Found Footage Friday: WCW in Manchester 1993~!

ER: We get a full 1993 WCW house show from a week long UK tour that had great sounding matches and really big crowds every night. This one is from Manchester and looks great. If there's a new Vader/Cactus match we get to talk about, it really wouldn't matter what the rest of the card looked like, but this is great. Aside from Vader/Cactus, we get something even more valuable, in a different way. We get fully into the handheld spirit of Dad Recording Events With a Camcorder by starting with some incredible man on the street interviews asking Impossibly British people about their favorite wrestlers. This is a professionally shot and assembled show and these interviews are supposedly professional, but it's crazy that they sold 8,000 tickets to a show and seemingly couldn't find more than a couple fans who had ever heard of WCW. This is essential. 

By the third interview they are talking to a shabby bearded man in a stocking cap who looks like Badly Drawn Boy if he had a bad childhood with a really strict loveless father. The man says his favorite wrestlers are Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo, because he saw them live a coupla times and saw them on TV. Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo have not wrestled in over 10 and 20 years, respectively. The man started acting like he was being asked too probing a question about his taste in wrestling. One Brilliant older lady says she loves Marcus Alexander Bagwell and then politely seemed embarrassed to say that she doesn't like Dustin Rhodes! She calls Barry Windham "Big Barry" and asks if he's married, then yells to her friend Barbara. She shows mild disgust at the mention of Big Van Vader. There are numerous kids with Arn Anderson signs. The most British kid in the fucking world wearing a bowtie and talking about how much he loves Sting. 

Johnny B Badd vs. Scotty Flamingo

MD: Good opener. It was obvious almost immediately that Scotty knew exactly what he had with this crowd. I'm not going back to looking at gates around this time but he was probably not in front of a crowd like this often. They were going to react to everything he did, every forced break in the corner, every complaint about a hairpull that didn't happen, ever stop in the action to interact with them, and he milked it to the fullest. Badd was used to these openers by now and stooged Scotty around for a bit before getting dragged down for most of the match. Scotty's stuff was varied and credible and they worked a few believable hope spots in before going to an energetic stretch of Badd coming back with a few inversions, be it Scotty reversing him off of multiple whips into the corner or just ducking the KO Punch. It wasn't until Johnny snuck in a late match headscissors takeover that he got Scotty off balance to hit it. This was exactly what it ought to have been and the crowd responded accordingly. 

ER: Sorry, Scotty Flamingo fucks. When the cameras cut to him in his fringe and his bulge, he looked like a sex god bringing color to a washed out colorless world. He looks like a Happy Mondays concert. Johnny B. Badd's sequined Naval blue and gold jacket, Captain's hat, and lampshade knee fringe is hotter and far gayer than any gear Cassandro ever wore to the ring and I am frankly stunned at how much bedazzled sex they brought to this town. Flamingo knew exactly what kind of heel to be, trying to sneak things in behind the ref's back, bumping comically when needed, while leaving the biggest bumps for babyface Badd. Johnny took a huge bump over the top to the floor and later a fast one through the ropes, and Scotty had this fun way of playing an innocent little guy. Flamingo used the Curt Hennig corner bump effectively, and the way he went down for Badd finally landing the left hand looked good. This crowd was clearly into all of this and I love a crowd who shows up ready to see some wrestling. 

Maxx Payne vs. Michael Hayes

MD: This peaked in the second minute. Not to say anything else they did was wrong, even if Hayes was 34 going on 60 in how he moved, but I liked the shtick the best. Probably not a surprise. It was good shtick too. Hayes came out decked to the nines and knew the crowd was going to be up for it all. Weird, you couldn't really hear the impacts in the ring (even of the nice punches that needed a louder stomp to go with them I guess?) but you could heard the crowd stomping and cavorting. Even just Payne pointing to each side of the ring to boos and Hayes doing it to cheers felt refreshing. Payne leaned on him like you'd expect and it was fine. Hayes came back and it was fine if a half step slow. And then the finish was nice as Payne shrugged off the DDT and dropped him right down with the... what was it? The Paynekiller? I need to look this up. Yep, the Payne Killer Fujiwara Arm Bar. Perfectly ok house show match but I wish they had done even more goofy stuff at the beginning. The crowd was eager to eat it up and Hayes could make it work.

ER: I liked this quite a bit, but mainly because it was worked around a lot of nice punches that hit and missed. Both guys have nice punches and the ways they would weave the misses in with the hits always felt different, like they kept telling the same punch story and ending it in different ways. I like "old man" Michael Hayes (as Matt said, somehow 34 years old here) and I like that nobody in England had ever seen a man move this way before. That moonwalk is something that would have made him a major star had British wrestling not collapsed already. Maxx Payne is a guy who lands with real heft. A super dense guy who isn't fat enough to be a big fat guy and clearly isn't a body guy, but is big and dense enough that the fat guy spots - like falling on Hayes after Hayes can't handle the lift - work well. I loved how he blocked Hayes' DDT attempt but just anchoring his feet to the mat and shoving off. 

Dustin Rhodes/Van Hammer vs. Barry Windham/Rick Rude

MD: This was a blatant lie as Barry took out Dustin with a chair right after he got to ringside (after a brief scuffle) and it turned into just Rude vs Hammer.

Van Hammer vs. Rick Rude

MD: In general, obviously it's a disappointment that we don't get Barry and Dustin in this tag but it did really let us see Rick Rude at the height of his power working a fairly complete match against Hammer. The early parts where he let Hammer show him up again and again with strength bits and comeuppance and bluster that made him look like a fool was all done extremely well, really getting the crowd moving in exactly the right ways at exactly the right times.

When things settled down, it was all a little weird. A lot of these wrestlers aged better than you'd think because the sheets were valuing so much of the wrong things back then but Hammer is an exception. Rude had to call the match against a broomstick; that's the impression I got at least, because he had him do heel spots and have them go wrong on him only for Rude to do the same spots and have Hammer overcome. For instance, the seated chinlock, which Rude liked to do and then miss on a jump onto the back. Hammer did it first and then when Rude tried to repeat, Hammer was able to lift him up. Likewise the leap onto an outstretched foot. Hammer did it first and you don't often see a babyface wipe out like that. Despite all that, it worked, because Rude made it work and the crowd wanted it to work and Hammer... I mean, he did what he did by this point, a few years into his WCW run. Rude hit almost a snap, swinging sort of Rude Awakening which I'm not sure I ever saw him do. So this had value, but not nearly the sort of value the tag would have had.

ER: Yeah that tag match we didn't get sure looked worlds better than a 15+ minute Van Hammer singles match, but you can't deny how over Hammer was. Before the show when Cappetta was running down the card, Hammer got louder cheers than anyone but Davey Boy, which is incredible. And Rick Rude is probably the best person on the roster at getting a good match out of Van Hammer. Rude knows how to sell effectively for guys like Van Hammer and he knows how to keep crowds interested to make up for the babyface skills Hammer lacks. Rude sells his back better than most wrestlers and takes higher backdrops than anyone, gets ragdolled incredibly on a bearhug, limbs swinging and flopping everywhere like he was giving something to the real Bez-heads in the crowd, blows snot rockets on a downed Hammer, and swings his head around so sweat flies off in waves when Hammer stands up out of a camel clutch. The finishing stretch of this is really good. Rude ducking and moving to avoid Hammer punches until Hammer fakes him out and catches him with one. Rude gives the crowd exactly what they want with his duck walk atomic drop sells and getting run over with clotheslines. I imagine the swinging Rude Awakening was to deal with Van Hammer's height, but it looked good for it. 

Davey Boy Smith vs. Vinnie Vegas

MD: What Worked:

- Vinnie Vegas' cutoffs, including a big boot that went over Davey's head and a great slam back into the corner.
- Vegas' lightning bolt tights that feel like they should have been worn by Sasaki.

What Didn't Work:

- Nash having no idea exactly how much to give at any one point (he gets it sometime in the next year; maybe he was just put off by the size of the crowd?)
- Nash's mannerisms in general. None of it seemed organic.It was all cartoony and over the top in a way where if he dialed it back fifteen percent the crowd would have eaten it up more.
- The crowd doing the same Bulldog chant for ten minutes straight. I shut my eyes and can still hear it.

ER: I got too excited for Matt talking about Vinnie Vegas's cutoffs before watching this and now I'm disappointed. I wanted to see leg. That said, I thought Vegas was a good Bulldog opponent here and I thought this all kinda rocked. Nash might have been more Skywalker Nitro here than what he would be in a couple years, but I thought they were great opponents and both looked good. All the early shoulderblocks and Vegas no sells were great. Bulldog threw a perfect dropkick to a large man and he ran very hard in to Vegas with shoulderblocks. They worked through some compelling slow exchanges that the crowd stayed incessantly attached to with a repeated Airhorn Bulldog chant. All the small stuff built to big Bulldog moments: The long test of strength blow job spot, the heavy sleeper that ended with Bulldog powering to his feet to run Vegas multiple times into the buckles, a sleeper that builds to Bulldog throwing clotheslines and slams. I thought it was all great. 

I thought Vegas looked great. He had a lot of good ideas and a good mix of offense. His two big boots had a nice visual look and were well timed, he threw Bulldog far with his bodyslam, and jumped into a good hard connection landing on his elbowdrop. Vegas did something that I loved as much as anything I've seen in a Kevin Nash match - and I'm a guy who loves a lot of Kevin Nash matches - when Vegas blocked a vertical suplex with a quick punch to Bulldog's kidney. It was so badass, caught perfectly on film. His running missed elbow into the turnbuckles to set up the running powerslam was a full speed miss meant to hit. I thought it was a performance that has aged really well. This felt more like a match he put together for Bulldog than a match Bulldog worked him through. 

Big Van Vader vs. Cactus Jack

MD: Race certainly earned his pay on this night between moving the guardrail out of the way when Cactus was having a superhuman run on the outside to being there for a lot of pivotal moments of Vader taking back over by eating Cactus' stuff while he recovered, including on the finish. The middle felt a little flat to me with Cactus kicking out of the two Vader Bombs a little too early in the sequence maybe, even though there was going to be an escalation to Vader coming off the turnbuckles with a splash. Maybe I just don't remember exactly where Vader's offense was here in 93.

On the other hand, watching Cactus taking Vader's punches is a pretty magic, horrific experience. Just gnarly shot after gnarly shot. Cactus' comebacks were all really good too, be it just getting his foot up at the exact right time or throwing a few DDTs or slamming him out on the floor. Vader was so big that Cactus could believably get a sleeper on him by jumping on his back. And when he took out Race once, he had a great heads up standing tall look to him, a hero you could get behind. So this was good overall, if maybe a bit too reliant on Race and a bit off in the middle. We're better off for having it certainly, if only to see those punches land one more time.

ER: I thought this was pretty fantastic; the match that obviously leapt off the page when the show dropped. A new match added to the legendary feud and it has moments just as violent as the best matches they had. The punches were there but sadly obscured; instead we got Vader taking a diving bump off the ring staging across and over a guardrail. It's one of the bigger Vader bumps in their feud and it's crazy to see on this show. It looked no different than a dangerous Cactus bump, but this match was about Vader and Harley Race being the ones taking bumps on concrete and ring edges, not Cactus. Vader was taking big DDT bumps with slick vertical pause, missed a big splash off the middle buckle. Honestly Cactus got out of this one easy. Jack was the one announced to the crowd multiple times as one of the main attractions but the reactions were not there. Nobody was talking about him in the pre-show interviews, nobody seemed to know how to react to him as a man. 

Vader knows how to get reaction and works impressively overtime. This is a match that raises Vader's stock. He was an incredibly hard working mammoth man. He worked 125 matches in 1993 and he's out there playing up to the large crowd, falling hard, swinging harder. In between his big bumps are the big hits. Beyond our obscured sequence of definitely shoot punches, there were straight kicks to the ribs and headbutts; a little kid smile before jumping ass to chest with a bombs away. I thought the Race involvement was hilarious and unnecessary but love that Race is a psycho taking suplexes at 50 and looking 65. Vader is good at being specially vicious taking over after his interference. He mule kicks Cactus so hard in the balls that it felt like a finish. But Vader is an artist. A fan's wrestler. While Jack is selling his balls Vader delivers his biggest hardest swing of the match into the side of his head. 

Cactus/Vader was an excellent feud to get another match from. They always had new ideas, and this one had a structure I hadn't seen from them. 

Sting vs. Paul Orndorff

MD: The good in this was really good. Orndorff looked amazing to start. There's an early sequence where he begins with an awesome grinding headlock and moves into faster rope running than you'd think into almost a snap press slam by Sting and the recoiling that followed and it was all great. I wish we had a little more stooging before he took over, but his offense for the transition was all credible, jabs and a perfectly timed knee cutoff.

The problem was that there was both a lack of motion and a lack of heeling once he did
take over. He mostly ground Sting down as they built to a few hope spots and I get why he might contain him and Sting sold well, but it maybe wasn't the match I would have wanted as a main event. I half get the impression that since the fans were just chanting for Sting over and over, Orndorff felt like he didn't need to do a whole lot to get more heat. They did have a good finish though with Orndorff taking a front bump into the corner and Sting splashing him to the back and then rolling up. I'm not sure I'd seen that in too many Sting matches. So good overall but maybe not rising to the moment.

ER: I thought Orndorff looked incredible here. Sting was a great babyface, I loved all his flying and his comeback punches might have been the best on the show. But I couldn't stop watching Orndorff and his weird arm but mostly his incredible skillset. He was fast, dynamic, bumped everything like he meant it and It mattered. He knew how to use that little arm to throw short sharp elbows to the jaw and pointed elbowdrops straight down to the throat that were exquisitely worked. He took a damn vertical suplex on the floor; his back suplex landed Sting firmly on his shoulders in a way that looked distinctly All Japan. I thought about Paul Orndorff in 90s All Japan as the crispest possible Johnny Ace and thinking about how differently things could have been. Sting/Orndorff is a match I don't think I've ever seen. I don't think of them as guys who feuded. This felt like a NEW new match to me, and they probably could have done more and built to something bigger than the Vader/Cactus match that preceded them. But for guys I don't think about as wrestling each other, Orndorff felt like one of the best to take Sting's offense. This man knew how to draw money wrestling wild eyed babyfaces like he was born to do it. 

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Found Footage Friday: TEAM USWA~! TEAM WCCW~! THUNDERDOME~! BRET~! FLAIR~! MONTERREY DEEP DIVE~!

Thunderdome Cage Match: Team USWA (Bill Dundee/Danny Davis/Jeff Jarrett/Billy Joe Travis/Gary Young) vs. Team WCCW (Eric Embry/Tom Prichard/The Awesome Kong/El Grande Pistolero/Steve Austin) USWA 1991

MD: This is going to be a found week. I swear I've seen this before but it could just be a phantom memory or I'm getting it confused with some NWA Anarchy match or something. Everyone's in the cage to start and there are handcuffs set up around the cage. Whichever team gets handcuffed to the cage first loses and the survivors get the key and get to unlock their partners for five minutes of pure, unfair violence. There's also a pinfall stip but it's confusing to everyone how it works even if it plays into the finish. 

Kong gets handcuffed right as the match starts, which gives the babyfaces an advantage from the get go and also takes out of play the biggest physical threat in the match. It's a choice, I guess. There is that sort of danger you get from let's say a NJPW elimination match, where if you get too close to someone who's handcuffed, you can get disrupted or grabbed. That too plays into the finish. In general though, Kong is a non-factor here. There's one solid visual of all of the USWA guys attacking him post match (which gives away the finish, sorry), but in general, he's gone from the get go. Pistolero might have been Gypsy Joe. If that's the case, it's a shame he didn't get to do much either as he's one of the first guys to get handcuffed. 

They cover a lot of ground in less than ten minutes here, though. Everyone gets bloody pretty quickly. People get slammed into the cage. They change dance partners and make some use of numerical advantages when they come up. the USWA side is pretty solid and you have at least Embry and Prichard on the other side, given who gets taken out early and the fact that Austin is green but game. It comes down to Travis and Prichard. Prichard gets too close to Jeff who nails him. Travis rolls him up but he's too close to Embry who breaks it up. Prichard is able to handcuff Travis and get the key. Dundee kicks Prichard who loses the key. Young gets it. The heels win but the babyfaces get free and the fans are delighted by the beatdown that follows. Pretty clever stuff all around. I think there's room for this gimmick in 2024.

PAS: This was basically an all punches match, and luckily we have 6-8 of the greatest punchers in wrestling history throwing hands. If all it is is Bill Dundee and Eric Embry throwing hands, Dayenu. Add that to Billy Joe Travis uppercuts, lots of blood and a crowd pleasing finish. Pure candyfloss pro-wrestling pleasure. I am not sure it would work in 2024, who even throws good punches anymore, but shit it worked in 1991.

ER: I thought this was incredible. I can't believe how much they did in 10 minutes, and I never expected it to swell to an insanely sadistic babyface conclusion. There are seven great punchers doing literally nothing but throwing punches and literally everybody bleeds. The Thunderdome stipulation is low key brutal and actually more violent than anything in the PG-13 Beyond Thunderdome. They did these matches with Robert Fuller and Eddie Gilbert replacing Gary Young (that's a plus) and Billy Joe Travis (that's a lateral and a totally different vibe). I get Kevin Nash being unavailable but I wonder if they tried to get Al Green...

On paper I wouldn't have thought handcuffing every one of your opponents to the cage would work, but then I laughed the moment Amazing Kong got cuffed 1 second into the match and spent the rest of the time hoping someone would come near enough to kick out at. Everyone else was too busy throwing punches. They all looked great, but my favorite bit was when Dundee (who looked incredible all match) finally got cuffed and Eric Embry was trying to line up a punch on someone, but he back into Bill Dundee who caught him with a short punch to the cheek and then a harder punch while he was stunned. Jarrett had tremendous fire throughout, Nightmare Danny Davis always comes off like Rutger Hauer in a street fight in these kinds of matches, and Billy Joe Travis is an incredible dirtbag with real babyface fire. You can tell by looking at him that he's a dirtbag, but the man is a fighter and when he's on your side you want that. 

The finish is downright sadistic. The winning team - the team who cuffs every opponent to the cage - then gets 5 minutes to beat their extremely disadvantaged opponents without mercy. Prichard wins the handcuff key for WCCW but Dundee kicks it away, meaning Gary Young gets it and uncuffs all the USWA guys, who - despite losing - proceed to fuck up every member of World Class to a rousing babyface reaction. This is such a long beating that I kept waiting for the Memphis fans to turn on their own. Seriously, after the match it's just 5 mean being beaten bloodier and bloodier by the good guys, desperate to fight back but chained to a cage, the Good Guys lining up shots at sitting ducks. When the halfway announcement of 2.5 minutes comes, it's already felt like this beating has gone on far too long. This is a merciless beating and the blood flows freely as Team Memphis just stomps on dead bodies like total psychopaths, never once stopping to consider if what they were doing was the correct choice. Ethics aside, every second of this was amazing. What I thought was a silly gimmick that would get in the way of what would have been a better 5 on 5 tag, turned out to enhance every part of it. 

Tigre Universitario/Principe Franky vs. Bello David/Bello Guerrero CMLL 12/92

MD: Deep into the crates here, as Roy didn't even break the matches out of these episodes. I'm going to try to go through each and every one however. Between the pre-match interview and the primera, I got the sense that David and Guerrero were in the midst of a gimmick change maybe. David had a Millionaire name as well and he might have recently lost a match? Luchawiki isn't much help there. Tigre and Franky were in matching gear and worked well as a tandem.

This was crowd-pleasing, action-packed undercard lucha though. There are a few clips; when we come in, they're hitting a foul on Franky and control for most of the primera. Lots of well put together double-team stuff, mostly double clotheslines and back body drops and elbow drops and the sort. The tecnicos come back and hit some flashing stuff including a great rowboat to win the caida. There's some fun stuff with Guerrero accidentally hitting the ref on the outside as well. The rudos got their fall back in the segunda (and showed more exotico tendencies) and everything built to cycling and a pretty exciting finishing stretch where Tigre and Franky continued to work well together (both with an alley-oop into a double axe handle in the corner and the tandem topes into the seats towards the end). The finish had each side getting a fall but Franky accidentally hitting the ref as David kept dodging dropkicks; he locked in a submission but the ref DQ'd him as David was tapping. Entertaining stuff all around.

Bret Hart vs. Ric Flair WCW 2/20/98

MD: Again, this feels like something we would have seen at some point, but it's still worth watching. MGM Grand House show from early 98. They fit a ton into the first few minutes, with Bret sort of stumbling bemused through Flair's act. It's entertaining but I'm not sure I'd call it particularly great or resonant. Definitely entertaining though. That means he has a slap fight with Charles Robinson, trading inverted atomic drops, eating an eye poke in the corner off a break, putting Flair in a figure-four, that sort of thing. Bret got serious fairly quickly once Flair took over, working from underneath as Flair hit some vicious stuff on the floor and a really nice belly to back. We get what I assume to be a brief cut so we never see how Bret gets out of the figure-four but he goes full Lawler for the finish, dropping his strap and fighting out of the corner before hitting some moves of doom and locking in the Sharpshooter. Definitely a moment in time and certainly crowd-pleasing.

ER: There were a lot of Bret/Flair matches that happened, but we don't have as many of them as I assumed. Most of what we have exist as handhelds (I believe Souled Out '98 and the excellent Smack 'Em Whack 'Em title change are the only two officially released bouts) including the great '93 Boston Garden iron man. But almost all of the handhelds was during their long series of '92/'93 WWF house shows. WCW, despite running Hart/Flair within a month of Bret joining the company, rarely ran the match. This happened the month after Souled Out and then they didn't interact for nearly two years. This match is the weakest of the Bret/Flair matches we have, but I don't think that's really an insult. The WWF matches are all great, and while it's been some years since I watched Souled Out '98, that match was at minimum praised at the time. 

This is nowhere near as ambitious as their WWF house show title matches 5 years prior, and it worked much more as a compact greatest hits. We're missing a portion that may or may not be significant (I am leaning towards Somewhat Significant, as the crowd is rather loud through Bret's struggle in the figure four, and when we clip to them standing in the corner they have gone quiet. We could have missed 30 seconds or 8 minutes), and the focus their title matches have isn't really here. The ending, especially, seems a bit too simple: we clip to Bret taking down both straps, backbreaker, Hitman elbow, suplex, sharpshooter with no fight. It was too tidy for the drama they are each capable of. They were both such more compelling during Flair's control segment. Flair and Bret are each guys who are good at yanking on a leg, Bret's inside cradle and backslide were each strong nearfalls, and I popped for a Bret enziguiri while working underneath that felt like an underutilized Bret tactic. The smaller moments of this were better than the broader moments. I particularly loved the way Bret sank to his seat in the corner after getting Flair cheapshots him in the eye, and how he recoiled when Flair did it again standing. 

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Cactus Knows There is Crack in Everything, That is How the Light Gets In

Cactus Jack Manson/Rick Ryder vs. Steiner Brothers NWA 1/20/90 - FUN

PAS: It's Steiner brother mauling a pair of jobbers which is always a blast. Cactus is starting to get a bit of a push, so he jumps Rick and gets a couple of shots in before the hammer is dropped. Rick hits a released belly to belly which folds Cactus in half. Ryder comes in a gets thrown around top rope belly to belly gut wrench, sick Frankensteiner, only for Cactus to beat him up post match, and hit the hipbuster. You wouldn't guess Cactus had such a stellar future ahead of him from this, but this role of punching bag who kills his partners post match was a lot of fun.

Cactus Jack/Abdullah The Butcher vs. Bill Kazmaier/Brian Pillman WCW10/12/91 - FUN

PAS: This didn't have the chaos that your best Cactus/Abby tag matches had, but had some nifty moments. I actually loved the big guy face offs between Abby and Kazmaier and I want to track down their singles match on WCWSN, Abby was a force in this, thrusting Pillman in his bad throat, knocking him off the apron with a running shoulder block, and he and Kazmaier freight train into each other. Cactus was a bit subdued, especially for 91. He is mostly on the defensive and would have ended up pinned by Kazmaier's incubatory FU at the end of the match if Abby didn't cut loose with the Kendo stick. Much more of a standard tag then a whirlwind, but plenty to like.

Cactus Jack/Larry Zbyszko vs. Abdullah the Butcher/Ron Simmons WCW 2/2/92 - FUN

PAS: Love this pair of WAR teams locking up on the Main Event. This was set up to tease the Omni Cactus vs. Abby cage match, and they did a nice job whetting the whistle but never really giving us a full taste. I actually dug the Abby vs. Larry Z interactions the most, with Zbyszko breaking out his spin kick to Abby's big guts, only to be met with some nasty karate thrusts and Abby curling his finger and trying to rip out Larry's eye (with a great bellowing sell by Zbyzko). They did a Simmons face in peril section which wasn't much, only to have him hot tag Abby, almost immediately tag back in and spinebuster and pin Cactus. Felt like wires might have been crossed there. We go right into a fun post match brawl which sees Cactus hit a hipbuster on Abby and smash him with a big rolled up piece of cage material. Release the Omni footage!!

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RIP Bobby Eaton Pt. 2

Bobby Eaton vs. Chris Champion NWA 1/23/88

ER: Cool TV match that I kept expecting to go the time limit, with Eaton working over Champion's good arm while Cornette berates Champion from ringside. Champion had really nice jabs and nice timing on his dropkick, and that's more than enough for Eaton to work with. I love Champion's Future Lost Boy haircut, and the idea that he was smart enough to travel 15 years back from the future but can't avoid a car accident. Eaton is great at running right into Champion's dropkick, his punches all sing, and the zig zags shaved into Champion's head give Eaton a perfect target for a wicked kneedrop. I love how Champion punched with his cast arm, while Bobby kept grinding away on the good arm, and we also get to hear Eaton talking trash while wrenching in hammerlocks. Cornette was great at ringside, bashing Champion with the racket, getting in Tommy Young's way, and getting right in Champion's face when Eaton had a submission near the ropes. Eaton took a nice backdrop bump on Champion's comeback, and Bobby's quick sharp running knee strike to Champion's spine was a cool thing to drop him with (as well as Cornette holding Champion's foot so no kickout). I knew there were several MX/New Breed tags but I didn't actually know we got a singles match between any of them, so this was a real treat. 

Bobby Eaton/Sting vs. Abdullah the Butcher/Cactus Jack WCW 10/26/91

ER: Fantastic Center Stage war that played with the same chaotic energy as all of their prior interactions. I loved how Bobby and Sting rushed to the ring after the heels' entrance. You never get to see fired up babyfaces charging into battle anymore, and how could fans not get behind two heroes who charge at their crazy foes with punches and kicks? Cactus was a real great Center Stage bumper, and here he takes a huge backdrop over the guardrail down a fire escape exit ramp, the kind of building location that you could tell he had been dying to incorporate into a big bump, and later he splats off the apron with a missed cannonball. Eaton is on fire throughout, but they're smart about how often he gets cut off and how quickly things turnaround, and those quick turnarounds really make a short match pack a wallop. His punches all look great, but those don't mean as much when Abdullah and Cactus are ripping at your face holes. There's a great spot where Abdullah blocks a Bobby monkey flip by holding in the corner (a monkey flip Bobby hit in their earlier singles match) and that's when the gouging starts. Abdullah has some incredibly nasty face work, really looked like he had two fingers dug into Bobby's right eye socket, ripped at his nose, Cactus comes in and rips at Eaton's mouth and kicks him in the head several times, and Bobby's selling and bumping for Abby's throat thrusts make them feel as deadly as they look. Eaton and Abby are really great opponents and all time legends, but that earlier singles and this tag are most of the available interactions we have between them. There is a Lethal Lottery Starrcade tag a month later, and that's it. We have been gifted with cool wrestling handhelds, but it's probably too much to ask for their two house show singles, or the holy grail of Bobby/Abby teaming up vs. Dustin/Windham. This tag and their singles match a month prior accomplish a ton of story in under 9 minutes total, and it's a shame this didn't go on for months. 

PAS:  What a wild, chaotic and satisfying match this was. Eaton is amazing as a fired up southern babyface, you could see how great he would have been if he and Ricky Morton Freaky Friday'd in that tag feud (Morton would have made an amazing Eaton too). This really made me want to go and watch every WCWSN and Worldwide Abby and Cactus tag, they felt like such a whirlwind of violence, which was Abby's real pro wrestling superpower. Cactus was fucking nuts, he took four insane bumps in a five minute tv match, and also had a great punch out with Bobby, throwing great looking jabs only to get caught with the left hook. I loved the call back spot with Abby blocking the monkey flip. It is probably something only I and Eric noticed, because we happened to watch both matches within a week, but I love that they were smart enough to put it in there for the obsessives. 

Bobby Eaton/Arn Anderson vs. Steiner Brothers WCW 3/28/92

PAS: This was a house show match designed to showcase the Steiners and get the crowd excited to see them do their thing. We get a bunch of fun stooging Arn moments, Rick biting him in the butt, him diving into an outstretched foot, classic clown show Arn. For a guy who had such a rep as a serious killer, he was a great stooge. Bobby eats most of the big shots from the Steiners, taking a real reckless looking Frankensteiner and some of the big Rick overhand rights. I thought all of the business in this match was great, but I wish we had gotten a longer heel on top section. It really only lasted about 90 seconds (although it did have Bobby land his incredible looking top rope knee drop) and you need to let it simmer a bit more than that to make the hot tag pop. Still. this was a great opportunity to see amazing performers, perform. 

ER: This was like the Steiners working a 90/10 match against Well Dunn, with Eaton and Arn as the world's greatest Well Dunn. Dangerous Alliance doesn't get a single piece of offense until about 8 minutes in, when Eaton lands a right hand on Rick that then gets him immediately clobbered. A huge chunk of this is Arn stooging around for the Steiners with stumbling clownshoe mannerisms, great Bugs Bunny shit like outsmarting your opponent and then turning around to find that you did not, in fact, outsmart your opponent. Eaton and Arn take several armdrags and hiptosses and hard Rick door knock right hands while Madusa does a great job on the floor running around and trying to get her boys to focus. Arn's bumping is so great here, even his silly spots that don't quite make sense end with whip crack bumps, like him boot after questionably attempting his axe handle to a downed Dogface. Eaton is great at taking dangerous Steiner offense (like Scott's Frankensteiner at the finish) but I LOVED a sequence he had with Rick. We already had the cool unexpected layout of Bobby being the aggressive guy on offense and Arn being more of the bumper, but Eaton ups it with this: He goes for a slingshot suplex on Rick, and on the bounce Rick shifts his weight and lands behind Bobby in a reverse waistlock. Eaton holds the ropes to buck Steiner off and block the O'Connor roll, only to turn around and get clotheslined to the floor before even knowing what's happening to him. Gorgeous sequence that looked naturally executed and not like a guy just playing reversals wrestling. 

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RIP Bobby Eaton Pt. 1

It has been a rough couple of weeks for wrestling deaths, and the great Bobby Eaton had a great career and great life. There is so much tremendous footage available, so we are going to be doing several posts over the next week.

Bobby Eaton vs. Koko Ware CWA 12/6/80

MD: I think this was actually December 1980, deep into the year without Lawler, which is a time in Memphis I always have a lot of fondness for, just due to the outlandishness of having guys like Ellering and Eaton king. This is pure Memphis, as Valiant's out to destroy poor Koko's TV (again; he's de facto lead heel having just insulted Tommy Rich's mother) and Koko can't do anything about it since he has to fight for his life against King Eaton. He would have been an underdog in any situation, but he's got extra fire and extra anger as the TV gets destroyed by the announce position almost immediately, and it's up to Eaton to bully him and lean on him and really keep the offense going in order to keep Koko down. The containment works exactly as intended and when Koko ducks a shot and starts to fire back the studio goes nuts building to a bigger prize when Koko actually gets his hands on Hart. If I have my timing right on this, they were in the midst of Tojo/Valiant vs Rich/Koko main events with Eaton vs Tony Charles in the mid card and this was a great example of entertaining TV that served a lot of purposes and gave the fans a legitimate thrill and pop despite being entirely inconclusive and setting up the live shows to come. Exactly what studio wrestling should be and Eaton played his part perfectly. 

PAS: These two formed a legendary but under footaged tag team a couple of years after this match, and it was cool to watch them work a studio fight. One thing that really struck me about this match was Eaton's athletic explosiveness. Bobby Eaton didn't look like an elite athlete, but man was his motor high and his attacks kinetic. Just the speed and force he hit a simple elbow drop, just great. Fun business with Handsome Jimmy smashing the big ass 1980's vacuum tube TV too.

ER: 21 year old Bobby Eaton is a treat. He's like an athletic brother of Francis in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, making chubby faced sneers while working a long mid-match headlock. But the 21 year old also hit really hard shoulderblocks and threw his headlock punches with a confident sass. Koko plays this like kind of a cooler black Bob Backlund, sticking his butt out to sell Eaton's already hot punches. Drop downs and leap frogs are quick and honest, and Eaton hits one of the most gorgeous highlight reel elbowdrops. He runs off the ropes and leaps from the three point line, landing perfectly horizontal with his elbow across Koko's collarbones. Jimmy Hart is an incredible manager and not only was his voice great from ringside, but his physical involvement at the finish was really tough stuff. Hart had a feel of a guy getting into a public fight and immediately getting in over his head, like a too tough talking small town pharmacist. 10 minutes of Memphis stacks up consistently with the best wrestling ever. 

Bobby Eaton vs. Abdullah The Butcher WCW 9/28/91

PAS: This was an incredible four minutes. Abby jumps Eaton before the bell while he is hugging some kids and smashes him with a kendo stick, posts him, throws him into chairs and lights him up with chair shots. They brawl to the back, and right when you think this is 90 seconds, they pop back out from the curtain with Eaton pasting Abby with those right hands, he tees off with a chair on Abby, and looks like he is going to finish him off with an Alabama Jam until Catcus runs out and jumps him. Eaton gets thrown off the ring apron into the guard rail, and gets double teamed until Rick Steiner runs out for the save. Totally wild stuff, with Eaton almost working as a Steve Austin babyface. Loved it. 

ER: Here's a great match to show someone who would be interested in seeing in how much can be accomplished in pro wrestling in just 4 minutes. This hardly ever gets to be a real match, the bells rings before 4 minutes have even passed, and yet I guarantee every fan in attendance went home talking about this match. Abdullah jumps Eaton during his entrance and really beats him, including throwing him like a comic book villain through some chairs, then beating him down on the floor with a chair. He completely overwhelms Eaton, kicking his ass back through the curtains. Magic happens once they cross that curtain threshold, as Eaton comes out firing, punching Abby back to ringside and runs halfway around the ring to find his own damn chair. You get a real joyous bloodlust crowd reaction when Eaton charges back with his chair, and he absolutely pastes Abby with 4 or 5 chairshots that looked as violent as any Attitude era shots. Cactus runs in when Abby gets in too much trouble, and he rocket launches Eaton off the apron ribs first into the guardrail. This was incredibly entertaining, Abby looked humongous and dangerous, Eaton looked like the kind of babyface everyone would want to root for, Rick Steiner looked like a fearless top babyface. It was the best of everything. 

Bad Attitude (Bobby Eaton/Steve Keirn) vs. Ricky Steamboat/Arn Anderson WCW 5/1/94

MD: There's a moment midway through this match, just after the heels took over with a blind switch, where Eaton hits an elbow drop off the top rope on Anderson. It lands well and looks impactful, because of course it does, but afterwards, Eaton does something odd. He stumbles off to the side and bounces off the second rope before he recovers to keep the beating going. You're left wondering why he made that specific decision. Was it to sell the beating he had taken so far? Was it to get over the damage that he was willing to do to himself and how dangerous and powerful the elbow drop was? Was it to justify with a move so back, even so early in the beatdown, didn't immediately put Anderson away. I don't know. It could have meant any of that or all of it, but fifty other wrestlers doing an elbow off the top in that moment wouldn't have done it. Eaton did and it added to the match because it felt totally natural and it felt meaningful. It made everything that was going on somehow more tangible and real; it wasn't rote and you didn't expect it and it made you wonder, but in a way that drew you more into the match instead of taking you out of it. That's what Bobby Eaton did. 

If it was to sell the early beating he took, that would have certainly been warranted, because he fit a lot of pain and stooging into a three minute period, bumping up and over the rail, including a press from Anderson off the apron into it. None of the bumps were particularly huge but he sold them in such a skittish, almost tragic way that they meant far more than far bigger ones than most others would take. We're eulogizing Bobby here, for good reason, but a quick note on Arn: he always says he wasn't a great babyface because he didn't have "tools," and here I think tools are shorthand for dropkicks and the sort. He always had the makings for a standing tall Bill Watts/Dusty Rhodes style babyface though and that's fully at play here. He had amazing timing on hope spots (which makes sense as he was always so good at his cutoffs) and could garner sympathy as he dragged himself around the ring during a beating, and when you had great strikes and a lightning fast KO move like the spinebuster, you didn't need to be throwing about flying back elbows. Though, of course, it helps when you're across the ring from someone like Bobby Eaton.

PAS: 1994 WCW is a bit of a blind spot for me, I don't really remember seeing very many Bad Attitude matches before, but this "pals of Stan Lane" version of the Fabs is really great. Keirn had turned into a real creepy looking guy at this point, and had really good heel facial expressions. He hit this awesome looking flying forearm for his high spot and was great at the nuts and bolts parts of being a heel. I enjoyed babyface Arn, loved the Spinebuster as a babyface move here, and he and Steamboat make a really effective pair. Of course Bobby was electric, with big bumps and great looking small bumps, cool twists on formulas, and a real speedy energy for a guy who was also great at going slow. 

ER: Bad Attitude were a really great proto Southern Comfort, with a wild eyed Keirn sporting a craziest era Billy Bob Thornton shaved head mullet as Eaton plays the more strait-laced southern pro. And you get to see these complementary souther pros take apart a FIP Arn for 8 minutes, and it's great. Eaton takes some big leaps, getting rocket launched by Arn from the apron to the guardrail, and later landing a perfect top rope elbowdrop on Arn. He and Keirn cut Arn off from Steamboat really effectively, with Keirn coming off like a cool closed fist punching tough guy and Eaton knowing exactly how to play all the timing spots, when to distract Steamboat, when to direct Arn back into the wrong corner. Steamboat's hot tag is really the only down part of the match, with Steamboat coming in with lesser Kofi Kingston offense, karate chops that are the weakest looking strikes in the match, and a standing splash that's pulled so much it's like a dad fake wrestling with his toddler. We only got half a year of Bad Attitude, but it was a real great combination of two legendary tag wrestlers who gelled immediately. 

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WCW Bash at the Beach 7/13/97

I can't believe they had under 8,000 fans in attendance for this show. I thought the build was great and the lineup on-paper is really strong. This really feels like the kind of show that should have drawn 20,000+, but a hot smaller crowd could be a great thing. 

1. Wrath/Mortis vs. Glacier/Ernest Miller (9:47)

If you found out that WCW was going to essentially have a karate division, with nothing but arcade fighting game characters, this is the best possible version of the kind of matches that attempted to fuse fighting games and pro wrestling. These guys all had varying levels of training and in ring backgrounds, but I don't think you could have laid out a better match for this specific combination of wrestlers, and it resulted in an insanely fun PPV opener. It's 10 glorious minutes of shockingly good spin kicks and crazy double teams, like a cartoon version of a Low Ki/Red match several years before that was a match. I'm not sure Ernest Miller or Glacier ever fit so naturally into a match again, Wrath and Mortis doing a great job of being in all the right places to take some complicated kick landings. This was much more snug than other Glacier/Miller matches, everybody really tightened up their punches and so many of the kicks looked genuinely explosive. The US was still in a big martial arts craze in 1997, and this match fit so well into that, and the crowd reactions showed that. There were some crazy spots here, all using some impressive timing. Mortis and Wrath hit their great powerbomb neckbreaker, Wrath hits a big cannonball of the apron, Miller is trying springboard attacks, and Glacier looks like he gets a concussion on the floor when Wrath hold a chair for Mortis to superkick directly into Glacier's ear. His left ear eats chair, right ear gets smashed into the ringpost. There is a little slow down before the finishing stretch, but when Miller tags in and is hitting spin kicks and James Vandenburg gets superkicked off the apron you won't care. The finish is the best possible Memphis Mortal Kombat, when Vandenburg wraps a chain around Mortis's boot for a loaded karate kick win. Pure brilliance, one of my favorite PPV openers of the 90s. 

2. Ultimo Dragon vs. Chris Jericho (12:55)

This was a pretty good embodiment of a lot of the 1997 WCW juniors matches. There's a lot of great spots that get big reactions, a couple of ambitious spots that look blown, they lose the page a bit and try to make up for it with big bumps, and it works! The best stuff makes up for the worst stuff, they mostly keep a good pace, and throw in some genuinely memorable spots. A lot of it is fairly typical 90s juniors wrestling: some engaging but meaningless matwork, a mirrored move, some cool backdrop reversals (Dragon landing on his feet, Jericho cartwheeling through), a stand off, we all loved it in 1997. It was the reason we traded for WAR tapes before all collectively realizing that the lumpy old sumo main events were the reason to be trading for WAR tapes. The best stuff here is very good, with a couple of very nice Jericho moonsaults and fun Dragon kick combos, a big double powerbomb from Jericho, great Asai moonsault to the floor, and some fun reversals. They get off the page a little bit when both men fall on a top rope spot, Dragon basically leaping to the floor while Jericho leapt back into the ring, and Jericho feels like he's trying to make up for that spot by taking a couple of really big bumps to the floor. It doesn't ever quite seem like it's anything other than a nicely laid out collection of spots, but the effort being put in elevates things. 

3. Steiner Brothers vs. Great Muta/Masahiro Chono (10:37)

This was filled with a lot of miscommunication, but still came off great to the crowd thanks to some huge Steiners throws and a fantastic stooging heel performance from Chono. He yelled at the crowd the entire time he was on the apron, and continues riling them up any time he was in control. He easily crossed any language barrier just by having no problem throwing the sole of his boot into heads with his great yakuza kicks, while also rubbing the crowd’s nose in it before inevitably getting smashed by the Steiners. The match is pretty formless, but the nWo Japan control is very fun and it’s cool seeing them dominating the Steiners and not being eaten alive like has happened. Scott looked absolutely massive here, which only makes it cooler when he is throwing Muta across the ring with his hip switch belly to belly or nailing the Frankensteiner. Muta hits his own big top rope Frankensteiner and Rick hits dangerous overhead belly to bellys on both. Chono also took some big backdrops from Rick, just a great house show main event heel performance. The match was a mess, but a cool mess, with big charisma and big highspots. The finish is dangerous and made everyone in the building get to their feet, with Muta taking an electric chair DDT. It looked as safe as possible, meaning it looked like a man taking a vertical dive off another man's shoulders. Those kind of things made it feel like a bigger, better match than it was. 

4. La Parka/Villano IV/Psychosis vs. Juventud Guerrera/Hector Garza/Lizmark Jr. (10:08)

This was the same kind of fireworks that made the opener so much fun, although the Daytona crowd didn't react as loudly to this as they did to that. It wasn't for lack of effort, and all kept working so hard to impress for 10 minutes that eventually the crowd finally had to respect it. It started a little slow with some nice Psychosis/Lizmark maestro match up, and the crowd reacted kind of confused to it. Even Tenay had to explain to Schiavone and Heenan that it was common for lucha matches to start with matwork. From there they build to some huge flying spots that come mostly at the end of the match, and they build to those big spots with hard bumps and stiff strikes. I don't think the crowd was looking for the luchadors to beat the hell out of each other, it's as if it isn't even happening right in front of them. Villano IV especially just comes in murdering everyone with chops and punches and lariats. La Parka does the same (he hit an amazing clothesline on Juvy in the corner, running down the length of the apron to land it), and Psychosis throws maybe the two hardest lariats in the match. 

La Parka is an excellent base for Juvy's headscissors, even catching a nice one through the ropes to the floor, and Psychosis took hiss missed corner bump on the back of his head. The crowd didn't react to any of Psychosis's bumps, even though he was killing himself. Seeing that, you really got the sense of how well Juvy and La Parka understood the timing of spots and how to hit them for the maximum crowd reaction. But the crowd got more involved after a series of misdirections, every member of the match missing consecutive top rope splashes, and it's like it suddenly woke everyone up and reminded them that bodies were crashing for their amusement. The dive train was tremendous, all started by Lizmark flattening V4 with a plancha. Psychosis got backdropped by Garza into a tope con giro, Garza acted as a tabletop for Juvy to get *incredible* height and distance on Air Juvy, just soaring beyond the ropes, building to the big Garza tornillo. A match that deserved to win the crowd over, and eventually did. Very memorable PPV lucha trios, one of the best. 

5. Chris Benoit vs. Kevin Sullivan (13:10)

A tremendous swan song performance for Kevin Sullivan, a real fight feel for its duration with some great use of non-participants and a ton of violence. The violence never dips and it's a painful pace to keep up, things beginning with a punch exchange that makes it clear Sullivan will be throwing fat fists square at Benoit's face. Benoit keeps everything entirely professional the full match, always working snug but clearly working elbow strikes and kicks. Sullivan, however, has no interest in worked shots and beats Benoit up the way someone fighting for their career would. Every punch is thrown to hurt, every kick to the stomach looks upsetting, he stomps Benoit in the balls, double stomps him in the stomach, throws him through a display of surfboards and even throws Jacqueline at him. Sullivan was an expert at taking advantage of Jacqueline and Jimmy Hart's interference, and both of them are great additions to the match. 

Jacqueline is relentless when things spill to the floor, getting flung aside by both Sullivan and Benoit but always screaming back into action. Benoit lifts her up for an atomic drop and instead launches her at Sullivan; Sullivan shoves her at Benoit while immediately following up with a fist to Benoit's eye. Jimmy Hart climbs a lifeguard's chair only to ride it into some fake palm trees after Benoit shoves it over, and the fight continues. Sullivan hangs Benoit in the tree of woe and delivers three hard running knees, and they cool things down a bit with a long crippler crossface. I really liked the long application, Benoit locking his hands right underneath Sullivan's nose, and Sullivan getting a long hard fought rope break and a nice reaction from the crowd after fighting to his feet. The ending pays off the weeks of Sullivan shoving Jacqueline around as she brains him with a wooden chair and leaves Benoit to fling himself straight down with a headbutt off the top. Great fight, worked with the importance of the stipulation in mind, stands out as a stiff brawl in a promotion full of them. 

6. Steve McMichael vs. Jeff Jarrett (6:56)

Very entertaining US Title match, with a crowd loudly against Jarrett. Jarrett knew exactly how to get heat from this crowd, and knows how to rub it in every time he's in control against Mongo. I love how Jarrett bumps and gets upended by McMichael's offense and has to keep spilling to the floor, yelling at fans, then pointing smugly to his head at those same fans whenever he would lure Mongo into a trap. Mongo looks good on offense, hitting a big powerslam and heavy knee lift, but was even more effective bumping for Jarrett. McMichael misses an awesome kneedrop into the corner, patella straight to the top buckle, and Jarrett immediately begins mocking him as he goes after the knee. The crowd hates it when Jarrett goes into a three point stance and takes out Mongo's knee, and just when it seems that Debra is about to step in and save her husband, she instead gives the Halliburton to Jarrett! The finish looks great, with McMichael blocking the first briefcase shot with his forearm and grabbing at it in pain, opening himself up to take the briefcase to the head. The crowd seemed genuinely surprised by Debra turning on her husband, and the announce team all seemed just as shocked. Everyone played their role really well and it lead to a great 10 minute segment. 

7. Randy Savage/Scott Hall vs. DDP/Curt Hennig (9:35)

This show has been really great at keeping every match within a perfect time window, giving everyone long enough to work an interesting and memorable match while not risking them losing the audience. It keeps the audience up the entire time, and this match had a good TV build. A lot of time was spent on who DDP's mystery partner would be, with Hennig and Raven being the ones not so subtly hinted at. In fact, it was hinted at so strongly that it felt more likely it would be neither of those two, so I was actually surprised when Curt Hennig came out as the partner. But even then the announcers had the appropriate reaction when they said "Oh so it IS Curt Hennig!" The match itself doesn't actually build much, as it turns out to be more angle than match, but the rare match ups elevated things and got us nicely to the angle. Hennig and Hall were a strong AWA tag team a decade prior and only fought on house shows and one PPV tag in the WWF.  And, outside of a few possible Royal Rumble interactions, Hennig and Savage is a first time match. So those are fun pairings, and to add to that DDP always works well with Savage so the floor on this one is high. This was an inspired stretch for Savage, always loved the energy between he and DDP. Hennig and Hall square off and it feels new, even though it's not, ahem, perfect. It all builds to DDP skinning the cat which causes Hennig to get slowed by a low bridge, but then he attacks DDP and leaves him prone to the Outsider's Edge/Elbow. I think Hennig made more sense as a heel during his comeback, so I liked the turn and thought it came off unexpected. 

8. Roddy Piper vs. Ric Flair (13:26)

I loved this match. Piper vs. Flair hadn't faced off against each other since 1992, and most of their early 90s WWF feud was house show only. Their interactions in the 1992 Rumble were arguably the best part of one of the most legendary Rumbles, and this match immediately brought back the energy of those Rumble interactions. Whenever I think of the 92 Rumble I think of Piper going after Flair every chance he got, running in and flinging himself onto Flair, and that's exactly how the first several minutes of this match go.  Piper's strikes all look classic, throwing hard overhand right chops, mixing up punch combos, big knife edge chops, Flair off balance the whole time and only making his way into the match by landing a chop block after Piper briefly gets tied up with the ref. Both men are good at both sides of the match, Piper looking like a crazed lunatic going after Flair, but also doing an impressive job selling the damage Flair was doing to his knee. 

Flair stooged and bumped and flopped for Piper's strike barrage, then looked near sadistic every time he would kick or stomp at Piper's knee or ring one up below the belt. Flair takes a couple bumps to the floor and Piper not only kept up the brawl energy at ringside, but he managed to limp around on his worked over leg the entire time. We get a couple of dramatic figure 4 moments, and a great twist when Piper has to deal with Benoit and Mongo. It's a bunch of chaos all at once, with ref Randy Anderson suddenly very easily distractible while people are crashing behind his back, but the payoff is worth it. Piper suckers Benoit into hitting a flying headbutt on Flair, but Mongo absolutely spikes Piper with a tombstone. There's a lot of great Flair/Piper drama as Flair crawls to cover Piper after Mongo's tombstone, and it really felt like it could have been the finish. Flair takes just enough time getting to the pin that it feels like there's a chance of Piper kicking out, and when it does it gets a huge reaction from the crowd. These two knew how to build to convincing pinfalls, with Piper also getting a reaction from a swinging neckbreaker that looked good enough to be the finish. But everyone wanted to see Piper drag Flair to the mat with the sleeper, and it was great seeing Flair's arm drop. This would have easily played as a strong main event a decade prior, and it was great to see both really go at it. 

9. Lex Luger/The Giant vs. Hulk Hogan/Dennis Rodman (22:30)

Buffer really adds to the big main event feel for this one, although he gives the nWo a way cooler intro than our two babyface heroes, saying that Rodman is a bad boy because he's good enough to be as bad as he wants to be. This tale of the tape feels very opinionated, but it does get the crowd buzzing. The match itself is long, but expertly laid out like a Memphis arena main event. It's classic Memphis, with a charismatic heel teaming with an athletic superstar and a charismatic face teaming with a green Giant. Sometimes the athlete is a babyface and sometimes the giant is a monster heel but the Memphis feel is strong. Hogan adds to that vibe by working as total chickenshit heel, and while the match had a purposely slow build, they knew exactly what they were doing as the crowd built along with it. They hide weaknesses and bullshit around strengths, with the Giant not tagging in until over 11 minutes into the match and Rodman being celebrated for every single wrestling move he managed to pull off. Hardly anything happens for the first several minutes and the crowd is along exactly where they need to be the whole time. Hogan takes forever to lock up with Luger, it builds nicely to Rodman entering the match, and the match works as a real impressive way to frame Rodman's first pro wrestling match. 

Rodman has a high floor as a wrestler. His size is impressive, and it makes his slow hesitant movements come off like a dangerous giant, not a tentative celebrity newcomer. Macho Man is the nWo's second, and he and Hogan are perfect cheeseballs who celebrate Rodman's every move as a feat of wonder. He locks up and armdrags Luger, and Macho and Hogan come screaming into the ring like Rodman had just grabbed a rebound to seal a playoff win. A Rodman leapfrog exchange leads to a reaction typically reserved for gold medal sprinters breaking the tape, and it's all great. The fans cannot stand Rodman and hate the idea of giving him credit, so we begin to get loud Rodman Sucks chants, and Rodman knows exactly how to soak it up. But they also can't help getting excited when he got more and more involved, and by the time he was hammering a trio of very nasty looking back elbows into Luger in the corner, he no longer felt like merely a celebrity attraction. They built well to everything the crowd wanted to see, and they especially reacted big whenever Rodman took damage. Rodman's size made his bumping more impressive, the crowd loved seeing him knock Luger down with shoulderblocks and also leap into a huge Giant bearhug. Giant is still real raw here, does a lot of Giant Gonzalez wide eyes swinging arms selling and comes off clumsy and unsure, but Hogan and Rodman are both good at working around him. It's all basic southern house show, but those connect with crowds and these reactions kept getting bigger. 

Not only did we get a steady stream of wadded up garbage thrown at the nWo, but the big spots all felt big. Rodman and Hogan did a double hip toss on Giant that felt shook the building, and the fans reacted like they had just been through an aftershock. Rodman violently manhandles ref Randy Anderson and headbutts him in the back of the head, and it leads to a chaotic finish that works for the match. Sting (a man who is clearly not Sting and instead a 7 footer who steps over the top rope entering and exiting the ring) hits the Giant with a baseball bat but WCW still gets to triumph amid the confusion, with Luger torture racking Hogan, Rodman, and Savage one after the other. It's a strong main event to one of WCW's best PPVs, a match that felt like a main event and properly navigated the egos of two top wrestling stars, one star rookie, and a major mainstream celebrity. It's not necessarily an easy match to book, but they made it look simple. 

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Tony Halme Reminds Me Bout a Symphony on the Radio

Tony Halme vs. Ron Simmons  WCW/NJPW 1/4/93 - VERY GOOD

ER: I think they could have had a really great singles match if they were around each other a bit more regularly, and weren't thrown into a kind of Special Attraction match. This was the only match on a huge Tokyo Dome card to go under 10 minutes, and it barely even went 5. It's pro style, not Halme working as a massive boxer and Simmons trying to find his way around that, and I think a great hypothetical match exists in both styles. We didn't get either great match, but what we got still had some predictably cool moments. Jim Ross and Tony Schiavone are on the call, and refer to Halme as either "Home" or "Holmes" the entire match, but I liked Tony shaping a little narrative by saying that Halme is pissed because this match was signed when Simmons was the WCW champ and was supposed to be a title match. There's a long feeling out process, and I thought Halme was good at setting up Simmons' offense, and much of the match was him setting up offense for Simmons. Halme ran through a lot of major NJPW guys during his time there, so I was surprised at them letting Simmons mostly control this (his status as recent champ notwithstanding). 

Halme's awkwardness adds to these matches for me, as it makes his reversals look more like failed shoots than guys just on different pages. He lets Simmons lay into him and nicely sets up a Simmons bulldog, takes a nice piledriver, but then just stays standing when Simmons hits a flying shoulderblock, just shoving Simmons into the ground. For his part, Simmons was completely looney about leaning into Halme strikes, particularly a clonking headbutt and a big right bear paw attack that knocked Simmons through the ropes to the floor. Halme's avalanche and big heavy feet-planted clothesline looked great, and Schiavone and JR seemed pretty impressed at how high arcing his powerslam was. The finish was weird but not bad? Simmons hits a powerslam of his own but it doesn't look great, then tries to get a small package twice in a row on Halme. Both small packages look loose, but to me it made it look like Simmons was trying to shoot pin Halme and Halme wasn't having it (I am projecting all of this on the match, I don't think anyone was being unprofessional here). Halme misses a haymaker and Simmons hits the spinebuster with a fantastic float over pin holding Halme's legs down. I think you can improve on literally every section of this match, and a great match wasn't far off, but what we got was plenty cool and it was always going to be a treat seeing Halme cheered as a babyface against Simmons in front of 60,000+ Tokyo Dome fans.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE TONY HALME

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Lord Regal and September Spawned a Monster

Lord Steven Regal/Stunning Steve Austin/Mongolian Mauler vs. Dustin Rhodes/Sting/Flyin Brian Pillman WCW 1/31/94 - GREAT

PAS: Totally WAR six-man tag match with five of the greatest wrestlers in history and the Mongolian Mauler for some reason.  I kind of liked the Mauler in this he had a nice chop to the throat and both a back rake and the lesser seen but equally effective front rake.  The other five were as great as you expect them to be. Regal and Sting have a couple of exchanges and those guys always work great together. Dustin was the face in peril, and he is an all time at it, he takes a great bump on a blocked monkey flip, and does a 360 on an Austin clothesline. It all leads to a hot tag with both Sting and Pillman, and those guys can heat up a tag. Great Worldwide main event, the kind of thing that would put a smile on your face on a Saturday morning.

MD: 1994 WCW is a bit of a blindspot for me, actually. I've seen some of the biggest stuff (both in general and in our circles) but the idea was that I always wanted to keep that one specific year, especially the first half, in my pocket for a rainy day. I had this ridiculous notion that there was going to be a limited amount of old wrestling out there and I never knew when I was going to need a bunch of it that I knew I'd probably love. There are a couple of things like that for me (The prose version of The Big Sleep is another actually). My rainy day media.

So I haven't seen this before. "From Mongolia, the Mongolian Mauler" is a pretty ridiculous billing. They should have probably just called him the Mauler. The black contacts are gold for 1994 though. I immediately like the camaraderie of the babyfaces. The unity and shared vision they all seem to have must have made Hogan's arrival a few months later feel all the more jarring. My favorite shot in all of this is probably the shift from Mauler chewing the scenery (figuratively but just barely) on the floor, to Regal making faces on the apron. You would get random few week/months runs with guys in WWF (Lance Cassidy or Battle Kat or what have you) but the nature of WWF TV meant that there were less name vs name matches and a lot less random tags/six-mans in general, with only the more established guys selected for Coliseum Videos, so it's less likely you get a situation like this with a guy who was in and out.

The match itself was what you'd want out of 8 minutes of this grouping. Sting got to take about forty seconds of the Mauler's offense and you get the sense he was absolutely into it, to the point where I'm amazed the didn't work more during this short run. Sting knew what he could do with an opponent like that. The real heat came after Dustin contorted himself impossibly for a bump on an Austin clothesline out of the corner. He didn't just hide his size as a FIP but he also went over big for things like Regal's butterfly suplex. When he actually used the height was when he futilely reached for the corner which was always an effective visual from Dustin. That's another side of this. By 94, most of these guys knew each other so well that they could do a match like this in their sleep. You add the Mauler into the mix as an X factor and you get a fun bit of televised chaos.

William Regal vs. Bubba Ray Dudley WWE Raw 5/20/02 - FUN

ER: These two matched up for months in tag matches, with Regal and Lance Storm having a long feud with the Dudleys. This is the only singles match they had though, and the first half is exactly what you'd want. Regal worked really stiff, roughing up Bubba with hard elbows and punches, hard knee strikes, both collided with different shoulderblocks, all of it shaping it to be a classic. But things get unnecessarily derailed when Molly Holly interfered and Bubba chased her, and the timing of things gets thrown off a little bit. They started with a nice violent flow and interrupted the rhythm. Regal kind of whiffed on a punch that was supposed to land and they kind of wound up standing in the wrong spot. Regal gets things back to where we were by just throwing Bubba throat first against the middle rope, my favorite moment of the match. It looked practical - like the way Finlay integrated the ring into his offense - and really violent, and I fully bought into Bubba's choked selling. But then Brock came out and interrupted the rhythm they had regained and it didn't really get it back. It had too many distractions away from the ass kicking, and for a 3 minute match ending in a DQ, it still could have been great if the 3rd minute was like the 1st minute.

PAS: This had a couple of fun moments, which is pretty good for a short TV match to set up a run in. Bubba's opening offensive run was stiff enough to bruise up Regal's chest, and the post Molly Holly interference spot where Regal threw Bubba's jaw into the rope was super nasty. Bubba needing to get in a running man set up for a splash, a flip flop and fly, and a "Bubba get the tables" in a three minute match was shtick overkill. You have three minutes, pick one thing. 


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE REGAL

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New Footage Friday: WCW Festival de Lucha

ER: This is one of those shows that I've heard about for 20 years, one of those shows that someone on a message board would pretend to have a copy of, cause a stir, and of course never actually follow through on getting the footage to anyone. It's one of those shows where people just wanted to see it more and more because they thought they would never get to see it, which is the best kind of Hidden Gems gift. And, excitingly, Super Boy is now officially on the WWE Network. Blessed. We get the fantastic mission-front set with traditional dancing, great pueblo set, ring valets all in traditional garb, and what sounds like a loud crowd who is into this. I'm there with them.

TOMK: It’s about time this showed up. You would have thought they would do this in September as some sort of Hispanic Heritage Month deal…but I’m not complaining about October.

MD: I'm dealing with some shifting watching situations that make annotations tricky currently (as in, I watched this show on a commuter bus over a few days), so the comments I provide will be general. Hopefully, Phil and Eric have the heavy lifting here.

I'm not going to say "Nitro lucha" is my least favorite lucha but it's certainly not my favorite. So many things that I've learned to love about lucha libre just aren't present. My remembrance with them is that you didn't really get memorable captain feuding or character driven pair-offs or momentum shifts with builds to comebacks. Clearly defined segments. Dives as means to a bigger end instead of ends in and of themselves.

It was distilled one-fall Lucha with some of the wrong things distilled.

That said, this entire show was a blast. So much of that was due to the setting, the dancers, the fact that they really just embraced this stuff instead of having it off to the side as a sideshow. On this show, these guys felt like stars. Top to bottom, too. You had Disco Inferno main eventing for maybe the only time of his career up until that point, and he felt natural in that role. Jericho felt larger than life, like a Buddy Rose type figure, and almost all the more charismatic or memorable luchadors felt like big deals.

And that was most of them. The talent pool here was great. You had a lot of the usual suspects: Villano III and V, La Parka, Psicosis, Juvi, Halloween and Damien, Hector Garza, Super Calo, Konnan and Rey, and the WCW contingent with Finlay, Smiley, Swinger/Lane etc. but you also had guys that didn't really show up in WCW like Felino, Pirata Morgan, Texano, Rey, Sr., and freaking Super Boy. Maybe coolest of all (not as cool as Super Boy, but...) we had new Blitzkrieg matches, and a bunch of unique pairings that you just didn't think you'd get.

Everything basically worked, from Jimmy Hart's Boricua first family to Jericho's foreign legion, to the fact guys seemed to trade between being rudos and tecnicos depending on the match. There was some sense of overkill or a lack of agenting. For example, I really liked the Juventud Guerrera, Pirata Morgan & Psicopata vs. Hector Garza, Konnan & Rey Mysterio Jr. There was a pretty key story in there with a big fight for the top rope rana through the pairings and ultimately, a bigger fight for the Juvi driver, but in the next match on the taping, someone hit a top rope rana almost instantly, like it was nothing, and then I think a match later, someone hit a Juvi driver, of all things, just as a move. Even if these matches weren't all taped in the order they'd be filmed, that would have been a long term problem. That's not to say the matches didn't vary at all. Some had more thorough beatdowns (Especially the Damien/Halloween ones, I think), and others more comedy, but the general tenor of Nitro style lucha is "good action" and that's a lot of what this was.

Other random thoughts: Psicosis might have been the best masked rudo of his specific generation (guys born in the early 70s). He's so emotive, such a dick, able to play to the crowd, but also able to base so well and hit so much stuff. Juvi just really got it too. He integrated a lot more of US heel mannerisms and it was a good mix. I'm not super familiar with Salsero, but I'm amazed he didn't get himself more of a job out of this. He was playing a unique role and would have probably gotten over on a weekly basis in WCW as a clowning, joke-spot guy that could still go. Lots of clotheslines and DDTs on the show. It's a joy to watch the differences in the selling though: Blitzkrieg folds in half, Hector sails across the ring, and yeah, Disco makes sure to flail sell for quite a few seconds. There was at least one VIII decapitation of someone too. I thought Konnan worked surprisingly well in his trios match. I don't remember him working nearly that spritely in the late 90s. He also gave a lot for Disco who was giving his all. Heel Big Wiggle era Norman Smiley was a lot of fun and Jericho as a corner man made it all the better. I've seen rudo Rey Sr a few times lately (had mostly seen him as a tecnico) and he's just a great stooging pug base. I wanted to see Finlay, Blitzkrieg and Super Boy against literally everyone else on the show. I'm glad we had a few more matches than listed because it would have been a crime not to see Finlay in this setting.

I guess my biggest takeaway from it all is that I wish it had gone on for a while. 


Silver King/Venum/Kendo vs. Super Boy/Villano V/Felino

PAS: This would probably land in the lower half of WCW lucha trios, but it was still a ton of fun to see different guys work in this environment. Kendo's stuff fit in great in the sped up WCW lucha style, and his big tope looked awesome. Super Boy and Felino both looked great too, Felino was fully in his fastest luchador in the world prime, and Super Boy is an amazing short fat agile revelation. I have no idea why this didn't at least get them both WCWSN filler gigs. Venum Black looked not ready for prime time, he was tentative, and awkward, and even his big dive felt unsure.

TOMK: The EMLL announcers used to talk about Felino as one of fastest wrestlers in the world but you kind of forget how fast he could make an exchange look. Not sure if he’s actually “stop watch fast” or just knows how to make every move look sudden. It is a blast to watch Felino and Silver King working their fast exchanges. I think Super Boy and Silver King tried to do a ridiculous exchange near the end that had a 1/50 chance of working but if it did it would have blown every one’s mind and they were completely prepared for it possibly not working. Venum Black may have blown his leg on his dive near end.

ER: The Felino/King sections of this were really hot, and if this match just had their cool trips and ankle picks it would have been worth it. All of the Felino stuff was really great, and then you have Super Boy coming in and being the fast flippy fat guy who looks even more awesome taking falls, because his beautiful round belly looks great on the mat and his shirt always exposes it. It makes him look like when you'd KO King Hippo by punching him and making his pants fall off. Venum looked a step behind everyone but he did hit a wild dive at the end (which Tom thinks may have wrecked his leg). I have no clue what King and Super Boy were going for at the end, but it doesn't happen, and it was fun to see them pick up the pieces. I saw Super Boy work a flea market in the early 2000s, and he did a huge dive, crushed the two chairs in the row in front of me, and landed on my leg. It was great. 

ER: I am LOVING the Jimmy Hart Festival de First Family. What a great bunch of weird dudes, with American Wild Child mugging the whole time, Psicopata dragging around a blow up doll, and Pierroth yelling on the stick. I love Pierroth, and this late 90s period of Pierroth was really great. This was a stable I would have killed to see go up against the LWO. I'm just picturing Pierroth whipping everyone with his belt and hitting hard lariats on everyone. This is great.  

TOMK: Jimmy Hart comes out with his stable, Ricky Santana, Fidel Sierra, Pierroth, American Wild Child and Psicopata. Holy shit why couldn’t this have been a regular WCW stable. Pierroth gets the mic and explains that he is going to wear the Puerto Rican colors. And fuck it Pierroth really is the guy who I didn’t get at first but now when I see old footage absolutely can’t take my eyes off of him in a ring.

La Parka/Super Calo/Salsero vs. Halloween/Damien/El Mosco

PAS: Total fairgrounds lucha match, lots of classic shtick you can see at any small arena around Mexico, except performed by masters of the craft like Familia de Tijuana and Parka. Great stuff by Salsero too, who turned every move into a shake of the hip, and threw out a crazy top rope quebrada to the floor. Loved everyone missing an in ring dive, all of the stuff with the Kendo stick and Parka making the rudos dance to his tune. Usually WCW lucha wasn't this traditional, so it was a fun look into some stylistic differences between the matches.

TOMK: Salsero? Salsero? Of all the guys they brought in Salsero. I guess Salsero and Kendo come as package. But why would you want that package? For a little dancing followed by in ring tope and slapping rudos confusion comedy spots, Rayo is right there. This is mostly a match made by Halloween/Damien heel miscommunication spots and pretty much they are absolute kings of building a match around that.

ER: Damn this was fun. You show me this list of 6 names and Salsero would not be the guy I'd expect to be featured the most, but here we are. This whole match was full of schtick, and it was super welcome. And the pairings were all real fun, starting with Mosco and Calo. Mosco has a big high spinning heel kick, and later takes an amusing bump over the top off a Salsero dropkick. Salsero got to work a bunch of classic schtick, getting the rudos to attack each other (loved FdT ganging up on Mosco and Mosco swinging a chair at them), and boy did I not expect him hitting a gigantic top rope quebrada (to seemingly no reaction, on a show getting loud ass reactions from everything, that's weird). Halloween and Damien looked as good as usual, loved them getting outsmarted by La Parka at nearly every turn, and La Parka was so great at leaning into every single strike. I loved Parka's long  dance evasion from Halloween, ending in a perfectly timed mean slap from Halloween, and Parka was running so fast into Damien's corner boots, catching them right in the neck. This really got to unfold in a great way, and while it didn't hit anywhere near the peaks of WCW lucha sprints, it had a nice traditional charm that was felt throughout. 

  

Rey Mysterio Sr./Villano III/El Texano vs. Blitzkrieg/Piloto Suicida/Raul

PAS: Damn is Villano 3 a beast in this match, just a violent lucha machine, hard shots, great looking DDT, internal organ flattening senton, just a monster. Your tecnico team felt like a green tecnico team being carried by awesome rudos, and we had awesome rudos. I am surprised Blitzkrieg was as subdued as he was in this match, my memories of him were always just a lunatic breaking out crazy highspots, here he wasn't much crazier then Raul (whoever that was). Excited about the run in setting up a killer rudo battle later on the show.

TOMK: Who is Raul? Is that Zorro? Facially kind of looks it. I thought Zorro was a tad taller than that. Anyways this is a fucking Texano showcase match as he just beats the fuck out of everyone and throws himself around bumping and setting up face comebacks. Jimmy Hart’s team runs in at the end attacking both faces and heels and we get an awesome tease of Pierroth vs. Texano. Is Psicopata actually Mando at this point? He doesn’t really move like Mando…If WCW only had been willing to air this show we might have gotten a WCWSN main event Psicopata/Bad Street vs. Psycho/Killer and that would have turned everything around.

ER: Damn check out this Rey Mysterio Sr. showcase, what a brute who knew how to make green fliers looks formidable. He's someone who throws in extras, fills time nicely, a guy who needs to be spoken about in the same sentences as other era workrate lucha gods. I like how he throws in an extra spin while getting into position for a Piloto Suicida armdrag, and on the floor he eats a rana and purposely throws himself into the legs of the guardrail to make the bump look better. Oh but then you had his excellent rudo partners looking like all time asskickers. Villano III gets Blitzkrieg a WCW contract by crushing his ribs with a top rope senton, and Texano was the most explosive guy in the match throwing strikes as hard as his bumps. The thing falls apart in absolutely glorious fashion, I mean three tecnico dives that all miss in increasingly spectacular fashion, terrible catches and botched dives and the most incredibly ugly trainwreck you've seen. Raul (yeah who the hell IS Raul?) slips and dives head first straight into the floor, Piloto apparently pilots the plane on the cover of License to Ill, and Blitzkrieg takes a flip dive into nothing when Rey whiffs. I was so damn into this rudo team, but this ending was too funny. Post match Pierroth run-in made everybody in the match look like a lesser luchador though. It's unfair to people in the match to let Pierroth come in and beat the shit out of people as the last visual. 

Juventud Guerrera/Pirata Morgan/Psicosis vs. Rey Mysterio Jr./Hector Garza/Konnan

PAS: Juvy/Psicosis/Pirata Morgan is a absolute killer rudo team, and it is really cool to see all three of them have matchups with Rey Jr., all great exchanges worked at a high level. Konnan is also working super hard on this show. This was his big opportunity to headline a show, and he was delivering at the peak of his abilities (admittedly a low peak). Run in was fun, although weird they had run ins at two different matches.

TOMK: You forget how amazing Juventud was. Just the entire fucking package, has the crowd in the palm of his hand, able to do the workrate midcard lucha spotfest that was asked of everyone while also just slowing it down to get little things across. It is WCW, so of course they are going to do two matches with invading foreigner heel teams attacking Mexican faces and rudos for a finish. The heel stable of Finlay, Lenny Lane, Jericho, Kaz, Norman Smiley, Chavo and Johnny Swinger is bizarre but would have also liked to see that as a regular WCW stable. Well maybe not Swinger.

ER: Damn now look at THIS rudo team! This is definitely the high profile main event of episode 1, because that's a big time tecnico team too. Tecnicos were fine but this was a rudo bump showcase. Psicosis and Juvy are among the greatest most explosive bumpers of all time, and this was them compressed and burning bright. The way Juvy takes whip snap somersault bumps looks so great, he rolls up tight like Samus and just bounces off that mat. Psicosis bumps to the floor, onto his head, onto his stomach onto the floor, onto his head again, just dude being who he is. Even Pirata takes a totally preposterous somersault back bump to the floor after getting dropkicked off the apron; the bump felt completely disconnected from the dropkick, sending him the totally opposite direction of where he should have bumped, but the dude somersaulted to the floor so who gives a fuck. No padding on the floor, no logic to the bump, but Morgan is here taking a hard bump to the floor on this taping.

The run in was totally badass and I LOVE the invading foreigners stable!!! What a kick ass gang of everybody-but-Mexicans. They're wearing light wash jeans with cuts ranging from "dad" to "Kaz Hayashi's Jncos", black sleeveless crop tops, woven belts, just throwing stomps and beating ass. This is what the stunt doubles would have looked like if there had been a Backstreet Boys Movie. It's so perfect. You can already see the hierarchy of the stable, with Lane, Swinger, and Kaz being the underlings who would actually get their asses kicked in trios matches before either Finlay or Jericho came out to cheat for them to win. Also Tom isn't excited for Johnny Swinger? Swinger is a guy who ate some of the worst beatings on 1997 WCW TV, he's the perfect guy to be the lowest totem pole guy in a stable. Somebody needs to take the ugliest beatings while the top guys escape. I hate that I never got to see this stable until now, and not more.


Juventud Guerrera/Felino/El Mosco vs. Piloto Suicida/Salsero/Raul

TOMK: Is El Mosco really wearing “Live Drug Free” on the back of his tights?” Really?

ER: This was pretty messy, and probably the weakest of the show so far. Felino doesn't vibe really well with Piloto, Salsero breaks out a nice tope con giro and STILL gets no reaction (his dives are like the only ones that get met with silence, it's like people enjoy his shtick but then get mad when he breaks out actual impressive highflying), but this is 100% a showcase for Juventud. Juvy is a genuine frontrunner for best chops in wrestling history. That sentence is not hyperbole. Juvy's chops are the fastest and feel like the best representation of the term "knife edge". His chops absolutely slice and hit harder than the chops of men twice his size. He does have the curse of overly visible frustration when things go wrong, and things can go wrong with a green face team, but there is still gold here. Juvy hits a real hard missile dropkick and Piloto takes a nice classic rolling lucha bump through the ropes, Juvy drops a great springboard legdrop, hits his great spinning rana off the top, basically Juvy on offense could do no wrong. But we do get a real bizarre finish, as Juvy calls for the Juvy Driver, picks up Piloto Suicida, and then drops him twice in a row. Maybe it was supposed to look like Piloto was blocking it? He did eventually get a kinda roll up nearfall, but it just looked like Juvy kept blowing the spot. I really don't think that's what they were going for. 

Kaz Hayashi/Psicosis/Ron Rivera vs. La Parka/Blitzkrieg/Kendo

TOMK: Why is Kaz in this match? He’s in the Jericho outsider stable but just a regular rudo here? They only had one taping and still couldn't keep booking straight? Kaz really leans into all of Kendo’s stuff nicely and the two RPW guys work match up and know how to work their spots together. Parka is over and kind of weird to see him getting this much of a showcase in all these matches when I don’t think he ever got this much of a taste at any other time in WCW. Wait, they were aware that he was super charismatic and can carry a face team on charisma? They knew?

ER: Parks was given a WCW showcase in several ways that other luchadors were not. On the WCW/nWo Revenge game - the highest selling wrestling game on the Nintendo 64 - La Parka was one of only a few luchadors included in the game (Rey, Psicosis, Juvy, Chavo and Eddie if you count them as luchadors), which had a really large roster for video games at the time. And Parka was presented as separate from the "cruiser" luchadors, the only luchador other than Konnan who was lumped in with the heavyweights in the game (tantamount to guys like Barbarian, Stevie Ray, and Yuji Nagata). He was presented separately and as a potential breakout star, and they seemed to know it was a good idea to feature him more in matches and give him side angles to work his gimmick...and yet they seemingly had the coldest possible feet about pushing him as an actual singles star. It made no sense. They knew, but they didn't know. Highlights of this match were Kaz really making all of Kendo's headscissors look great, a great Blitzkrieg dive followed by a big twisting La Parka dive, and Blitzkrieg hitting a big phoenix splash for the win. Blitzkrieg was a cool part of wrestling 1999, and I love that we're getting a little more added to his story. He's a total cult fave, indy white guy shows up as an out of nowhere unknown in WCW one episode of Nitro, gets over immediately when he's treated like a peer by Misterio, and has maybe 30 matches total on tape. He was a nostalgic part of my teen wrestling fandom, and now we get like 10% more Blitzkrieg appearances than previously existed. That's awesome.

Rey Mysterio Sr./Villano III/Villano IV/El Texano vs. Pierroth Jr./Fidel Sierra/Ricky Santana/Psicopata

TOMK: There was some nice Pierroth and Fidel Sierra stuff, but this wasn’t going to live up to my expectations. I was also expecting a big Hart bump, and instead Hart was subdued. He felt like a watered down Andy Barrow.

PAS: I loved this, it was rudo vs rudo and kept up a really killer pace. Pierroth is rocking an amazing Soul Glo Jheri Curl and every time he throws a chop activator juice flies all over his opponent. Psicopata was all over the ring and the outside, stooging, flipping to the floor, bumping huge, total barrel of energy. Really different from a normal WCW lucha match, and I dug that difference.

ER: This lineup is far and away the match I am most excited about on the show. Tom is right that it couldn't possibly live up to my expectations, but damn did I think this was just great. This was our Pierroth showcase match of the evening, and this was an evening that benefitted from a Pierroth showcase match. He was throwing the best punches of the show, kicks to dicks, and the best non-Juvy chops. He came off like a total boss against a very badass team. We got a lot of simple brawling, and it was satisfying as hell. Villano III gets some nearfalls that the ref keeps missing, including a gorgeous small package off of a delayed vertical suplex, and we get an actual powder in the face spot for the finish!! Hell yeah! There was so much powder!!

Rey Mysterio Jr./Silver King/Hector Garza/Konnan vs. Chris Jericho/Norman Smiley/Johnny Swinger/Lenny Lane

TOMK: I think there may have been a good Black Magic vs. Silver King exchange but this was messy.

ER: My god who is the Festival de Lucha girl accompanying Rey? Jesus. And this foreigners stable is so much gold. I love every single stable at the Festival de Lucha tapings!! Every single stable in this 75 minutes has been something I want to watch weekly!

Felino/Psicosis/El Mosco vs. Super Calo/Blitzkrieg/Venum Black

TOMK: Venum Black’s leg is fucked and he comes into this match hobbling. The whole match is just super impressive to watch this guy work a match on one wheel. Should he have worked this match? Should an agent have put someone else in? Whatever. Super Calo does my favorite Super Calo thing where he eats a clothesline by landing on the top of his skull.

Fit Finlay/Kaz Hayashi/Norman Smiley/Johnny Swinger vs. La Parka/Hector Garza/Kendo/Raul

TOMK: I really liked this match. This is hidden gem that you didn’t know you wanted. Kaz’s offense looks great and he sells and bumps to make Raul look like a bad ass. Eats a real nasty piledriver from Raul. Parka gets extended exchanges with Finlay and a dance off and exchanges with Smiley and hits a tope that takes Swinger’s head off. Garza gets some cool stuff in opposite Smiley as well, Swinger and Kendo keep each other occupied, and it’s a cool finish.

PAS: This was really fun, so awesome to watch Finlay and Parka beat on each other. I can imagine an alternate universe where this show was successful and these two had the greatest Apuestas match in wrestling history. Jericho was really fun as a douche on the outside heat seeking. Parka and Smiley had a fun dance off too, honestly Parka is so great he can have dope exchanges with everyone on this roster.

Super Boy/Halloween/Damian 666 vs. Rey Misterio Jr./Piloto Suicida/Salsero

TOMK: This I liked too. A bunch of Halloween/Damien stooging, miscommunication stuff, and you get to see the California guys match up and showcase what they can do together. I really wish Rey vs. Halloween was a WCW series at any point cause it is a cool match up…plus there was an ESTRELLA!!!!

PAS: Really fun stuff, Super Boy has to have some of the biggest missed potential of anyone in the 90s, and it is cool that we get to see a little more of what he could do. Halloween and Damian 666 are such pros and they make everything the tecnicos do look great.

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