Found Footage Friday: WWF 1998~! AUSTIN~! TOO SEXY~! AGUILA~! FAAROOQ~! CACTUS~! TAFKA GOLDUST~! QUEBECERS~!

WWF House Show Anaheim 3/13/98

Mr. Aguila vs. Brian Christopher

MD: This was the good stuff. I can't imagine anything else on the show is going to reach this level. Christopher was as on as a human being could possibly be. Fascinating reactions to things, fascinating creative choices. He went for a German out of the corner and Aguila landed on his feet. Yet he celebrated like he had just tossed him across the ring. Surely, he would have felt... well, no matter. Then he ate a massive dive and sold his throat for some reason. I enjoyed it. He had some really nice offense too, not just the power bomb down the stretch but a Stroke and this Bulldog which for some reason Aguila decided to sell by compacting himself in a seated spot. Story of his comeuppance was going for the same thing twice and then having it backfire on him in the most spectacular way possible (bulldog #2 let to him crotched in the corner). Really, this was Christopher wound up and given room to run as fast and as far as possible to amazing results.

ER: I love how long they both took coming to the ring. We've never seen Aguila take this long to walk to the ring, and because of that this is the most we have ever heard of Aguila's music. This is the clearest this theme has ever been played. We're learning more about WWF Aguila than ever before, as this is also a clear beautiful look at his gear. This is a GREAT set of gear on Aguila, great use of bright color against white, Lisa Frank color with a clean white canvas. He uses that canvas to paint something beautiful, like the sequence where he knocked Christopher down with a spinning heel kick, hit an effortlessly high floating dropkick to knock him to the floor, then hit an incredible twisting moonsault press to the floor. Cleanest shit ever. 

Christopher was great at setting up his own offense and Aguila's. His set up and execution of the Stroke, rolling Aguila through and firmly planting him, got a stunned reaction and he knew it, soaking in the crowd's hate even more than normal. His messy bulldog (complimentary) nicely set up Aguila shoving him off the next bulldog, balls first into the turnbuckles. The elbowdrop Aguila dropped right on Christopher's face after he dropped to the mat was the best...or was it the best when Christopher hopped to his feet running in place selling that the elbowdrop smashed his nose. How often did we get to see Christopher use two different powerbomb variations in WWF? Funny that I'm seeing it on a house show. Both men covered from the blown spot well, Christopher worked as base for luchadors far better than anyone could have expected. 

Steve Blackman vs. Faarooq

MD: Farooq looked really good here. Just tons of presence. He called everyone ugly on the mic to start, then got Blackman to pose, lured him into the corner and hit a spinning heelbutt I've never seen him do. It was just the way he carried himself. He went for a handshake and Blackman kicked it away but then he got him to run right into the spinebuster slam. Most of his offense was just tossing Blackman out so D-Lo and Henry could beat on him, and Blackman won far, far too soon with a small package out of nowhere, but Farooq looked great in the few minutes we got here, just like the savviest wrestler going. Post-match there was Nation dissension and Rocky ran out and drew chants to try to calm everything down.  

ER: Faarooq looked so damn good here. As someone who's been throwing 1998 WWF on as a break from 1997 WCW, I can attest that this is the best Faarooq looks in the ring in the entire first half of '98. Was he saving it all for the house shows? I'm so confused. He had a really cool Raw match against Shamrock in January '98, so maybe we just weren't getting enough Faarooq against shooters? Honestly, this is one of the greatest NATION performances we have. This is more than just the leader, this is everybody contributing. Faarooq is out here channeling Jungle Jim Kelly with a corner spinkick that he never otherwise used, showing off his peoples' karate to some white karate champ, while his whole team is putting in great work. How about Mark Henry throwing fucking BODY shots full arm into Blackman's stomach? Mark Henry is in baggy light wash jeans and a leather vest and is so wide it's insane. He looks like prom night Shaq. Kama and D-Lo put the boots to Blackman and Kama throws one of the best punches he's ever thrown. Faarooq's singlet doesn't get enough credit for being as elegant as it was. A truly great piece of pro wrestling gear. The simple band diagonally across his torso and the confidence to have so much of the singlet all black. This is confidence. Blackman's inside cradle finish was so slick and so well executed that it played as a finish just as well as Ogawa beating Akiyama, but this was a whole damn Nation show.

Cactus Jack vs. Billy Gunn [Falls Count Anywhere] 

MD: This was great fun. Just constant motion with weapon shots and big bumps all around and stooging from Gunn. Gunn landing on the outstretched chair and taking a goofy flopping bump was one of my favorite Billy Gunn things ever. The transitions were otherwise basically of convenience. Gunn would roll out on the Mandible Claw. He'd roll Cactus back in and Jack would take over in the corner with punches and the running knee, etc. So it wasn't exactly rocket science, but it was still very enjoyable and the sort of thing people weren't going to get on TV. 

ER: Also as part of my 1998 rewatch, I have become a much bigger fan of Billy Gunn than ever before. Did I contribute to the not-long-ago Billy Gunn discourse online? I sure did. I don't know why we didn't give him credit for what he was doing in '98 while it was happening, but damn has his work aged well. This man is a true stooge who is incredible at setting up opponents and taking a lot of damage. All of that is on display here, and all of it plays perfectly off Cactus. Gunn is the best part of the brawl on the floor, the way he hits the ring steps for max volume, the way he flops around on all his bumps and the way he and Cactus get so dirty after a suplex. Why is the floor of the Arrowhead Pond so damn filthy!? Was this a cowboy bar on days the Ducks weren't playing and they needed to fill the arena with sawdust? Gunn and Cactus get so covered in dust that they look like they're on a crew who hauls asbestos out of office buildings. 

Gunn is the perfect foil for all of Cactus's offense, from the violent to the absurd. He leans into Jack's best punches and holds firm to take a running knee in the corner. He gets tossed through a table in the corner and later takes a hard whip into the table he broke. But he is at his best getting over through absurdity, and that is on full display when he gets his balls salad tonged by Cactus and the crowd loses their damn minds for it. Gunn lays Cactus out with a chair and lays the chair over his face, setting up a fistdrop off the middle buckle - he even kisses his fist, which is some expert fistdrop knowledge from a guy who I've never see do a fistdrop before - that is of course reversed when Cactus raises the chair to meet Billy. Gunn's running in place face flop to sell the absurdity was divine. His two big pieces of offense looked great, snapping off a piledriver with real torque and sticking the not-yet-named Fameasser when Cactus ducks his head. For the finish, I loved Billy's kickout attempt after taking the double arm DDT on a chair. No life in the legs, no chance of kickout, but a visual attempt to roll his shoulder up at 3 that didn't take away from any of the violent and/or silly damage he took. 

Mark Mero vs. Chainz

MD: No idea how they thought this was going to work. The only babyface out there was Sable (and someone was whistling for her the whole match). Mero's entrance was over with all the lights and Sable was very over in general, getting her own chant as the match started. Mero played to the crowd, especially when it came to her. Chainz was just there, a de facto babyface who didn't get a shine (he tossed Mero out right at the start). Mero's shots and knees and what not looked good, but no one wanted to see Chainz work up from a chinlock (even being choked by wrist tape). He had a brief comeback but missed a Bombs Away kneedrop and ate the TKO. Probably good to see the state of the Mero/Sable act in a setting like this but this was doomed from the start.

ER: Chainz was definitely the babyface here, he was just the least defined character of the DOA. Part of this was because he didn't have a nazi twin, part of it was having a Z in his name like he was a member of the Burger King Kids Club. But he was a babyface at this point of 1998, even if that was mostly because DOA were in a regular feud with the Nation and WWF crowds were definitely going to be in the corner of DOA for reasons beyond face/heel alignment. Would a heel have the kind of shiny, lustrous hair that Chainz had? 

I thought the match worked really well with Chainz as babyface, throwing strong punches that Mero took like a great overpowered heel. I was also surprised at how fast Mero bumped to the floor when Chainz threw him through the ropes. Both men bump real well for the other. Mero goes down hard for a shoulderblock and clothesline, Chainz takes a shockingly cool bump when Mero snaps his neck over the ropes. He took it the exact same way Jimmy Hart took his apron bumps, and bumping was an underrated part of Chainz' game. Yes, I realize while typing that that every part of Chainz' game was underrated, because there isn't a person reading this who can clearly picture their favorite WWF Chainz moments. What did Chainz use as a finisher? I can't ever recall him winning a match during this run. But in the couple months around WrestleMania this year, he seemed like a guy who was trying for the last time to be noticed. We're not counting that weird stretch in TNA where he was losing 10 pounds a week until he was all teeth and jawbone and his hair started suffering from vitamin deficiency, I mean that he was trying to stand out to someone in WWF who might notice. 

Go watch how much Chainz puts himself out there in the DOA vs. DX vs. Boricuas chain match angle from Raw 4/13/98 (I fully understand if you do not do this) and it was clear he was trying to be noticed by someone. Was it me? Was it me, Chainz, noticing you 25 years after the fact? I love what you did against Marc Mero, Chainz. I loved your missed kneedrop off the middle buckle, and loved you leaning in to take Mero's kneelift to the side of the head rather than to your breadbasket. Nobody else took Mero's kneelift this way, only you Chainz. And it looked really good! I am a noticer, always noticing things. Your effort was true. 

Steve Austin vs. Hunter Hearst Helmsley 

MD: I haven't actually written out the word "Helmsley" in a very long time. It still has a red underline under it. I'm not going back to check. Let me dump in some of the personal stuff here actually. I didn't watch a hell of a lot of wrestling from ~93-98. I remember seeing Hogan turn on scramblevision. Mania XIV was in Boston (I lived in a suburb) so with the public workout and everything, people were buzzing about it at High School and that's when I more or less got back into it, right around here.

That said, I don't go back to 98 WWF much. If we had more house shows, maybe it'd be different. What I have seen tends to be C-Shows. So I haven't seen these guys from this particular year in a long time. And it's fascinating just to see Austin move. I'm more used to the Austin of a couple of years earlier or a couple of years later, but here he was a superstar just ready to get the belt and carry the company. He conducted the crowd and fed off of them. It was a house show. The act hadn't quite calcified yet. So he was a little looser but it didn't feel pandering in any way. 

What I'll say about Hunter here is that he was very giving. His character didn't earn a single thing. He got everything through cheating or Chyna or chance. I imagine it wouldn't have carried through quite as well if TV cameras were on but he let himself be genuinely vulnerable in a way that, after a certain point, he never did genuinely again. And he came off as a better, more effective heel because of it. 

Early on they did a couple of hammerlock bits which were very good. Great back elbow and fun punch out of them. That's probably what I will remember out of this as much as anything else. Austin had to fight his way back from some legwork, but he did. The finish was wonky, overthought. Even vulnerable Hunter is still Hunter. It did six or seven things (too complicated a set up for the comeback with a double down that wasn't really needed, shrugging of the stunner the first time, a ref bump, Chyna, etc.) when one or two would have hit so much better. Still, the good in here was quite good.

ER: Man, I loved this. I loved this. I thought it was great. Austin was flat out incredible and constant motion towards something More, while HHH turned in what might be his best performance of the year. I have seen enough Austin/HHH matches and don't think they always work well as opponents, primarily because of HHH, but this was tremendous and a perfect use of time. If you dare, go ahead and check out their brutally long match a few weeks later from Mayhem in Manchester, and you can see a HHH with no idea how to treat a match against Austin. Here? Like night and day, roles defined perfectly and not a single wasted movement by either. HHH was not attempting to work cool heel, he was just feeding and setting things up for Austin to knock down, which he did spectacularly. The work over Austin's perpetually injured knee/s was interesting, and the ways Austin moved around that knee work was amazing. It's crazy how active Austin was in this era. 

For a guy who would eventually be surrounded by go go go wrestlers, it's wild how much he went went went without making his actual work feel empty and forgotten. It's funny whenever I see Austin talked about as a guy who "didn't do much" in the ring. Maybe that's referring to his "small moveset" (silly) but I watch the guy and see someone who is constantly doing something. Austin is a very active wrestler and this 12 minute and change format is perfect for him to craft this active, cool story. I loved every beat of this. When Hunter was getting his ass kicked, he was actually getting his ass kicked. This was not a self-service stooge performance from Hunter, he wasn't yet at the time where he was "showing people he could work down" he was just the heel taking a beating. Early, Austin rocks him so good with a back elbow to break a hammerlock that I had to rewind it a few times, both to see the elbow and to see the actual anger in Hunter's face. That's how a heel should look when a tough babyface elbows him in his big nose. And, while it didn't smash Hunter's nose, Austin's falling elbow is one of the greatest pieces of offense in wrestling history. What an incredible magic trick. This wife beating beer drinking Texas rattlesnake also figured out how to work an incredibly dangerous elbow, pointed directly at someone's throat and never showing a sliver of light, in a way that looks like he's collapsing a man's trachea. The trust he built with that elbow is incredible, and earned. 

When things settle down into Hunter working the knee, I loved the way Austin would stay in the match while selling, never settling into a long Hunter control sequence (because Austin rightly understood that Hunter has next to no ideas how to control things for that long), which fits perfectly into Austin's style. He is a fighter, a man who wants to constantly advance and who will keep after you after losing a limb, and that's how he sells the leg. There is an incredible spot, my personal favorite moment on this show, where Austin misses a clothesline and falls forward into the ropes, recovering in time for Hunter to kick him straight in the knee. The way Austin missed this clothesline pays such perfect attention to detail, every frame looking like a man who threw to connect, falling into the ropes because your missed momentum carried you there. His fall into the ropes looked like a man who hadn't considered he would ever miss that clothesline. Only the top 0.1% of wrestlers can miss offense with that kind of conviction. 

Chyna's involvement was the perfect amount as well, as her presence was always acknowledged while her threats were mostly implied. When she finally elbow smashes Austin from the floor it played as one of the best moments of an already excellent match. When she finally gets in the ring for the finish, the crowd was rabid for any kind of involvement from her. The way they played Chyna's first year in the company was an incredible use of restraint, totally unimaginable today. Austin's greatest feat in this match is actually making Hunter's goof ass Flair/Race cosplay bumps mean something other than "now is the time Hunter can show that he has watched several Flair/Race matches". His rolling upside down bump in the corner is almost always shoehorned into a match, but here felt like the best possible use and execution, adding an off the rails feel to Austin's comeback fire. 

I honestly don't think I could name 10 better matches in 1998 WWF. If these house shows keep coming, maybe eventually we'll be able to name 20 better. 

Godwinns vs. DoA [Country Whipping]

MD: Three minutes. The fans didn't really care at all until a couple of hard Godwinn shots in the ring towards the end. I was off thinking why they didn't get a couple more hillbillies (Moondog Splat was still active in 97?) and have them as part of the whole gang wars thing. And then I blinked and there was a slop drop and the thing was over. On some level this was kind of Death Valley Days coded. Just guys whipping the hell out of each other for three minutes and going home. If Phil, Matt and Eric booked this though, it'd have way more emotional resonance. 

ER: This was only two minutes long and a mostly useless two minutes, all likely for a very good reason. When you have Nazi Bikers taking on Confederacy Nostalgists it is only a matter of time before they come to some real Can't We All Just Get Along conclusions. Why are we lightly whipping each other for two minutes? We all collectively, the four of us, hate blacks, so why are we fighting each other? Henry and Skull have a moment of understanding that they're wasting their own energy fighting those with the same goals, so they agree to a lazily set up Slop Drop and clear the ring so a full crew of tough black dudes can do something more productive. 

Rock vs. Ken Shamrock

MD: Sort of a tale of two matches here. Shamrock looked great early, charging right in and having a lot of dynamic offense. Rocky fed and fed and fed and he did a great job with it. Some distraction from the outside let Rocky take over and it was a little off to me, a little rough around the edges. He didn't register some of Shamrock's stuff in the hope spots. That sort of thing. They did another ref bump here, but it was a nice one with a ducked clothesline. Then the rest of the Nation got involved and everything fell apart. It looked like Rocky was going to sneak away with a win after a D-Lo chairshot but another ref ran out and the Nation swarmed in. DQ win for Shamrock with the fans getting at least one big moment as he hit the Belly to Belly on Henry after a heated face off. 

Headbangers vs. Quebecers

MD: I had high hopes for this one, and it seemed like they'd be personified in Jacques' look. It was pretty amazing. Quebecers had the blue gear here, but Jacques had his hair pulled back tight, which made him looking like the hairline was really receding, with an almost fluffy ponytail, and a baldspot in the middle. Amazing stuff.

There was nothing wrong with this match really, but I wanted more elaboration in the early stooging. Pierre bumped all over the place, but I needed a bit more pluck and comeuppance from Jacques. It's a house show. Do all the bits. They did barely any of the bits. There'd be more bits on a 1989 Rougeaus TV squash. So I was a little disappointed there. I did like the finish where one Headbanger leapfrogged over the other to avoid a whip into one another, only to run right into Quebecers clotheslines. That set up the Quebecers going for their finisher, it getting broken up and the Headbangers hitting theirs. I needed this to have 600% more bullshit and I'm not sure why it didn't.

Undertaker vs. TAFKA Goldust

MD: There were elements to the initial Goldust character which pushed things in clever, if not entirely subtle ways. I don't think much of that was in this incarnation. It was all trying too hard and so little of it landed. Dustin wasn't at his physical best here but he still bumped all over the place for Taker and had his usual timing. Another distraction transition, this time with Taker choking Luna. I liked the comeback though as Taker hit a flurry of punches to the gut like he was playing Punch Out! Then the lights went off and the place went more nuts for Kane than they did for any of the matches. You wonder about the mic-ing with the cameras as they are for most of this, but when the place explodes for something like that it really does make you feel like they've just been quiet for most of the wrestling. I kind of liked Taker's punch exchange on Kane too. Weirdly, the ref didn't call for the DQ even though it would have made total sense (it wasn't a ball control thing either; Kane was getting shots in). But they wanted to send the fans home happy with a "clean" win after the Tombstone I guess and they couldn't do yet another ref bump. 

I'm going to chalk this off as a dubiously agented show. There were good things, but past the Christopher match, which they still might have gotten pre-show, just at half the length, and the Cactus Jack match which they wouldn't be getting anywhere else save maybe PPV (at least until the Hardcore division started up), I don't think it was all that much of a stronger experience than you would have gotten from a Raw of this era, and as a house show, it really should have been.

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Found Footage Friday: TAJIRI~! HHH~! BABA~! EIGEN~! FURNAS~! MVC~! SPIVEY~!

Dr. Death Steve Williams/Terry Gordy vs. Dan Spivey/Doug Furnas AJPW 10/19/90

MD: I like Kroffat as much as the next guy, move even, but Spivey being in there instead increased the hoss level considerably. This was heated from the start too. Doc had it out for Furnas for some reason. He gave him the middle finger before the match. Furnas returned the favor by swinging a kick at him as he was squaring up with Spivey. Doc wiped his sweat in Furnas' direction. Furnas gave him the finger. Doc told him to kiss his butt. You get the idea. It's a good way to start a match. 

It doesn't let up from there. Furnas uses the three point stance to knock Gordy down, but Doc's able to grind Furnas down well enough that he makes sure to rush over and smack Spivey around a bit too, before mouthing off and maybe even spitting at him drawing Spivey in and it's just an absolutely chaotic feel early on.

What follows is about five minutes of the best wrestling you'll ever see. Doc catching Furnas in mid air and bringing him to the top rope, the two of them trading slaps and Furnas leaping over him to hit a belly to belly. Doc and Spivey smacking each other all the way out of the ring. Spivey hitting a bossman slam on Doc and boos ringing through the air as Gordy breaks it up. The place absolutely exploding as Furnas press slams Gordy only to eat a lariat. It's a hell of a five minutes before everything settles down to holds.

They take it down before building it back up and the overall effect is a hell of a thing. Gordy and especially Doc get a ton of heat. Furnas is able to clap up Spivey. There are a bunch of great nearfalls down the stretch before an extremely definitive ending but one that took that bit of extra effort. These are the sort of lost matches we hope to find.

ER: I love All Gaijin matches in All Japan because it's interesting to see how they can organically draw heat and interest without any kind of Nativism at play. No side is necessarily more loved or hated, only more established. Dr. Death understands that and leans into the MVC's established rep and for seemingly no reason goes hard on Doug Furnas. I have zero reason to believe there is any kind of animosity between Dr. Death and Doug Furnas, but everyone in this match made me believe there was. Doug Furnas was fairly established at this point. Not at the level of beating teams like Doc and Gordy, but already a two time All Asia tag champ who had beaten big teams. Doc quickly turns him into an underdog babyface which leads to a more spirited wild eyed performance from Spivey and some incredible payoff when Furnas finally starts throwing them around. 

Everyone was so good in this match that I fully bought into Doc and Gordy as two guys who actually hated Furnas (they didn't), Furnas as a guy out of his depth (he wasn't) and Spivey as a guy fearlessly telling MVC to back the fuck off and stop taking liberties with Furnas (they weren't, but at times it didn't seem like Spivey realized that). Doc was doing some performative middle fingers and phony baloney heat drawing across the ring while Furnas looked like a guy making the universal face of "Hey man I didn't do anything to you do you have the right guy?" You could tell Doc had the right guy when he sat Furnas on the top rope and slapped Furnas so hard to break. Furnas looked like Allen Covert and sold the slap by making the face that Allen Covert makes when his girlfriend leaves him in one of the few Sandler movies where that happens. Doc is great at bullying Furnas to rile up Spivey, and Spivey is that great combination of large and reckless and Just Getting Real Good so that he always gets too amped up on his first punch of an exchange and throws some potatoes before dialing back a little. He always looks ready to pop off, and it's a killer distraction from Furnas finally popping off. 

Doug Furnas gorilla press slamming Terry freaking Gordy - and the scared face Gordy makes while being held up high in that press - is an incredible spot. It would have been an amazing press slam anyway, but once Furnas added a pump it became an all timer. The crowd lost their minds at that press slam and that hyped Doug up so much he did a backflip and then ran as fast as he could into Gordy's biggest clothesline of the match. Doug finally suplexing Death was so cool. I love the way Doc bumps when he's reeling, just as I love when he decides one turnbuckle isn't enough for a stampede. MVC made damn certain that they were the bad guys here and were so convincing that the fans bought them as bullies against two of the toughest dudes. Terry Gordy out here getting booed over and over for breaking up pins and picking on Mega Athlete Doug Furnas.   

Giant Baba/Rusher Kimura/Akira Taue vs. Harkua Eigen/Motoshi Okuma/Masa Fuchi AJPW 10/27/90

MD: This is a recent Classics drop and a Baba 30th Anniversary match. Jumbo gives him a plaque before the match and everything. This gets a ton of time, 20+ it feels like and it's just packed full of character and comedy. It's hard to do justice to it all or even half of it but I'll point out a few things.

First, Eigen, amazing as always, really shines at the start. He faces off against young Taue to start but then darts to the corner and slaps Baba before running out. They reset, he does the same thing but this time teases Baba and slaps Rusher. Then when facing off against Rusher, he ducks and slaps him twice before leading him to the corner for a long heat segment. They kick away at him forever before we ultimately get some goofy stuff with Okuma and headbutts. There are a ton of headbutts in this match and while Rusher gets some in, a lot of them are eaten by Taue.

Taue's a lot of fun here. I've seen every bit of 1990 footage we have of him and he wasn't there yet, but here he's got this sense of wild abandon, limbs flying and flopping about, that would soon be gone from him. He looks like he's going to become an entirely different wrestler here between his selling of the headbutts and a sort of physical recklessness.

This refuses to end, a lot of the normal things you think might end it getting broken up. They run some of the best Eigen spit spot stuff ever, as both Taue and Baba get to do it, with Baba getting it on his hand and everyone almost cracking up (and Kobashi cracking up decades later on commentary). Then Rusher goes for it, but he's blocked, and Baba comes in from the other side with a chop and it's pretty hilarious let me tell you. The finish is a fun combo of Taue hitting an atomic drop sending Okuma into Baba's foot and then right back into Taue's belly to back. My only regret is that they didn't repeat the atomic drop/boot sequence a couple of times first. Great fun that no dirtsheet would have appreciated at the time but that we can absolutely appreciate now.

ER: This is one of those Wrestling Heaven situations for me. I love my King's Road, and I love my boys. Give me 20 minutes of VILLAIN SHOKAI up to their old bullshit and the nuanced twists that come with every new 20 minutes. It's crazy how many ways they found to do their same bullshit slightly different over the years. You recognize the behaviors but there are always things they do different, things I've never seen, or realistically perhaps things I've seen a million times but don't care because they all work so well together that I don't ever get tired of them. All of these old men matches (Masa Fuchi was 36 lol) were written off unfairly by morose tape traders, so now everything in them is ripe for discovery. Nobody was talking about how great Haruka Eigen was when I got into trading, none of these guys were getting any kind of acclaim. We're long past that now.

Now, before this even starts, you just know Eigen is going to get up to shenanigans before Villain Shokai starts bringing headbutts and hamstring kicks. Eigen starting the match with a slap and run routine on Baba and Rusher is so classic, celebrating in the aisles with young boys you barely recognize, knowing he was going to get paid back down the stretch. A lot of these start with long heat on Kimura, eating boots and headbutts and selling the headbutts so believably (that happens here), but that's not where the match stays. I thought they did a great job integrating everybody and keeping Baba's involvement short and exciting. Villain Shokai made quick tags and this settled into me being excited watching an Akira Taue who didn't wrestle a single thing like my favorite wrestler Akira Taue. 1990 Taue is so cool as can see hints of the Taue that would be there just a couple years later but you'd only notice them if you were familiar with them. For the most part, he's a totally different guy with totally different offense and movement. 

His most important characteristic that he apparently always had, was his realistic approach to bumping. Watch how he sells an Okuma headbutt to the mouth, watch the way he falls with limbs flopping around and not in a controlled wrestling school back bump. The realistic bumps and selling were the things that instantly drew me to Taue at the end of the 90s, and with all the '90 Taue we have as evidence we can see that it's just who he is, a thing that would be near impossible to teach someone. He also has completely different offense and I love "elbowdrop Taue who doesn't use his giant feet in any way" but maybe I only love it because I know we're not far away from "big feet to face and the best chokeslams ever" Taue. 

You get so much tough guy sneaky prankster Eigen that you forget they had already started honing the Spit Spot this early. It's still early, as the front row all knows what's happening when it's happening, but nobody is holding up newspapers. People are fleeing, which only draws attention to one woman who is not moving at all while every other woman around her scurries to safety. Baba getting involved in Eigen's Spit is a thing that does not happen in most of these, and his involvement here brings two incredible moments: Baba clutching Eigen under the chin and clubbing his chest, only for Eigen to spit all over Baba's hand, leading to Baba wiping off his hand all over Eigen's head; then when Rusher is winding up to club Eigen, Fuchi intercepts his arm. While the two are locked in struggle, Baba creeps in from the other side and just knife edges Eigen. Taue's back suplex drops like a damn anchor. These 20 minutes always feel like 5 to me, something I never say about Modern Epic Wrestling. 

HHH vs. Tajiri WWE 1/25/03

MD: This is the sort of Vault drop that we're looking for, Hunter reign of terror match or no. Previously we only had a few minutes of this. With the introductions and post-match this is 30+ minutes. The biggest takeaway, past maybe how good Tajiri is here and how it's a shame we don't have a bunch of other 20+ minute matches with him from this era, is that Hunter consciously worked it differently than almost any other match of the period. Maybe even almost any other match of his career.

There's the whole bit about Hogan doing two extra bits of chain wrestling in his Japanese appearances (when it's more the reckless energy and Axe Bomber people should be looking at). To me, this was more about Hunter getting to work the sort of classic NWA Title match style that he didn't think the current WWE audience would appreciate. The problem was that he just didn't have the reps with it (which isn't really his fault). It meant he did the sort of stuff you'd expect him to be good at (feeding into headlocks and other holds) well, but when he tried some fancier escapes, it didn't quite click. The headstand escape to the headscissors was cute and all but people haven't clipped him basically comedically putting himself back into the hold to set up the positioning for it.

What did work were the transitions, the hope spots, the cutoffs. Hunter took over by clipping Tajiri with a clothesline on the handspring and that looked great. They worked a lot of hope spots given the time the match had to breathe and it meant when Tajiri did comeback, it felt momentous. Lots of moving parts and hoohah on the finishing stretch but the fans certainly got their money out of all of it. I loved hearing Earl talking up close too. That's something you'd rarely get in the heavily produced WWE, even in the early 00s. This just felt very different and refreshing in a sea of 2002-2003 Hunter matches I have memories of but really don't want to revisit.  

ER: I remember being 21 and reading about this match in the Observer and DVDVR but now I'm twice as old as I was then and my wants and priorities have changed. How far away, the post college years where my friends and I split an Observer subscription for several years and my friend Jason would use his work photocopier to copy even double issues for all of us. If this match had been taped, I would have traded for a tape to see this match. The 2025 version of doing that is me making 30 minutes of time to watch a HHH match. I'm glad I did. It closed a loop and lived up to its release. I love that it's shot handheld, I love the format, and I loved the story.  I always love the story of a guy who isn't World Title level getting a lengthy main event title match. If it exists, I'd be equally excited to see Brooklyn Brawler getting a long Shawn Michaels title match on a house show after winning a battle royal. 

HHH works this much more like a heel Bret Hart match and shows that he's better at that than when he's working his touring champion Flair match. Thank god this isn't his touring Flair match only in Japan. He's more execution focused than when he's in his Flair Entertainer mode and while I don't think he's anywhere near Bret as an execution guy there were several moments that I thought he looked a lot tighter than expected. He's better at bump as Bret than he is bumping as Flair and it made the match come off harder hitting than theatrical. Tajiri's kicks were great ways for him to storm back into the match and I liked how he would use them as unpredictable combos thrown at different body targets. HHH is bad at standing still making an "I'm waiting to be hit face" but much better at taking strikes that are less expected. We didn't have to see him hold his head a certain way as he waits to hair whip react to a punch, instead we just got Tajiri throwing kicks up and down his body. 

HHH as a guy working over shoulder back breakers is one of the coolest versions of HHH. Do more of that. Less Irish whips and more backbreakers! When Tajiri finally slips out the back of one of the backbreakers it's this great spot that looks like it's going to fall apart entirely and end in an awkward tangle but it somehow bumbles expertly into a clean sunset flip pin away from ropes. I thought for sure both men were falling and going to wind up in an ugly heap of blown spot but instead it made it all look like HHH was struggling to stop Tajiri's momentum. Tajiri using the Tarantula while the referee was out seemed like the one time where it would have been acceptable to let HHH Act. Just let him scream and NXT sell for a full minute while completely stuck, no ref to save him. I was disappointed that Tajiri maintained the 5 second rule. We didn't get enough of Tajiri maniacally refusing to break Tarantula. 

Tajiri kicking out of the Pedigree was something we all read about in 2003, but it plays far crazier than it reads. This is a detail I remember reading about. It was shocking to hear that Tajiri had kicked out of a Pedigree, but the details at the time actually downplayed what really happened. When it was reported, the reporting made it sound like the Pedigree was hit and Hebner - blinded by mist - took an eternity to make the count. That makes sense and it still sounded surprising that Tajiri kicked out. In actuality, the whole thing happened in under 10 seconds. Tajiri kicked out of the Pedigree less than 10 seconds after it was hit, which nobody else was doing in 2003. 

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Loosely Formed Thoughts on WWF Unforgiven 4/26/98

 

1. The Rock/D-Lo Brown/Mark Henry vs. Faarooq/Ken Shamrock/Steve Blackman

The Nation team is billed at 950 lb, meaning they could have gotten this to 1,000 if they subbed in Kama for D-Lo, meaning they fucked up.  

Blackman and D-Lo have very little chemistry but D-Lo's snap suplex looks excellent and Blackman throws the fastest spinning chop I've seen. 

Blackman is too hesitant this entire match and leads to awkward timing whenever he's in. He even tags back into the match when Shamrock was clearly setting Faarooq for the tag and Shamrock forces him to go back to the apron. Holy moly. Blackman has really bad timing with everyone, like he totally forgot how to bump for anything. It's really odd. Fans are noticing it and it's a bizarre choice to have him work the bulk of the match as FIP. 

Everybody is taking everybody else's offense slightly wrong, it's not just Blackman. He's merely the worst offender. 

The Rock's punch when he tags in to a dazed Faarooq is the best part of the match up to this point, and his clothesline is hard. I love all three of Mark Henry's quick elbowdrops when he tags in. Faarooq is a much cooler face in peril that Blackman but they cannot wait to get Blackman back into this match. I don't know why Steve Blackman is in this match so much. 

Blackman wailing on D-Lo with chops is a Better Blackman, and his punch exchange with The Rock felt like it should have looked a lot worse, but the Blackman FIP stuff doesn't work. People really dislike the Rock still, but they feel nothing for Blackman. He is just not a guy who should be selling in long matches like this. Use him like fucking Ernest Miller, let him fly into the ring in the last third throwing improvised kicks, don't have one of the worst physical actors on the roster go in there and sell for the bulk of your opener. 

The Faarooq hot tag could have been fire but it was way too rushed. I loved how he threw his body into the back of Mark Henry's knees and Henry took a great bump for the double leg spinebuster. Henry took another cool fall on a big Blackman kick. Shit, earlier he set up a nice powerslam on Blackman by throwing him into the Rock's knee and I didn't even mention it. Another strong Henry performance, really exposing all of us for not being fully into this guy the moment he re-debuted after his ankle injury. 

Boy this match did not work at all and on paper it really looked like it should have. This was a complete and total failure from the babyface side. Everyone in the Nation looked great, all standout performances. Faarooq's side all wrestled like they had just met each other backstage before their entrance, and none of them looked good during their brief windows to shine. Shamrock barely got involved, Blackman was taken way out of his comfort zone for far too long, hardly any focus was placed on Faarooq getting revenge on the Nation, just a full three person bag fumble. The crowd was quiet most of the match and it was due entirely to the uninspiring babyface squad. 

2. Owen Hart vs. HHH

Chyna in a tiny cage suspended near the ring feels like one of the last times Cornette convinced Vince to do a silly territory gimmick that WWF had never done at any other time. For all the things about territory work that HHH clearly never understood but constantly pretended he was an expert student, he at minimum does understand that he needs to kick the tires on the cage and rigorously test its sturdiness. 

This starts off a lot better than the opener but the crowd is still quiet. HHH bumps around ringside and Owen throws a nice headbutt that he doesn't use enough. Owen runs hard into HHH's jumping knee and it's among the best that spot has looked - equal credit to both - and Owen gets dropped kind of disgustingly chin first on the top buckle when HHH takes the legs out of his 10 count punches. 

Owen takes a lot of hard bumps in this, a great string of them. He makes all of HHH's knee offense look good, bouncing less on impact and making them look more painful. He hits the buckles really hard, and takes a couple more chin first bumps into them. This was the most spirited Owen performance since the rest of his family left for WCW 5 months prior. 

Neither of them can make HHH's Dragon Sleeper I Guess look interesting but at least HHH tries it out three different times, just in case the first two disinterested crowd reactions were a fluke. I don't think I have seen him attempt this submission before or since, but he's also done plenty of things that looked worse, so...

Chyna dangling from the cage is a really great, tremendously performed stunt spot. I forgot sometimes just how much my friends and I were excited for Chyna's further involvement in matches, dying for her to start doing more than hit Owen Hart in the balls. I forget sometimes how much of a Chyna Fan I was at 17. This was one of her greatest physical performances and a spot that looked actually dangerous the entire time it was happening. When she broke free of the little shark cage she was suspended from, and attempted to climb down it? That woman was at least 12 feet in the air, possibly higher, and did a full "hanging by one arm" stunt. Chyna was old John Cliffhanger up there, working with no safety net, with the very real possibility of her falling hard onto concrete or the entrance ramp. She was great at milking the danger, kicking her legs, making the cage sway, making it look like a struggle, making it completely impossible to focus on anything but her. What could have even been happening in the ring, HHH trying out another submission he saw a Japanese guy do better? 

Much better than their WrestleMania match, elevated by a big bumping Owen performance and Chyna's legitimately cool stunt. 

3. New Midnight Express vs. Rock n Roll Express 

I actually think it's pretty cool that they put the Rock n Rolls on a 21,000 house Greensboro show, but every criticism at the time of this match being put out there to fail, is sadly accurate. 

Bob Holly takes an awesome backwards cannonball bump to the floor from a Gibson shoulderblock, and Cornette still draws Greensboro heat by hugging him. Bart Gunn takes a nice bump off the apron too, after Ricky dodges a punch from Holly, and then they work another spot where the Midnights bump each other off the apron. The crowd should be responding much better to these bumps. 

What does not help is when Bart Gunn goes to an abdominal stretch like 2 minutes into this thing, the first heat they got on Ricky. The man tagged in and went straight to the stretch. 

Cornette plays this whole thing way too desperately, which is probably much more entertaining to the people backstage who wanted this idea to fail. I've seen Cornette start dozens of fights with referees and this is one of his worst, a fight with Tim White using the worst exaggerated "Let's Fight" mannerisms he's ever used. 

Ricky gets to take his own cool bump through the ropes to the floor and Cornette does wind up throwing the best worked punch of the match.  

I liked Robert's hot tag, leaping in quick on an advancing Bart, throwing fast punches, working 10 count punches with Ricky, sizing up the double dropkick. All of it looked good, none of it got much reaction, which is a drag. 

This was exclusively talked about at the time as something intentionally set up to look sad instead of cool, and that self-serving missions was mostly accomplished. Rock n Rolls were set up to fail in their WWF run, and that sucks because they were still a better tag team than basically any 1998 WWF tag team other than the New Age Outlaws. Robert especially was going hard every chance he got, they just couldn't have ever worked hard enough to succeed. It wasn't allowed. 

4. Evening Gown Match: Sable vs. Luna

I wonder how long it took the 40-something adult man in the front row to make his Sable Free Tongue Bath sign. This man had to go buy a poster board and at least two markers and had to have the commitment to thinking it was a great idea every step of the way. 

This is the first real misstep of their use of Sable. The WrestleMania match was excellent, and the pull apart brawl at Mayhem in Manchester was so authentic and natural that it seriously ranks as one of the best wrestling pull apart of the year. But every part of this suuuuuucks. 

The fans are undeniably into it, and that means something, but they are nowhere near as into it as they were the WM tag or the Manchester brawl. 

Also, why was Sable out there in such a dowdy gown? Talk about terrible lines and no sense of style. I know the dress wasn't staying on for long, but let's get your star in something that actually fits so she looks good in clothes before she is out of clothes. 

This whole thing is only two minutes long, and the only good part was when Sable booted Luna in the neck and then flung herself onto her and punched her several times in that same part of the neck. 

Also, it's wild how Luna often comes off as less trained than Sable. She looks lost in a two minute match where they only goal is to tear fabric, and the more of this I revisit the more I remember how Luna got 100% of the credit for anything that worked in this feud but it is very clear that Sable is responsible for all of it. Nobody was giving Sable credit in 1998 for any of this. 

It's two minutes long, Sable gets her Mama's Family funeral dress ripped off, and the whole payoff is Sable's 1990s Elizabeth Berkley long butt. The fans love to see those long flat white butts. Butts just used to be different and we can't ever put that genie back in the bottle. In 1998 America still liked 'em long and low. 

5. New Age Outlaws vs. LOD 2000

JR is still talking about the Outlaws shaving off Hawk's bi hawk like half a year ago. This entire feud is based around Hawk getting a 3/8" strip of hair shaved off part of his head two seasons ago. 

You knew the damn fix was in man, because directly after a segment where Lawler and Greensboro wolf whistled and unrolled their tongues at Sable's Classic Kelly McGillis Ass, Sunny is out here in her far and away hottest era. Her LOD 2000 gear made her look like the most incredible lead Fred Olen Ray could have found for Deathstalker III & IV. Babes don't come this hot in the apocalypse, but JR is busy talking about Hawk's mohawk. There should have been a social uprising whenever Sunny appeared in her LOD 2000 gear. 

The New Age Outlaws have aged really well as a tag act, especially during this early part of their run. They felt like a real natural team from go despite each completely languishing separately for well over a year before they teamed. Huge portions of their act would have killed in Memphis, and they threw in a lot of nuance that I didn't give them credit for at the time. I loved Road Dogg adjusting Billy's trunks for him, getting them just right while Billy was waiting to lock up. 

I also actually like this old out of shape Road Warriors era, because Hawk is still a really good puncher. So you get him pulling his tights up over his belly like a 60 year old luchador. He has no power whatsoever, but he also still hits a great fistdrop and is a great puncher. I would have watched another several years of Hawk as a punch guy. It's weird seeing a 40 year old Road Warrior work matches like 70 year old Jimmy Valiant but also I sincerely love Hawk as Jimmy Valiant. He fires off punches as well as anyone on the roster. I also remember liking 2006 Wrestling in Jeans Animal so it's possible I either have total dogshit taste or more likely really refined taste. 

Every match on this card feels like it's being worked the exact opposite from how it should be worked. Animal tags in and holds Billy in a cravat and I have no idea why we're building up to Billy's comeback but the crowd doesn't know either and they are silent. 

There's a cool and dangerous spot where Billy Gunn chops blocks Animal during the first Doomsday attempt and Animal crumples while Road Dogg just drops down onto him. That could have gone badly but instead just looked cool. The Outlaws try to get heat by working over Animal's knee, and Animal does a really great job selling the knee damage. All of the work looks good, it's just not getting any kind of response and it's always eerie when a crowd with this many people are this quiet. 

But the finish was incredibly insulting, and that's not going to help the crowd noise. Hawk pinned Road Dogg with a German suplex, they won the belts, but of course Hawk's shoulders were counted down. Why the ref was only looking at Hawk's shoulders, I don't know, you'll have to ask the Gods of the Bad Finish, but it's one of those wrestling finishes that can get no other reaction from the crowd than an annoyed "Oh seriously? Fuck off." It's a finish designed to get no heat, just insult everyone who saw it. Throw a flat as hell German suplex, ref gets down to count right next to Road Dogg's shoulders, but looks right past them to Hawk's shoulders. Nonsense. Well, have fun feuding with DOA for the rest of the year.  

6. Inferno Match: Undertaker vs. Kane

I don't know what any of us were expecting from this match. They kept details intentionally vague and I guess we were all supposed to believe that we would witness a man being burned alive, and that we were supposed to be intrigued by the idea of a man being burned alive? This PPV was primarily sold on one of these men being burned to death, and also on the possibility of you seeing Sable's tits. The Austin/Dude Love title match basically got added as the main event the week of the show. This was a PPV built on Fake Tits and Fire Death. 

Now, it's been long enough that my internal timeline has blurred and I don't actually remember if I saw this match first or if I had already traded for a 6 hour Sabu comp tape in 8th Gen quality and saw Sabu and Sheik and Onita and Tarzan Goto almost die in an outdoor wrestling fire. I had no idea who Atsushi Onita or Tarzan Goto or The Sheik were when I got that tape but I knew that it looked like several people almost died from Fire. Which match was my first Fire Match experience? That memory is lost to time. But damn this must have looked so fucking cool from the upper deck of Greensboro. The Colosseum darkened, the literal danger of INDOOR FIRE. Can you imagine being inside a building with open, flaring flames? Not me, not since the Great White incident. Fuck no. I'm not going to be one of those bodies trampled in a doorway. 

Hey, is this match actually really fucking great? This is fucking fire and it's also 300 lb. men fighting near fire! Normal Kane/Undertaker spots look better with fire! The flames shooting up the ropes when Undertaker does Old School is the best that a jumping punch to the arm is going to look. Undertaker's flipping clothesline now becomes a riveting miss because it sends him tumbling to the edge of the ring next to The Fire! And yes, they probably should have saved all of the fire flare-ups for big shit like chokeslams and Undertaker's superplex instead of doing them for every bump or impact, but it is also Very Funny seeing flames shoot up 6 feet in the air after Undertaker does a side Russian legsweep. 

A note about Kane: you know how Kane threw great worked uppercuts but couldn't throw any other kind of punch that looked good? Here he threw great overhand rights but didn't use any uppercuts at all. What is considered the Best Kane Era? 

Kane takes the biggest over the top rope bump to the floor of his life when Undertaker has to throw him far enough to clear The Fire. And how about the fucking VADER chant when Vader In Sweatpants runs down to ringside and starts punching and headbutting Kane in the face!! I get Undertaker needing someone like Vader out there to provide more landing coverage for his tope suicida over the fire. Great spot. Undertaker does a suicide dive over Fire and the crowd is left chanting for Vader. That's huge. That means something. Fans either still believed in the big man in 1998, or those Vader/Flair matches left a long lasting impression on the people of North Carolina.  

Paul Bearer hits a big bladejob after Undertaker hits him square over the head with Star Search band Sawyer Brown's kick drum. A big sweaty fat guy hitting a huge blade job is one of the great disgusting visuals unique to wrestling. You couldn't just fire up the internet in 1998 and see a fat guy bleed in a suit after a kick drum was slammed over his head. It was only a pro wrestling visual then. A fat sweaty guy dressed for the finest Sunday Service potluck gets his head busted open by the same kick drum that was used earlier in the night to perform Sawyer Brown's smash hit #1 single (from 1992) Some Girls Do.   

So it turns out the Inferno Match is really good. Let's turn this one into the new King of the Road Match. This one is due some revisionist history I think. I had openly wondered what the best Undertaker/Kane singles match was, and this has to be one of the absolute top contenders. Great spectacle.  

6. Steve Austin vs. Dude Love 

The wrestling sections in this were so much fun, and I love how it evolved from a classic wrestling match into sick bumps and bullshit. Dude Love running the ropes all fast and sloppy and Austin rolling in with a perfect dropdown, catching Dude on the run with a Thesz press. That falling elbow Austin does is one of my favorite moves in wrestling. I'm a person who hates having my neck touched, hates shirts that are too tight and rub against my neck, hated playing night game baseball in high school because it meant turtlenecks under my uniform. So I can't really picture the kind of trust I would need to have to be okay with Steve Austin sending the point of his elbow down towards my Adam's apple only to stop a couple centimeters short. It's one of our purest pieces of worked pro wrestling offense. 

All of Austin's classic pro wrestling exchanges look great, but when he throws Dude off the stage we all know a guy splatting onto concrete so early in the match meant that there was a chance Foley might do something even more painful. 

Nobody had lower crotches on his tights than Foley. Dude's tights fit like old long johns.

Austin is a guy who knew how to capitalize on Foley as an opponent. I guess a lot of guys did that - he took some terrible beatings - but you can tell Austin is really sinking things in. He back elbows his way out of a body vice (a Dude Love body vice!) and runs clotheslines at him as hard as he can. 

This is the first time (of what would be many times) that they milked the Montreal Screwjob as a Vince Tactic. I don't know if anybody I knew in 97/98 actually knew what actually happened in Montreal at this point in our lives and probably just assumed that Vince stopping matches was just going to be a finish we'd get every few months. We had a party to watch Wrestling With Shadows when it aired on A&E, but that was several months after this match. I don't remember how effective this angle was to me and my friends as teenagers, how much we bought into the worked shoot that we wouldn't have known was a work or a shoot. 

Foley does save some really great bumps for the finishing stretch, bouncing off concrete, getting tossed over the guardrail and back, and getting suplex off several corners of the ring steps. I'm not sure you could have suplexed a man into a more painful part of the ring steps. All edges. 

Vince McMahon takes a chairshot right off the side of his fucking head, a completely insane thing for a man with real money to be willing to do. Vince was willing to take a harder chairshot than Foley took (*in this match) and Austin was a man being paid to hit a sociopath in the side of the head with a chair. No wonder we all loved the Austin/Vince stuff so much. 

Well, this was an overall underwhelming PPV, and it all started so promising with a direly serious Undertaker/Kane video package that's nothing but grim allusions to an afterlife spent in hell, broken up bouncily with a "1-800-COLLECT PRESENTS...." It's tough to top that. 

Best Matches:

1. Steve Austin vs. Dude Love

2. Undertaker vs. Kane

3. Owen Hart vs. HHH

Worst Matches: 

1. Sable vs. Luna

2. The Nation vs. Faarooq/Ken Shamrock/Steve Blackman

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WWF In Your House: Final Four 2/16/97

Shamefully, I've never seen the Final Four main event. It's a big 90s WWF blindspot for me and there's no reason for it, other than I don't love 1997 WWF. The highs are high, but the arenas are cold, the undercards are stale, the house style leaned towards dull, and I don't think the shows are filmed well. But other than that, I can't complain. A fact that can double as a reason, is that I've been watching - daily - a lot of 1997 WCW lately for my wildly entertaining and cumbersome book, and watching something like this does make for a nice comparison point. Plus, In Your House events were still under 2 hours at this point. They're basically a Coliseum Video with worse editing.  

Anyway let's correct the mistake of me never seeing a universally praised match with 3 of my favorites, and also double down and replace that corrected mistake with a bigger mistake: reviewing the entire show. 

1. Marc Mero vs. Leif Cassidy

ER: Marc Mero gets a ring full of sparklers, and Cassidy is already waiting inside that ring of sparklers. How often did they already have somebody waiting in the ring to start a PPV? I really like how the French announce team talks about Chattanooga, but the crowd is cold for this one. A Wildman shouldn't start off a match working a kneeling wristlock, so the cold is earned. Cassidy at least throws in bumps and acts like a dickhead. When Cassidy is kicking at Mero's leg, I buy his look of disgust. Cassidy throwing legsweeps and heel hooks is more interesting than what Mero was doing with the match. Okay we are going into the heel hooks and the elbowdrops to the inner knee a lot more than I was expecting. Interesting to me doesn't mean "interesting to the live crowd", but to the crowd and wrestler's credit they did all come together to root Mero through the legwork. 

It just hit me that the whole thing is laid out like a Tony Garea/Johnny Rodz match, and how a lot of 1997 WWF undercard matches felt like they were doing tributes to bad 1982 WWF undercard style. Not only is that a terrible style to be doing in 1997 - especially compared to what WCW was doing - but this was in Chattanooga and people in Tennessee were getting Lawler/Dundee in 1982, so Salvatore Bellomo vs. Baron Mikel Scicluna wasn't going to cut it. Mero has a cool short runway tope to break up Cassidy threatening Sable, and the shooting star press looks like even more of a crazy 1997 finisher today, but WCW opened their February PPV with Syxx/Dean Malenko like one week after this. People saw the difference. 

2. The Nation of Domination (Crush/Savio Vega/Faarooq) vs. Goldust/Flash Funk/Bart Gunn

ER: What even is this babyface (?) team? What do those three men have in common? Are they all recent TV victims of the Nation? I didn't watch any of the TV surrounding this match, but that's a tenuous reason to have three men teaming up on PPV. One of the clips they showed was Goldust getting jumped on a house show. Was WWF setting up PPV six mans on house shows in 1997?! Also I know I'm a big hypocrite because if I saw this match was on a WAR card I would lose my shit, and I would be right to do so. And this match - what we get of it - might be worth losing your shit over? It's filled with Flash Funk in his Labelle boots, hitting huge planchas (including one he gets Irish whipped into), and a nice run of the Nation cutting the ring off on Funk. Flash has a great sequence to build to his hot tag, back flipping over a Vega/Crush double clothesline and leaping through them with one of his own. 

The hot tag goes to Bart Gunn and it's kind of incredible to have one of wrestling's best babyface hot tag guys on the apron but choose not use Goldust as the babyface hot tag in a match where Goldust was the one shown getting attacked at a house show and makes the most sense as the babyface hot tag. But hey I guess liked the simple usage of Gunn. He comes in, throws left hands, hits a couple clotheslines, and gets a nice visual pin on Faarooq with the bulldog. This is a very fun six minutes, but ends way too early and feels way too incomplete to fully recommend. There was hardly any Goldust, Crush, or Vega. I don't know if you can have a good a trios match while barely utilizing half of the participants. It's useful as a match you can point to when talking about strong Flash Funk performances - maybe the least recommendable era of Scorpio's career - as it has some of his best flying and great selling. That means something. 

3. Rocky Maivia vs. Hunter Hearst Helmsley

ER: I didn't actually check the full card for Final Four before I fired up this review, and I gotta say I'm not jazzed about watching a HHH/Rock title match. That said, this was really good. It has a great opening. They do a really cool section around dueling drop toe holds, a bit of a scramble, a loud slap delivered by HHH and returned by Rocky and it snaps the crowd awake. Helmsley hits kind of hard and Rocky bumps bigger and a bit more recklessly than he would a year later. I wish we got a bit more Rocky bumping, as the HHH control after the hot opening was solid, workmanlike, but doesn't give Maivia a ton to play against. Rocky isn't great at emotive selling in 1997. He only knows one move and it's "heave on the mat". He just lies there and heaves, which is the worst way to make a grounded side headlock interesting. But the more he moves, the more the crowd swells, and he's very good at taking offense. He is much more watchable when he runs into Hunter's running knee (which Hunter brings up to face level) and misses a high dropkick than he is is hitting a running crossbody. 

Rocky's big punch comeback has some fire but was missing something, much better taking at a hot shot off the top turnbuckle. Yep, Rock's offense sucked in 1997, but HHH tucked his head painfully on that stupid "hop around you" DDT. This had a really good opening and a second act that felt like it was building to a hot third, and I don't think we got there. Of the Islanders given a surprise title win in 1997, it's clear that Prince Iaukea was so much further along than The Rock. We'll see how this continues to develop, but as of February 1997 it's clear that Iaukea is more advanced as a wrestler and in line for a more successful career. Not one single person could have predicted what Rock would become by June 1998 if they had only seen him in February 1997. Impossible leap. If Byron Saxton had become an all time short term draw a within a year. 

4. Owen Hart/British Bulldog vs. Doug Furnas/Phillip LaFon

ER: This is one of those on paper matches that feels like it should be great, but this was not great. That's partly due to a lot of this being angle instead of match, but also due to the angle itself not being any good. I don't think the Owen/Bulldog team was ever as good as it should have been, and even working normally I don't think they were ever as complementary as they should have been. That means in this match they are a team of non-complementary guys who are now intentionally not communicating as part of an angle. It's awful. And let's just get it out of the way now: British Bulldog looked like shit. He didn't look like shit physically; he actually looked healthy. "Healthy" isn't a word typically used to describe The British Bulldog, but this era is the healthiest he looked. He's noticeably smaller and has none of the inflated muscle he had through most of his career. Every person in this match is basically the same size, even though I don't think of any person in this match being the same size as any other person in this match. Bulldog and Owen are essentially the same exact guy here. So physically, he looks great. 

He just wrestles like shit. His strikes are shockingly bad, just putrid strikes with no kind of weight behind them. His clotheslines look so pulled that you'd think his body was incapable of taking any kind of resistance. Bulldog was much smaller and not wrestling like a heavyweight...sorta. Other than holding LaFon up in a vertical suplex, he does no power spots, instead doing sliding dropdowns and sunset flips. The powerslam is still his finisher, but it's more like Charlie Haas doing a powerslam. British Bulldog is like if Doc Dean had worse stomps. 

 

Owen and LaFon feel like they would be a much better team with better chemistry. I liked the twists they did on their own Malenko/Guerrero roll-ups. I'm pretty burnt out on 2 count kickout reversals but theirs looked fresh, and it helped that they weren't doing these reversals in a bunch of their matches. Owen and LaFon feel like two sides of the same coin and even their movement is similar. None of the Owen/Bulldog offense looked good and they really did feel like a time who never teamed before, more than a team having disagreements. When Bulldog holds up LaFon in a vertical suplex, Owen goes to crossbody LaFon to the mat and instead mostly lands on Bulldog's face. But I did like Owen's spinning heel kick into him when LaFon ducked out of the way. Their best interaction against each other was strong, when Owen actually slapped him and Bulldog responded with his best clothesline of the match.

Furnas and LaFon wrestled like a fucking team. These dudes wrestled like every single tag team on TV today wished they wrestled like. It's crazy you don't hear Furnas/Kroffat every mentioned by modern wrestlers as influences, because there are dozens of guys on current wrestling TV who seem to be wrestling like worse versions of Furnas/Kroffat. They were doing this high speed move chaining so much better than all of the teams who have turned that into the prevailing Big Match tag team style. When Furnas made his hot tag it made the match actually hum for the first time, with nothing but cool shit getting chained. But then it ends with Owen barely hitting LaFon with his Slammy award. Major boner not just giving Furnas/LaFon the titles here. 

5. Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin vs. Vader vs. Undertaker

ER: I'm not sure why I haven't watched this before now. I really didn't know anything about the match other than it still gets consistently praised and that Vader got busted open. I remember seeing the Raw Magazine with Vader's bloody masked face on it in the supermarket, at a time where I hadn't been exposed to that much bloody wrestling. I had bought an old copy of the War Games Bash '87 clamshell VHS at a Healdsburg video store and that had really opened up my wrestling world. That who tape was bloody and had at least two dozen instances of somebody getting their face painfully raked across chain link. I don't think I had seen bloody wrestling before that tape, and I don't think I had seen blood in a WWF match before seeing Vader bloodied up on that magazine. 

And Vader bleeding is really the thing that makes this match great. It's really chaotic, more chaotic than any main event WWF had done, because most of the match is two separate singles matches happening in the direct way of each other, without ever really getting in the way of each other. Impressive feat. It rules that Vader gets busted open like 2 minutes in, running full face into a chair and then taking a big bump into the ring steps, quickly apparent that the cut over his eye is disgusting. It's great that the match became all about Vader's disgusting eye and didn't focus on a goof like Undertaker, a man who is doing his silly rope walk in a match where you can lose by being thrown over the top. Just out here making everyone look like fools. It's only when Vader is swinging wildly at him with a chair - and then getting that chair mashed into his face by Taker's boot - that the match really starts to feel like a match. Well, I guess it felt like something great was going to happen before the match when Vader and Austin were flipping each other off. But Vader is a force and the crowd is hyped and loud. People love seeing Vader get chokeslammed, people love Vader kicking Bret in the balls and beating him with a chair, the people loved Vader and Austin hitting each other with the ring bell and fighting on top of some balding guy who Vader fell on top of. 

Vader gets kicked in the balls by Bret Hart in one of the most teed up kicks to the balls to ever appear in a main event. When Vader is eliminated, he is uppercut in the balls by Undertaker. People get choked with production cables and kicked in the balls in this match, and every time they show Vader's cut it looks worse. His missed moonsault is incredible. It defies physics. That moment where his hand is no longer in contact with the top rope and his body is leaning back before starting his rotation, it looks like you're about to witness the most dangerous accident. But then he gets superplexed by Bret and you begin to wonder which bump is worse for a man the size of Vader to be taking, and how fucking stupid it was that WWF had a 400 pound mastodon who could bleed out of his eye for 20 minutes and still go up for a moonsault and a superplex and then take a bump over the top to the floor, but still not see a role for him as a star.

I liked everybody in this match. Bret was as great as Bret always is in main events, Austin was lean and incredibly fast, Undertaker somehow fit excellently into the chaos, and I guess that's the key to why this worked so well: it was constantly chaotic with very little downtime, without any pairing ever overshadowing the other pairing, no matter who was fighting or where they were fighting. But this was Vader's show, a legendary big man performance that probably would have come off great even without one of the more grisly cuts in modern WWF history.  

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The Unheralded Two Minute Long 1998 WWF Chain Match

Savio Vega/Jose Estrada vs. 8-Ball/Skull WWF Raw 4/13/98

ER: WWF was not a Chain Match fed. I don't think they even ran any chain matches during the Hardcore Title era, and before this two minute long match that was much more Great Segment than Actual Match, they hadn't run any chain matches since Hercules or Ivan Koloff had been there. But in 1998 they had Puerto Ricans and Nazi Bikers and it's actually shocking that this is the only chain match the promotion had during that run. But again, this is not so much a match, as it is a great way to have nine guys fighting onscreen at one time. Savio is fighting Skull, Estrada is fighting 8-Ball, Savio swings his chain past Skull's ear into the ring steps, and from there they all have chain-wrapped fists as they brawl to the void as more and more people get involved in a bigger and bigger fight. 

WWF has had putrid, at times unwatchable camera work for the last 20 years, a product filmed and directed by people who don't know how to film or direct pro wrestling. Watch any game from any major sport in 1998, and you will be blown away by how many advancements have been made in filming each of them. All of them have made net positive gains in the way they are presented and shot. Pro wrestling is somehow the only athletic event where every part of the presentation has devolved. This is a segment that shows how well they were able to film and direct a lot of moving parts while always showing every part of the chaos that was happening. While two cool Puerto Ricans punch two Nazis in the face, DX comes out and at once begin to beat Chainz' ass. I am not sure where Jesus Castillo or Miguel Perez were on this night, but Chainz is the only man to accompany his boys, and he is quickly swarmed by DX. 

The cameras perfectly frame the assault on Chainz in the foreground while chains fly in the ring in the background. Billy Gunn and Chainz throw punches at each other's crowns until Chainz takes a chair to the back, and then the chain fight in the back fades out as we close in on Chainz taking just an unnecessarily brutal beating. X-Pac gives him an unprotected chair shot to the head, he takes an even harder shot to the back, HHH gives him a Pedigree on the chair, and the man gets dragged to the entrance ramp to take a spike piledriver on another fucking chair. The Chainz Stretcher Job. DOA and Los Boricuas are all throwing close quarter punches at each other's heads while the chains whip around everywhere, oblivious to the Chainz massacre. 

With Chainz left for dead the assailants spill into the ring and the filming of the action shifts, as DX now joins Savio and Estrada as true heroes unmercifully stomping the Nazis while Chainz is framed perfectly in the background, slowly dragging himself up the ramp like he's futilely crawling away from Leatherface. X-Pac is stomping and choking the hell out of Skull while literally screaming in his face, Estrada is dropping Hitman elbows on 8-Ball, Billy Gunn wraps his fist in a chain and does a fucking chain wrapped fistdrop and it's one of many things that make Billy Gunn perhaps the highest Stock Rising guy of 1998. When the Nazis are lying in their own filth, Chyna finally gets involved and uppercuts Both Boricuas in the Balls. 

This whole segment was one of the only times DX actually came off like full heel total assholes who weren't trying to be cool. There was no preening to the crowd, nothing was done to come off likable, every part of their time on screen was spent fighting. They were dominant but in a real Taking Liberties Because They're Bad People kind of way. They started by jumping one guy 4 on 1 and giving him a ringside beating that stood out as noticeably stiffer than any prior DX angles, then went 6 on 2 to beat up that guy's friends (technically Nazis so that is them being good guys), then went 5 on 2 to take out the two guys who had just helped them out. Real assholes with no redeeming qualities, filmed by a production crew who knew how to highlight everything that made them assholes. 

Not 10 minutes later Mark Henry, The Rock, D-Lo, and Kama have a crazy pull apart with Faarooq, Steve Blackman, Ken Shamrock, and various security guys like Sgt. Slaughter and Tony Garea. This has to be the only Mark Henry/Sgt. Slaughter interaction we've ever seen. 

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Loosely Formed Thoughts on WWF WrestleMania XIV. A Strong, Easy WrestleMania

1. 15 Team Battle Royal

I miss this. I miss getting way too many men in the ring at one time so that even the smallest action stands out. It makes punches and facial selling mean so much more, when you're working to stand out in a crowd of 30. We don't have that. We don't have situations where guys like Bull Buchanan and Recon are in between gear and on shaky gimmick ground. The audacity to run a 15 team battle royal when you only had, generously, 11 teams on the roster. 

Remember the BRADSHAW/CHAINZ team!!?! They gave us a Bradshaw/Chainz team because they needed 4 teams, which meant we got a great moment where Dirtbag Windham ran in just to blindside Chainz and eliminate Bradshaw without having to touch Bradshaw. Dirtbag as Crafty Spurned Lover. 

Sunny is wearing the least amount of clothing possible. In a better world she would have been wearing this flame bikini throughout 1998 and beyond. 

Ultimate Dark Horse: Jose Estrada

Scott Taylor earns points by picking a fight with Henry Godwinn. Taylor punches him in the face and gets his eyes raked instantly. 

Ricky Morton, Scott Taylor, and Hollywood Tatum Bob Holly took high backdrop eliminations. The New Midnight Express was a go nowhere idea but the tights really were fantastic. That rich blue with the gold lightning is so aesthetically pleasing. 

Brian Christopher stands out among 30 men with his bright lime greens, one of the few guys in the match who understands the importance of standing out in a crowded WrestleMania ring. Henry Godwinn and Bart Gunn also felt like they got it. 

Mark Henry hits a great press slam on Christopher, dropping him on his stomach and then just watching while Christopher flops like a fish in the ropes. 

Henry Godwinn in a giant worn Confederate flag shirt vs. a Nazi biker in front of 19,000 Boston males feels like a Where's Waldo of finding a specific type of racist in every frame. 

But I mean Jesus this Sunny outfit really is incredible

 

2. Taka Michinoku vs. Aguila

Let me tell you how many times I watched this match when it was my turn to borrow the WrestleMania XIV tape that somebody's dad's co-worker at Marin Municipal Water taped for us. It's six minutes long and all highlights. Here is one highlight per every minute of the match: 

~That Aguila moonsault off the top to the floor, a beautiful arc

~Taka's no hands running plancha that holds up as one of the most iconic highflying spots in wrestling history. The Insane speed and distance plus the impossible hang time haven't really been duplicated since Taka, and there has been no shortage of wrestlers in the US, Mexico, and Japan who have tried to innovate something as impressive. The camera angle on this one also couldn't have been better, which only adds to this specific plancha's majesty. 

~I'm not sure Aguila's corkscrew dive ever looked as good as it did here. His 10 match WWF run as Aguila, pre-Papi Chulo, long before Essa Rios, was as exciting as anything Blitzkrieg did, but we reacted to Blitzkrieg as something we'd never seen before. Were we that entranced by a standing corkscrew splash? 

~Taka's fast flipping bump off the top turnbuckle, directly onto his hip

~Aguila's slick leaping rana off the top

~Taka had the most gorgeous belly bounce on all of his missed moonsaults. Full commitment, full extension, no idea how it didn't completely rearrange his bones and organs. 

WWF were so proud of themselves for landing Gennifer Flowers. I hope she landed a great payday. I'm not going to pretend to know what a great payday for Gennifer Flowers looks like, but I think I'd know it if I saw it. WWF was really giving the greater Boston area a lot of credit for following presidential scandals. 

3. HHH vs. Owen Hart

The Chyna/Slaughter are handcuffed together and they do a chin to chin showdown and it was one of those moments that WWF loudly said We Know What We're Doing. They knew what we wanted to see when these two were cuffed together. 

Owen's "sledgehammer hitting an anvil" guitar shredding music should have stuck around. His "Enough is Enough" intro became one of the worst intros of the era. 

Owen has a nice nice standing rana, HHH has a killer bump jumping off the apron into the guardrail

HHH trying to go into Flair mode and I guess I still kind of like it here? It felt more earnest. His high knee was a move that would have played in 1998 All Japan. I would have liked to see HHH's work on a Patriot-level All Japan tour, maybe form a Wolf Hawkfield team. Lose a couple matches to Giant Kimala/Jun Izumida. Get his hairline fucked up by a Tamon Honda headbutt. Lose to a Masao Inoue clothesline. There are a hundred wrestlers today who I wish had never seen an All Japan match, but I think HHH could have actually pulled some positive influence from working tours there. 

Owen gets a cut on the bridge of his nose and I'm not sure where it comes from but it looks good

HHH does some legwork that is interesting enough. JR had a bunch of cheesy pro wrestling bullshit about Owen's leg. Things like "He just got the cast off today!"

I hate Owen Hart as a babyface comeback so much. He is so unimaginative in so many ways. Here he gets worked over so much, building to a big comeback, fighting back and finally making HHH show ass, which had hardly happened. And when his big spotlight came, he just kind of blandly punched HHH across the ring with zero conviction. Just a total boner.  

The best part of the match is Sgt. Slaughter taking bumps over the guardrail at age 50, a true Mt. Rushmore Bump King candidate. 

They made Owen look like such a weenie. Just a dumb babyface with a little baby dick. It felt like that's how he looked for essentially the next year and then well. I wonder why I liked this match so much when I was 17. What was the allure? What appealed to me? Then, I thought this was one of the best matches on the show. Now, I think it's arguably the worst match on the show. Shamrock/Rock is the worst, but I could argue this one there if I wanted. 

4. Marc Mero/Sable vs. Goldust/Luna 

Every single Goldust punch in this was great, and it made Mero's punches look even better..Goldust's punches were more clobbering shots to the side of the head and face, while Mero responds with some of his best worked amateur boxing, including some of his best uppercuts. All of the Mero/Goldust segments rock.

I need to see a list of every backdrop from 1998 higher than Goldust's in this match. Any fed, any wrestler, let's see any that went higher than Dustin in this damn match. He does a tight tuck and gets launched straight up by Mero, manages to look super dangerous and also incredibly safe. It makes sense for Goldust to do a big backdrop early in a match as it makes his dropdown uppercut spot make more sense later in the match. You need to establish that your opponents have a good reason to duck their head, show that you're susceptible to rafters-reaching backdrops, then that dropdown uppercut just makes your opponent look like he's chasing that backdrop dragon. 

You'd have to call Sable's first hot tag - and her first match as a whole - a tremendous success, right? It didn't matter how raw she looked, her energy was perfect the entire match. Her apron work was really strong, which is something that plenty of actual wrestlers don't ever get. I thought it was great during the Mero/Goldust segments when she would be annoyed that Mero wasn't tagging out. "Come ON Mark," in an irritated voice, managing to come off not like a nagging wife but as a woman who wanted to beat their asses. 

When Sable does tag in it really doesn't matter what her offense looks like, because she's screaming and breathing heavy through clenched teeth and all of her body language and energy reads like a girl who just beat her enemy's ass and is now being blocked from doing further damage. You already ripped out her weave, you don't need to damage the girl's bridge work. 

This all built really well and you can tell everyone treated it like a big deal. Mero broke out his big moonsault press for the first time in ages, and there were a few very strong nearfalls down the stretch that all felt like the actual finish. You wouldn't think a match that was hyped around Sable finally getting her hands on Luna would actually need false finishes, but the ones here are great.

When Goldust accidentally charges into and knocks Luna off the apron? Marc Mero's inside cradle on him felt like a real finish. Great two count. 

When Luna splashed Goldust, after Sable moved out of the way, and then Sable only gets the TWO COUNT with her powerbomb!? That's a huge nearfall. People flipped out about Sable doing a powerbomb so loudly in the arena, and that pop stuck with me so much that before this match I would have bet on my memory and said the match ended with that Sable powerbomb. That they actually did such an excellent late kickout shows how serious they were about this match. You didn't need false finishes to give this crowd what they wanted. 

When Sable did win, with the TKO, I love the little piece of drama around Mero raising her hand. Mero staring her down, about to flip out on her for taking the pin, but instead giving her a brief but sincere arm raise was handled the precise correct way within character. This whole thing was really great, really well done, and looking back I'm kind of in shock at how well they executed it. Everyone played exactly the role they should have played, and there wasn't a better mixed tag match in WWF until the Beulah/Funk/Dreamer match the next decade. 

5. Ken Shamrock vs. The Rock 

How many years did The Rock take off Ken Shamrock's life with chairshots in 1998? How many years did The Rock take, collectively, off every wrestler, over the years 1998-1999? Rock swung his chairshots directly at the soft spots of heads and faces, and he brains Shamrock with an all timer straight to the face. Rock hits Shamrock in the face harder than any chairshot used in any ECW music video. I remember watching this match while eating breakfast before school, and when Shamrock started going wild eyed, JR was going into histrionics with all of the "DOES HE EVEN KNOW WHERE HE IS!? HE'S LIKE AN ANIMAL!" My dad looked over his paper, looked silently at the TV for a moment, and then said "Stupid" as he raised the paper again.  

6. Cactus Jack/Terry Funk vs. The New Age Outlaws

Finally we get Funk's first actual appearance as Terry Funk. This guy is amazing. Any 50+ year old that gets a regular wrestling appearances in WWF has had a great career, but none of them got to come back to wrestle in their 50s and wear pantyhose and the weirdest fitting jeans while swinging around a chainsaw. Finlay just came back and started beating the shit out of people, but he did it while dressed like a man, not like a scarecrow. Terry Funk left a note about a horse over a decade earlier and then got paid money to stumble around in pantyhose for a couple months, then gets to look like an old badass action movie star as TERRY FUNK at WrestleMania. Funk came off like the toughest guy in WWF in this match, and it turns out the match is the best WWF match so far this year. 

Funk starts the match by punching Billy Gunn in the side of the head a ton, then headbutting him, right in front of the ring. 

Cactus Jack runs his whole body into the dumpster just to knee Road Dogg in the face and then hits a somersault senton off the other side of the dumpster. It's a sick bump, off the side of the can and onto the floor in a heap. But an extra brilliant part of the spot is Cactus hit the dumpster - and not Road Dogg - because Billy Gunn had done a baseball slide to KICK Road Dogg out of the way after Cactus had already begun his senton! That's a really incredibly timed and executed crash. 

Funk hits the guardrail full speed in front of a bunch of kids, then gets backdropped into the dumpster. These guys are all firing off an amazing amount of creativity working within and around the confines of this dumpster. Every time either Funk or Cactus are in and around the dumpster it's total brutality. 

Billy Gunn pays Funk back for all the chops and this suddenly turned into a violent southern brawl and one of the great brawls of the year. Road Dogg holding Funk prone while Gunn rips his Funk U shirt off him, slapping his chest, punching him in the forehead. These guys are all so good at brawling that they're making cookie sheets look downright evil. I feel the stinging obnoxiously stiff rubber of the dumpster lids slapping off my back, because Funk and Cactus are taking these beatings. 

I don't even think the match needed a ladder, but the work they did with the ladder only elevated this already great match. Cactus and Mr. Ass saved their best brawling for their climb up the ladder, which was brisk. They walked quick up that ladder and punched each other in the head the whole time, and the second they got to the top they got knocked into the dumpster by Funk. Funk got punched into the ladder and flew back into it like he was telling his story of climbing Mt. Everest. 

Everybody's fall into the dumpster looked great, but I don't know if they topped that Cactus/Ass ladder spill. Or, maybe it was topped by old ass legend Terry Funk getting powerbombed off the fucking apron, into the dumpster, onto his old ass shoulder like he was working an FMW show in a baseball stadium. 

After this spills to the back and every single man falls into a bunch of concrete and wood and giant plastic Powerade bottles, and after every man gets hit in the head with a chair or equivalent, Terry Funk gets to use a forklift to move bodies in real time. I'm proud to be among the percentage of people who have had a forklift job. I have used a forklift to unload and load trucks at two different companies in my life, even if I've never actually had a job where I realized I would be using a forklift at the time of my hire. Two different companies trusted me enough to use a forklift. One of the forklifts was a stick shift. I can't even drive a stick shift car, but I knew how to unload expensive pumps and engines off a flatbed with a manual forklift. Two companies trusted me with a forklift, and Vince McMahon trusted Terry Funk to use a forklift at WrestleMania. 

7. Undertaker vs. Kane

I remember at the time this felt like a big deal to me and my friends. I am not as excited by it at age 42 as I was at age 17. Who could have guessed we'd see dozens of these matches. 

Kane does a Tombstone/Oklahoma Stampede and it's at least an interesting idea. 

This is kind of a tough match for Undertaker, as Kane has to stand perfectly still and no sell all of Taker's strikes, so they all kind of look like shit. Meanwhile he makes Kane's punches look excellent at times and throws himself into bumps in cool ways. His corner bump on an Irish whip looked great. 

There's an electric chair spot that is cooler than it should have been. Undertaker gets up on Kane's shoulders like he's Robert Gibson doing a headscissors, and Kane sits down fast and sends Taker kind of toppling down headfirst. 

The match starts to feel a bit long in the middle. Kane was an unmovable object but also an object that would lie in a long grounded chinlock. Two brothers sharing a small bed. Too old to be in the same room, let alone sharing a bed. 

Undertaker takes an insane bump on a tope, flying over the ropes and getting sidestepped by Kane, basically doing running dive into an empty swimming pool that had a big table and Spanish commentators at the bottom of it. 

Even after the big dive, the fans stay pretty cold. It gets quiet down the home stretch and it's really odd. You can argue whether the match layout is to blame: Did the match go too long even though it was the semi-main and at worst the third most anticipated match of the night? I don't think so. Kane's heaving wind sucking stomach might think otherwise. Maybe Undertaker made his comeback too suddenly after 13 consecutive minutes of Kane taking no damage? It felt like they were doing the right things down the stretch but the reactions were not there. The three tombstone finish is a good finish for this match, and the tombstones all looked like the tombstone that Hogan pretended he had taken to break his neck in PRIDE in 1973.

Kane worked singles matches this long against Bret, but that was a different style, and three years before. This man was tired and after 15 minutes of a physical match suddenly Undertaker had to pick up his dead weight into three different standing 69s. Kane was going to get dumped on his head. It was inevitable. 

I thought this delivered what it should have, but was surprised by the cold reception for the biggest moments. What matches are even considered the best Undertaker/Kane matches? Is there a consensus? 

8. Steve Austin vs. Shawn Michaels

God there were so many years I'd die to have an Austin/Michaels match. We got a big one at King of the Ring 97 and we got this one. Both ruled. Both could have been incredible in 1992, or 93, or 96. 1997 and 1998 were great and I bet if we had any of their house show matches from 96/97, at least one of them was bound to outshine their big stage PPV matches. These are two guys with house show work even stronger than widely seen work, because they were that good. 

This has a great chase to start, ending with a killer Austin Polish hammer. Michaels takes the Hennig bump in the ropes and stooges around with his tight little ass 2/3 out of his tights. HHH is such a coward. HHH spent the worst years of our mainstream American wrestling fandom aping the most boring stretches of Flair matches, but he was too much of a puss to literally show ass. HHH had a complete aversion to any type of ass showing. A pathetic pro wrestler. Shawn Michaels would hang his tight set out there for us all and it's a shame we didn't get more footage of 1998 Michaels. He was still on one. 

His high speed upside down bump in the corner landed his body in such a painful way, jarring his entire skeleton off the turnbuckles, a brutal bump no matter the condition of his back. This would throw any body completely out of whack. His bumping in the opening half is nothing but painful spills and extra leaps. He wrecks his balls on an atomic drop, goes chin first into the announce table off the apron (gorgeous bump). He finds great ways to get run into every single one of the turnbuckles.

Austin throws perfectly worked Hitman-style falling elbow smashes. His huge swinging punches look fantastic.  

Home stretch builds to a series of different great bumps, an incredible back and forth. The best of them were: 

~Michaels aiming to wrap Austin's legs around the post, but Austin yanking him chin first into the post instead. Michaels was an incredible ring post bumper in the early 90s and is somehow still best in the world in his retirement match. It's so infinitely more valuable than making funny faces on 2 counts. What the fuck happened to this guy? How did going cross eyed and born again make him shy away from sick turnbuckle and ringpost bumps and into goofy never had sex o-faces.  

~Michaels taking an in-ring backdrop that would have stood out on any house show match in Memphis in any year

~An even better backdrop bump: Austin going breakneck fast over the guardrail, onto concrete, inches away from fans

Do we actually know if Michaels' selling during the final minute or two of this is his back just seizing up, or is this dude just a perfect carny worker in his final match ever, working a back injury in one of his greatest selling performances of his career. 

This match was the literal LAST of the best era of Shawn Michaels. I don't know if there were 5 of his matches from 2002 to 2010 that he made better. It's one of my least favorite runs in wrestling history. 

He never returns after WrestleMania XIV, he's Barry Sanders. 

Best Matches: 

1. Terry Funk/Cactus Jack vs. New Age Outlaws

2. Marc Mero/Sable vs. Goldust/Luna Vachon 

3. Shawn Michaels/Steve Austin

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