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

WWF House Show Anaheim 3/13/98

Mr. Aguila vs. Brian Christopher

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

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

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

Steve Blackman vs. Faarooq

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

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

Cactus Jack vs. Billy Gunn [Falls Count Anywhere] 

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

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

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

Mark Mero vs. Chainz

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

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

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

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

Steve Austin vs. Hunter Hearst Helmsley 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godwinns vs. DoA [Country Whipping]

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

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

Rock vs. Ken Shamrock

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

Headbangers vs. Quebecers

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

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

Undertaker vs. TAFKA Goldust

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

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

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Found Footage Friday: 1991 WWF TAPING~!

WWF London Ontario 2/16/91

MD: This is all new save for the Crush vs. Butch match, and therefore, we'll cover the rest.

Koko B. Ware vs. The Barbarian

MD: Early on, Lord Alfred talks about seeing a young, young Barbarian in Puerto Rico when he was wrestling there with Monsoon and I wish we had 70s Lord Alfred in Puerto Rico. Ah well.

This was very good, especially the early feeling out process. They framed each and every exchange well, Barbarian's early strength (holding him up in a one-handed choke, which you never seen), and then Koko chipping away at him with dropkicks, until he went sailing over the top and menaced the camera man. Back in the ring, Koko was able to fire back with shots to the face, but Barbarian hefted him over the top and then crushed him against the post on the outside and that was that. 

Pretty good face-in-peril with some nice hope spots (including a sunset flip in). The nerve hold could have been a little more active, maybe, but the crowd came up for Koko getting the elbows in on his comeback. That got cutoff but then Barbarian missed an elbow drop and Koko was back in it. They actually had me on a couple of the nearfalls even though intellectually, I knew there was no way Koko won this one. Barbarian won it with a hotshot out of nowhere, which really did feel like the ultimate match-ender for this time period. A guy ends up with his throat draped over the top and it's over.

ER: I was impressed with how well Koko overcame the size difference here. 1991 is some Peak Gas WWF (see how fucking jacked Bushwhacker Butch is in the match after this) and Barbarian looks immovable. Well, Koko moved him real well and threw babyface punches so good that they believably kept moving him. I love Koko, a great sympathetic babyface seller who knew how to take bumps that garner even more sympathy. His low fast backdrop to the floor made the bump look more tough and his selling once he was on the floor built it more. Barbarian will slam your spine into the ringpost but a great salesman like Koko will make it look truly backbreaking. Koko has two strong nearfalls: an inside cradle that was pulled off quick, and his missile dropkick which was done well enough that I bit on it as a finish. He took Barbarian's hotshot finish so exuberantly that the top rope practically touched the bottom. Frankie wasn't there to see the loss. 

Ted Dibiase vs. Jimmy Snuka

MD: Pretty interesting point in time and space here as Snuka actually got on the mic and brought out Virgil to Dibiase's horror. Virgil was super over as you can imagine. Once this got going, it didn't wear out its welcome. Dibiase got sneak attacked by Snuka while distracted and then everything he tried for the next couple of minutes backfired on him. Honestly, this is as good as I can remember seeing Snuka look in this run and so much of it is due to the set up. Dibiase did take over by getting a gutshot up to counter a double axe-handle, and they built to Dibiase trying to suplex him in and Virgil grabbing the leg to set up the upset. Dibiase got rocked by him post match. Very effective, crowd-pleasing stuff to help get over what they were doing with Virgil.

ER: Agree that this feels like the best 1991 Snuka, but a lot of that felt like the best 1991 Dibiase. This was a basic 1991 Offense WWF match that Dibiase was working like an All Japan match. He took extra, probably unnecessary, snap off every surface Snuka bounced him off. Dibiase made every connection an impact, dedicated to making every slam into a turnbuckle look brain scrambling. He could have gotten away with going lighter on the 2nd night of a week straight of house shows. Snuka had timing and Weird Buff Old Guy energy, using simple offense like clubbing hands, and "grabbing Dibiase to shove him into a thing". I can't recall when I've been so impressed by someone getting their head bounced off the ring apron. Jimmy Snuka was in his late 40s and moved older than that, but Dibiase made him feel like a fighter. 

The camera doesn't film his fistdrops from the best angle but he does three of them and we keep seeing each one from a slightly different too close angle, and by the third it felt like a cool look at the up close magic form of his fistdrop. He was a guy whose Ace Worker status dipped after we watched the Mid South footage, a guy who plays incredibly in the greatest matches of all time but doesn't hold up in the weekly TV. But I'm quite high on 90s Dibiase. He started working more like Arn Anderson and I thought he was great. I love '93 Dibiase. He stands out in unique ways from the other strong WWF heel workers from that year (Doink, Michaels, Headshrinkers, Yokozuna) and takes his impact bumping to All Japan and locks it in until his injury. Ted Dibiase is destined to become one of our wrestlers whose discourse constantly waffles between overrated and underrated until we die, but I think any unearthed 90s footage has only added to his case as a great worker. 

Gen. Adnan vs. Hacksaw Jim Duggan

MD: I don't remember seeing a singles match between these two make tape during this run but I could be wrong. It's one of those things you'd see in house show results and wonder how they did it. Now we know. A lot of "Back to Iraq" chants by Duggan. Adnan snuck up on him with the turban, choked him, got slammed, and ate the three-point stance clothesline. Another crowd-pleaser but now we know what it'd look like at least.

ER: To think, looking like a reasonable facsimile to Saddam Hussein would get you a certain death gimmick as a decoy in one part of the world, while in another part it could net you a plum late career WWF gig. I have a ton of respect for Adnan Al-Kaissie's 90s WWF run. You're in your early 50s, haven't worked WWF since your 30s, and you happen to look like a dictator from the country you're from and don't have to get in actual shape for the gig. You get to have one minute matches on house shows where fans watch Saddam Hussein get no offense in on America (OR Canada!!) before quickly losing. It all ends with a main event PPV gig opposite Hulk Hogan. Also you get to wear incredible boots. It's one of wrestling's greatest gigs ever and should be celebrated as such. How many wrestlers get the chance to work in front of 20,000 people in a main event, ever, in their careers, let alone in their 50s? I wonder what his Summerslam paycheck looked like compared to Virgil's. 

Rick Martel vs. Jake Roberts

MD: Martel on the mic with just a few words about how everyone was jealous to ensure he wouldn't get any Canadian cheers. Jake had the blue and gold cobra crotch tights. Important everyone knows that. 

Very fun early. Martel ambushed but crashed into the post on a shoulder block attempt. Jake started on the arm, including lifting him up and holding him there for a second, and punches. Best part was when he faked high, causing Martel to duck, and then kneeled down to punch the model in the face. Big sell of the nose. Big pop. Jake really bathed in the DDT chants too, milking them.

Martel's control, after using the ref as a stalking horse, wasn't as interesting, but he had some good cut offs at least. Jake ended up trapped in the ropes as Martel went for Arrogance, but he got out while the ref was fighting with him and hit the DDT. He took forever, absolutely forever, to creep over and pin him. 

ER: It was truly stunning to watch how long Jake took to pin Martel after the DDT. They were both down so long that the ref started counting both down. I have no idea why Jake was down so long. He set up the DDT with a long stretch of being stuck in the ropes just like Andre, doing great physical work of stretching out his body as he tried to pull both arms out of the ropes. His physical work was so good, his selling for Martel so emotive, and his post DDT crawl was the slowest thing you have ever seen. 

Undertaker vs. Tugboat

MD: I don't have a lot to say about this but it's a great example of how the initial heel run Undertaker had total commitment to his character. He moved like a lurching zombie, ever creeping forward. It was a great act and has been rarely emulated. You could push him back but he'd keep coming in a way that was sort of unnerving. When they shoot to the audience for Superstars/Challenge matches and show scared kids, they were scared for a reason. And then, when least expected, like in the finish here, he'd do something extra quick or agile and it'd go from creeping doom to jump scare. Here it was vaulting over the top rope so he could climb up, take a few steps and hit an elbow drop to beat Tugboat. 

ER: Marvel at the front row of Very Canadian Men who all seemed amused/confused by the Undertaker. None of them understood what it was they were supposed to be seeing and silently stared accordingly. Imagine if zombie heel Undertaker actually worked like a heavyweight and hit like he was a big man. He could have been one of the scariest heels of all time. By the time he learned how to strike 15 years later he was incapable of ever being a heel. He had a kick to the ribs that was so light he may have confused people into thinking he was portraying a ghost who is incapable of making physical contact with our realm. His backward leap into the ringpost is a cool bump in theory but he doesn't know how to give it weight or impact. Tugboat is the one of the two who felt like a guy with potential. His powerslam has rotation that makes it feel big but a controlled landing that safely drops a 300 pound zombie. When Tugboat hit and then missed his leaping avalanche I was thinking how much more agile he was than Taker, but just then Taker leapt over the top rope to the apron and got to the top rope so fast that it was like I was watching a wrestler I'd never seen before. Taker's rope walk elbowdrop finisher was a cool piece of his arsenal that felt like a dead man falling off a roof. 

Brooklyn Brawler vs. Virgil

MD: One thing I appreciate about the Brawler's act is that they let him come out with Yankees gear. My guess is that if he came around today, he'd have Brawler written on his shirt instead. 

He did a good job of showing fear of Virgil early, which only helped him be over with the crowd. They had a nice bit of rope running with multiple leapfrogs too. In general, this went longer than it should have. Virgil took some big bumps including one through the ropes to the floor, but I do think this was set up to give him some ring time selling. The match was sacrificed to prep him for future matches which makes total sense. He won it with a power slam which is not a move you usually associate with him. 

ER: This era of Virgil's work was so weird. This match was smack dab between his babyface turn on Dibiase at the Rumble, and their big WrestleMania match next month. It is the only match Virgil worked in February. No matter your thoughts on Virgil's in ring, it is undeniable how well his babyface turn got over. Listen to the response he gets from the people of Ontario! This is a man they are rooting for! He hasn't wrestled as much as you might think for being on WWF TV for so many years, but he wrestles like a guy who is barely trained while also wrestling like a trained wrestler who is wrestling as an untrained wrestler. You see glimpses of a man who can't run the ropes, who throws clotheslines like he's only seen them portrayed in children's drawings, but also see a man who throws himself into big babyface bumps and knows how to use them to draw sympathy. His bump flying through the ropes with nothing slowing him down, back bump past the mats and onto the London Gardens floorboards, was the best bump on the show and kept his reaction peak. But he also took a "hard way" bump back into the ring that I thought was among the best of its kind. His powerslam looked terrible. 

Brawler is a worker I like more whenever I rewatch him. Any era. Virgil gets a great reaction for a bizarrely scarce post-turn match, but Brawler is great at keeping them interested in Virgil all match. What's the best Lombardi match? Is there a consensus? I think Tom once sold me on an Abe Knuckleball Schwartz/123 Kid match.  I don't think this one would be in the discussion for Best Lombardi match but it's a great showing and a professional handling of the green veteran Virgil. 

Hart Foundation vs. Power & Glory

MD: These two teams were very well matched. Bret started with Roma, lots of rope running ending with him catching him on a leapfrog and then hitting the inverted atomic drop/clothesline combo. Herc outpowered him but didn't outpower Anvil. He did catch Bret off the ropes and took over accordingly. They worked over Bret's back including some nice Roma backbreakers. We rarely get close up footage without commentary like this and you could hear how vocal Herc and Roma were in rooting for one another. To set up the hot tag, Bret climbed across the mat on his back using the ropes. Great stuff. Finish had Roma cut off the Hart Attack and Neidhart cut off the Powerplex and then everything spill out to the floor for a double countout. Post-match Harts ran P&G off but it mostly set up a second encounter. 

ER: This should have been better but there was a really great Bret/Roma match in the middle of a good enough tag match with a bad finish. I don't know if I've watched the Bret/Roma singles matches but now I'm going to, but if there are Hercules/Anvil matches I can probably skip them. This was two FTR teams that are better than FTR working a so so FTR match. I wonder what Bret's thoughts were about he and Anvil working over Herc's shoulder only for it to build to a Hercules gorilla press slam? That's the kind of backwards set up that Bret never wants to take part in, while feeling like a sequence Bret was mapping out. Bret matches don't build to the heel press slamming the babyface after getting his shoulder pummeled. 

Is P&G the best era of Paul Roma? Has to be. It's crazy they kept trying to make him a babyface. He looks so untrustworthy. He'd assault your girlfriend at a party while you were in the bathroom. Power & Glory Roma was fully in his element. The Bret/Roma stuff works so well because he's essentially working a heel Bret style, if Bret were a greasy forcible sexual assaulter. The snap was the same, the heel bumping was the yin to Bret's baby bumping yang. He's a great punch taker, a truly hateable piece of scum like Tully Blanchard who moves similar to Tully as well. I loved the work from everyone when Roma ad Hercules were tying Bret up in a bearhug; Bret's selling was compelling, Roma's bearhug was even better than Hercules', and Roma worked a false tag far better than you'd ever think from someone who teamed with Jim Powers. I don't remember the last time I saw a team work a modern false tag spot without also doing it with a I'm A Heel wink. Roma wasn't out for glory, he had business to take care of. 

The finish stunk, but there was a tremendous reveal while setting up the late match Hart Attack: The way it was filmed, you couldn't see where Roma was. He got knocked off the apron into the guardrail but his location couldn't be seen. As Bret started his run into the opposite ropes, he was expertly kept off camera to preserve the mystery behind whether Bret would hit it or whether Roma would make it back in time to grab his ankle. It was the latter, but until Bret went down it looked like he was gearing up to take Hercules' head off. 

Sgt. Slaughter vs. Ultimate Warrior

MD: I know we already had one or two of these Sarge w/Sherri matches but I haven't seen them for a bit so I couldn't tell you how similar this was. All I generally remember is Sarge bumping all over the place and Sherri dying at the end. This starts with her doing a saluting ceremony with Sarge on the floor after Warrior runs in, including putting the title up to her waist to taunt him, and it's good stuff. Warrior gets Sarge's helmet and goes nuts with it which is also good stuff. 

Warrior chases Sherri around including the usual 1991 high culture bits of them coming out from under the ring with him having undressed her. That lets Sarge take over though and there's a pretty long heat which is well done. Sherri works her ass off helping and cheering on Sarge, especially in a never-ending Camel Clutch. That's going to end with him shrugging Sarge off of course. What's surprising is that the cut off has Sarge getting his knees up. They really make Warrior work for the comeback, which makes it all the more frustrating when he shoves the ref for basically no reason once he does come back. Post-match, he continues to cause havoc including the press slam on Sherri. It's impressive how much they got out of this honestly. 

ER: Sherri was looking THIS hot on Canadian house shows!? That's the major takeaway from this match, which was such a "should have been better" match that I feel I was too quick to give Hart Foundation/Power & Glory that title. Sarge looked more washed than I remember - great bumps still, including his classic over the ringpost that I love so much - with sludgy offense where he looked afraid to fall over too fast. His stomps and some of his other offense looked like he was working a kid with progeria, not as gassed up freak sporting his dumbest haircut in a lifetime of dumb haircuts. Warrior comes as close as humanly possible to hitting a 50 yard head of steam Pounce on a ringside cameraman who sprinted out in front of him like a wild rabbit. Warrior was only going to do so much to avoid him and this guy came about 3 inches from being driven brutally into the guardrail. It would have been the highlight of this event. The Canadian crowd clearly had no idea how they were expected to react to Warrior assaulting Sherri both physically and sexually, but they rightly sat in uncomfortable silence while he hit his hardest offense of the match on her, dropping her from his gorilla press with a real flop, then actually stepping on her as he exited the ring. I wonder how many in attendance had actually seen a woman this hot before. A satin pink teddy with black thigh highs? Girl, Detroit is thataway. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

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Found Footage Friday: HOGAN~! JYD~! ORNDORFF~! ADONIS~! BABY TAKA~! TERRY BOY~! SASUKE~! DELFIN~!

Hulk Hogan/Junkyard Dog vs. Paul Orndorff/Adrian Adonis WWF 8/27/86

MD: Very interesting match from the very first Challenge taping (including Lord Al doing the ring announcing). Both Hulk and Orndorff came out to Real American, though they had very different people to come out with. Hart, Heenan, and Orton were with Orndorff and Adonis though Heenan really was subdued for most of this. 

I saw some people saying it was sloppy, but to me, it was wild and out of control. There were bodies going everywhere at the start and if people seemed out of position at times, that just added to the feel and it certainly kept the crowd going. This didn't feel rote or rehearsed. It felt like it was all over the place because people kept coming at Hogan and JYD from every direction and they just threw fists and anything that moved. I'm not sure you'd want that every night for every match but here it clearly worked. 

Adonis bumped all over the place, including into the corner multiple times in interesting ways. Orndorff stooged like a maniac. After one punch he wobbled around the ring for long enough for Hogan and JYD to switch so he could finally eat a shot and fall down. They ended up working over JYD after some chaos with everyone getting involved again (with Hogan being choked with a cord on the outside so he couldn't stop it).

They had a nice bit where Adonis held down JYD so Orndorff could leap off the top on him, a sort of nothing axe handle type move. Later on Adonis help cut JYD off and got a shot in but didn't hold him down so when Orndorff went for it he met an outstretched fist. That set up Hogan getting back in, Hart getting involved, and the leg falling nonetheless. Chaotic and enjoyable. I'm glad this one showed up. 

ER: I'll trust Matt that people were saying this was sloppy, but I wouldn't trust anyone saying that because this felt much more like an out of control fight, with Orndorff and Adonis cutting off JYD and Hogan getting absurdly loud reactions the whole match, especially when he wasn't in the ring. The Hartford Civic was packed and loud, because these people had sat through three Challenge tapings and were finally getting a real match with a megastar. I'm sure the Moondogs/British Bulldogs tag had something memorable, but this tag was on another level. Great Hogan performance throughout, and a reminder that my favorite kind of Hogan match is when you can tell he's having fun, and it would be impossible to not have fun with this crowd behind you. 

Orndorff and Adonis were real assholes. Bobby Heenan was at ringside as a red herring, seemingly out there to do nothing but make people think he would be getting involved in the match when actually it would be Jimmy Hart doing that. I don't remember Heenan getting involved in any way, but as Orndorff attacked with the kind of elbowdrops and fistdrops that made me say "THAT'S a wrestler" aloud. Adonis bumped all over, to no surprise, but this was all about Hogan and his massive reactions. He started the match punching everyone around the ring and ringside, but this match gave us a great look at an underrated Hogan: Apron Hogan. When I say it looked like Hogan was having fun, watch him on the apron as JYD is being cut off. He is fueling this large crowd, building the anticipation, playing into distraction spots, before giving them all release when Dog makes the tag. Hogan relishing the hot tag on the apron before slamming the door shut gave me a huge smile, a jacked goofball giving everyone in attendance exactly what they wanted to see. Great tag. 

Super Delfin/Terry Boy vs. Great Sasuke/Taka Michinoku Oriental Pro 1/20/93

MD: This was very early into Teioh and Taka's career and it's definitely an interesting look at their early development. They were matched up for a couple of exchanges before switching dance partners with a few minutes left in the match. I'd say Terry Boy was further along maybe, though some of that might have been that he was framed as the aggressor and had the gimmick to fall back on. Their first exchange was primarily young lion matwork, but it got more interesting from there. I do think Teioh was more explosive and just struck at things a little harder, with Taka a bit more reactive. The punches were over and the spinning toe hold was definitely over (even if Sasuke hit a springboard dropkick to break it up).

Delfin and Sasuke worked well together, very quick matwork exchanges which had a lot of headsprings and kip ups but that still felt competitive. There were a couple of teased dives until they switched partners, at which point Sasuke hit a couple of moonsaults and Delfin crunched Taka with a plancha. Sasuke flew into no man's land on the outside at Terry Boy to set up the finish. Really, them working with Taka and Teioh was mostly a chance for them to hit stuff more cleanly and sharply than against one another, but it was effective nonetheless. Just a fun, well-balanced tag all around even if it was clear that Taka especially was working it all out.

ER: Oh my god if someone can get me an Oriental Pro logo shirt, with that gorilla wearing a singlet, I will pay them real American dollars. Please. It's incredible to me how formed these guys were in this incubatory period. One year later they'd be creating tape trader gold, but they were all already so far along. The flow got better, exchanges got tightened up, but everything was there in earlier forms. I came away so impressed by Terry. He's surely the most underrated of this Mpro group, and that might be because his highs are less consistent than the others. I think, at his best, he might rank as the actual best of the group, but I also think that Taka, Togo, Kaz Hayashi, maybe even others had highs they hit more consistently, but on any night Terry could look like the best of them. Early in his career he was much more blatantly lifting from every great Mid-South worker. He's doing Junkyard Dog headbutts in a way that shows he studied every frame of JYD's delivery (since we just watched and wrote about a JYD tag before this, it was incredibly easy to see how accurate his was) and all the Funk aping, but it was his gorgeous Dibiase fistdrop that made me react out loud, the same way you'd react to taking the first bite of a really great meal. If it's possible to learn to throw a fistdrop so perfect so early in one's career, then it's an indictment against every wrestler today than none have. My reaction to his piledriver was similar. 

Everything was much more clean than I expected. I mean, Sasuke's occasional clumsiness is baked into the overall charm of Sasuke, as he may stumble but he will always see something through, but the overall tightness impressed me. They didn't all have the same speed or snap as they would, but their mastery of the basics stood out and elevated the craziest spots. Look at how perfect Delfin/Terry's vertical suplex/crossbody combo was. No two Armstrongs ever hit one finer. This match was incubatory for what was to come, but you really could see everything that was coming.  

Yoshihiko Abe vs. Katsumi Hirano Oriental Pro 1/20/93

MD: They say styles make fights, and Katsumi Hirano's style was to get kicked in the face. That sums this up pretty well. It went two rounds before Hirano's corner literally threw in the towel and it was a minor miracle that he survived the second round. His great hope here was to catch Abe's kicks and take him down and do something, but every time he tried either the bell rang to end the round or Abe ended up in the ropes or it just didn't work and Hirano ate more strikes. Really a mauling with Abe coming in at every exchange guns firing and Hirano having no answer. Abe wore a gi and he lost it between the second and third rounds. That was a prelude to him just pressing Hirano in the corner with strike after strike until his corner gave up. Post-match was almost more interesting than the match itself as everything got chippy with the seconds and Abe but even that petered out pretty quickly. 

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Found Footage Friday: QUEBECERS EXPLODE~! CESARO~! GUNTHER~! LOS COWBOYS IN GUATEMALA~!

Los Cowboys (El Texano/Silver King) vs. Astro de Oro/Skeletor Guatemala 9/15/91

MD: There's a certain genre of match that I find fascinating. There's no good name for it but it's best described by the rudos/heels being visibly, noticeably concerned about the amount of heat they might get in front of a specific crowd and adapting their wrestling accordingly. I don't know what preceded this but there was nothing to make Texano and Silver King come off as particularly rudo in the early going here. They came out, they were nice to fans, they posed well with the belts and the anthems. They wrestled clean early. Texano worked really hard to get a handshake. And the trash was still coming and they seemed kind of alarmed and put off by it. For the anthem, there were a ton of kids singing which was always a good sign. Skeletor came out with a robe with Guatemala on the back. Astro de Oro was obviously beloved. 

So there wasn't any mask ripping here. Their win in the segunda was real quick. While they controlled in the tercera there was never really that sense of danger for the tecnicos. You always got the sense that even amidst the double teams Skeletor could PROBABLY make the tag if he really really wanted to. It was, shall we say, a ginger rudo performance. 

Instead, they flew all over the place. They missed leaps off the top rope and dives. There was plenty of heel miscommunication. Silver King was happy to fly out of the ring on a kick out. Skeletor was charismatic and hammed it up a bit with Texano. Silver King and Astro de Oro were really moving at times and mostly everything looked very good. There was a point in the tercera where Texano and Silver King did Tiger Feints instead of diving and one guy right in the center of the crowd shot let out a popper/firework thinking the dive was coming and that's a little bit of really interesting cultural information. It made me sad for him that they didn't get dives because his timing was perfect. Anyway, of course the locals won and everyone survived to see tomorrow. 

Jacques Rougeau vs. Pierre Carl Ouellet WWF 10/21/94

MD: This is about 80% of a perfect match to me. 75%, 75%. I was thinking structurally, but the thing needed blood too. It has parallels to MS-1 vs. Sangre Chicana in some ways. And before you balk at that, think of the setting. This is Jacques in Montreal, in what was supposed to be a celebratory swansong. He's up against Pierre. He's got Raymond in his corner. Polo's out there with PCO.  

And Pierre cheapshots him before he can get his robe off. Raymond tries to break it up but the ref pulls him off which just lets Pierre stomp away. Jacques tries to fire back, but Pierre's younger, stronger, bigger. He lays in a beating, a nasty, brutal thing. Every time it seems like Jacques has an answer, he cuts him off. Jacques is able to outsmart him and back body drop him over the top. He lands on his feet. Jacques gets a flurry and he catches him in midair and puts him in the tree of woe. When the ref tries to stop things, Polo comes over to choke him. Pure heat. There's one moment where Pierre is whipping Jacques off the ropes and Jacques makes a sort of out of control bobbling motion, almost seizing, with his head as he's getting whipped and it's some of the best selling I've ever seen.

The thing is, Pierre can't put him away. So he starts to go with more and more high risk moves. He hits a flip dive. He goes off the turnbuckles, once, twice, and then Jacques catches him, crotching him on top. It's not quite the punch heard round the world but it's pretty damn satisfying, especially to this crowd. 

And it opens the floodgates for the ritual beating. And what a beating it is. When Jacques tosses him into the stairs on the outside, it's about as loud as I've heard stairs. After beating him around the ring, Jacques goes for a mounted punch (no puns). Pierre tosses him off and we get this great ref bump. Polo comes in to attack. Raymond hits him with a superkick.

And that's when they should have taken this thing home. Have it seem like Pierre was going to get the advantage, have Jacques mount one last comeback, go to the finish. They don't though. They just sort of meander with some nearfalls and momentum shifts and they don't lose the crowd, but once you see Polo back on his feet rooting for Pierre, you realize that the match went just a little long in the tooth. The finish is amazing, Pierre going for a tombstone and Jacques turning it around for this gnarly sitout variation and then slowly, fatefully draping a hand over for three. There's just no reason why that couldn't have happened almost immediately after Polo got taken out. And blood. Blood would have been good. Still, 75% perfect is pretty damn good.

Cesaro vs. Gunther WWE 11/8/21

MD: This is a house show match between Cesaro and Gunther. In Leeds. It is definitely. That's nothing to scoff at. It's just not transcendent like Cena vs Reigns or even the parts of Jacques vs Pierre that were transcendent. 

It had room to breathe. It managed the crowd well (and a crowd like that needed managing). It didn't get ahead of its sails. It didn't go off any rails. It was measured and focused and did what it had to. Instead of having the crowd go for dueling chants or ironically entertaining themselves (or shouting 2! a lot or whatever), it got them to clap up three times, early on in a test of strength, then during a surfboard (the one with the head in; Cesaro got out of it with some headbutts of his own after he turned it) and finally once in the heat as he was building to the comeback. 

It got them to chant for the swing right before Cesaro got it down the stretch. They hit hard, both early on and right before the finish. And yes, they built to that swing and they paid it off. They worked things fairly even up front. Gunther would go for cheapshots and deviate from the wrestling first but Cesaro generally had an answer. I liked the big comeback spot as Cesaro was able to catch Gunther in midair and turn him, strength outdoing strength, and the finish was good, with a near-miss with the ref before a cheapshot and a thudding top rope splash. This hit marks, and that's admirable. A good match. A good house show match. And good for the crowd for letting it guide them.

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Found Footage Friday: SAVAGE~! LAWLER~! MABEL~! PCO~! TAKER~! MANKIND~! JARRETT~! RAZOR~!

Jerry Lawler vs. Randy Savage Memphis 3/23/85 (Jonesboro)

MD: I'm not going to wax poetic on the WWE Vault finding this. You know. We live in amazing times.

The match itself was very interesting. Savage had turned a couple of times during his primary Memphis run and he was a familiar face and he was over. He had Newman with him. He was clearly the heel. The fans were still split. So they did everything they could to present Lawler as worth cheering and Savage as worth booing. To start, they had Lawler break clean at every point and get the best of Savage on rope running exchanges. 

After Lawler got a knee up in the corner, and raised his hands to show he meant for it to be a legal attack, Savage went out, got on the mic. Then Lawler did the same complaining about Tux, then Tux got to talk, and Savage again, and they went around with it, really laying out the case that you should cheer Lawler and boo Savage, even if it didn't look like that at face value. And then, when they got back into the ring, Lawler nailed Savage on the break, but by now, it was fully established how much he deserved it and how Lawler had tried to play nice first. On the next break, Lawler stepped on Newman's hand on the apron instead. The fans want to see the babyface hit hard and clown the heel and they built to it coming off as a pure babyface move and nothing petty or spiteful. 

Then of course, they inverted it by having Savage freak out about Newman getting stomped, run around with a chair, and get a cheapshot in on the next break. Unlike Lawler, though, Savage celebrated as if he'd accomplished something monumental. Suddenly, the crowd wasn't split anymore. They were booing Savage. Pretty masterful stuff. 

Because they had to tear things down and then build it all back up, Savage didn't really take over until around twenty minutes in and he did with a clever bit of misdirection with Tux and his cane. From there, things were pretty wild with Lawler coming back a couple of times and the fight spilling out to the audience. Incredibly crowd pleasing stuff with rapid fire slamming of heads into turnbuckles and grounded punches. Lawler turned Tux interference back on Savage one last time and hit the fist drop for a definitive win. Post match, he ALMOST got his hands on Tux but had to fight off three other heels instead (and he did to the crowd's delight). Really brilliant stuff overall in how they ensured that the crowd was exactly where they wanted them.

ER: To think there was a time in my fandom that I would have been bored by something like this. Savage, avoiding contact to rile up the half of the crowd who hates him while simultaneously appealing to the half who adores him, an incredible cross section of fans that not only allows this match its beautiful slow burn, but encourages it. This was 20 minutes of slow burn and shifting allegiances with men actually pleading their case on the house mic far more than hitting each other. They get so much mileage out of Savage just going out to the floor and getting upset, with little bits of in-ring character like Lawler popping his head up and down for four straight dropdowns while Savage sprinted back and forth over him. 

All the bullshit started breaking down when Savage finally started hitting Lawler and Lawler caught a Savage kick, hopping him out to the center of the ring, holding Savage's leg high up on his chest and drawing it out before finally tipping and fistdropping him in one move. Savage then catches Lawler's leg the same exact way and goes  through the same routine, only this ends with a Lawler enziguiri (a great one!). The misdirection around Tux Newman getting his cane to Savage and everything that happened after that was the kind of fire you want to see from a Lawler/Savage match. The way Savage punched Lawler all around ringside was filmed so perfectly it's as if they purposely took the brawl in front of the cameras, without actually doing that. It was just Savage giving everyone some close up magic and popping Lawler in the forehead around each side of the ring, these individual reared back shots every 10 feet, then hitting a big axe handle to the floor, then another. It's an honest to god miracle that he didn't blow out his knee until his mid-40s because he was just jumping onto concrete on every show for 15 years with or without cameras present. 

Savage is battering Lawler, and it all turns into one of the great turnbuckle smashing comebacks. Savage is bashing Lawler's head into the buckles, and they start coming a little slower with a little more resistance. The sixth time Savage is actively working to get Lawler's face to the buckle, and by the seventh Lawler has fully blocked it, and the crowd is here for it. When the strap comes down, Lawler's back is to the camera so we get to see Savage react to it, and Savage's eyes are the perfect eyes to be reacting to the strap coming down. We get them in shocking HD and it plays like such a famous clip that you'd think we'd have been seeing it in highlight videos for 40 years. Lawler's fistdrop off the middle buckle is as good as you can actually do a fistdrop...but his earlier missed fistdrop into the mat and subsequent sell might have been even better. Just another classic match we didn't realize existed until the last week. 

WWF House Show Footage

Mabel vs. Pierre MSG 11/26/94

MD: Really enjoyed this one. Pierre looked as good as anyone in the company at this point. He flew all over the place for Mabel early, timing all of his stooging perfectly and just bumping big given his size. One bit of punishment after the next. The transition was great. Mabel tried to suplex him back into the ring (and this didn't seem like a huge effort considering what he'd already done to him) and Pierre dropped straight down to the floor from the apron, causing Mabel to get hotshotted onto the top rope.

Then all of Pierre's offense was equally good, maybe too good, because the crowd was starting to go for him despite him working them a bit. Thankfully, they still went for Mabel on the comeback (reversing things on the floor to post Pierre) and Mabel hit two or three big things on the way out. Just a strong, larger than life undercard house show match.

ER: I love Mabel, ADORE Mabel, I will always back the big man...but HERE is a damn Quebecer Pierre performances if ever there was. It's no secret PCO is insane - it's been his main brand for a decade now - but I don't remember him going this hard in New Generation Raw matches, let alone on house shows. This was a man working UP to MSG, taking bumps that put 1-2-3 Kid to shame and hitting offense like a truck. I loved the layout of this, where it looked like the whole thing was going to be Pierre getting tossed repeatedly. He gets thrown so violently to the floor on the first lock up that there is no way he was able to work like this night in and night out....a thing one could have said before we found out how much he loves falling from great heights. Mabel suplexes him like it's nothing, throws him into the air with a high back body drop, really slamming him at will. 

Pierre turns the tide by stopping a suplex into the ring by throwing his body weight back and stunning Mabel on the top rope as he drops to the floor yet again. Then we get this great mix of Pierre trying to tame this sea beast by jumping all over Mabel's back, and taking big bumps as he's swatted away. He takes a back drop to the floor and responds by running up the nearest turnbuckle and hitting a real heat seeking missile of a dropkick. It always feels unsustainable, only a matter of time before Mabel would catch him again, and when he does it's just as great as before. Pierre takes an even higher backdrop than before, kicks out of the spinning heel kick but gets crushed by an avalanche, than takes his well earned time wobbling to the center of the ring and back, turning around to get flattened by a Mabel crossbody. 

Undertaker vs. Mankind Meadowlands 7/5/96

MD: I haven't seen any of the Taker vs. Mankind  stuff in a while and I wasn't quite prepared for where they were at this point in the feud. I don't remember Taker's shots ever looking quite this good for one thing. I don't know if that was Mankind leaning into them or Taker just laying them in because he was used to working him. 

This kept moving quite steadily, with Taker controlling for the first half but never in a straight line. Mankind would take over for a few shots and get cut off. He'd lose focus and start chasing Bearer. He'd go for a chair only for Taker to get it instead. He'd knock him over the rail only for him to come flying back with a clothesline. 

When he did really start to lean on Taker, he couldn't put him away. Taker punched out of the Mandible Claw in a great bit. He'd kick out of everything else and eventually Mankind lost focus again and started to hit himself and slam his head against the turnbuckle. Even then, even as he shot a choke up to stop the second Claw, Taker had to really fight for the comeback and it ended up as a pretty complete experience for everyone watching. A good entry into their series. 

ER: I shouldn't be surprised by Foley going this hard on a house show, but seeing it in HD it's shocking how much damage he took in front of a bunch of New Jersey sickos who knew how much of a sicko he was. If you ever look at Foley's schedule over '95-'98 and see a house show match like this, you'll wonder how his body didn't give out the first few months of his WWF schedule. When Foley started in WWF he was still making trips back and forth to Japan, going back and forth to take sick beatings on opposite sides of the globe. I guess his body was just conditioned to it by that point but I was still surprised how hard Taker was laying it in and how bad Foley's bumps got. It's obvious Taker is hitting him hard from the bell, clubbing him hard on the back of the neck and throwing tighter strikes than I associate with 1996 Undertaker. 

But then the chairshots start, which are much harder than 1996 WWF chair shots, and it all peaks with Foley taking his backwards bump off the apron to the guardrail...but this lunatic lands back-of-head first into the thickest bottom rail of the guardrail, and the leap back was FAR. The leap backward being so far is probably what led to his body not flying into the railing itself, but flying backward just to whip the most tender part of your head into the thickest steel...that's a guy who should be working 180 matches a year right there. That bump would concuss and give brain damage to most men, but it doesn't even slow Foley down. He still takes more crazy bumps on the floor, including a great one over the railing, off a chair and onto the concrete, which seemed to signal to the Meadowlands crowd that he really was doing this for them, as the chants for Foley started to have a One Of Us feel to them the more damage he took. Awesome fight. Foley really did himself a minor disservice by focusing on his goofy "having fun with Owen" house show matches in his first book, because I had no idea there were hard performances like this out there. I, of course, should have known. 

Jeff Jarrett vs. Razor Ramon Montreal 10/21/94

MD: Most of the Hall I've seen lately has either been 90-91 Puerto Rico or 88 NJPW so it's weird to see him as Razor. This went a few directions I wasn't quite expecting and I think, as much as anything else, it was them trying things. They had wrestled a few times earlier in the year but this was fairly early in their 'marriage' that would last a while.

It's funny because I buy it out of 2025 Jarrett, but I'm not sure I was feeling the strut here. Much more gripping and organic was the way that he paintbrushed Ramon's head after taking him down a few times. All of that paid off so well with him running right into Ramon's open handed slam and bumping huge. Beautiful stooging and feeding. He'd subsequently get knocked out, come back strong, and run right into the fall away slam and Ramon paintbrushing him a bit in return.

Once he took over, he controlled primarily through some nice cutoffs (an enziguiri, dropkicks, corner whips, a nice punch, etc). They really did a great job of building the hope spots, getting bigger and more elaborate each time until Ramon finally punched his way through it all only to get redirected over the top. Ramon controlled out there but Jarrett reversed a whip for a cheap (but effective count out). 

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Found Footage Friday: BACKLUND IN KUWAIT~! BUSHWHACKERS~! CONDOR~! ESTRADA~! PSICOSIS~! VOLADOR~! WINNERS~!

AAA TV 5/21/95

MD: A new Roy Lucier drop. I think the top two matches were already out there so we'll dive into the undercard. 

Karloff Lagarde Jr./Mr. Condor/Perro Silva vs. Brilliance/Diamante/Zafiro

MD: I loved the primera beatdown here. The rudos just hopped out as Mr. Condor wrapped a cape around a tecnico's neck even as he was coming in with the valets and the commentators were just casually announcing who would be in the match. Business as usual. Some gnarly stuff on the beatdown with Condor's arching power bombs, a giant lifting face plant, and Perro Silva looking like a beast between the way he threw himself into things and this brutal reverse hotshot where he dropped the back of the neck onto the top rope with a spinebuster like twist instead of the throat. Argh. 

This was going just two falls with a fed up fiery tecnico foul finish so they actually teased a comeback early in the segunda which was pretty spirited, tossing rudos into the crowd and what not, before it got cut off to set up yet another comeback a minute or two later. Sort of a false short segunda (almost makes you wonder if there was a cut, but I don't think there was). Down the stretch Mr. Condor bled all over the place even on the undercard and the tecnicos got a lot of revenge but they lost their cool and the rudos took this one by DQ. Everyone leaned hard into their roles here and the match was fun because of it.

Antifaz del Norte/Panterita del Ring/Volador/Winners vs. Arandu/Jerry Estrada/Misterioso/Psicosis

MD: Some of our Monterrey pals here in the form of Panterita and Arandu (who came out to the Flash Gordon theme by Queen!). Very nice to see them in this mix with some of the AAA mainstays. That's an awesome rudo side right there. And honestly, this was great. The primera was at least somewhat subdued. Misterioso was leaning hard into his gringos loco look and attitude and was dodging Volador. Arandu bumped all over the place. Estrada teased his big bump over the top but didn't give it to people. Psicosis was an absolute jerk paired with Antifaz. I love watching him just exist and antagonize people, even on top of his basing and offense and bumping. He's one of the best bullheaded jerks in wrestling history. Anyway, the tecnicos took it after some exchanges and general chaos with Volador getting a shot in on Misterioso on the outside too.

Things went absolutely nuts in the segunda though. They started destroying both Antifaz and especially his mask. Somehow Estrada got a fork and started to stab away, lick the thing, paint his face with blood, just have a merry time. Then the comeback had all the crazy bumps you might imagine. Psicosis took the corner knee over the top bump as wild as I've ever seen it. Estrada just got yeeted into the third row like a rocket on a reverse whip. I'm not sure I've ever seen that concrete ground look harder and more solid. Finish was the rudos getting back in and getting Antifaz' mask off so thoroughly and clearly in the camera that someone could have picked him out of a police lineup. Just wild stuff in the back half.

Mr. Bob Backlund/Leif Cassidy vs. The Bushwhackers WWF Kuwait Cup 5/11/96 

MD: Recent Richard Land upload. I had thought we'd be getting the Yokozuna tag vs. Backlund, but nope, we've got the Bushwhackers instead. I don't know exactly how much Mr. Bob Backlund heel footage we have but whatever we have, especially after he got shunted down the card, it is 100% not enough. He's as absurd and over the top here as humanly possible and it's wonderful. First off, he comes out to the Rockers theme with Leif and he wants absolutely nothing to do with him. Cassidy tried to bow down to him and go for a handshake and point to the Bushwhackers and everything under the sun and Backlund just shook his head and shouted NOOOO. 

Then, there'd just be random booing no matter what Cassidy and a Bushwhacker was doing in the ring and the camera would cut over and Backlund would be out there on the stage gesticulating to the crowd and going wild and getting huge heat. When he came down he went right after some kid in a Bret shirt and he never really let up. It takes minutes for the match to begin because every time you think it might, he has another fit to huge crowd reaction. When they get going, they do some heel miscommunication spots almost immediately and then have Backlund get shown up by a Bushwhacker, including sneaking out and pointing to his head only to have him right behind and then hiding in the corner just to get bitten on the butt.

They eventually take over on Luke's arm and it's all pretty good with some hope spots and cutoffs until he finally makes the tag and they do one last bit of miscommunication before Butch gets the roll up. Just unbelievably entertaining. Lightning in a bottle. If you could follow one wrestler around to every house show, 96 Backlund feels like a great one to pick. 

ER: When you get access to a 1996 Kuwait show where Bob Backlund is the third oldest (second youngest?) guy in the match, I feel we are then obligated to write about that match. There is so little footage of Mr. Bob Backlund from this era and now we officially have our most substantial look at him. I loved Backlund's look and attitude during 95/96, when he was mostly a house show worker and cantankerous TV presence, but we don't have a lot of footage of him actually wrestling. We have so much footage of his 92/93 babyface return, which I think is mostly awful (unless I find one credible source telling me that it was an elaborate troll and he was fucking up every single non-Doink wrestler's timing intentionally, then I might like it), but not nearly enough of heel Mr. Bob Backlund. Now we have real footage of Backlund charging at a Kuwaiti 11 year old and getting in his face, just because he was wearing a Bret Hart shirt. Backlund singled that kid out and went straight for him (and the kid loved it). 

Throughout my wrestling fandom, not that long ago in the grand scheme, I had no room for bullshit in my wrestling. I wanted action, and I wanted wrestlers to get to the action. I'm not sure when it changed, or what inspired my initial dislike of it. I viewed it as "guys not wanting to work" and maybe it was due to Scott Keith and others demonizing of stall tactic wrestlers like Larry Zbyszko, spurned on by older local indy wrestlers who were taking a Friday night off in the ring. When we did the initial WWF 80s set, I had the Rockers/Rougeaus Full Bullshit match (from France or Italy) ranked very, very low. Not many years after that, the Rougeaus match in Puerto Rico where they take forever to lock up while getting pelted with diapers and other garbage became one of my favorite matches to show friends who were and were not wrestling fans. I don't know when the change happened, when I went from wanting action to embracing bullshit. The change happened quick, I know that, and is surely directly related to indy wrestling styles becoming about All Action, no doubt caused by similar people to me who grew up being told that bullshit and stalling in wrestling was bad. 

Now, most wrestlers are petrified to let anything breathe. Well, either they are petrified or they honestly have no idea what it even means to let a match, or sequence, breathe. They surely never watched wrestlers who knew how to do this, and they surely won't be seeking any who did so. Bullshit became extremely rare (and has only gotten rarer) and now that action is the literal only thing on the menu, I find that I cannot wait to shove my nose in a steaming plate of Bullshit whenever I have the opportunity. And Mr. Bob Backlund was allllll Bullshit. This entire match is 90% bullshit, and I chose to prioritize it over the two awesome lucha matches unearthed above. I don't think anyone takes a bump until well past the 10 minute mark, although Backlund does get knocked off the apron by Cassidy, and he hits the ground running and gets in the faces of more fans. So look, I'm not saying all of this was good. The Bushwhackers are old and they aren't going to bump or throw punches that look good - although Butch Miller throws a fucked up clothesline to Cassidy's neck on his hot tag - and a lot of the bullshit won't seem unique to anyone who had the privilege of seeing guys like Honky Tonk Man work indy shows in the late 90s, but the unique setting and the bizarre pairing and the rarity of Fully Unhinged Mr. Bob Backlund made this well worth your time. Backlund does none of his strength routine, none of his amateur wrestling, and I don't even think he took a bump. Yet he was On during every second he was on screen, a true weirdo being his weirdest self in the weirdest possible live wrestling environment. 

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Found Footage Friday: MICHAELS~! GOLDUST~! CACTUS~! SABU~! REY~! PSICOSIS~! GALLAGHERS~!

Doc Gallagher/Mike Gallagher vs. Scotty Andrews/Donn Lewin 1950s Buffalo

MD: Wrestling Films has posted a lot of things lately but a lot we already had. This one does seem new to us though. It's a relatively rare look at Donn Lewin (Mark's brother, who we have a 1951 match we're very high on) though they do say he was a twelve year vet here. The Gallaghers are, of course, very good at what they do, and what they do is cheat, goozle, and clubber. Stooge too. Andrews and Lewin control early and Mike really scrambles to try to make it to the corner while in a top wristlock and it's fun stuff. They trade off keeping that wristlock on until the Gallagher's start switching off with illegal chokes themselves. Honestly, for an old tag, it all breaks down sort of quickly, building to Doc holding the rope down so that Scotty crashes and burns to the floor. It all came off quite well and the crowd, even in the studio, was hot for it. Lewin had good fire in the ring while this was going on but he wasn't the legal man so him pinning a Gallagher didn't matter. They got Scotty back in there and made short work of him. Very fun sub-ten minute match here.

Cactus Jack/Psicosis/Sabu vs. Rey Misterio Jr./Super Calo/Winners IWAS 10/21/95

MD: This was an Arezzi show with AAA and ECW talent and was a gem. Of course, with the Vault, we just get the primera, but we'll take it. I do wish sometimes they'd go a little further on some of this. Why just give us Goldust/Michaels if they have the whole card (maybe they don't?). Why give us just Gonzales and Hogan interacting after the finish if they have the whole Money Inc. vs. Megamaniacs lumberjack tag (that they must), etc. But we take what we can get, and this is a very cool thing to have.

It's the primera, so you get some posturing, some ambushing, and a couple of exchanges. Psicosis is great here, tossing a chair in at first, mocking Rey with a little dance from the apron, and then taking all of Rey's stuff like an absolute king, including getting pressed head first into the post in an impossible sort of way that he made seem not just possible but feasible. They teased Jack vs. Rey for a moment there but we ended up with Jack vs. Calo instead, still a fun and weird scenario. That was mostly Jack's forearms in the corner but they were great, so I'm not going to complain. Sabu got to take some of Winners stuff and land on him repeatedly. Winners tends to look super charismatic in this era (it's after the point where he lost his mask). It builds to chaos and Rey hitting the tightest 'rana on Psicosis to pick up the fall. Every indication here is that the rest of the match (even if it ended in a no contest) would have been just as fun, plus they probably would have mixed up the pairings a bit. Ah well. We didn't think we'd ever get even this much so we're glad to have it.

ER: I fully second everything Matt said about the unnecessary tease aspect of the WWE Vault. Here's one scorching hot half of one match from a Chicago AAA show. Let me see the Koji Kitao/Masaaki Mochizuki match. Let me see what 2 Cold Scorpio does on a show with cool luchadors. There's a Superstars taping Dark Match Jarrett/Bulldog ladder match released on the same drop as the incredible Michaels/Goldust match we praise below, but from that same Superstars taping there was a Sid/Kama vs. Michaels/Undertaker dark tag and that's the kind of shit that I would also really want to see. If they have one, they have the other, so just put the shows up man. We don't get shows, we get teases of footage that isn't being released. 

That said, we now have extended sequences of Cactus Jack repeatedly elbowing Super Calo in the face like an early version of Necro Butcher in Chikara. It's amazing how much faster Cactus was in '95 compared to '97. That bump card filled up fast and the Jack/Calo pairing would have been so different just a couple years later. This feels like the best year for it to have happened. Cactus elbows him in the face but good, and he also takes two big bumps to the floor for him, including getting clotheslined over the top and later fully catching his missile of a dive. Winners looked so good, a guy who went on to an iconic gimmick but in '95 made a fascinating "what if" among the guys who could have crossed over to the US mainstream, instead of just being thrown out to die on a couple of WWF shows. His plancha soars far off camera and he had such potent tecnico energy any time he got in the ring. Did he really debut the Abismo Negro gimmick at the Royal Rumble? Anyway, Rey/Psicosis was so amazing in '95. I said Cactus lost a lot of speed just two years later but seeing Rey/Psicosis in '95 after watching all of their '97 work and you see so many things that slowed down and got changed. Rey still had his original knees here and was so much faster, while Psicosis had a smoothness that had vanished by summer of '97. "Clunkiness" sounds like I'm insulting his work, but compare some of his bumps here to the same ones two years later, and those later bumps seem like someone doing clunky versions of Psicosis bumps. His ringpost bump is incredible, getting alley-ooped into the ringpost but doing it in a way that looked so alien, just amazing. His fold on Rey's huracanrana bends physics, like he was a human Popple whose head could easily be folded into his own ass. 

 

Ladder Match: Shawn Michaels vs. Goldust WWF 8/24/96

MD: This is not new, per se, but it's an amazing footage upgrade to a match that I've seen at least a few times. It's one of those matches that we give people new to the community on the way in (like Dump vs. Omori or the Savage vs. Garvin cage match). What we had before, however, was a pretty blurry handheld, and this is crisp and beautiful single camera ringside footage. Early on when Goldust brings the ladder towards the ring, you can hear it scraping against the ground perfectly. It's quite the footage upgrade.

And it's a match worth seeing again. When we handed it to people, we'd say it was one of the best ladder matches ever. So much of that is because they delay the use of the ladder. It shows up early as Dustin goes for it and then once in the heat as he puts it over the guardrail and ring to create a hard surface to drop Shawn on, but other than that, it really doesn't come into play until the back half when they start to try to win thing. 

What you get before that is a rough but generally conventional match between Shawn and Dustin where all of Dustin's stuff, which generally looks great to begin with, looks all the better because of Shawn taking it. Just the drop down punch alone maybe never looked better. A bit of extra zing and extra electricity. It means instead of having a match full of contrived spots around the ladder with a lengthy set up and dashing one's suspension of disbelief, they just get to do their thing, and their thing was as good as almost anyone in the world in 96 and we have so little footage of them doing it together.  

The setting is great, an outdoor show at the Canadian National Exhibition Stadium (the site of The Big Event) with a giant Ferris Wheel lit up in the background. The card was stacked with gimmick matches (casket, strap, street fight, etc.) so it's pretty remarkable that they showed the discipline that they did. You get some big bumps (Shawn over the top, a splash off the ladder), but it's all smartly put together. Early on they tease a Curtain Call and then Superkick. Dustin pulls off the turnbuckle pad to do some more damage. Late in the match, Dustin takes a bump off the ladder into it face first but recovers to try to catch Shawn in the Curtain Call while he's climbing. This time when Shawn goes up and over he actually hits the Superkick and is able to win. It just hits a bunch of marks between thought and execution with just enough discipline to hold it all together, to put it above any number of more spectacular ladder matches. Now we get to see it so much more clearly.

ER: This is some incredible footage. I'm not saying this as any kind of brag, but I stopped watching new WWE matches well over three years ago and I haven't looked back. It wasn't a decision I made where I consciously said, "After today, NO MORE!" Because it wasn't a conscious decision, it was the culmination of something that had been building up for several years. There will always be enough people on the roster who I enjoy watching, but what began majorly turning me away was the entire presentation of the product, of the wrestling. I don't think there has ever been a wrestling fed in history who makes their in-ring product look shittier than modern WWE. What an ugly product, directed by people who seemingly hate wrestling, with garish LED lights and quick camera cuts and identical match structures designed to be ROLLING into commercial breaks. Everything is bright as hell, phony as hell, manufactured as hell, and as inauthentic as possible. This match could have feasibly happened in WWE some time in the last 5 years, but you take this exact match and present it the way WWE now presents pro wrestling, and the whole thing would have been half as effective. 

The ring work in this is undeniable. We hardly have any Dustin/Michaels matches (how many of the other Goldust/Michaels World Title house show matches do we even have? Any?) so that makes this extra special. Dustin Rhodes told me that Shawn Michaels is one of his four favorite wrestlers of ALL TIME. One of the four on his Mount Rushmore (with the others being his father, Terry Funk, and Barry Windham). I can't imagine higher praise for a peer, and you can see that respect - mutual respect - in the brilliant and extremely energetic way this match was worked. 

But you can really see that energy because of the way this match was filmed. One camera, at ringside, now in HD detail so crisp that it feels like you're roving ringside while two greats in their prime worked close up magic in an amazing outdoor carnival setting. 20,000 polite but excited Canadians outdoor with a lit up Ferris Wheel in the background like a nighttime Super Nintendo background. The work in the ring was so clear, the camera so embedded into the action, that you feel the very hard bumps both men take and see just how hard they're hitting each other and, eventually, a ladder. The sound is so good that you're put directly in the middle of this carnival. The sound of Dustin's back hitting the ladder is or Michaels hitting a table engulfs you. You run this exact same match today, only with WWE's modern direction and lighting, and it would play as half effectively. 

All of Dustin's strikes - his great worked punches, his great stiff punches, his hard slaps - would be jumped away from, all of Michaels' big bumps - taking an almost Falcon Arrow on a ringside table, springing away from a Dustin uppercut, recoiling off the ropes after being tipped off the ladder more than once - would have been hit with the ugliest fast zooms and held for reactions. Even the small bits of comedy play better from this live ringside angle. I cannot tell you how hard I laughed at the very beginning of the match at the face Michaels makes, when Goldust - jumpsuit hugging those buns tighter than you could ever imagine - approaches him in a flirtatious manner and Michaels uncomfortably looks off to the side, like he doesn't want to make eye contact for fear of being lured in. 

I wish we had a dozen more Michaels/Dustin matches. We have a Raw match and this excellent ladder match, where you can see their off the charts chemistry. 

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Found Footage Friday: 1989 Copps Coliseum WWF Show

1/16/89 WWF Copps Coliseum Toronto

MD: This is another Richard Land find and you should be checking out his stuff at (@maskedwrestlers) since he provides about 1/3 of the new footage coming out today.

Red Rooster vs. Danny Davis

MD: This made me feel like I have to check out a lot more Danny Davis, honestly. He got on the mic at the start and said Heenan was paying him for this but he would have done it for free. Then he shoved Taylor and ran around the ring from him, got chased in, did some rope running, stopped, taunted, and walked right into a punch before taking a powder, all before his ring jacket was off. Great stuff to begin. Then came the real stalling as he just pressed himself in the corner and covered his head. When Taylor finally did get him he begged off until he could turn an arm wringer into a clothesline and then he looked pretty solid in control. There was just a spring to his step. He had some nice stuff (a weirdly balanced shot off the second ropes, a throat cross chop when Taylor started to come back) and then begged off again towards the finish where Taylor got him with the Scorpion Deathlock. I enjoyed this one.

ER: Imagine what a crushing day it was when Terry Taylor was told he had to get the top of his hair dyed bright red. I can't imagine, but it's a conversation about your career as a top pro being over and done with. Look at him here, with his blond locks and no red, a man existing as a man and not as a rooster. But I am much more of a Heel Terry Taylor man. Let me see that evil Mark Harmon unleashed, like you find out the guy running your goof around summer school is actually a real hard ass who will probably assault more than one of the students. No, this match is owned by Heel Danny Davis, and I agree with Matt that more Danny research must be conducted. Fans hate this man on sight, even before he gets on the mic to say, "Bobby The Brain Heenan paid me a lot of money to come to this god forsaken place! But brother, he didn't pay me a dime because it's gonna be myyy pleasure." Then he one-handed shoves Taylor.  

Davis has great movement and plays to the crowd expertly, the kind of guy who you'd want to keep as a heel house show undercarder. How he punches Taylor over the referee, that stiff quick short arm clothesline to break an arm wringer, those great running short kicks to a downed Taylor's jaw, his very good short right hands aimed straight at the chin - including a fist shake out after one, thus cementing Davis's status as a Great Puncher - all of it is stuff that Danny Davis performs far better than we've ever given him credit. If you were doubting his Great Puncher status, he also throws nice corner 10 count punches and dropped a hammering fistdrop from the middle buckle, and if that's not the trifecta then man I don't even know what we're doing here. The thing is, even better than his corner 10 counts? His shoulder shrugs in the corner. You remember how Batista always had real awful shoulder shrugs, coming in way too light and making it obvious just how much he was holding back? Soothe yourself by Danny Davis going hard into Taylor's stomach and ask yourself why we don't demand better. Demand Danny Davis. 

Curt Hennig vs. Rick Martel

MD: This was a draw that did air but was clipped in half or so. I can't speak to that version. I will say that the good stuff here was very good. The feeling out process where Hennig won the first few exchanges only for Martel to turn it around and toss him around with all the babyface fire anyone might want was just as good as you'd expect. Martel's one of the only guys I've ever seen that was so into the flow of what he was doing that he'd do flat back dropdowns to set up an armdrag. After that rope running they went into extended controlling of the arm by Martel and they kept it interesting enough, with lots of escape attempts by Perfect, before building to an elaborate bit where it looked like Perfect might get him three times before finally dropping him with a belly to back.

Perfect's control started out engaging (especially as he was still selling the arm) but they went into a long front face lock. Obviously, these are two guys that could work that, and Martel was going to work from underneath well, but it was also clearly eating up a bunch of time in a twenty minute draw. The payoff was good though as again Perfect was going to rush right in to all of Martel's fire. Once he cleared the ring of him that was the time limit so it didn't really even build to the sort of nearfalls you often get with a draw. It more felt like they were just calling it a day (even if Martel tried to invite Hennig back in).

ER: This did not need to be a time limit draw, and it didn't need the moments you knew they were working towards a time limit draw, but I also thought Hennig was fantastic throughout all of it. Look at black trunks Perfect in '89. It's easy to talk about Hennig the bumper but it's really all about Hennig the ball of energy. It's going into every exchange with real aggression, real purpose. You see how hard both men are leaning into a collar and elbow and you see how Hennig throws everything - armdrag, hop toss, fireman's carry - with real purpose. His punches look like he's really trying to mess up Martel's pretty face. This era Hennig was going to come in hard and then feed even harder, making his opponents' bodyslams and hiptosses look more violent than his own. Before things settle down into arm work and front face locks, he takes a great bump off a light dropkick, flying out through the ropes and off and over the ringside table, then faceplanting all around the ring while Canadians lose their minds. 

I love how hard he pushes all the rope running that leads to him eating shit. He pushes Martel fast, like he's trying to get him to mess up a sequence, but it always ends with him on the mat kicking his legs in a hold. He does two different missed charges into the turnbuckles that lead to long series of him eating bigger bowls of shit. The arm work is long but Perfect makes it look so convincing that I heard two different people - women! - yelling for Martel to break his arm. He's good at timing how long to keep the crowd engaged while kicking in a hold, and knows when to start breaking out match ending fireworks. Curt Hennig is perhaps our finest wrestler ever at bumping like a heel who has his shoelaces tied together. A lot of the Minnesota guys were great at that. Was it common practice to work 2 a day drills while pantsed or something? Hennig gets kicked around hard before fleeing at the sound of the bell, and every fall is that of a man escaping a ransomed kidnapping. We act like it's a foregone conclusion that this was "just another match clearly worked as a time limit draw" but this was the first time limit draw that Hennig worked during the Perfect era. This wasn't just a thing he and Martel were doing around the horn, this was a Copps exclusive where some tag specialist took Perfection to the limit. 

Rockers vs. Brainbusters

MD: This had Billy Red Lyons interview the Busters (no Heenan) before the start. Nothing notable but nice to see. The match itself started great with Michaels looking like a huge star outclassing Arn (Arn feeding for it perfectly) and then escaping to slap the hands of the fans like he had escaped with the crown jewels. Then, he, being Michaels, doubled down on it and no sold all of Tully's stuff (Tully still bumped huge for him), and it wasn't until Jannetty came in that they even started the false transitions. Just another case where this would have been better if Michaels took that first win, gave Tully a tiny bit, and then overcame. Ah well. Jannetty looked great as he overcame (including fighting out of the corner and hitting a backflip to reverse a double top wristlock.).

Really a never ending heel in peril (though one full of entertaining individual bits) until Michaels ducked a Tully clothesline on the outside only to run into an Arn one. Thankfully the Busters were great at making the most of their time on top. Michaels knew how to be a star already and was constantly trying to fight back. I think a babyface should be doing that but maybe he didn't quite have the proper escalation in it. Arn crotched himself on Michaels' knees to set up the hot tag and things got chaotic but the Busters fairly quickly snuck one out. The great stuff was absolutely great but in part due to Michaels' tendencies and Arn and Tully being happy to just go along with them, this didn't come together like it could have.

ER: This really did feel like a 15 minute match where Tully bumped and stooged and made narrow misses for 13 of those minutes, and I did not mind that layout one bit. I was wildly entertained watching the Rockers punch through Tully for a long tag, as Tully is wildly entertaining at getting run over by punches. He cannot just walk a straight line to a destination and it's perfect. When he's punched, it's a turning drop to the knee before getting punched in another direction; when he misses, it's a quick turn back to his target to take his medicine. He finds several safe and less safe ways to fall to the floor and continue his constant motion and I loved them all. I loved the theatrical slow mo Sgt. Slaughter bump to the floor and the ways he would fall off the apron into a back bump. He treats every punch from each Rocker as something worth bumping for, and it makes his eventual tag out moment even greater when he turned a near tag out into an inverted atomic drop. The Brainbusters really didn't have a lot of offense here - that Arn clothesline on the floor that the camera missed, Tully's atomic drop to set up his tag, and Arn's spinebuster after ducking a clothesline - but the Rockers didn't really have any offense either. Even when Michaels goes up top after they hit tandem superkicks, he only comes flying off with a punch. And I'll take it. The finish is fantastic, even if uncommon. Marty goes for his first flying headscissors but it's too close to the ropes, and Tully pulls his head down from the apron and slam dunks his head over the top rope.     

Iron Mike Sharpe vs. Paul Roma

MD: I'm honestly a little astounding how good this was. (Eric will not be, but he is a Mike Sharpe truther). It was 80% shtick and 20% Roma hitting dropkicks, but the shtick was really good and Sharpe was incredibly entertaining. He's one of the most vocal wrestlers ever and there were times where I could shut my eyes and still know exactly what was going on just from hearing him stammer. Mainly when he was begging off but not always. And he did a lot of begging off. A lot of stalling. They got tons of mileage out of a handshake bit at the beginning, out of him threatening to leave, out of Roma catching his foot on a kick attempt. Just one bit after the next after the next with Sharpe throwing himself into it completely and Roma being a perfectly fine straight man. It's the sort of match the sheets would have grumbled about in 89 but that plays a lot better in 2025 when there's nothing like it in the world anymore. You can see the value so clearly now. Honestly just a great show for stooging up til this point, and from guys that don't get the credit for it like Davis and Sharpe.

ER: We get an honest to god Iron Mike Sharpe ring entrance and the fact that he is in his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario and announced as such does not give him a single second of goodwill from his town. These are his people, and the people of Ontario fucking hate the mirror that he is holding up for them. The women scream for Roma as he removes his jacket, but when the match is over I will challenge those same women to tell me anything Paul Roma did during the match. They won't be able to, because this is Iron Mike Sharpe's town, and Iron Mike Sharpe's match. To use an already dated out of existence joke format: Mike Sharpe is the Tully Blanchard of Barry Darsows. He has the size and sound and lack of offense of Darsow, but watching him directly after a Tully match you really see what a large adult son Tully Blanchard he is. He is not as hateable on sight as Tully (few men ever have been) but how much of an instant turn off does one have to be within pro wrestling to be booed on sight in his own hometown? 

I love how quickly Sharpe takes armdrags and how it's the only bump he really takes differently than his standard arm waving back bump that he uses for everything else. His swinging arm into Roma's stomach looked excellent and the man gets tied up in the ropes more efficiently than any wrestler other than Andre. But where Andre was always a temporarily inconvenienced giant, Sharpe has a way of making it feel like he just might be stuck in those tangled ropes for the rest of the evening. The finish is outstanding and probably something that no wrestler other than Sharpe would even want to do: Sharpe loads up his cast and swings it at Roma, but Roma catches it and throws Sharpe's loaded arm back into his head. It's so stupid and so hapless that it can only be a Mike Sharpe finish. We didn't know how good we had it, and as Matt points out, it's because nobody comes close to being a Mike Sharpe any more. We didn't recognize how essential different workers were to a roster. 

Greg Valentine vs. Ron Garvin

MD: Another awesome match in their feud. What can you even say about this really? They lay into each other in the corner. Garvin's great at firing back out of it just when you think Valentine has him. Valentine's great at stumbling about and getting a sneaky advantage right until he doesn't. There were some really brilliant specific moments which shows you they weren't just hitting each other blindly. At one point, Valentine's about to do the flop and Garvin catches him so he can hit him one more time first. Valentine takes over with a shinbreaker but when he goes to the second, Garvin nails him before he collapses so they both go down. Finish had Garvin wanting to use the shinguard as a weapon and getting distracted by the ref so he got rolled up but post match he hit a punch version of the Garvin Stomp to a prone Valentine and nailed him with the shinguard anyway. The world would have been better off if we had whole promotions based around this style instead of whatever else we got in the 90s and after.

ER: It would be a good idea if we just kept getting new Garvin/Valentine matches every couple weeks. Every single one we have has been a real gift, and while there are a lot of similarities among them there are always new ideas and ways that certain sequences can be extended. This was, I think, the shortest one we have, and I think going less than 10 actually made their strikes play harder. The first two minutes is just them shoving each other in the chest with both hands and I would have been happy if we never even got to the punches. I could have watched them shove each other and burn out their arms for eight minutes, just to see who would be the first to fall. 

But I do like the strikes. 

Valentine always takes more punches than he gives in the Garvin battles, but I think this one takes the cake. He just gets battered. There is often a corner punch out stretch of their match, and Valentine's selling made this stand out from the rest. Garvin kept punching and chopping him and Valentine kept getting knocked to his ass, hitting the bottom buckle and getting pulled back to his feet only to be punched and chopped some more. When he finally can no longer stand and begins pitching forward into a Flop, Garvin actually holds him up with both hands on his chest. Garvin looks like a support beam propping up a leaning building in the Philippines, and it's all so he can just punch him in the head one more time.  

When Valentine does flop, there is no rest to be had. Garvin starts raking his back and Valentine sells multiple back rakes so well that it made me think of how Tenryu might've sold a back rake if that had been something that any wrestler in WAR ever did (they did not). But it's all back rakes that Valentine sells incredibly, punches to the nose (that Valentine sells incredibly), a fantastic headbutt, and one of those sleepers that starts like a violent clothesline. Garvin is a monster and I don't think there was anyone else on the roster who would have put up with this. Garvin has his own great run of selling when Hammer turns a side headlock into a knee breaker, then does it again. Garvin is limping around on one leg, and after he takes the second knee breaker he landed one big punch that knocked Hammer to his back while it spiraled him into the mat. 

I think calling Garvin's punches after the bell a punch version of the Garvin Stomp kind of undersells how nasty those punches were. Garvin just got into mount and threw disgusting punches while Valentine was on his back. He threw eight of them, and Valentine couldn't really move to absorb them, so Garvin just stood over him raining down shots that built into even more disgusting hammerfists, both fists held together like an ape attacking his handler. Hammer can barely move and has to take a rapid succession of wicked punches and man....is this the best of the Garvin/Valentine matches? I think this one packs in the most action, and it felt like they went even more violent with the shorter runtime. 

Randy Savage vs. Bad News Brown 

MD: This has been out there before but I'm not sure I've ever seen it. It's a street fight. Bad News is out with a Mets shirt. Savage is out with a white shirt with a Gold's Gym tank top over it and grey Zubaz type pants and pink elbow pads so it's a look. Liz looks like Liz. That feels like a missed opportunity. It's basically ten years before its time. You give it a couple more minutes and some more goofiness around the finish and it could have been a 1998 Austin No DQ main event. Brown started with a chair but then missed a punch on the post outside. Savage used the timekeeper's table and kept on him. Then he took the weight belt off and used that. Brown came back with a chair. They set up a table and but the ref got crunched in between it and Brown. That's when we got the Ghetto Blaster and the visual pin, then a hilarious second one as Brown got the ref up and slammed Savage but the ref did a face first bump as he passed out again. When he came to Savage rolled up Bad News for a quick pin and that was that. Post match they went at it with Brown getting an early advantage and Savage fighting back as the locker room cleared. Pretty bizarre to watch overall, but it worked well for what they were doing especially if they went back to it.

ER: This was on the very first DVDVR 80s set, the one that was assembled and arranged differently than all the other eventual sets because this was the very first time we were doing this and nobody had any idea how large this project would grow with subsequent sets. "Controversial" is not the correct word for it but I remember some people wondering why this match was included at the time. There were a lot of imperfections and missing matches on that first set, and I still can't believe that was 20 years ago now. 2005? Impossible. It was not well received by the people who participated in that first ballot. It finished in the bottom 10 out of 100 matches, and it almost surely wouldn't have been included were the set put together with the same method that all subsequent sets were assembled. From the very next set (Other Japan Men's) we were watching every single match from the territory/fed and picking among the very best. There were plenty of matches that should have been included in a WWF 80s set, and we sadly never got to re-do that one. I can't find my initial ballot either, so I have no idea how high/low I ranked it 20 years ago, when I was a 24 year old man, but now I think it's pretty safe to call this pick ahead of its time.  like a pretty ahead of its time fiat pick (that I believe was made by David Bixenspan, credit due).

Maybe it belongs just for the gear. Nobody shows up for a fight like this and they're idiots for that. I loved Bad News in his 50-50 poly-cotton Mets tee and Savage just went over the top with gear. The Golds tank top and Zubaz would have been enough but the tight undershirt and pink elbow pads that looked like knee pads he was wearing on his elbows make it insane. It's possible Big thought it belonged on the set because it was a unique match for 1989 WWF. Savage was the World Heavyweight Champ and it's not like he and Bad News were working Harlem Street Fights around the horn. This was the first (and only one that exists on tape) and they worked just eight total over the next couple months. It's short, it's a tough fight, Savage takes some tough spills - including getting thrown hard over the railing to the concrete, a girl in her neon green sweatshirt helping push him back over the guardrail so he can go after Bad News. Bad News punching the ringpost felt like a novel spot in 1989, and him setting up a table in the corner and running a ref straight through it feels even more novel. That ref got crunched man. The bullshit finish is incredible, with Bad News getting a real long visual pin over the champ, then reviving the referee just for the man to collapse again just as Bad News re-secured the pin. Maybe people disliked it 20 years ago because it was too short? It's less than 8 minutes long, which feels more like a snack than a World Heavyweight Title match, but I'm glad I watched it again now that I'm sliding down the other side of the mountain. 

Jim Duggan/Hercules vs. Ted Dibiase/Virgil

MD: This was already out there as well so I'll keep it quick. Herc and Duggan team up very well. Two versions of the same sort of visual idea with big shots and driving motion. Duggan constantly moving forward especially on his hope spot punches is something I didn't appreciate enough for a lot of my life. Honestly, Dibiase is fine here, feeding and stooging, but he doesn't give himself over to it in the same way a lot of the people earlier in the card. Everything is technically sound but it almost feels more like him putting himself in the right place at the right time in a more modern way as opposed to that sense of total abandon that we got from Davis or Sharpe or (in different ways) the Brainbusters (or in a different way) or Valentine (in a different way). Virgil is interesting here as he never really does much, mainly just plays interference and holds someone for Dibiase. It's actually a clever use for him. This was ok, and fit well on the card. I just don't think Dibiase stood up well to his predecessor heels.

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