New Footage Friday: Funk, Droese, Necro, Jumbo, Rheingans, Hernandez

Jumbo Tsuruta vs. Brad Rheingans AJPW 8/30/83

MD: I'm actually surprised that Phil went for this one when I suggested it and said it was surprisingly good. I'm getting in on this one first so I'm curious if the others liked it. My best guess here is that Jumbo knew that Brad was legit and really wanted to go all out with him. This one had a tremendous sense of struggle from start to end, all the way to Brad's frustration at losing and Jumbo's insistance that they shake hands post-match. I loved how all of Brad's big offense was pure AWA (ok, the gutwrench suplex was a higher level but who else could accomplish so much with atomic drops?) all built to through the match itself. Jumbo had to fight for all of his big stuff, and then they went back around one more time for the finish which is always appreciated. This is the kind of performance which really justifies Brad's intermediary role in Japan years later.

PAS: I really dug this despite being a low voter on early 80s Jumbo. I loved how they started out going full Greco Roman with the grappling, and the first couple of minutes of this really felt like proto shootstyle. We got into more of a traditional 70/80s style heavyweight match after that, but Rheingans has great leverage and power on all of his throws, and those were some really great looking atomic drops. If this was the first you had heard of Rheingans you would think he would have been a huge star in the 80s, this feels like the apex of his interesting but ultimately underwhelming career.

Terry Funk vs. Marshall Duke CWA 10/18/97

ER: I'm a pretty recent convert to Duke Droese, as in I'm not even sure I'd seen an actual match of his before this year. I missed 2-3 years of WWF while in high school, before coming back to the pro wrestling fold. Droese was a guy I knew of only because of people making fun of his gimmick. He was a wrestling garbage man, and that was what I knew. But when I actually watched the footage I saw a guy with great size, great punches, hard offense, someone that the 1995 WWF crowd was genuinely excited to see. So when we unearthed a Duke/Funk match, I flipped. The match is slow paced but engaging, made up mostly of headlocks and punches, building to some bigger bumps and some nice nearfalls. It probably didn't need to go nearly 25 minutes, but I'm also glad it did. From what I've seen of 1995 WWF, Droese was the best non-Lawler puncher on the roster, so seeing he and Funk take turns teeing off on each other's foreheads is something I don't mind watching at length. This was Duke working a Funk match, and Funk took us to plenty of great places. 

We got weird hijinks like Funk's second opening up a canister of blue gas right in Duke's face, like he was Cesar Romero or something. We've all seen salt and powder, I'm not sure I've ever seen someone get Joker gassed. Funk starts taking all of his pratfalls and setting up Duke to interrupt his attacks with punches, coming in slow with axe handles so Duke can throw great body shots and uppercuts, teeter tottering on the ropes so Duke can line up punches, and Funk falling into the ropes and off the apron is one of the most entertaining things about Funk matches. Terry takes a couple nasty spills to the floor in that theatrical Terry way, eating a big lariat over the top to the floor, gets run into the ringpost from the apron and stumbles most of the way back across the apron before falling off, hangs by his feet in the ropes, and in one of my absolute favorite moments of the match he does a trademark Funk Stumble and falls backwards over an on-all-fours Duke right into a nearfall. Funk goes to Germany and starts taking his bumping cues from the Phillie Phanatic, and it's the best. Funk brings some nice weapon shots, smashing a set of rolling metal steps into Duke's leg, and violently throwing a table on him on the floor. And they come back to the ring to work some simple but effective nearfalls and escapes, with a nice sunset flip from the apron by Duke, a few torture rack escapes from Terry (including one where he just punches Duke right in the eye to escape), before Terry gets caught in a nice over the shoulder powerslam for the win. Mid 90s CWA is definitely an untapped source for hidden gems, and the timing on this unearthing was perfect for me.

MD: Here you have ECW era Funk playing a heel against and completely disrupting the orderly German round system with his antics. I had a professor who worked on European Integration that told a story about a resort on the border of France and Germany. On the resort there was a pool and in the pool, the Germans would swim about in an organized line around the edge. As they were doing that, the French jumped in splashed through the middle. I'm not going to say that the German round system is exactly like that, because we've seen too many pirate chain matches (3?) but it's what I thought of here as Duke calmly backed off at the bell and Funk, when he had the advantage, would just press it in the most outlandish fashion on the floor between rounds.

When they did make use of the round breaks, it made for some interesting stuff: the double clothesline to set up the finish and especially Funk's amazing crawling, head-down sell out of the ring. Funk was sufficiently wild (picking up a table on the outside completely uncaring if the legs took out members of the crowd) and Duke was properly indomitable, with solid punches and a sense that he deserved what was probably one of the biggest wins of his career. Huge novelty value and a pretty good match. I'm very glad this one turned up.


Necro Butcher vs. Hotstuff Hernandez TASW 2001

MD: So, this was something completely different. What I liked the most about this was the volume. They started at 7, with a chop exchange and the dismantling of the valet, stuff that you'd generally expect in the back third of a match. That let the things that followed like the (completely misguided but structurally sound) dueling chairshots and the barbed wire to feel like proper escalation. The crowd didn't deal well with Hernandez' mix of underhanded tactics, big bumping (the guy had great, charismatic range of motion at this point, working for a back row that didn't even exist), and huge spots. Necro felt like he was working from underneath, but after a Hernandez dive, the fans were more than happy to cheer for him. It worked out in the post-match but it made the journey a little bumpy. The finish was sick. Absolutely sick. But hey, at least it ended the match, right?

PAS: Really cool early look at both guys and you get a sense of what would make them both such compelling guys in a couple of years. I loved the simple stuff in this match, Necro has great looking punches and headbutts and Hernandez had these awesome looking underhanded thumping shots to the ribs. I honestly could have watched a minimalist fist fight between the two and been super happy. Instead we get sort of an indy version of a Mike Awesome vs. Masato Tanaka match with crazy bumps into barbwire boards and tables and some gross head shots with chairs and stop signs. These are a pair of really fun guys to do Awesome vs. Tanaka. I love Hernandez's no hands tope and we get a crazy Necro flip plancha, it builds to the huge pair of bumps to end the match, Necro getting awesome bombed off the ring apron, and Hernandez eating a sheer drop powerbomb through a stop sign. Not everything was hit cleanly, but man this was a spectacle.

ER: This is definitely among the earliest Necro matches I've seen. This is when he was skinnier and wore facepaint, so he looked like Buffalo Bill if he were into Darkthrone instead of women's skin. I love seeing early career work from guys like this, it's a fun time to see totally different version of guys you liked. Both are still raw here, and what's hilarious is Hernandez is the one trying more stupid dangerous stuff, while Necro is the one who did stupider things the longer his career went. And this was a pretty awesome indy match. If I had plunked down $15 to see this on a Saturday night, I'd be talking about it years later. Fans get on Hernandez a bit when he hits a sloppy spear, chanting "You're not Goldberg", but he was pretty hard to root against by the end of this. He had Necro willing to take some wild offense, and he dished out some risky stuff. He hits a couple huge missile dropkicks, one of them with Necro crotched over the top rope, the other while Necro is stuffed into a garbage can. Phil is totally spot on calling this an Awesome/Tanaka match, because it was exactly that. We got unprotected chairshots, a couple big powerbombs through a table, big bumps on shoulders, and Hernandez breaking out his always crazy missile launch dive. That dive is one of the craziest moves in wrestling the past 20 years and deserves to be talked up more. This was great garbage from two guys who would go on to have real memorable careers, and it's cool to see how great their instincts were this early.