New Footage Friday: FUNK! BOCK! ALLMARK! GALLAGHER! TANK ABBOTT?!? BOB SAPP?!?
Terry Funk vs. Nick Bockwinkel AJPW 7/12/83
MD: As new footage goes, this isn't as major a discovery as it looks. We had this match pro-shot with commentary, but missing the first few minutes. This gives us a HH version from a different angle with much better crowd noise and a few of those first few minutes of actual action (including a much better listen to Bockwinkel's Bill Murray lounge style Star Wars theme), but then misses a few minutes of great matwork has other, smaller cuts on longer holds throughout.
I still pushed for it for NFF because it's a match I've always loved with two of my favorite wrestlers and because it's a great match to signify that my first post for Segunda Caida was 6 years ago this week. I was really looking for both an outlet then and for a way to keep myself honest and focused on lucha specifically, since I had struggled with working out the ins and outs of the DVDVR set. I couldn't have been happier how that worked out (even if yeah, we're mourning the loss of Cubs' channel this week). In the last few years, starting with the release of the Houston Footage, but then with the weekly WWE Hidden Gems, and Japanese handhelds, big German releases, and now the French Catch collection, it's been just great to scour the net and to unearth and bring this stuff to people's attention. I'm less focused on modern wrestling than Phil and Eric who manage to watch everything that comes their way, but between Tuesday and Friday, I am watching six+ matches a week and having a blast. So thanks to them for letting me be part of this place.
Enough of that; on to the match. I watched this side by side with the pro-shot footage and that's always interesting. This was part of Funk's first retirement run and part of the benefit of the HH is that you see a clear shot of both of them throughout the entire match. While close-ups are good, Funk and Bock stand out compared to almost every other wrestler ever in that you want to see them every moment of a match. They are always acting and reacting. I don't think there's anyone in wrestling history better at portraying his emotions during a moment of advantage than Bockwinkel. A lot of wrestlers barely even try. With Bock, it's the elation and struggle of every single hold. Likewise, no one sells like Funk, especially in this early 80s AJPW setting. That's how he got over there despite being an American in an environment where the foreigners were all heels. He had a willingness, an utter fearlessness, to be vulnerable but resilient. Name another wrestler of this era in this place that would, even in victory, limp his way to the back. Without the announcing, with nothing but raw crowd noise, you can hear the crowd chanting his name, hear them get behind his comebacks. You can feel the energy and the adulation. There are so few matches between these two on tape but in some ways they are the perfect counterparts for one another, two perfectly engaged wrestlers who are able to thereby engage with one another, able to create a sum that is greater than even their incalculably lofty parts.
PAS: 70s and 80s title match wrestling is a style I am pretty much over, it's the reason I have very little interest in revisiting Jumbo matches. These are two guys which can add enough interesting things to a match to get me into a style I am not excited to see. All of the matwork was solid stuff with Bock trying to hold the spastic Funk down, with Terry spinning out and taking different angles then you might expect. Though the knee work was solid stuff which Funk sold great, and the fight on the apron near the end was a real highlight. This was the equivalent of some cool character actor performances in an otherwise standard movie.
ER: Let me say that I could not be happier with what Matt has brought to Segunda Caida over the years, and I can't believe it's been 6 years. I love the match structure analysis that he brings and I'm pretty sure he points something out that I didn't notice in every single post he writes. He's awesome, and this match was awesome. I'm really glad he pushed for it as it's a match up between two legends that I don't think I've ever seen before. I don't think of these two as opponents and I certainly can't recall ever seeing them in a singles match. But I loved it, muga minimalism at its finest, with every headlock and knee attack executed with snug realism. Bockwinkel's knee attacks came off really cruel, and part of that was Funk's less-grandstanding-than-normal selling. Funk still managed to flop around the ring and ringside (throwing himself into the guardrail right in front of the announce table) and continued to prove that it is an impossible feat to throw one individual streamer out of a wrestling ring. I loved how aggressive Funk was with a single leg takedown, and the way Bock punished that knee, dropping his own knee on it hard and peaking at the finish where he was throwing brutal shots that looked like he was trying to dissect Funk's MCL with fists. They did a lot of really cool stuff in the ropes (Funk is always good at flopping around on ropes) and Bockwinkel takes a nice bump to the floor that I assume leads to the Count Out. Again, I'm pretty positive I've never seen these two cross paths, and I absolutely loved it.
Bob Sapp/Stone Mountain vs. Kevin Northcutt/Tank Abbott NWA Wildside 12/14/00
PAS: Man I have no idea how Cornelia feds were always able to find such huge dudes. Both Stone Mountain and Kevin Northcutt looked to be of comparable size to Bob Sapp and Tank actually looked small. This was a tag with two guys who were basically untrained, but Sapp and Tank both had an entertaining awkwardness, shots would either miss or land way too hard. I really liked Tank's body shots, he seemed to really lay those in and that must have really sucked. Northcutt had a nice crescent kick, although other stuff looked odd. Sapp has an undeniable ring presence, and in a different world would have been a huge wrestling star. I can imagine if WCW didn't go out of business Sapp vs. Goldberg would have been a supernova. Nifty look at an all time WAR level weirdo tag and good to see that Bill Beherns is uploading Wildside to youtube again.
MD: This was pretty fascinating, I suppose. You're here to see Abbot and Sapp in the same ring, and you do for a bit, and it's probably the best part of the match, and it's really just Abbot taking a powder on the outside and stalling. It's hard not to like that because the dissonance of toughman Tank Abbot playing Larry Z. Playing against expectations is good heel wrestling. He was playing Harley Race in a tag match in Japan here; whenever he got in, his side lost control. Sapp obviously wasn't there yet but you still couldn't look away from him. The guy was so big and so exuberant that his muscles were somehow able to get in the way of his own clotheslines. I don't know what to say about Northcutt. I liked his energy slamming guys into the corner. Less so his strikes once he got them there. He could do a slingshot flipping senton into the ring. You get the sense that he and Stone Mountain could have an ok singles match, but it's not exactly one I'd go out of my way for.
ER: Man, give me a pro wrestling match like this every week and I will be a happy man. Wildside was such a great indy, something that holds up as still ahead of its time today. But a match like this will draw my full attention no matter where or when it happened. When the amount of mass in a ring is SO RADICAL that TANK ABBOTT comparatively looks like a tiny little junior. Any fed that throws Green Giants in the ring with any number of shoot fighters is a fed that I will support and a match that I will desperately seek out. The best part of shoot fighters in a wrestling match is the shots that land way harder than they should, and Tank threw a couple shots to the back of Stone Mountain's head that didn't look purposely unprofessional, just accidentally unprofessional. And the Accidental Unprofessionalism is the kind of thing that makes a match like this brilliant. It's the same reason someone like Sean McCully is so endlessly watchable in early Zero-1. That combination of "yeah I'm an athlete but I've never done this before but sure I'll try it!" that always leads to someone taking a super dangerous bump to the floor or accidentally punching a guy in the throat.
Kevin Northcutt was a guy who showed up in dying days WCW syndication that I thought had a ton of potential, and even here he threw an awesome kneedrop to Stone Mountain's temple and some great shots to the body throughout. Stone Mountain was clearly the greenest guy in the match, but his leaping elbowdrop looked fantastic, and that's probably because he just leaped up and dropped his full weight behind an elbowdrop. And that's precisely the kind of thing I WANT to see from a match like this, precisely the kind of untrained wildness I want. And then we get it again when Bob Sapp drops his tremendously large dome down in a killer falling headbutt, and snaps off an effortless powerslam. If I had the choice of seeing a match like this or a previously unseen Flair/Steamboat match, I'm going to choose a match like this every single damn time.
87. Jack Gallagher vs. Dean Allmark NGW 9/14/14
PAS: Really nifty juniors match between two of the best 21st century British wrestlers. We start with some WOS matwork, and this is something that these two guys do much better then most of the British indy guys. It doesn't feel like a pair of a guys slowly going through dance choreography but incorporating that stuff in an actual wrestling match. My favorite spot of the whole match was probably Allmark's simple single leg takedown, which he landed with real velocity and force. The finish is a bit wonky with Gallagher arguing with the ref only to get smashed with a superkick. There was some big moves near the end of this match that would have been better finishes. Still this was good stuff.
MD: Fun thematic inversion of the Funk/Bock match as this one has had a handheld out there for a few years but now we get to have a pro shot version. This was a ten minute TV-style match as part of the Davey Boy Smith cup tournament. Very back and forth but everything was good. Gallagher isn't a big guy and doesn't have a huge palette to work with but he's great at changing up his look in interesting and iconic ways. They didn't have a lot of time to tell a story, especially considering how evenly this was worked, so it was down to the counters (and repetition, like how Gallagher went through the legs on an escape once but got caught the second time later; little things like that) and how they engaged the crowd. Allmark was quick to appeal to them or to try to get a clap going while Gallagher was delightfully smarmy, mocking Allmark while shaking his hand, clapping his own hand with Allmark's while he had him in a hold, etc. They tried plenty of tricked out chain wrestling flourishes and a few rope running spots and everything seemed pretty smooth and not too cooperative. They set things up for the finish and had a few good near falls but I would have liked this to have more time so Gallagher could control longer and Allmark's comeback would mean more.
ER: This was about the smartest way to work a quick 50/50 TV match, as both guys got to fit a ton of cool stuff into an short overall runtime, without ever feeling like either guy was shrugging something off to get their own stuff in. Gallagher wasn't on my radar until about a year after this match (even though he'd been a 10 year vet by that point, it's hard to keep tabs on EVERY wrestler) and I fully agree with Phil that these are likely my two favorite modern WOS guys. There's so much flash they do that is much more than merely flash, and even the slickest sequence felt like it had purpose. I loved things like Allmark trapping Gallagher's arms before popping off a straight Rockette kick to the chin, or knocking out Gallagher's legs to plausibly trap him in the ropes long enough to stomp on his neck and snapmare him off the turnbuckles. One of my favorite things about Gallagher is that he's so consistently good about making each individual piece of offense count, so that even though he's working from the same offensive toolbag each match, he's not just going through rote sequences. He mixes his offense differently into matches, so things like his massive corner dropkick always come off as a surprise and keeps it a finisher-level move. The early matwork in this was good enough to write up, but I love how the bumped it up into exciting juniors wrestling, with a big bump to the floor and actual quality nearfalls (at least three things down the stretch could have been finishes). I thought the finish was done well for that finish, as Gallagher wasn't overtly turning his back to Allmark while arguing with the ref, and it just showed that only a couple of seconds was enough for Allmark to take advantage with a nasty superkick.
2014 MOTY MASTER LIST
Labels: 2014 MOTY, AJPW, Bob Sapp, Dean Allmark, Jack Gallagher, Kevin Northcutt, New Footage Friday, Nick Bockwinkel, NWA Wildside, Stone Mountain, Tank Abbott, Terry Funk
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posted by Phil @ 10:00 PM
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