Found Footage Friday: EDDIE~! JANNETTY~! COLT~! GANG~! REY~! GERMANY~!

MD: Going to finish out last month's Richard Land Germany knowing we've got some 81 footage to go through too (Rudge vs. Bret Hart for one).

9/6/80

Axel Dieter vs. Kim Duk

MD: Just a clip. We come in JIP. We get no finish. It's almost entirely Duk chopping Dieter with karate strikes. Overhand shots. I've seen a lot of Duk between Germany and Puerto Rico and that one cool Korea match that came up last year. And he can be very good. He really can. And we get flashes of that here right at the end when he's scrapping with Dieter who's firing back. The chops are quicker. They hit harder. He's actually trying to cut a resurgent warrior off instead of just marking time. Usually though, I find him lacking and I did in the first bit here. He's relatively big and has a great look and a clear personality and he just does the bare minimum to limited effect a lot of the times. But when it is time to go, he goes hard. Not much here.

Sal Bellomo/Achim Chall vs. Jim Harris/Tom Shaft

MD: Something of a slight tag but another look at Shaft and another chance to see Pre-Kamala Harris. There was some tomfoolery early where neither Harris nor Shaft wanted to be in there (past one shaky bit at the start, Harris fed pretty well for early shine), but as you can imagine, Harris was able to take over fairly quickly. It was interesting to see him do the handshake with one hand behind is back on his knees deal, which led to the transition. He had a misunderstanding with the ref. Due to the nature of the rules, you have to connect a pin to your last move in some way shape or form. His big splash defied that and he had to make sure to get in an extra bodyslam and quick pin to win the fall. Shaft did not impress. He could grind someone down but whenever he tried to do anything more (like a butt butt where he barely got off the ground) it just lacked oomph and energy. 

Not much to say about the faces. Bellomo took massive back body drops here and Chall came in hot on the hot tag. Good strikes. Bellomo won the second fall with a body block but everything got thrown out, with the heels getting DQed for illegal double teaming early into the final fall. More educational than entertaining overall.

9/13/80

Chris Colt vs. Louis Lawrence

MD: I knew how great Chris Colt was. I've seen him in a bunch of different territories, right? But watching him in these German matches is a whole different beast. He's itchy. That's the word. He wrestles like he's seeing colors wherever he looks and it's wild. Everything he does is worth watching, whether it's strutting around the ring as he's being announced or pointing at the ref, paranoid, between rounds. At the end of one round he was trying to get out of a headlock with roll ups and lifts where he got taken over, and he just decided to lay there in the middle of the ring once the bell rang. Lawrence had to come over and pour water on him and then he freaked out. Constant motion, constant manic energy, just fascinating to watch.

Lawrence, unfortunately, was not fascinating to watch, but I guess he provided a sane baseline for everything going on around him. There was one point where he just put him in a cross toehold for a few minutes and Colt WAS entertaining in it but they could have been doing a hundred more entertaining things. Finish was pretty hilarious as Colt guided the ref to the ropes to look out so he could climb them to do an elbow drop off the top. But the ref only looked for a second. It clearly didn't work. Just a "Look over there" that was futile, but the ref let him get away with it anyway. Maybe it was legal there and he thought it wasn't? Who knows? Anyway every match we get with him here is well worth watching.

Eddie Guerrero vs. Marty Jannetty ECW Enter Sandman 5/13/95

ER: We only had this (already short) match in very clipped form, and now we have all six minutes. Eddie had wrestled a 30 minute draw earlier in the night against Malenko and who could say what could ever have happened in that one. Maybe someday we'll get to see any of the Malenko/Guerrero matches but for now I'll watch this unclipped match for the first time and...see why ECW originally clipped it so much. This isn't that great! That's unexpected! This is one of those times where I was really hoping for a hot go go go short match, two guys who can work some speed and never otherwise wrestled, and instead it's kind of slow and sleepy and structurally confused. Eddie seemed tired and Marty worked down to his sleepy foe. Eddie and Dean had jerked each other off for a half hour earlier but Joey Styles wasn't pushing Eddie being tired from an earlier match whatsoever on commentary, so I guess this was just a couple quick guys working at 75%. Eddie pokes Marty in the eyes and scrapes his boot across his face but otherwise does nothing else heelish. Heatless backslides, ramp up that doesn't ramp, never reaches drama. Eddie's snapped off huracanrana finish looked good. Great leg hooking. 

One Man Gang vs. Flash Flanagan WWF 2/3/98

MD: Gang dark match. He had dropped some weight from his peak and was up against Flash Flanagan. My big takeaway is that he had a lot to add to the company if they were to bring him in but that this match didn't necessarily serve him. He worked the crowd well. His clubbers looked great. He had pretty decent presence. He shouted out "Shut your hole" which popped everyone. He gave Flash a ton though, and while it was generally earned, it was probably too much and serving too many masters. I think the fans saw the two of them too differently and it didn't do Flash any favors. If he had to work from underneath even more and had to really scrape for every inch he got it would have done him better and I think it would have served the match (and Gang) too. Kind of weird what might have been here. You could see him all over the card, the lost member of DOA, an Oddity, or the third man in a Bossman/Shamrock Corporation trio?

ER: I love getting a look at these dark/tryout matches because some of them are good, some of them aren't, and some of them are weird. This one was kind of weird, as it was laid out almost like a double showcase. I"m not certain it did a good job of showcasing Gang, but it played like a Flash Flanagan babyface showcase while also playing as a "here are all of my various skills" showcase for Gang. By that, I mean it felt like Gang was showing every thing that he could possibly do, without necessarily putting that into a coherent match. Think of it like someone auditioning for SNL by doing a bunch of impressions rather than doing a tight set utilizing those impressions. This was slower than it should have been, because it felt like Gang showing his entire skillset, in order. You can see how he works a crowd or gets verbal with a ref, you see what offense he can do, then you see how good he is at taking and selling offense. Some of Gang's offense looked great: he drops a pair of sick elbowdrops that are, quite frankly, perfect, he gets his boot up in the corner right to Flanagan's chin and gets an audible OOF from the crowd, and his follow up clothesline following through to his knees looked great.  

But I don't think I expected, going into this, how much more valuable Gang would be at putting over a fired up babyface. He was fantastic at taking and selling Flash's offense. Part of it was that Flash Flanagan had great offense. His missile dropkick is strong (Gang hangs in the whole way and takes it to the chest), and he has a cool springboard dropkick that starts in the ring and gets aimed at Gang in the corner. He has several kinds of nice punches and is great at "punching up" to the much larger Gang. He even has a couple big back elbows that looked like they would indeed move a guy Gang's size. But I don't think Flash's offense works as well without a guy selling it as well as Gang. This wasn't just about bumping, it's about being a humongous man believably getting knocked around by a smaller heavyweight, and Gang was so good at getting punched around into place. But he topped it all with a ridiculous spot where he gets hung up across the corner ropes like Shawn Michaels and splashed repeatedly by Flash until falling to the mat. I loved it, never seen anything like it before. A man the size of One Man Gang using the rope corners like a hammock alone looked absurd, but every time Flash hit him his large body would get rearranged into a different hilarious position. Body sagging, legs propped up like legs that size never are, finally falling gracelessly to the mat. Ridiculous. 

I would have loved One Man Gang in 1998 WWF, even if he was just a guy working Sunday Night Heat. Reuniting the slimmed down Twin Towers would have been booking directly to me, and with Gang recently on the payroll it would have made them more likely to bring the Towers back as a triumphant patriotic babyface team at the end of 2001. 

 

Eddie Guerrero/Kurt Angle/Edge vs. Undertaker/Kane/Rey Mysterio WWE 7/2/05

MD: Enough of a lost Japan house show match to write about certainly. We miss a huge amount of it but we get the beginning and the end and there's plenty to see. For one thing, this might have been the best use of Kane ever. He was tagged in early when Guerrero and Angle were basically trying to throw Edge under the bus. They had dodged Rey and Edge thought he was going in to face him only to get Kane. Lots of goofing around and it's all entertaining as the characters crash up against each other. Best part might have been Eddie trying for a sneak attack only to run when Kane turned his head. When Eddy finally gets in there, the crowd tries to encourage him which is all very funny. 

For what actual action we see, we get a good Eddie and Rey exchange where Eddie bases all over the place for him and then Edge feeding and feeding for Undertaker and that's pretty much what he's best at so it all works for me. It's much preferable to things being the other way around. Then we come back for the finish where Eddie got to goof against all the babyfaces and the ref with a chair. House shows are the best sort of wrestling? Sure seems it.

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Loosely Formed Thoughts on WWF Over the Edge 5/31/98

The Propaganda-style intro to this PPV is fucking insane. It's all World War II footage of tanks and soldiers and fucking Stalin and Mussolini and actual Nazi footage and it's all interspersed with They Live CONFORM and OBEY block fonts but also video of Stone Cold doing shit like turkey tapping Vince from several angles. Best possible start. 

 

1. LOD 2000 vs. DOA

It actually feels impossible that LOD 2000 didn't become the biggest tag team of the rest of the decade with Sunny as their manager. I don't think I'm being overly horny here either. I don't think the fact that Sunny looked like this while I was 17 years old matters here, as I don't think this is a matter of bias. I think I'm being a very reasonable and appropriate level of horny in a way that the eyes of history agree with. 

This is Hawk and Animal vs. 8-Ball and Skull but Droz and Chainz are there. Up above I only wrote "LOD 2000 vs. DOA" and I didn't want anyone to get confused about what members of each group of friends was actively involved here. 

Skull throws a nice ugly big man swinging neck beaker and an actual good legdrop. It does not bring me great joy that 8-Ball and Skull's work from '98 is probably better than we assessed at the time. 

Animal is in strong style mode and does a dragon screw and I don't think I've seen that from him before or since. How much of his BattlArts work is available? 

8-Ball vs. Hawk is better than Skull vs. Animal. They did more punching and elbowdrops and an ugly piledriver that Hawk gets to ignore completely because that is Hawk's spot. 

Hawk has a way of looking off balance while also having this incredible balance and sturdiness on all of his clotheslines. He looks wobbly, but takes this incredible bump all the way across the ring off a missed top rope shoulderblock, flying out of the ring into an almost Halloween style sliding bump to the floor. Hard. I liked Drunk Hawk when I was a teenager but I don't think it was because I thought he was GOOD good. Accidentally, time has only proven me right. Further proof of how good he still was on fumes in '98: the 1-2 punch of his  neckbreaker -> fistdrop combo. 

The 8-Ball/Hawk punch exchange is good and should have gone three times as long. It's worth it for Chainz punching Hawk in the balls from the floor in a way that didn't even seem planned. Cameras weren't focused on it. You can see Chainz pop him in the nuts from the floor and Hawk reacts like a guy who just realized he got tapped hard enough in the balls to react. 

Nobody quite knew how to get to the finish, but Animal clotheslining his way through a hot tag and hitting a great powerslam for the finish plays well with any lead up. 

There is a Faarooq! Faarooq! Faarooq is on Fire!! sign and folks, that's a good one. 

2. Jeff Jarrett vs. Steve Blackman

Fuck I hope Steve Blackman tries a piledriver here but I have a parlay on Jarrett doing one. You see, in between matches backstage, Faarooq hit The Rock with the Piledriver To Beat tonight. We're 20 minutes into this show and we've had two piledrivers and we still have over 2.5 hours to go.  

Blackman is really fun to watch during this stretch. We don't get Reformed Musclehead Karate Guys Working Every Pro Wrestling Spot He's Ever Seen anymore. Blackman doing a baseball slide dropkick to start but then press slamming Jarrett back into the ring but also doing Ricky Steamboat double chops but also looking lost and kind of dangerous is just lightning in a bottle. I think he would get a lot less interesting the more he learned, but this is still in that magic window. 

Blackman hits a thrust kick on the floor that looks like the the most violent version of Chuck Norris kicking Jarrett down the aisle. 

Jarrett does a really good job icing this down the right amount while there's an Al Snow angle taking several minutes too long at ringside. Jarrett works Barry Darsow chatter like "He ain't going nowhere now!" and "Ring the bell he's done!" and is able to do essentially nothing for a few minutes, really well. 

They do a preposterously slow 9 count after Jarrett hits a back suplex. Jarrett had been working over Blackman in a chinlock for a minute so I have no idea why Jarrett was as knocked out as Blackman. I thought they would explode a bit more after the Al Snow angle, you know, to get everyone back involved in things, but they kind of do the opposite for no reason. They've turned the entire rest of the match into "every move keeps both of us down for too long" and it sucks.  

Steve Blackman is at his absolute beautiful best when he is doing moves with full commitment without looking as if he's ever even practiced doing the move before. It's only a detriment if a couple of miscues happen back to back, but has a remarkably high ceiling as a style. His elbowdrop is not thrown like any other wrestler has thrown an elbowdrop. It's like he was born with the knowledge but without memory of where the knowledge came from. He knows it's right, but it's informed by something beyond him. He is not inspired by anyone else who came before. 

Steve Blackman is Backyarder Doug Furnas and we didn't know what we had. We didn't know, and he didn't know how to continue giving that to us. 

3. Loser Leaves WWF: Sable vs. Marc Mero

I'll say it again: Mero and Sable were really great during the first half of '98. Neither ever did it better. Maybe when we get into Jacqueline Era Marc I'll determine that it has aged even better than his Sable Forced Separation arc but I'm not expecting it to be. Honestly Sable and Mero are fucking GREAT together. They really seem like they dislike each other, like their marriage was really already over instead of merely being on the start of a 5 year slide towards being over.  

Marc Mero is so good during this entire segment. "Sable what happened to us? This business ruins relationships... It ruined ours."  

Marc Mero pulling a small package after doing the honorable thing and lying down for Sable, then jumping around the ring in celebration is one of those things my sister will bring up unprovoked 25 years later. 

4. Bradshaw/Taka Michinoku vs. Kai En Tai

Bradshaw press slams Taka into everyone within the first 30 seconds. He's so massive, they look like Lilliputians wearing Miller's Outpost jean shorts. 

I remember this being a lot better, with a lot more heat. Crowd really isn't as into it as I remember. I'm not into it as much as I remember. The Kai En Tai stuff doesn't read as fluid or unique today. There are a lot more seams with 2024 eyes. Bradshaw is not actually reckless at all. Did we all have false implanted rose colored memories of Bradshaw recklessly fucking up everyone in the match or was that just me? This Wisconsin crowd doesn't understand a single fucking part of it. Arms are crossed in Milwaukee, politely not understanding any of Dick Togo's excellent senton variations. 

Jim Ross makes an extended Gulliver's Travels reference and then explains it and I feel like a stupid asshole who's only read three books in my life out here making the same similes as Jim Ross. JR and I each watched the Ted Danson Gulliver's Travels Two Night Television Event in 1996 and now we use it to describe pro wrestling when big man fights small men.   

Okay it gets good when Bradshaw finally tags in and that's when he starts throwing them around. It's still never unprofessional in the ways I remember it being. In fact, Bradshaw was actually a good sport believably taking Kai En Tai's offense, leaning into dropkicks and struggling really well while the Lilliputians tethered his legs with rope. He does polish Funaki with a clothesline and choose Teioh as his Only True Victim by throwing him - really throwing him - with a tiger suplex, but you could watch this match and have no actual idea that Bradshaw is a miserable prick.  

5. Faarooq vs. The Rock

I think Faarooq looked like a real badass (before the match started). This match was the best his Faarooq gear ever looked on him. Fuck how cool would Jacqueline have looked in Faarooq's exact gear? Faarooq looks like a lean cut Masa Saito, or the most bulked up Bernie Casey. He looks perfect, in other words. He looks like a guy really giving a beating to a guy he dislikes. A beating he's been waiting to hand out. His sparsely African-patterned gear looked great with the straps up, and even better when he takes the straps down. Someone who's good with computers, put Jacqueline in Faarooq's gear. 

I hate how guys like MJF or Austin Theory or Ricky Starks move like 1998 The Rock. It sucks. They all flop the same and walk around with their butts out the same and it's all theater kids goofing around doing People's Elbows. The Butt Out Walk must be the first thing they teach at Brahma School. 

I don't know why the crowd isn't more excited for Faarooq dishing out a beating. The Rock wore a big neck brace after Faarooq piledrove him earlier and takes a fun beating, and that combination of things deserved a reaction. His elbows on the apron looked good, Rock is acting like a real punk doofus, yet nobody cares. 

Real flat finish. This feud never had a chance. There was a weird 3 count that got a silent reaction and the camera shot it in a way where you couldn't see Rock's foot on the rope. This whole thing was only 5 minutes and felt really incomplete. Blackman/Jarrett got twice as much time without even being based around an actual feud, so this whole thing was just set up to fail.  

When DX runs in after the match to ambush The Nation they look like the 4 Horsemen of Rape.

6. Vader vs. Kane

Vader was getting real reactions in 1998. There was a powerful machine working against 1998 Vader. He does the Vader flex, he flashes the V's, a ton of fans have Vader signs. The People believed in Vader in 98 and the people in charge didn't want them to. Vader was done wrong. We all know it. The man was 43 years old, which is not an old age at all. I know this because it is my age and how could I possibly be old? I understand why they instinctively didn't want to get behind a 43 year old Vader, but you see things a couple decades removed from the original context and you realize just how mammoth a star Vader would have been in WWF had they just treated him the same way they treat Nakamura at the same age. 

Kane's punches were better in 1998 - better, not good - but his straight rights are not good. There is a reason he never threw them for most of the rest of his career. They have no weight behind them. His uppercuts don't look good either. He threw a bigger variety of punches then, not just uppercuts, and their form is good but the weight is absent. Kane's strikes look shittier the longer the match goes. He would go on to phase all of these punches out other than the uppercut.  

Vader's offense looks good against a big guy like Kane. His bear attack runs him over, but he smartly did one bear attack that stunned Kane, then a second bigger one that flattened him. Nobody was flattening Kane in 1998. Vader knew we build to that. "Vader using his mass now" fuck yeah he is JR. 

This match should be getting a bigger reaction. Vader is making this look like a big fight. He's swinging arms into all sides of Kane's head, even throwing them to the back of his head. Kane is in retreat! Vader sent Kane into retreat which is a thing that has never happened and nobody is reacting to it. Nobody is reacting to these beefy arms and it doesn't make sense. Nobody thinks it's cool that Kane scoop slammed Vader? Vader is a really big guy to take a scoop slam! He lands completely differently than you've seen because you just don't see 400 pound men getting slammed. 

This has not been a night of good matches, which often hurts a crowd, but I don't know why this crowd was not reacting to this match as if it was not Good or Big. It was both, but the crowd reacting so indifferently and Kane just not being that good limited how good it could get. 

I don't know why I haven't mentioned how ridiculous the mask stipulation is but it really didn't need to happen. It didn't make anyone care more about the match than they would have. Vader getting real red-faced revenge would have been cooler. A match built around "first to grab and use the large comical wrench" would have been cooler, probably.  

Kane's top rope clothesline is the softest contact Signature Clothesline of the modern era. It's a terrible clothesline and it never got better. It was only ever good if used in No Mercy. His running clothesline, which he stopped using, looked like a clothesline that would run Vader over and is the loudest contact of the match. 

Vader bumps to get Kane over but they react more to Vader on the attack than Vader bumping around. If Kane had the energy of Bradshaw it could have been a real fight, but Vader has to create his own energy off Kane's Lesser Jason Voorhees body acting. Vader knows how to build a reaction when going for the Vader Bomb, and he knows how to peak it by pausing briefly on the middle buckle before deciding to climb to the top, Milwaukee swelling as he leaves his feet and deflating when he crash lands. The Vader moonsault is a flat out insane and incredible spot for a man his age and size to be using. Vader understood PPV and They resented him for it. This man got up for a goddamn Tombstone and yep, it looks cool as hell when a guy the size of Vader is Tombstoned. 

I don't actually know how I feel about Vader calling himself a fat piece of shit. I think it's a raw promo, and his delivery is note perfect. I guess the problem is that I don't think they ever did anything other than kind of reflect on how sad it was that Vader called himself a fat piece of shit. I don't know if we needed to see vulnerable, sensitive Vader but I do think it was so memorable because of how real it was delivered. We've all been down on ourselves in our lives. A lot sometimes, for any little thing. Vader felt real, and maybe we didn't need Real Vader. Maybe, if it led to something of substance, a renewed energy and fight, it would have allowed people to reflect on themselves when they get too down on themselves. I don't think WWF was or is capable of writing that kind of character. Whatever. It felt like actual, real frustration, the kind we all go through. We don't get that kind of insight into athletes. They're insulated. Taught what not to say to the media. Me, personally? I do not think Vader is a fat piece of shit, but I believed in that moment that he did, and that's affecting. 

I forgot this was the PPV they did that weird Lawler/Crusher/Mad Dog Vachon angle. The Crusher, in his early 70s, kept looking cooler the more undressed he got during his segment with Lawler and Mad Dog Vachon. He looked cool the entire time and got a great big reaction from Milwaukee. He looked like such a badass grandpa in his brown Wrangler Wranchers throwing his bolo punches. This was such a weird thing for WWF to do. They had already used Mad Dog's wooden leg in a match and the idea of WWF honoring a local hero who had nothing to do with them is such a non-Vince move. 

7. HHH/New Age Outlaws vs. D-Lo Brown/Owen Hart/The Godfather 

If your friend had never watched WWF programming before, you could convince them pretty easily that Owen Hart was working some kind of hacker gimmick in his caution tape singlet and, well, hacker sunglasses. 

Owen tags in and runs straight into a Billy Gunn clothesline, Gunn punches and press slams him, Gunn goes up for a backdrop for him, really two of the only guys trying to make this work.

Helmsley's running jumping knee and his tilt a whirl backbreaker (!?) looked good. He always really looked like he enjoyed working Owen. 

Why was the Billy Gunn/Godfather pairing so good in this? They worked kind of fast against each other, and Godfather looked like he was throwing his kicks and missed clotheslines with different pep.

New Age Outlaws working over D-Lo is really good too, though not as good whenever HHH tags in. It's wild how much HHH really kills all the pacing and vibe of this match any time he's involved.

More Owen Sucks chants than I remember but his perfect piledriver to Road Dogg brings no reaction at all. Philistines. 

This match is going a lot longer than anyone could have reasonably expected. The fans get real restless whenever anyone considers doing any kind of hold. This thing is dying the longer they go, nobody is doing anything to bring it back to life even if a lot of the work looks good. It's crazy how bad HHH makes the DX act in-ring. He is actively hurting their vibe and wrestling image. 

8. Steve Austin vs. Dude Love 

Pat Patterson is so fucking funny introducing Gerald Brisco as the guest timekeeper. He has his readers on and a stack of at least a dozen 3x5 cards. He actually said that Gerald Brisco's heart "beats like the tom tom drum on the reservation, like the Heartbeat of America." I mean whoever wrote that line was onto something next level. "Some call him the reincarnation of Jim Thorpe. We call him...A Friend." This is incredible. I did not appreciate how amazing his intro was when I watched this as a teen. All my friends and I just wanted to see Austin beat everyone's ass. 

Vince looks like an impossibly hulked up Robert Carradine. A real geek, and a real freak in his flap pocket black chinos and sleeveless ref shirt. Incredible posture, but a freakish build sculpted onto that wealthy flawed Connecticut skeleton and Kennedy hair. He has a million facial reactions and it's incredible how good literally every one of them are. It's a real Gotta Hand it To. 

Foley sells a back elbow like Austin really spiked him in the nose, running himself into the ground like Terry Funk but more real. The longer the match goes, the more I know that each man was really taking these shots. I just didn't realize they were roughing each other up from go. 

Foley takes such a great bump on a clothesline to the floor. Austin really timed it well and collided with him well, but Foley went over so fast, in that way that Foley sometimes does where you don't know how controlled it actually is. Man would just throw his body to the floor with more speed than he used for anything else. Shouldn't really be a shock anymore that Foley took some crazy bumps, but his heavy lower half really whips him over the ropes. Nobody else has really been able to duplicate that. 

Austin throws Foley onto Brisco and then stomps on them both and punches Foley in the back of the head too many times before clotheslining him ass over elbow onto concrete over the guardrail. I probably haven't watched this match since the early 2000s (I bought the Over the Edge VHS from a video store in Healdsburg that was going out of business) and remember it being built around tons of bumps onto concrete, and that is exactly what it is, and they keep escalating. 

Austin taking a backdrop onto the hood of a fucked up old style Honda Civic, boot going through the windshield 20 years before Zona 23. Is Zona 23:16 anything? Austin gets thrown onto and over a tilted old Mercury and Foley sunset flips him off that Mercury's hood, it's awesome. Foley's body makes a wet splat as his weird torso and wide butt land perfectly flat. It's a sound you never hear and Foley has made it like three times in this match alone. 

Austin is bleeding and is always an incredible looking bleeder. The blood doesn't keep up but the initial color is strong. When he bleeds he always gets the best deep red color on his tanned bald head. For a match built around big bumps on concrete I forgot how many hard back bumps Austin takes onto concrete in this match. My man is out here taking backdrops and suplexes in parts of the entrance that at least 7,000 people can't even see. It's insane. This man broke his damn neck 10 months ago and he's bumping on concrete for himself. 

Also, Steve Austin is great because he manages to bounce a chair off the ropes and into his own face and makes it look like a complete accident. It's a spot that a lot of men have tried and few have made work well. I think there needs to be a level of alcoholism involved to make it work. Sandman was good at it too. 

Pat Patterson throws such a punch into Mike Chioda's lower orbital bone. There's no way any of these Patterson/Briscoe matches from 1999 are any good but damn they should have been using Patterson in more physical roles this whole time. He takes one of the best chokeslams of the year through a damn table. This is a man pushing 60 who retired four presidents ago and hasn't done physical stuff on screen since the mid 80s. How did he even prepare to take this? How did Vince psych himself up to get brained with a pre-Chris Nowinski research chairshot? No idea. 

I don't know how well this holds up as an All Time Great Brawl, but it's differently great for its big stunt show feel and old man bullshit that was at the center of a fight. It was messier than I remembered and was more about getting to specific areas and moments, but this is still a standout 1998 WWF match and surely the best WWF match of the year to this point.   

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

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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

Read more!

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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Loosely Formed Statements on WWF's No Way Out of Texas 2/15/98

 

1. Marc Mero/Goldust vs. The Head Bangers

Marc Mero is a 1998 Rising Stock. Always on. Endless energy. 

Marc Mero's high back elbow and precise elbowdrop. Stocking Rising. 

Marc Mero's ass over crown bump to the floor for a Mosh lariat. Heat Seeker. 

Goldust working dropdowns and leapfrogs and a high backdrop bump in black lingerie. Picturing him working 2000s AAA. 

Marc Mero draws real heat. His bumps for Thrasher's shoulderblocks are real. Online Mero Discourse will swell. 

We get real blood 10 minutes into No Way Out of Texas. Thrasher takes a real manly bump when Goldust snake eyes him onto the ring steps. Blood spidering down his face. Match at a new level. 

Mero - the worker of 1998 WWF - immediately targets the cut whenever he is in, including stomping Thrasher all over the cut to spread the blood. 

We'll see if any chant will be louder during any other match than this MERO SUCKS chants. Scotching heat in February. That's before he unwraps some wrist tape and chokes Thrasher until the tape is red, and then the chants resume. 

Mosh has four sincerely great punches on his hot tag. 

2. Pantera vs. Taka Michinoku

Pantera has the greatest offense. Multiple rolling armdrags, THAT running swanton to the floor, a tricked out headscissors that felt more World of Sport than lucha, and a fast flipping bump to the floor. 

Taka's springboard plancha flies 4 feet past the guardrail into the entrance.

Pantera's rolling headscissors from the top rope to the apron is in the discussion of Greatest Headscissors in History. The tope diagonally past the ringpost was triumphant garnish. 

Well Brian Christopher called Taka Michinoku "slant eyed" on commentary. Jesus. 

Cools down a bit when Pantera is working over Taka's back, but I like it. 

The cooldown burst into flames when Taka took one of the highest bumps over the top to the floor that I've ever seen, moments before Pantera leapt over the top rope with his running senton, the most incredible move on 1998 wrestling TV. 

The cool back work stretch is paid off many times over when Pantera fills every bit of space with elbowdrops aimed with precision at Taka's lower back, and two different backbreakers that looked...backbreaking. 

Pantera pulls off an effortlessly accurate top rope moonsault, the way I might take a bite out of a sandwich, then snaps off a hurricanrana with both of them jumping off the top rope just as easily. 

Brian Christopher was a...real presence...on commentary. The entire match. You have never heard louder slurs on commentary. 

3. The Quebecers vs. The Godwinns

I'm not sure why they even brought in the Quebecers in 1998. They brought them back to Raw with no re-introduction, just the two of them wearing the blandest and worst gear of their respective careers. Still a good team, but out of place and oddly presented. 

Rougeau keeps ducking Phineas's lock ups and then yells "How about those Canadians, eh?" to the crowd like a prick. 

Jacques is out here getting mowed over by shoulderblocks, and when Pierre tags in he starts working wristlock exchanges with Henry. It's kind of silly, but those big boys did really yank the hell out of those arms. 

Phineas works really vicious with Jacques. He hits a full on Glacier front kick into Jacques's stomach and tries to pull his arm off with a single arm DDT. 

Henry drops his head and Jacques kicks him hard right across the chest. Pierre is the only guy not throwing leather so far. 

They're working this as a classic WWF heel in peril match, the crowd completely silent as the Godwinns cut Jacques off from Pierre. For some reason, the fans do not cheer for Rougeau's sunset flip nearfall, and I have no idea what crowd reaction they were expecting when Henry held Jacques in a chinlock that could only build to Jacques fighting back to his feet. 

The match is actually really good but the role reversal fucks everything up. 

The fans do not want to see Jacques make a hot tag to Pierre. The cannonball that they hit is not triumphant. 

Jacques hits a pretty crazy plancha off the top to the floor, crashing into Henry. 

Everything was completely backward and the crowd was icy but it was a good tag if you pretend it was in Montreal with a poorly mic'd crowd. 

4. Bradshaw vs. Jeff Jarrett 

Say what you will about Cornette being given a dead in the water idea, but I loved the short-lived NWA stable. What a bunch of weirdos. Windham, the Rock n Rolls, and Jeff Jarrett with my favorite gear and hair of his career. Robert Gibson is wearing a duster with county fair sweatshirt art of him and Ricky on the back. 

The opening is really well worked, just Bradshaw swinging arms and chaps and boots at Jarrett and Jarrett taking all of it. I loved when Bradshaw ducked down and Jarrett finally landed something, a stiff kick to Bradshaw's chest, and Bradshaw just straightened up and booted Jarrett in the face. 

It's funny when they exchange strikes, as Jarrett is doing these nice worked right hands but Bradshaw is just hauling back and smashing Jarrett with the edge of his elbow. 

I appreciate JR pushing the story that Jarrett knew to target Bradshaw's knee because Barry Windham told him about Bradshaw's knee in secret, because I guess it's better than telling the story of Jarrett targeting the two foot long braced kneepad that covers most of Bradshaw's left leg.

All of Jarrett's kicks to Bradshaw's leg look good, but none of it leads to anything. 

This was a lot better when it was Bradshaw laying waste to Jarrett and the NWA. It loses steam once they went into more of a back and forth. 

When the NWA runs out after the match, Robert Gibson takes a really fast, pretty crazy bump to the floor. I have to remind myself that Gibson was only 39 during this run and was really busting his ass. 

5. Faarooq/The Rock/Kama Mustafa/Mark Henry/D-Lo Brown vs. Ken Shamrock/Ahmed Johnson/Chainz/Skull/8-Ball

I remember watching this PPV a couple days after it aired, getting the tape from a friend whose dad had a co-worker who taped the PPVs. Something something the kids will never understand what we went through. If your parents didn't let you actually order PPVs, that's how you got to see a PPV in 1998. 

I remember watching this match before school, and my dad getting actually offended by them clearly running a team of militant black people opposite several white supremacists. My parents already hated pro wrestling because of its stupidity. I don't think my dad had ever even considered that there would be angles with white supremacist good guys. I remember him reading the paper and putting it down, saying "It's VERY clear what they're trying to imply here" and being mad about it. 

This match was set up by The Rock hitting Shamrock in the face with one of the most disgusting chairshots in history. 

Does anyone actually know any differences between Skull and 8-Ball? Is one of them better than the other? Does anyone actually know which one is which? Did they themselves actually keep track of which was Skull and which was 8-Ball? When JR tells me that Skull is in against D-Lo, should I trust him? Should I trust JR to know the separate identities of Skull and 8-Ball, even though this is a War of Attrition match and JR very clearly did not know the definition of "attrition" when Lawler asked him to define it, and JR had to use schoolyard tacts like "*I* know what it is, do you?" until the moment you can tell someone came on the headset and told him the definition. You can tell someone came on, as JR was *floundering* and fucking seething at Lawler for pressing him on this, and after 20 agonizing seconds suddenly JR blurted out 6 synonyms for "attrition". (Skull has a slightly rounder face, FYI)

Shamrock dumps himself on his head doing a Japanese armdrag to D-Lo. 

Chainz drops several fast elbowdrops but I'm not sure if any of them are good. His big boot is better. 

Mark Henry looks like a total badass calling for Ahmed, and the crowd really comes alive when he and Ahmed start wailing on each other. 

D-Lo does a frog splash onto Ahmed's ass and legs, committing to the splash even as it looked like Ahmed was a man not expecting a frog splash. 

It is wild how much smaller Shamrock looks than everyone else in the match. 

Who could possibly give a shit that D-Lo Brown is a Certified Public Accountant, JR? How would that be interesting to any person watching D-Lo Brown in this War of Attrition? Talk about his nice Hitman elbowdrop.

Jesus now JR is talking about The Rock's degrees. JR tanked this match. They're fucking fighting JR, stop talking about everyone's fucking GPA. 

6. Vader vs. Kane

The cameras cut away just as Vader was about to do some V-hand crab dancing and shit this company hasn't known how to film wrestling in 25 years. 

Vader is throwing punches straight at Kane's forehead and then swinging his whole arm into the side of Kane's head. 

Vader gets a rear waistlock and grabs Kane by the hair with his left hand so he can punch Kane in the back of the head a bunch with his right, including one shot from behind that snuck up and under into Kane's temple. 

Kane isn't bad in control, but things are much better whenever it is Vader punching Kane in the head. 

Vader has taken big bumps for clotheslines. 

My dad would have made such a good Paul Bearer, if he was someone who ever dressed up in a costume for any reason (I have never seen my dad in any costume for any reason). My dad is more handsome than Paul Bearer, but the body shape and parted brown hair are too similar. 

Kane does his uppercut but he hadn't learned how to arm slap yet. 

Vader tests just how sturdy Kane's mask is by punching him directly into the face six times until Kane literally responds as if he's being swarmed by bees. 

Kane is wearing some insane Boris Karloff lifts, and whenever Vader rocks him with a standing clothesline you can really see them throwing Kane off balance. 

Does Vader have the best standing splash? It's up there. 

Kane's strikes don't look great, his top rope clothesline doesn't look great, but there's absolutely no denying how awesome it looks seeing Vader get tombstoned. 

7. Savio Vega/HHH/New Age Outlaws vs. Steve Austin/Cactus Jack/Chainsaw Charlie/Owen Hart

Savio Vega sure makes a lot of sense as a kayfabe partner and as a guy who would be able to work this match, but when a teenager hears Mystery Partner and that Mystery is replacing the World Heavyweight Champion, well...

All of the Austin/Gunn exchanges are really great. Gunn scrambling out of the ring to avoid a Stunner, then bashing Austin with the edge of a trash can on the floor, Austin running him the hell over with a clothesline, beating him with 1998 chairshots

Billy Gunn is doing all of Hunter's Flair bumps better than Hunter

Funk is in there taking nothing but damage, beaten by trash cans, getting powerbombed through a pair of chairs, taking a piledriver on a trash can lid, back suplex onto a lid, also threw a trash can into the air and taking the hit when it comes back down.

Billy Gunn has that Paul Koslo weave

Cutting Funk off from everyone else is a cool way to work this 8 man

Austin throws a mashed up trash can so hard at Billy Gunn's head, and again, Gunn bumping for Austin is perfection

Nobody backstage told Savio and Funk that they were wearing the same thing? Both got that big ol dad butt denim 

Owen Hart's best role is running in from the apron to back off DX, and then returning to the apron. He hits a great missile dropkick into Savio and later runs across the ring to hit a big dropkick and take swings at all of them. 

Ending is a bit abrupt, with Austin tagging in, wasting everyone quickly, and then just hitting a Stunner on Road Dogg, but the match was a really fun brawl. 

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WWF 305 Live: BROCK! Big Show! Undertaker! Kane!

Undertaker vs. Kane WWF Survivor Series 11/15/98 - FUN

ER: I'll be writing up a bunch of matches between these two, and I'm curious if any will stand out as legitimate gems. Am I the only one with that curiosity? These two paired off a LOT in singles matches. Without checking, Kane would be my pick as the guy Taker faced the most in his career. They were both around for so long, at the same time, constantly in each other's business...but was any of it any good? Well, this was pretty good! Taker did some unique things, like work over Kane's knee. People in the crowd didn't seem to want any of it. Part of this was probably that technically Taker was the heel here, and Kane was the face, none of which made any sense to anyone, so you got left with a quiet crowd. Taker clotheslines Kane right in the back of the knee and then locks in a kneebar, and I'm sorry but that's cool as hell. But he abandons that and works a kind of sluggish punch exchange. Kane looked better than Taker on all strike exchanges, but there's something about seeing two giant guys slug it out, two "7 footers" as JR kept saying. There were a couple hard landings, big clothesline to the floor, the odd visual of Paul Bearer helping Taker cheat to win, overall not bad.

Brock Lesnar vs. Big Show WWE Royal Rumble 1/19/03 - EPIC

ER: I loved this, a massive collision and the crowd was losing it seeing Big Show get tossed around. Babyface Brock is a real machine, and I don't think he's ever gotten enough credit for being such a great babyface. It wasn't a long enough run, but he connected, he knew how to bump as a sympathetic face (different than his big match heel bumping), made heel offense look great, and there was not one wrestler who can compete with Lesnar's babyface comebacks. He's so tenacious, starting the match charging in for a takedown, getting headbutted off and coming back, and we get a lot of Lesnar powering over Big Show with cool belly to bellys. Big Show is one of those guys who had a great career, but also a disappointing career? Even at his best, there was always one thing off. This giant of a man had so many goober looks, with silly mustaches and various stages of balding, always with an uncanny ability to look like the world's largest IT guy. Here's he wearing Old Navy carpenter jeans and has a too thin handlebar mustache, he looks like a 7' tall Diedrich Bader character. But he looks heavy as hell to throw around, and it looks amazing every time Lesnar gets him off his feet. Brock takes a huge bump to the floor, basically getting chokeslammed off the edge of the apron, and he gets huge height on a perfect nearfall chokeslam. Brock is one of the greatest in ring actors, and his last second kickout on the chokeslam was a thing of beauty. Big Show does Shock Face a couple decades before it was the house style, and it was justified. Heyman gets involved and takes a hard bump when Brock drags him in the ring, and I thought the interference was done well. Lesnar came out looking like the Incredible Hulk, and the match finishing F5 on Big Show is one of the great wrestling feats of strength spots. What a way to open a PPV.  

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WWF 305 Live: Crush! Booger! Viscera! Kane! Big Show! Undertaker!

Crush vs. Bastion Booger WWF Raw 6/28/93 - GREAT

ER: This is great for what it is supposed to be great at. They're a week out from the Stars and Stripes Challenge, and Crush is being lightly built up as someone who could potentially be the one to slam Yokozuna. On the way to the ring Heenan is the one to point out that if ANYone in the WWF had a chance of getting Yokozuna on his tiptoes, it would be Crush. Vince and Savage weren't talking about it, so Heenan bringing it up unprovoked about a good guy felt like something kids would have noticed. And the match story is simple but effective, with early hard shoulderblocks neutralizing each other, and Crush twice unable to lift Booger into a fireman's carry. Doubt was cast on Crush's lifting ability, and there's a great moment where Booger crushes him on the floor with a killer avalanche into the ringpost. Booger works a long gross bearhug that Crush fights out of by jamming his arms down into Booger's prominent titties, while Vince and Savage go on and on about how bad Booger smells and how disgusting his hump is. The man's hump is admittedly off putting, it's a really stupidly effective dumb gimmick. We get some great moments of Booger being a large heavy man, and I genuinely can't tell if he was sandbagging intentionally or not. He barely gets over on a backdrop, kind of rolling and flopping off Crush's back, and then Crush actually goes for a vertical suplex but doesn't get him quite vertical and ends up in sort of a half bodyslam. Intentional or not, it's effective at putting over the denseness of Booger, and Crush is strong enough at selling that he comes off strong for just shifting him. The finish is really great as Crush gets fired up and hits three straight bodyslams on Booger for the win, with Vince flipping out the whole time that Booger is 450 pounds, only 100 pounds less than Yokozuna. The fans recognized that too and it made Crush come off like a genuine babyface threat. 

Undertaker vs. The Big Show WWF Raw 5/3/99 - FUN

ER: Pretty stunning that the first ever meeting between Undertaker and Big Show happened on a random episode of Raw, and wasn't even announced ahead of the episode. That's crazy. They really had no idea what to do with Big Show, judging by his character arcs over his first few months. This is a short match with a quick finish, as Undertaker punches Show into the corner and climbs the turnbuckles, only for Show to drag him down with a nice bearhug. Undertaker rolls to the floor and Paul Bearer hands him ether to dump on his elbow pad. I always love when ether or chloroform gets involved, mainly because the commentary has to say things like "You smell that? It smells like ether!" and I suppose if you're around pro wrestlers long enough on the road you may eventually learn how to identify the smells of chloroform or ether. Taker locks on a sleeper and hooks the ethered pad around Show's face, which is a cool spot to bring down a giant. Oh but this is the middle of 1999 so Undertaker just gets a baseball bat and fucking breaks it over Big Show's face. Why not just jump him before the match and bash him with the bat, why wait the 2 minutes? The bat spot is totally preposterous, as the bat just explodes over Show's head, cutting Undertaker around the jaw and busting open Big Show's forehead, swelling his eye. There was a lot of ridiculous weapons stuff during this era, but Russo realllly loved the implausibility of full force baseball bat shots to the head.

Viscera vs. Kane WWE Backlash 5/1/05 - VERY GOOD

ER: Outside of the weird racist/misogynist Trish/Viscera angle (Viscera slaps her ass and is promised sex upon Kane's demise, Trish calls him - among other things - a "chicken eater" when he fails), this match was a blast. Kane is outweighed by almost 200 pounds so works more as the fast undersized guy. They run into each other nice and heavy, Kane drops fast cruiser elbows like he's Waltman or something, and even hits a nice legdrop with good height. The standing exchanges look good, and even though Kane usually hits light on flying offense, he dialed up the crazy and hit a flying shoulder tackle off the top to the floor. Viscera bumped big, ring shaking back bumps, nice job running into the ringpost, all of it felt very King of the Monsters. We even got a fun spot where Trish ran after Kane with a chair but got blindsided by a Lita cane shot, sending Trish and the chair flying. These two have matched up several times, and this match made it clear that there could be a really good match in there somewhere. I could also see this being their peak, but this was real good.

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WWF 305 Live: Bradshaw! Rhyno! Undertaker! Mark Henry! Big Daddy V! Kane!

Bradshaw vs. Rhyno WWE Smackdown 12/11/03 - VERY GOOD

ER: It's pretty jarring how much faster some the house style was in 2003. Guys obviously move fast now, but an absurd amount of the time is based on missed moves and reversals and learned behavior garbage. This was worked super fast but built entirely around both guys colliding. Learned behavior wrestling is a real curse, give me 4 minutes of two big guys throwing punches and boots and taking big spills. Rhyno starts by running at Bradshaw before the bell, Bradshaw turns and sticks his boot up and Rhyno stops. No contact made, but a fun way of doing it that you rarely see. When was the last time you saw a guy try to get a cheapshot, get caught before delivering the cheapshot, and agreeably stop the cheapshot? Bradshaw hits a nice floatover suplex early, which is a neat way to hint at the finish. There was a weird delay in his floatover, that also planted a visual seed for the finish. He hit the suplex, but didn't immediately float, instead they both lied there as if he was considering rolling into another suplex...but then floated over. The delay felt odd, but I understood what he was doing after the finish.

We got plenty of big chops, Bradshaw throwing short right hands and big elbows, a nice big boot, and the whole thing was go go go while always based around collision. I loved how Bradshaw missed an elbowdrop: as quickly and close to Rhyno as possible, the kind of miss that looked like it was aiming to hit. Bradshaw was really good at working cutoffs, my favorite being when Rhyno climbed to the top and Bradshaw just grabbed his hair and headbutted him. What I was not expecting was Bradshaw to hit him with a fallaway slam off the buckles. Bradshaw headbutts Rhyno (who is already mostly to the top buckle), then climbs to the middle buckle while also lifting Rhyno, and it would have been so easy to lose his footing and drop Rhyno directly onto his face, the whole thing looked super dangerous. Now, the finish was both solid and a little too manufactured. Bradshaw hit a fantastic superplex, and then - just like that earlier vertical suplex - they both lie there. For a bit too long. I'm starting to thing "did they BOTH get stingers? That's why huge dudes shouldn't do superplexes", but then Bradshaw goes for the floatover, and Rhyno sees it coming and gets a small package win. So, yes, Bradshaw was really showing his work to the fans, making it a bit too easy to connect the cause-and-effect dots. "Ohhhhh, he waited a couple seconds to floatover with that suplex earlier, and this time his habit of waiting several seconds to floatover cost him the match." It's a neat idea to leave breadcrumbs like that in a match, and it often makes for a much better match. But it's not neat when it's something like this that looks so out of place. I'd never seen Bradshaw delay a floatover on a suplex, so when he delayed even longer on the finish floatover it looked even weirder. This wasn't a regular thing he did, it was an odd pitfall invented only for this match, and not a very good one. When you leave match psychology breadcrumbs for fans, their takeaway shouldn't be "wait why was he lying on the mat for so long after hitting a suplex?"


Undertaker/Kane vs. Big Daddy V/Mark Henry WWE Smackdown 2/1/08 - VERY GOOD

ER: This is an on paper dream pairing for 305 Live, a match they ran a few times on house shows (wish any one of those made it as a handheld), and I really wish they had given Henry/V a run as an unstoppable monster team. They paired them infrequently enough that they never completely gelled or felt like a team, and they were around so much at the same time that they really should have been given that chance. This was their highest profile tag together, and also their last time tagging together. The match itself is kind of aimless, and more than a little repetitive. It was made by Undertaker flinging himself into the corners off of big whips from giant men, and Mark Henry leaning into every single piece of offense thrown at his head. Taker and Kane hit him with four big boots over the course of the match and he's out there taking all of them with his face. Henry is the real slugger of these four, and it's wild how much that stands out here. You'll have Kane hitting these bad stomach kicks and you know it blows, but then Henry will counter with two nasty clubbering arms sounding like he's beating a rug. Henry hit a knee right to Kane's jaw that was probably the coolest thing in the match, and that's saying something because put four 300+ pounders in a ring and it is impossible for there not to be cool stuff. BDV came off a little too tentative, not so much in his offense as in how he was treating the storyline. The week prior Undertaker had debuted his triangle choke on him, and they did a cool angle where V tapped quick and then bled from his mouth. He gets backed down by Taker a couple times here and obviously I was hoping it was building to Taker getting crushed and flattened (it wasn't), but V has no problems smooshing Kane. BDV really crushes Kane with a corner clothesline, and Kane pays that back by hitting his big flying clothesline that stops a few feet short of the target. This actually could have been a really cool feud with some legs to it, easily could have seen this getting a big street fight stip on a PPV, but this was always going to be a Brothers of Destruction slaughter. Henry gets big height on the chokeslam and also bleeds from the triangle, putting this epically mammoth tag team to permanent rest.


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