants with his gotten-to eyes, and encourages them more when he rubs it in their face every time he knocks Shane down. He even goes for a pin and just gets up after a 1 count, not even lifting Shane. Our first peek at Shane offense looks awesome, as he hits a dropkick that sends Boss Man reeling into the bottom and middle ropes, and Boss Man springs back and just sidesteps the next dropkick. 

I love all of Boss Man's strikes, but after watching a lot of later era Boss Man my favorite might be his straight palm strike to the forehead. It's so great to see him rear back and then just palm a guy right above the bridge of the nose. Shane's big moment is good, and it gets a reaction because of the heat Boss Man was getting throughout, with Boss Man missing a hard chest first corner charge and Shane coming off the ropes with a flying forearm. Boss Man goes down, crowd cheers, Michael Shane gets a moment. Plenty of guys in Boss Man's shoes would not have given that moment, and I love how Shane gets fired up enough to do that forearm again and gets caught immediately with a Boss Man Slam. 

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Two Short Timers: 2002 Boss Man vs. Perry Saturn

Big Boss Man vs. Perry Saturn WWF Metal 2/16/02

ER: Both guys were close to being gone from the company at this point, but I was still surprised by Boss Man beating Saturn in barely 2 minutes. Both had no problems mixing things up, and I would have loved to see 5 minutes of this. It's a weird match, as much of it is spent one them reversing Irish whips and punching each other into place. It's like they went out and decided to do a quick match with no moves other than the Boss Man Slam. It is entirely punches and kicks, and it kind of rules. Boss Man showed off all his great strikes, and his 1-2 combo of hitting a hard knee to the gut to buckle a guy then following it up with a straight right to the jaw. It's quickly becoming one of my favorite combos. Boss Man threw hard body shots, a straight right to the chin, and a palm strike right between Saturn's eyes. Saturn hit his cool springboard dropkick off the middle rope, and I really loved that as he kept throwing Boss Man with Irish whips, that he actually looked like he was muscling him. So many Irish whips are a guy barely going through the physical motions, relying on the guy getting whipped to just start running as he's pat on the back. But here's Perry Saturn doing some deep knee bends to show his work, really showing that he was putting his full strength into whipping Boss Man, and it works. I loved the spot where Saturn whips Boss Man into the corner: Boss Man hits the buckles chest first, and Saturn sweeps his legs as he's staggering backward. These two clearly had the material for a longer match, so I can only assume the Metal taping ran long and they had to cut this match short. 

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2002 Boss Man Crashes Into Crash

Big Boss Man vs. Crash Holly WWF Heat 2/3/02

ER: Man, Boss Man was an absolute killer here. He looked amazing, a real bully, every strike looking awesome. It really looked like he was killing Crash out there. It's pretty one sided, yet it's also longer than his other 2002 syndicated matches. Crash kind of worked his brief offense section like he was Pepe-era Chavito, more goofing off than actually going for offense, so the bulk of this was 4 minutes of Boss Man beating his ass around the ring. I am totally okay with that, because Boss Man has nothing but great looking offense, clearly a guy who could still work way above the level he was being used. He has really impressive presence and everything he throws looks lethal. He hits Crash with four different punch variations in the corner, and I have no idea how to pick a favorite. There's the overhand right and the uppercut, but I think my favorite is when he just rears back and pops Crash straight in the forehead. 

Boss Man decks Crash with his sliding punch, throws an all time great cross chop to the throat, and makes something as simple as a running stomp look devastating. He leans into Crash's nice elbow strikes, and drops a great knee right to Crash's temple. At one point he literally just stands on Crash in the corner and it's the greatest thing: One boot on the stomach, one on the throat, just standing on him like a hate filled surfer. Crash takes the kind of beating that makes it look like he's on his way out of the fed, and basically his one bit of offense is a sunset flip that ends on a one count when Boss Man pops him in the eye with his calf. Outside of looking like the best striker of that era WWF, Boss Man shows insane amounts of personality. I laughed out loud watching his reaction to loud "Boss Man Sucks" chants, not getting fired up and yelling back, but instead standing there with his hands on his hips, lips pursed, equal parts annoyance and disappointment. I love this guy. 

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Big Boss Man & the Bodyslam

Big Boss Man vs. The Hurricane WWF Metal 2/2/02

ER: When you have less than 3 minutes to work with it comes off extra impressive to me when you can build to big moments within the minuscule narrative you created. We start with Hurricane trying to just take Boss Man off his feet any way he can, not budging him with a shoulderblock and getting the back of his head elbowed after a couple of failed bodyslam attempts. Boss Man throws Hurricane around with real strength, a nice mix of Boss Man's power and Hurricane's big bumping, and Boss Man's right hand variations in the corner look real mean. Boss Man had a limited moveset at this point but was super smart about utilizing every little movement and making stories out of those movements. Here, Molly hits him with a missile dropkick behind Nick Patrick's back and slips out of the ring, but Boss Man uses his slide to the floor to chase after her, sliding out of the ring and chasing her back in, and upon sliding back in Hurricane intercepts him and uses his chase momentum to actually hit that bodyslam. The crowd erupted for that bodyslam like Hurricane had just won the match, or even a title. Hurricane tries to take it too far and hit the chokeslam, but Boss Man shrugs him off, sends him into the ropes, and puts him away with the Boss Man Slam. How many throwaway bodyslams have you seen in all your years of watching wrestling, and here's Boss Man constructing a short match to make one actually feel like a major highspot. That's the story here.

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2002 Boss Man vs. 2002 Ass Man

Big Boss Man vs. Rikishi WWF Smackdown 1/24/02 

ER: I loved this one and wish we got more. Boss Man at this point was 80% punches, but the man had several excellent punch variations and still moved quick for such a big guy, so it worked great as a style. The only cruelty of this match is that it's merely 3 minutes, meaning Rikishi had to kind of quickly take things home after being worked over the entire match. Also, Jacqueline was the ref for some reason (which at minimum looked cool as it made both guys look that much larger). It all starts with a good lock up, one of those lockups where they really shove and walk each other around the ring, until Rikishi backs Boss Man into a corner and Boss Man responds with a two cross-handed throat thrusts, then proceeds with overhand rights to the eye and uppercuts to that neck. He does the Boss Man slide to the floor and decks him with another punch, then starts throwing actual open hand tomahawk chops to Rikishi's throat!! These chops are nasty as hell and I am all about Boss Man: Throat Offense. He throws an axe bomber so Rikishi can do his big flipping bump, and Boss Man even gets deep into his law enforcement gimmick by kneeling on Rikishi's throat and refusing to break! That is the kind of legitimacy I appreciate from a wrestling gimmick. This would have benefitted from a little back and forth, as it was Boss Man beating down Rikishi for the first 2/3, until Rikishi responds to a strong shot by just superkicking Boss Man's lights out, hitting a big Earthquake splash, then dragging him to the corner for a Banzai Drop. You throw in 1-2 more transitions and this is an under 5 minute classic, but as is it still rules.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE WWF 305 LIVE

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On Brand Segunda Caida: More 2002 Big Boss Man

Big Boss Man vs. DDP WWF Smackdown 1/17/02

ER: This era Boss Man really the master at taking 80% (or more) of a match and still letting his opponent plausibly beat him. Boss Man and DDP doesn't have to be an 80/20 match, but I liked how Boss Man turned it into one by using two different attacks out of the ref's view. Early in the match while the ref is trying to break them up, Boss Man punches DDP in the orbital bone to take initial control; late in the match he gets backed into a corner by DDP, and when Teddy Long leans in to tell DDP to break the hold, Boss Man uppercuts him right in the balls. All of Boss Man's offense looked great, like his big spinebuster, his awesome hot shot on the turnbuckle (after punching DDP's balls), and the punch exchanges between the two were fire! Boss Man's punches were the best in 2002 WWF (and that was when they had a roster of cool punchers in all weight classes) and DDP trades back and forth really well with him. At one point DDP just punches Boss Man in the chest to stun him, and that's the kind of thing you don't see anymore unless it's part of an overcomplicated combo. Much of DDP's offense comes from strong reversals or dodges of Boss Man, like a sleeper turned into a nasty jawbreaker, and it makes a lot of sense to make those kind of openings. Boss Man doesn't lay out for the Diamondcutter, taking it more like a Stunner, but the way he took it really made it look like a lot more snap was being done to his neck. Taking the flat stomach bump looks cooler, but I liked the painful way he took this one.

Big Boss Man vs. Shawn Stasiak WWF Metal 1/19/02

ER: Right out the chute this project is getting Shawn Stasiak's name in print for the first time on Segunda Caida. If nothing else, we'll always have that at least. Boss Man is wearing the riot squad gear (would have been awesome if he came back in Big Bubba attire for this run), but there's some confusion around the face/heel dynamics. Boss Man got a good reaction coming out, possibly because the aesthetics of his gimmick play much better in the south (this was in Texas). However, Stasiak was the de facto babyface here, meaning fans were put in a position to cheer Stasiak over Boss Man, which is tough because I cannot imagine many people cheering Stasiak over anybody. They do some things that feel like they would be expressly forbidden in modern WWE, namely Boss Man getting into it with a ringside fan (that guy who wears the same gas station shirt who was profiled on Confidential). It felt like the same way a guy would get heat on a southern indy show, and it just makes me nostalgic for seeing southern wrestling played to an 8,000 strong crowd. Stasiak even gets to go out and side with gas station guy and it feels like the crowd is suddenly far more invested in this. Could you see any wrestler today ever acknowledging or trying to start something with that one fan who sits front row with his mom every show? Boss Man was still really fast, and a lot of this was built around his speed, whether he was bailing quickly out of the ring or unable to slow a charge due to his size/speed combo, and some of his fast bumps were impressive. His offense is made up almost entirely of punches, which is perfectly fine because he still has a great uppercut and overhand right. I wish this one was not so driven by Stasiak offense, as he just wasn't very good and always landed too rigid on nearly everything he did. His crossbody looked like an ironing board being thrown at Boss Man and his leaping back elbow looked like he bounced off Boss Man instead of knocking Boss Man down. This was the last of the Shawn Stasiak I will be reviewing.

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An Exhaustingly Exhaustive Review of WWF Royal Rumble 1/24/93, Pt. 1

I started reviewing Royal Rumble 1993 and thought it would be a quick little thing, but sometimes projects spiral and the words flow more than they should, and I was left with a behemoth of a show review. Part 1 comes today, Part 2 comes tomorrow: 

Beverly Brothers vs. The Steiner Brothers

When you see a Steiners/Beverlys match on paper, this is the match you hope it's going to be. It's 10 minutes and an excellent Beverlys performance. These guys all work snug, we get a great stretch of the Beverlys isolating Scott, and we build to Enos and Bloom betting annihilated on a Rick hot tag. Bloom and Enos are pure wrestling joy, mixing a cheapshit house style with the insane bumps and highspots of a big PPV tag. Bloom complains about hair and tight pulls after every huge biel and takedown he takes from Scott, but has no problem turning on a dime to whip Scott to the mat and then rock him with a gorgeous long uppercut when he gets to his feet. But Enos is so good on the apron while Bloom is doing his thing, and the match really gives us a look at how complementary they were as a team, not just their in-ring style but their personalities. Bloom was like the prep school shit with rich parents and no consequences, and Enos is his slightly less rich dumb jock friend. It's a great energy. 

When Enos tags in he does some incredible dumb jock stuff, shoving Rick on the apron one hand to the chest like a real idiot, and then running away! In a great moment that would get a huge reaction on any show, Rick tags in and immediately knocks Bloom off the apron as he jogs by. But just like Bloom, even as Enos is getting punked by Rick, he also gives it back big. Enos and Rick have some great stuff together, great timing. They really nail this one stretch where Enos hits this great high rotation powerslam, cuts low on a clothesline and really tries to take Rick's legs out with a dropdown, does a great leapfrog...but of course gets caught mid-air by Rick and dumped. Enos was something else in this one. He took some of the most dangerous bumps in WWF PPV history, just a crazy willingness to lean all the way into STEINER BROTHERS OFFENSE. He gets thrown by Scott with an overhead belly to belly that almost plants him squarely on the top of his head (and close enough that Gorilla and Heenan go momentarily silent), but this match is so good because Bloom runs right in and just WASTES Scott with a lariat. These teams are laying in and this match should really be talked about as one of the upper tier WWF tags of the decade. 

The Beverlys are really good at cutting Scott off from Rick, dropping backbreakers and ax handles and Bloom elbowdrops, quick tags, hard elbows, Enos choking Scott with the tag rope, all of it the kind of shit you want to see them doing to Scott Steiner. The crowd noise builds perfectly through all of it because these Sacramento fans know that Rick is going to blow this ring up, and there is a fantastic late cut off of a Scott tag attempt that quiets the crowd down so damn quick, just perfectly timed by Bloom. After the hot tag was denied, Heenan has a hilarious bit about how Rick didn't actually want the tag because he's "a known coward". Heenan had this great ongoing thing where he would matter of factly call someone a coward as if it's a thing everyone knows, and Gorilla reacts to it every single time, and I laugh my ass off every single time. 

The Rick hot tag is as good as expected, and Mike Enos really went through one of the most insane wrestling minutes I've seen. Enos takes a backdrop bump as high as any Rick Rude backdrop, then takes arguably the most disgusting German suplex in WWF history. The match's one flaw just might be that Enos is picked up for the next spot almost immediately by Rick, not giving *that* German suplex any time to settle in. If I saw a man the size of Enos take that suplex bump live, a match stoppage would have seemed appropriate. It's a crazy spot that - once they saw Enos was moving of his own accord - they should have shown a dozen times from every angle. The finish stretch is crazy, with Bloom wiping out on an awesome missed top rope clothesline and a great Scott victory roll for a near win. But Enos takes his legendary performance somehow one step further, and takes the match finishing Frankensteiner better than any man has ever taken the Frankensteiner. Enos goes vertical on it, sticking the landing in a way that made people immediately leap up, as if he hadn't just been thrown for the most disgusting suplex a minute earlier. Mike Enos is a goddamn lunatic and I genuinely don't know what 90s WWF tag matches you can genuinely put over this one. Total classic. 

Shawn Michaels vs. Marty Jannetty

ER: It's unfortunate, but Marty Jannetty's ring gear has to be the worst ring gear in my time as a wrestling fan. Right? I don't know. There are other, good contenders. Maybe it isn't actually the worst. But, if not the worst, then at minimum I can say that there has never been any other wrestling gear that makes me feel the vicarious embarrassment that Marty Jannetty's 1993 Royal Rumble gear makes me feel. Sure, maybe that's hypocritical of me, seeing as how I lose my mind any time a wrestler shows up covered in tassels. When Jerry Estrada takes that bump over the top and his ocean waves of tassel crash into the shore as his body crashes into the concrete, I'm in wrestling heaven. Marty Jannetty just takes it too far. Maybe that's a good thing. Marty Jannetty may have established a Tassel Barrier in this match, and that's an important thing. It's good to know how far we as humans can, or should, go. And Marty established that we should not go here. 

Marty's gear looks like a child tried to make their own Tron suit out of torn toilet paper. If you pause the screen at the right moments, his ring entrance looks like Max Moon being drawn into A-Ha's "Take On Me" video. It is a hideous ensemble, and I thought it was hideous before I realized it's a two piece. Who crafted this entrance-attire-only blouse? Who crafted this blouse that looks like the most toilet-papered tree on Halloween? Can you imagine Marty Jannetty trying on his new gear in a small tailor's shop, analyzing all the angles in a full frame trifold vanity mirror, while a slender hunched old Italian man marks his hems with chalk? Well, turns that trifold mirror was cursed, and that mirror cursed Jannetty for the rest of his career. If you ever wondered why Marty Jannetty shows up in 1998 WCW looking like Enuff Z'Nuff's rhythm guitarist, lost and scared in a strange new grunge world, that's why. That mirror is why.

The match itself is weird. It has an excellent layout which gets the crowd downright rabid for the finishing stretch, but it's also filled with weak offense and stunt bumping that doesn't correlate to that weak offense. Michaels pinballs for every single punch Jannetty throws, and they are ridiculous bumps for what Jannetty is putting out there. Michaels gets bumped to the floor off a kneelift and Jannetty hits a tope that winds up looking like a couple trying to hold each other up at the skating rink before both slip and fall. But things get downright silly when Jannetty hits a flying punch off the top to the floor, and Michaels does a triple salchow to sell it. Now, I love a good flying fist or an absurd fistdrop, but there comes a tipping point where it probably makes a lot more sense to use your body to attack an opponent than just your fist. Marty's entire body crashes and burns off to the side while his fist grazes past Michaels' hair, and Michaels spins to the mat like Bear Hugger. A crossbody block would have lead to a safer bump for both AND would have read much better to the crowd, but wrestler offense is a funny thing. This is not as bad as that piece of Marufuji offense where he would tap his opponents' head into the top turnbuckle while hurling his own body out over the ringpost to the floor - as if Mitch Williams had not just fallen off the mound after a delivery but also continued rolling and tumbling all the way to the dugout - but it was incredibly stupid. So of course Marty does it again and Michaels punches him out of the air. Now, don't get me wrong, if some lunatic did a fistdrop off the top rope to the floor I would praise them as a wrestling offense god, in the same way I will always flip out seeing El Samurai or Makoto Hashi doing diving headbutts off the top to the floor. So now, not only are my takes on tassels hypocritical, I am also a hypocrite about what offense I enjoy and what level of stupidity I expect and demand out of it. Perhaps there's a boomerang effect where a fistdrop can keep getting more and more complicated until it gets very stupid, before becoming incredible again: 

1. Any kind of fistdrop from a standing position falling onto your opponent = Great

2. Fistdrop leaping off the middle turnbuckle = Outstanding

3. Fistdrop leaping off the top rope into the ring = Seems unnecessarily risky to your knees but fuck yeah

4. Fistdrop off the top rope to a standing opponent on the floor = You fucking idiot

5. Fistdrop off the top rope to the floor while opponent is on his back = You goddamn genius

The stretch of Michaels working over Marty's arm is satisfying (including a rough posting), but even all of that just builds to another stupid spot, which is Michaels coming off the middle rope and landing, standing, face first into Jannetty's boot, with no indication of what kind of move he would have hit had Marty not gotten that boot up. See, the twists and turns and momentum shifts all happen at the exact right place, except half (or more?) of the offense looks like incomprehensible bullshit. It's a cool exercise in seeing how fired up a crowd can get when you're hitting all of the turns of a match this well, that you can really give them any slop offense and - as long as you're shifting momentum at the right time - they will be right there screaming. 

When people remember this as a great match (Meltzer gave it 4 stars, and if Jungle Boy and Rocky Romero worked this note for note exact same match with dog ball's worse offense, it's impossible to see him going less than 4 stars on it), they remember it from the moment Sherri slaps Shawn thru the series of close pinfalls. When Sherri slaps Shawn the ARCO Arena explodes, and Shawn does his best selling of the match. When Marty drags him back in Michaels immediately takes his craziest/best bump of the match, taking the HHH backwards corner bump faster than anyone should ever take that bump, and Marty drags him back in again. The crowd really thought they were seeing a title change, so every single nearfall plays huge, deservedly so. Shawn missing a superkick only to get put down hard by a Marty superkick really did feel like the finish, possibly because it was the only bump Michaels took that wasn't in three parts, just put him down on the mat. The shenanigans at the finish play out too quickly and a bit too ham-fisted, with Shawn throwing a wide elbow on a punch to take out the ref, and Sherri accidentally hitting Marty with her heel. Shawn hits a superkick, Marty takes a ridiculous flip bump that felt mostly disconnected from the kick, and that's it. It's a great match with an incredible amount of flaws: some of the most detached bumps and goofball offense choices, and yet a match that earned the big crowd reactions. 

Bam Bam Bigelow vs. The Big Boss Man

ER: This is a great three match series to start a PPV with, a great hour of pro wrestling, with three very different matches. The is a match that of course I was excited for, two of the biggest coolest shaped guys at some real in-ring peaks. 1993 was a great in-ring year for both of these guys, Bigelow an adventurous big man with a big gas tank, and Boss Man hitting a legendary peak with his post-WWF All Japan tours. 1993 Boss Man was the best combination of size and speed, slimmed way down from his 1989 biggest, but much bigger than his 1998 WWF return. 1993 was when Boss Man was shaped exactly like his Hasbro figure. Bam Bam Bigelow has the best shape in wrestling and Boss Man has night stick work that makes him look like a cool gigantic American King of Fighters character. They move fast and they hit hard, basking in the salad days of big fat men. 

There's a ton of movement and it always leads to a big crash, and a lot of this is worked at a super crazy pace for two guys this size to keep. There's fast rope running and fast spots, like Bigelow lifting Boss Man up for a huge back suplex, but then faceplanting hard on a missed falling headbutt when Boss Man sits up right after. Bam Bam has really high impact avalanches and starts the match story early when he starts throwing shots at Boss Man's back, with a fist to the back knocking Boss Man forward through the ropes. Right before them, Jannetty and Michaels thought of the bump they were going to do and then kept doing it regardless of the offense, but Bigelow and Boss Man really knock each other down and fall in some big ways. Bigelow drops Boss Man with a huge hot shot that looks like Boss Man is going to go crashing right into the camera; Boss Man has this great high speed clotheslines to knockdown Bigelow, and then at least 25 different punches to knock him around to different parts of the ring. Boss Man was a great puncher who isn't talked about enough as a great puncher. He has great uppercuts, great aim (he can pick a target on the chin and not show light), and can throw them close or long range. He slides to the floor for a big right hand, gives the fans a corner 10 count, throws hard mounted punches, all great. 

But it's not enough to work great through the fast paced sections, you also have to time out the cool down sections so the fast sections peak, and they do that really well. It's a great transition because it happens with a spectacular spot: Boss Man missing a charge and taking a fast, impressive bump to the floor, appearing to smash his back on the edge of the ring apron on the way down. Commentary picks up on it the second it happens and Bigelow immediately moves to focus entirely on Boss Man's back, as if everyone knew Boss Man was going to take a sick bump back first off the apron. Bigelow works the back with some real effective stuff, grabbing an awesome reverse waistlock bearhug and throwing headbutts to grind Boss Man down. Boss Man's comeback has some nice detail work, with a great spot where he is able to pull off a vertical suplex, but it's a messier suplex that wasn't as effective due to his back being weakened, so Bigelow beats him to his feet. It's such a great thread to put into a match: working a Too Convincing back injury on a suitably dangerous looking spot, like Chris Hamrick setting up knee work by violently tangling his knee in the ropes. The only weak point of the match is that it wraps up a little too easily and suddenly, the match almost disappointing by coming to its logical conclusion: Bigelow weakening Boss Man enough to slam him and hit the diving headbutt. It's where everything was heading, Boss Man was getting weaker, and then Bigelow put him down. I think one more Boss Man nearfall hope spot could have put this on a much higher level, but this was a great 10 minutes.  

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

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On Brand Segunda Caida: 2002 Big Boss Man

 Big Boss Man was brought back to WWF in late 2001 in what I can only assume was a classic WWF "Hey it's December and we probably need a couple more options to flesh out the Rumble in a month" move. After returning in a Smackdown feud against Steve Austin he was almost immediately relegated to the syndicated weekend shows. This would be how his final WWF run would play out (while being there just long enough to bridge the gap from WWF to WWE). Metal was on at 1 AM Saturday nights (right after WCW Worldwide at midnight) and it felt like I was the only person watching these shows. My college radio show was midnight to 2 AM, so I would record Metal and Worldwide, get Taco Bell on the way home, and soak in the syndicated wrestling while wolfing down double decker tacos. I had fond memories of this little 2002 Boss Man run and wanted to see how it held up.

Big Boss Man/Booker T vs. Steve Austin/The Rock WWF Raw 1/7/02

ER: Boss Man came back and was put immediately into a pretty high profile program opposite the two biggest stars in wrestling, but would be found exclusively on the weekend syndicated programs just a month later. And Boss Man is clearly the glue of this fast paced, crowd pleasing match. Now, a match with the two biggest stars in wrestling shouldn't really need much glue, and this packed MSG crowd would have been happy just having both of them out here saying catchphrases, Stunner, People's Elbow, middle fingers, Steveweisers, etc. Instead we get 8 super fun minutes where the winners were never in doubt and the winners took 80% of the match, while Boss Man worked to make sure the momentum didn't die down. When Booker came in, he was mostly doing exchanges with Rock; Boss Man was the one trying to tie everything together, taking all the big bumps (he ate a clothesline to the floor from Rock, got punched off the apron by Austin and did a tremendous sprinkler spit spray as he was falling, then got knocked down again when he tried to get up on the apron shortly after). 

2002 Boss Man was really great at credibly playing a big man getting his ass kicked. He went up for two different Austin spinebusters, flew hard into the Thesz press, went over on a heavy Austin backdrop, and had better timing than anyone in the match. I had forgotten how sloppy Rock was during this era, really hitting a lot of his moves at 50% and expecting his opponent to make it work (Booker has to belly to belly suplex himself and had to bump a crossbody that looked like Rock couldn't decide between clothesline or crossbody so just did a terrible version of both combined), but Booker and Boss Man were good at making it work! Boss Man was great at getting heat from a crowd who wanted only to cheer Austin and didn't so much care about heels, but Boss Man was good at making sure those face reactions were even louder. It's hard to work interesting Heel in Peril segments, but he did, and his punches on Rock in the corner were among my favorite parts of the match.

Big Boss Man vs. Edge WWF Smackdown 1/10/02

ER: This was so awesome, Boss Man was the master of 3 minute matches with unique structures during this era. This was a one sided massacre, Boss Man one step ahead of Edge, and it was a smart match. He launched Edge with two different beals, cut off every offense Edge tried (catching a nice crossbody and dropping him with a great backbreaker), bullies him around the ring with several perfect punches, throws in a kneelift and chokes Edge down to the mat. We get the cool as hell Boss Man slide, an impossibly perfect baseball slide for a 300 pounder, before belting Edge. I love the way Edge's comeback and win is set up, with Boss Man totally dominating and then going to the floor for his night stick. The timing on this next spot was so well done, as Boss Man gets back into the ring with the stick, Teddy Long reaches out to grab it, and while the baton is being held by both Long and Boss Man, Edge nails him with a spear. Boss Man is so smart about setting up those kind of timing spots, always nails the mark. Even better was how he gets knocked into the ropes, bouncing back into an Edge spinning heel kick. Boss Man gets knocked and bounces off the lower ropes, springing back in time to eat that kick. He doesn't always go to that low rope bump, but when he does it always makes sense for the move he's selling. He's able to make Edge's silly "I grab your head and pull you backwards" look plausible, and the Edgecution on the night stick is a neat twist on the finisher.

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