Found Footage Friday: 1975 CANADA~! SHEIK~! POFFOS~! VON ERICH~! STASIAK~! JAY YORK~! RED LYONS~!

Canadian Big Time Wrestling (Unaired Pilot) 1975

Gene Dubois (Dave McKigney) vs. Waldo Von Erich

MD:  Lord Layton is our commentator because that's what you do with retired Lords apparently. They led off with the national anthem. This is from London, Ontario. I don't know how much Dubois or Waldo Von Erich I've seen (you figure I would have at some point but I don't think I have), but this made me want to see a whole bunch more of both. Waldo had headgear on at first and slugged Dubois (wearing his jacket still) before the bell before taking it off. They really didn't look back from there. Dubois was a shaggy singlet wearing guy and came off like a world's best Brody in a lot of ways. At one point early, after eating a thrashing, he landed on his feet out of a back body drop and started to fire back. They really just threw themselves at each other the whole time, going in and out of the ring. Dubois caught Von Erich a few times, either pulling him out by the legs or landing him stomach first over the ropes on a corner whip. Finish was a let down as Waldo wouldn't let Dubois back in the ring and kept kicking at him again to draw the DQ, but this was a great start for this endeavor and I now need to see how much other footage we have of these two.

ER: I am a man who has watched a lot of wrestling in my life, and I don't think I've ever watched a Waldo von Erich match. That's probably not true, I've forgotten about 75% (more?) of the wrestling I've ever watched, but I figure that if I had seen him, then I would have remembered him as a shit kicking badass because man is this guy a shit kicking badass. Waldo crafted this match around a hypnotic blend of kicks to the ribs and body, and thumbs jabbed into throats. Wrestling needs thumbs jabbed into throats more than ever. That kind of sleight of hand simplicity isn't really a thing anymore and that's a bad thing. I don't know if I can ever respect any wrestler who does a flipping cutter more than a wrestler who does swift attacks to vulnerable body parts. Some 11 year old kid yelled "Go back to Germany!" while von Erich was kicking the shit out of Dubois' ribs and there's no 11 year old in the crowd that would have that kind of reaction to a flipping cutter. I love how Gene DuBois also went by Dave McKigney; two equally, specifically Canadian sounding names but names describing two completely different types of Canadian man. The finish was von Erich kicking Dubois in the ribs from the apron, knocking him to the floor repeatedly, until he gets DQ'd after the fifth or sixth time. How much of Waldo's 1976 All Japan tour do we have? I need to see it all. 

The Patriot vs. "The Alaskan" Jay York

MD: Patriot was from "the heart of America" and someone in the comments suggested it was Michael Farhat but I can't say. York was working singles for some reason and they went a different direction than the first match, keeping it on the mat. Some really good mat wrestling in here though, including York rolling across the Patriot to switch positions into a headlock. Eventually he got fed up and started clubbering and they went right home after that with York hitting a neckbreaker drop off the ropes out of nowhere. So far, I'd pick this show up if I was the network. 

ER: Holy shit Jay York. More people in wrestling and life need to look like Jay York. We've drummed the Jay Yorks out of wrestling and we're so much worse for it. I went to at least a hundred Giants games in the 80s and 90s. Good seats in the Candlestick right field pavilion were $6. Worse seats in the upper deck were $8, because you could smoke up there. Baseball's insane ticket prices drove away the Candlestick upper deck dirtbag in cut offs, no shirt, suntanned the way a guy got when he wore his faded black jeans outside with no shirt often, cig stuck to lip. Jay York looked like one of those dirtbags, only he's 6'5", and he's wrestling really well. 

Because why was Jay York this fucking slick on the mat? Why is this guy working fast Negro Navarro escapes and rolling wrist clutch advances? York escapes an armbar by rolling up Patriot's body into the cleanest damn headlock and he looked like 2x speed Jake the Snake. Jay York reads in no way like a guy who would be this good on the mat. I haven't seen a Jack Brisco match with matwork as well executed and interesting as York's. He throws short headlock punches and neck twisting leveraged snapmares. Every contact he makes looks good, authentic. He throws the best neckbreaker drop I've ever seen for his finish, turning one of wrestling's weakest clotheslines into a finisher clothesline. The key is York's fast drop, hitting the mat in a low quick ark like a reverse bulldog.  Where are men like Jay York now, and why aren't they wrestling? 

Cage Match: The Sheik vs. Tiger Jeet Singh

MD: Layton made sure to let everyone know how rare it was to see a cage match on TV. Singh was, I suppose, at least de facto babyface here mainly because people wanted to see the Sheik lose. Apparently in this one you could ONLY win by going through the door. Going over the top was illegal which is something I can't say I've heard before in an escape rules match like this. A few early shots in to the cage, a lot of scrambling for the door and cutting each other off. Sheik went to an object early as well. They both ended up trading the object back and forth. Lots of what you'd expect here with tossing and grinding against the cage. At one point, Sheik did try to escape over the top but got dragged back. Finish had Singh errantly punch the Sheik through the door and to the floor. I imagine people tuning into this would have gotten their money's worth here at least.  

ER: The best part of this match was one of the cage escape spots where Sheik is holding Singh's whole boot to keep him from getting out, hooking his hand into the top of the boot so he's shoving four fingers in with one hand and firmly gripping Singh's bridge with the other. It was showed close up and the struggle looked so real, which really stood out to me from Sheik's kind of phony old man brawling that I can never fully get into. 

North American Championship: Stan "The Man" Stasiak (c) vs. Ron Doner

MD: Fairly short one here. Stasiak ran into armdrags to start, including an assisted kip up where he got put right back down. He had big meaty shots that he took over with but they had a great bit where he missed the heart punch in the corner and had to sell his hand. He got caught up in the ropes and pummeled too but all it took was him taking over one last time and locking on for the heart punch to win it. Love the heart punch. This was fine for what it was but it wasn't meant to be much.

ER: All of the stuff I wrote about wanting to see wrestlers (and citizens) who look like Jay York up above, all of that could be said romantically about Stan Stasiak. I wish there was anywhere I could go to see a wrestler who looks like and wrestles like Stan Stasiak. Wrestlers should look like him, and have names that sound like his. He is a man who looks like one of the guys drinking beer with your dad after their strip mall office car club meeting. Stasiak has a body like Dennehy, head like Meatloaf, muttonchops of the truck driver who starts a fight with an outsider at a diner. Stasiak's heart punch is the greatest version of one of wrestling's great Lost Finishers. Loved the heart punch miss, putting over how he throws it hard enough to hurt his hand. The last guy I saw use a sincere heart punch was the late Bison Smith, early in his career when he was wrestling as Super Destroyer 2000. You know that wrestler I don't like on Beyond undercards who works a wink heavy heart punch finisher? I don't know if there is one, but, if there is, he sucks.  

World Tag Team Championship: The Poffos (Angelo & Lanny Poffo) w/ Saul Weingeroff (c) vs. "Irish" Mickey Doyle & Billy Red Lyons 

MD: There's a self-published Mickey Doyle biography out there and I'm tempted to get it. He was touted here as the fresh young star of the promotion, though I don't think he was quite as young as they were billing him. It's great to see Angelo and Lanny all the way back in 75. Lanny had to be 19 here tops and he was full of cartwheels and backflips as you'd imagine. He had a singlet over his tights and took the singlet off, which was silly.  

Honestly, this was a bit of a mess. It was almost refreshing to see how much of a mess as it was because you never see old matches that go over the rails quite like this. Lanny bumped and stooged all over the place, just flailing and flapping around. At one point he took a back body drop face first in the oddest way and he hit a pretty odd missile dropkick too. Angelo begged off and got bodyslammed what must have been six times to the point of it being very funny but not making much sense. Doyle's hair started springing every which way like it was Lanny's cartwheels. Lyons looked great ("rolling like a winner" as Layton put it), full of fire and solid looking shots but that was kind of beside the point.  The ultimate finish had Lanny and Doyle crash into each other and Angelo push Lanny on top of him from the outside. That brought Layton out to tell the ref what happened and get things overturned (because of that push!) and when Saul and Angelo complained, Layton said that he wasn't just a commentator but that he represented all of the people in the crowd, which was a unique way of putting it. Anyway, this was entertaining but definitely unmoored. 

ER: How weird is Lanny Poffo? Lanny is one of wrestling's all time weirdest guys and we should probably write more about him at Segunda Caida. What an off putting fucking weirdo. This unaired pilot was great fun, filled with guys tailor made for Michigan/Canadian fans. Then we get to the main event where a bleached blond weirdo who you would avoid in a supermarket sucks in his stomach in a threateningly sexual but gross way and you know exactly why this shit never aired. What a weird guy. I've never seen bleached blonde Lanny and it's horrifying. He looks like gay porn Lurch and cartwheels around, then stands in postures you never see a man stand in. Poffo bumps weirder than the World of Sport roster, falling in a way that seems inspired by nothing. Every bump he takes is weird, every move delivered as if by a ribbon dancer who had only heard about offense described verbally. His greatest weird guy bump is easily his back body drop. The first time you see it, it looks like an accident. By the time he's done three crazier ones, you just realize Lanny Poffo was a teenage genius. His back body drop is taken horizontally, flipping over his opponent like a log rolling off a cliff, not end over end. It's so much harder to get height on your bump that way, and yet here's Poffo taking increasingly higher versions. I need to see more first two years Lanny, but I think we can say that at one point, he might have been a more interesting and unique wrestler than his brother. That's an incredible revelation.

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RIP Lanny Poffo: ICW Eye of the Tiger Cage Match

Lanny Poffo vs. Rip Rogers ICW 11/16/82 - Eye of the Tiger Steel Cage Hair vs. Hair Television Title Match

Part 1

Part 2

MD: This followed a Randy Savage vs. Ratamyus cage match that was (based on Lanny's commentary) more of a bloodbath. Unfortunately, that's not online, if we have it at all. Thanks to Rip Rogers, we have this. It, on the other hand, was a title match main event, worked primarily as a big title match, even with the no DQ and hair vs hair stip; it served as a contrast. That's not to say that it didn't escalate and that they didn't lay it in, but they started wrestling mostly clean for the first half and the cage itself didn't come into play until the last third. It worked for the match, though, with the wrestling mostly even and skilled (including a great Lanny bridge out of a side headlock that would have fit well in 1970s France) until Lanny took a couple of big back bumps into the turnbuckles and Rip started to hone in. Great selling from Lanny here. He was working for the back row, picking up a ton of sympathy along the way and knowing just when to fire up from underneath. All of Rip's stuff looked mean and credible, and when they started moving on towards slugging it out, Rip's headbutts and Lanny's right hand were both equally memorable. Lanny took some big bumps into the cage, only saved by a foot on the ropes and Rip then ate all of Lanny's flipping offense, getting his own foot on the ropes for the parallel. They gave Rip a visual fall after a rep bump to protect him after a wild dropkick, but in all of the chaos and cut off interference, Lanny scored a roll up and the fans went wild. 

The match stands on its own as a really solid main event with some great selling of exhaustion and big strikes down the stretch. What makes it doubly special today, however, is that 1982 Lanny narrates the entire match. You get a kayfabe explanation of everything he was doing throughout, what he was thinking, what he was feeling, why he used one move or another, all with his wry sense of self. He was in character, but his voice chimes through even forty years later. This was Lanny holding a title, wrestling in the main event as a local hero, putting his hair on the line, fighting from underneath in a cage, and explaining the whole thing in his singular voice.

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On Brand Segunda Caida: The Genius vs. Mark Young! Finlay vs. Barry Darsow

The Genius vs. Mark Young WWF Prime Time 12/25/89

ER: You ever unearth a (hopefully good) memory and can't really place it, but you do a little digging and figure it out? That's Mark Young for me. When I was a kid the only wrestling I saw was WWF's weekend morning lineup, and Saturday Night's Main Event. We didn't get PPV (zero chance my parents would have ordered one), and any friends I was on "sleepover" level with weren't really wrestling fans (one of those friends didn't even have a TV, and he's a cop now, so yeah). So weekend jobber matches and SNME were my insulin. And once I found out that SNME was a thing, it was harder to get excited about the squash matches, because the results - even to an 8 year old - were never in doubt. But there was this one guy who I never saw get a win, even though his matches were always way more competitive than most, and it was exciting because it made child me believe in the power of an underdog, the possibility of an upset. I randomly thought of this guy the other day, no idea who it was, only remember that he wore stars and stripes tights and I specifically remembered him having a competitive match against Mr. Perfect. Well, yesterday a random occurrence brought these memories back: someone posted an old wrestling magazine photo on Twitter, stars and stripes tights guy was in one of them, memories came rushing back, and it allowed me to pinpoint who he was and line it up to my memories.

It turns out this guy who I so desperately wanted to get an upset win through my young childhood was Mark Young. That's a name I definitely don't remember, I only remembered him having a "boring name" like the other guys who lost every week (you know, it would always be The Widowmaker vs. Greg Davis, or Mr. Perfect vs. John Jackson), but this was definitely the guy. Mark Young had a couple of fairly lengthy WWF stretches, a guy who occasionally won on house shows, rarely won on TV, and never won on the TV that I got to see. So I looked for a Mark Young match that I remember watching when it aired, and was pleasantly surprised to see how it held up, although not in specific ways that I loved when I was 8. The Genius was someone who I didn't even think was a wrestler when I was 8. When he fought Hogan on a SNME I thought there was zero chance Hogan would lose against this "tiny" guy (me being a child, I didn't notice how cut Genius was because he was standing next to this giant Hulk Hogan). I wasn't watching wrestling during Leaping Lanny Poffo, that SNME match against Hogan was my Lanny Poffo jumping off point, and if someone had tried to tell me Genius was brothers with Randy Savage I would have called them a liar (even though I was telling people that Shel Silverstein was Bad News Brown, because kids just lie a lot). And here he was against my boy Mark Young. A guy who was barely even a wrestler, vs. my boy Mark Young, who had gotten a close nearfall against Mr. Perfect? Surely this was Young's best chance to get a TV victory. I was confident this match would be the thing to finally allow him to break in.

Obviously Mark Young did not win, but the match holds up as extremely fun, and Genius holds up as an absolute asskicker. It's easy to see why I responded to the energy of Young so much: he did flips, derpy breakdancing, fast armdrags, and floated over with a cool high leaping hurricanarana for a nearfall. He felt like a guy who could beat The Genius. But the rest of this match suddenly made me want to go on a Genius deep dive. Genius had a haircut that would look great on one of the Vivian Girls, threw a bunch of nasty stomps into the back of Young's head and face, his prancing stooging still makes me laugh, and he (thanks to Young being a bit of a bump freak) practically invented the crucifix bomb. I'm so happy I figured out the identity of one of my earlier wrestling memories, and happy that it lined up with reality. Sadly, Mark Young also died young, passing away just a couple years ago. He made a very real impression on me that was still nestled somewhere in my brain 30 years later.


Fit Finlay vs. Barry Darsow WCW Nitro 9/21/98 (#158)

ER: A week ago I posted a couple WCW Worldwide reviews, and someone on Twitter started making up dream matches that they wished happened in WCW. It's a great idea, and part of the joy of those WCW syndicated shows is the dream matches you end up getting that you didn't realize were dream matches until after you watched them. Somebody in the replies mentioned Finlay vs. Blacktop Bully as their WCW syndicated dream match. Now, that match couldn't happen because Finlay wasn't in the fed while Darsow was using that gimmick, but here is the only singles match between the two, and it was used to kick off an episode of Nitro smack in the middle of the Hogan/Warrior feud. Darsow isn't a guy who really gets talked about as a legit tough guy, but he really comes off as an under the radar tough guy. He's a really big dude, and he had so many comedy gimmicks that it's easy to forget that he had no problem lacing it in against the opponents who demand it. Finlay is obviously a guy who is going to demand that. It's awesome when Finlay gets a guy like Darsow to step up. I loved Darsow throwing this meaty right hand into Finlay's jaw, and plowing straight through him with a hard as possible shoulderblock. This is Finlay's wheelhouse obviously, and he responds in kind. Darsow wins the "who has the hardest shoulderblock" game, but watch how hard Darsow bumps for Finlay's shoulderblock! Finlay pays him back by stomping on his hands, and grabbing him by teeth 3 thru 14 and elbowing his nose. This is a tight 3 minutes and I wish we had gotten the chance to see 8.

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