New Footage Friday: WARGAMES!! Fuchi! Chavo! Finlay! Brad!

MD: There's a real Black Saturday feel this week with the unofficial (because when can WWE ever be transparent about anything? What other industry acts like this?) notice of the end of the Hidden Gem releases. It's rough and we're left on the hook for all those potential 83 Georgia Omni shows or more full Crockett Cups or 90s Dark Matches or maybe, just maybe the 91 WCW Omni shows, etc. That's not going to stop us though. The community is strong. New or rare stuff keeps popping up: lucha, 90s and 00s indies, 80s and 90s Japan TV and handhelds, a treasure trove of German footage, and we know there's always the possibility, any week, of new PR or old French Catch. We have a backlog. We have veins to tap. We are here for you. These posts are up by Saturday morning most weeks. They almost always have links to matches that you almost certainly have not seen. We'll tell you if they're worth watching and we almost always pick matches that are. We're not going anywhere. Follow along, post your thoughts, tell a friend who might be lamenting the neutering of the Network footage. We'll keep going until the well dries up and there's plenty of water to go around for now.


Masa Fuchi vs. Chavo Guerrero AJPW 8/19/83

ER: This starts with a dynamite 3 minute real time package, Fuchi already waiting in the ring with gorgeous swooped hair and a blue track jacket unzipped below his sternum. Fuchi looked like a super cool high school P.E. coach, or an average cool southern California pharmacist. He waits stoically in the ring while Chavo lightly jogs out, mariachi jacket and pants, yellow bandana holding down hair almost as cool as Fuchi's, shotgun shells crossing his chest. And the match itself was cool and tough, about 70% of it on the mat and building to some heavy thuds at the finish. The mat work was snug and linear, nothing flashy, but nice headlock takeovers and headscissors escapes, boots scraped against faces to defend single legs, and cool things like Chavo losing a surfboard on the roll over so just opting for punching Fuchi in the neck a couple times. We get my favorite camera angle on the pescado, filmed across the ring so that when Chavo makes perfect connection the two of them just get swallowed up beyond the other side of the ring. The count out finish was one of the more clever count outs, with Chavo getting back on the apron after the pescado, but Chavo being on the apron gives Fuchi the leverage to drop him down to the floor with a back suplex.

MD: This had everything you'd want from a 1983 AJPW Juniors match. They really took it to the mat early with sharp, sweeping counters and nothing that felt given or even fed. That spiraled into a heel/face dynamic as Chavo went for the cheapshots first. Fuchi fired back angrily. They escalated into some bigger bombs, and it all ended with a dive and a fairly novel yet still definitive count out finish, with Chavo putting the icing on top by trying another cheapshot only to get run off. Just about ten minutes bell-to-bell.

PAS: Pretty basic match with a couple of cool flourishes. Loved those overhand smashes by Chavo, just thudding nasty looking shots. I always enjoy Fuchi grinding a guy down on the match and he really has some punishing moments. The finish was really great with Chavo hitting an alltime great Pescado, only to get snatched off the ring apron with a backdrop suplex on the floor for the count out. Shortish match, and it wasn't an all time great match for either guy, but it is fun sometimes to see the minor works too.

Fit Finlay vs. Brad Armstrong CWA 12/3/95

MD: We have a lot of Finlay to watch in this German footage, and that's the best problem in the world to have. For this week we had to decide between two or three different matches of his. This one felt really novel and was highlighted further by a really nice twitter post he made a few years ago talking about how great Brad was as a wrestler and a human being. This is about 40 minutes worth of video with entrances, a flag ceremony, and music during the round breaks. We get a bunch of rounds, five or so, and lots and lots of meaty, meaningful, illuminating wrestling, but it does cut off before the end.

The face/heel structure is not what you'd expect here. This is probably the most significant heel Brad footage we have, I think, especially unmasked Brad. As good as he was as a meat and potatoes babyface, you always hear from wrestlers that his personality was larger than life and how it didn't transfer into the ring. Just because of who he was and his position within his family, he wasn't going to have the sort of chances to be a heel that Brian or Steve might have, but you get the sense he would have shined a lot brighter in that role and could have easily been a guy on the US title level, despite not being the biggest guy. Here, he realized the way the crowd was leaning early on and he went mean and pissy and didn't look back. He was quick to hit cheapshots, to rile the crowd, to argue with the ref, to have his second (Kauroff?) pull open the ropes so Finlay could bump through, and to feed for Fit.

Finlay was a badass babyface here, the sort of guy who would take a cheapshot, fire back, and then just dare the heel to come after him. He had a real, unmistakable connection to the crowd, one that he managed without pandering and without much changing who he was. At times, it actually hurt the match a little. There were moments where they could have prolonged his revenge on Brad thanks to the round breaks to get a higher payoff. and he stormed out of the ring to give him a beating instead. On the other hand, Finlay actively hulking up towards the end of the footage was both surreal and thoroughly satisfying. You'd expect that out of the way he continuously dismantled Brad's arm with the world's meanest armbar, sure, but not with an outright hulk up.

I wasn't as upset about the lack of a finish as I might have been otherwise because we did get so much action here and because you had a sense the direction everything was headed after that last comeback.

ER: Bruce Springsteen should go into the Pro Wrestling HOF just for the vast amount of wrestlers who have used Born in the USA as their entrance theme because they were the American wrestler in the match. And I thought the face/heel alignments were screwy as hell here, and didn't give me much sense at all of what heel Brad would look like. Outside of some moments in the first two rounds, most of this was Finlay clearly being the heel and being cheered anyway because he's Fit Finlay in Germany. But I really didn't care about face/heel dynamics because the work was simple, tough, and engaging the whole way through. We don't get a finish and there's a clip where I'm unsure how much we missed, but the runtime on this is long so we get a lot of bang for the buck. There were parts of this where I felt Brad was working more stiff than I've seen, but while Brad's work was obviously tight it was mostly Finlay selling like he was seeing stars every single time Brad dished out an elbow to the temple. Finlay is my favorite salesman in wrestling history, and every time he took a shot he would be stumbling, whipping his head back, holding his eye, feeling around for his opponent, falling into the ropes for support, everything he could do to make Armstrong look like a lethal weapon. Brad throws a snapmare the way they're supposed to be thrown and Finlay takes a snapmare bump the way someone is supposed to take a snapmare, and I love how it lead to Finlay finally refusing to go over, stopping Brad's forward momentum and dropping him with a jawbreaker.

Finlay is such a tremendous post bell asshole, just getting in every shot he can every time a round ended. I loved Finlay just pounding away at Brad on the floor, where you can here someone say "Don't do it, Finlay". Finlay takes a tremendous bump through the middle rope to the floor when Brad's second pulls the rope, and it's one of a zillion spots that Finlay clearly works out the physics on. There are tons of those spots in wrestling where a wrestler does Action A which leads to his opponent doing Action E, except most of the time we don't see anything that looks like attention being paid to B, C, or D. A guy hitting a tope but getting stopped with a chairshot will almost always look like a guy just running into a chair, because it's extremely difficult and dangerous to commit to a dive that is ending with you taking a chair to the face and falling painfully to the floor. Finlay is great enough to have a reason to run into the ropes, and then actually look like he was 100% committed to hitting that middle rope before it wasn't where it typically is. Finlay does all of the math on every one of his spots, making things that miss and WHY they miss just as important. Finlay got the most out of taking Brad's offense, and when he fights back it obviously delivers. Finlay throws a short left lariat that is so perfect that I wonder why Finlay didn't use a lariat as a finish. His armbar was fantastic even though Finlay isn't a guy I saw routinely work armbars, but the way he gleefully works to extend Brad's arm is fantastic, as is the way Brad sells it between rounds while I Was Made For Loving You jams over the PA. Some of Armstrong's best work in this match was done between rounds, like pleading to the ref for more time because of Finlay wrecking his arm after the bell. For all we know there's another 15 minutes of this match, but right here we got more total time with these two than all their other singles matches combined, and that's a special thing.

PAS: I would not have expected to see Brad Armstrong of all people step into a Finlay match and match Finlay shot for shot. Where the hell was violent asskicker Brad Armstrong for all of these years. Finlay of course is a master, his crazy bump to the floor was Jerry Estrada level insane, and I imagine a lot of the reason Brad Armstrong felt like Johnny Valentine was Finlay's selling. All of the armbar stuff was perfection, brutal violent bursar sack popping arm mangling, which Armstrong sells great. Cage match has this going to round 10, so we miss some real parts of the finish, but man alive what a treat to get what we get.


Devil's Rejects (Andrew Alexander/Tank/Rufus Black/Se7en) vs. Team Empire (Drew Delight/Rush/Ben Thrasher/Chunky Dragon) EWE 3/1/12

PAS: A music video for this match got uploaded on youtube a couple of days after it happened and I commented on the video asking them to release it in full. Seven plus years later it shows up!! Devil's Reject's Wargames are some of the coolest stuff that happened this century, and hardly anyone has seen them. This isn't at the level of the all time classics in 2006 and 2007 (and Tank was the only constant besides Rev. Dan Wilson) , but it wasn't a huge step below. The Alexander and Drew Delight opening five minutes is awesome, heated brawling, great punches and and some big cage bumps. Tank comes in and starts carving, and there is a nasty spot where Ben Thrasher gets the spike from him and drives it into his arm. Se7en is a huge guy and really good at menace, I am not sure why he never got a bigger role somewhere. The finish is crowd pleasing, although a bit lacking in drama. The babyfaces just take control, and Chunky Dragon lays into Alexander with knife edge chops and a pectoral claw until he gave up. Wargames is a great wrestling formula, all you kneed is some good brawlers willing to bleed, and that is what this delivered.

MD: Very good War Games. I liked the idea of Alexander cutting a promo to begin. It set the mood and was a good use of having the first guy in. It feels like the sort of thing CM Punk might do to make a sanitized WWE War Games work better. Honestly, Alexander was the highlight in this whole thing for me. I'm not sure how I'd feel about him in a normal match but he was a great receptacle for Delight's great punches, stooged and bumped around the ring, even late into the match, and then served as the big end center point where he lasted long enough to gain sympathy but finally surrendered in the face of little enough escalation (but an absolute sense of hopelessness) that you didn't feel TOO bad for him. They handled the momentum shifts well, balancing the new faces coming in and the fatigue/numbers game. I think this would have been better with a second ring as nothing really stood out once everyone was in. I was of two minds on some of the last quarter. They worked one big set piece with the figure-fours and the bat and while it was a little silly for a War Games match, it stood out and was memorable. It was hard to keep track of the brawling in the single ring and no single final transition stood out, but I kind of like how the babyfaces just slowly won the brawling war of attrition.

ER: I don't have a ton to add (though it feels like when I type that I then end up writing two full paragraphs), only that this felt like a genuine article WarGames, and that goes a long way in making me love a WarGames. This was not as great as earlier Devil's Rejects WarGames, but that is an insanely unfair comparison. If these were just 8 guys we'd never heard of and not a stable involved in two classic WarGames, this match would come off even better. Having watched the WWE WarGames within the month and now this one, though? There's no argument which way is better. I came away super impressed with Andrew Alexander, a great front to back WarGames performance that mostly required him to take a beating and be a wobbly kneed clown for Empire, and he did it magnificently. Drew Delight was throwing these great hamfists at his head, big round closed fists that were thrown with no style, just swung right at Alexander's forehead. The order of participants was staggered well, Tank coming in 2nd as a big wrecking ball was great, and even better because he was a wrecking ball with a spike. Tank threw a couple shots with the spike that made me jump, and I love how the inclusion of a spike has been so important to WarGames: You know that bringing a spike into WarGames will mean that your team will be eating a tong of spike, and I dig when a WarGames starts getting deeply into that torture. Everyone filled their roles nicely, bunch of big guys punching and bleeding a ton - and really what more is there? - and I loved Chunky Dragon as the final man. I've never heard of Chunky Dragon, and I assume I'll never see another Chunky Dragon match, but he was such a good fired up babyface tearing into the ring. He had real Michael McAllister energy to him, dug his big crossbody, loved all his hard chops. The finish doesn't necessarily peak anything, but I liked the burn at the end, of Alexander being held prone and trying to hold out as long as possible while getting punched and chopped, and finally accepting that nobody was coming to his rescue. When you hear your local indy is running a WarGames match, this is the level of quality you hope for.