Roddy Piper vs. Greg Valentine JCP 8/4/83
MD: Elliott has been putting together great primer threads on twitter with match recommendations and came across this while looking for Piper. It's obviously from JCP TV but it wasn't on any of our radars. Just a great piece of business during a chaotic time centered around the US title. Valentine had it. He had damaged Piper's ear. Piper wanted revenge. Fellow heels Slater and Orton wanted it too. The episode was set up with Piper having the match but not expected to make it to the show, so they were going to give it to Slater instead. Piper did show up however and he came in hot.
They covered a lot in ten minutes here. The early stuff was so chippy and uncooperative. Piper wanted revenge but he also wanted the belt. An early sunset flip seemed so uncooperative that it almost turned into a flipping power bomb (and this is a good thing). Piper lit Valentine up with great punches too and a killer posting and the wild abandon kneelift where his limbs went flying as well. He kept going in too hot though and Valentine was able to take advantage. A lot of that was with escalating elbow drops but Valentine had this great gutbuster that hit almost sideways. Valentine could never hold Piper down for long and fired back and opened Valentine up, only to get tossed out of the ring on a fluke. That let Slater rush in and beat on Valentine to draw a DQ Piper didn't want. When Piper tried to fight him off, Orton came out as well. As best as I can tell, this never let to a tag match with the rivals on one side, which seems like a shame. Just great JCP TV.
PAS: This totally ruled, one of the great match ups in wrestling history and such a mitzvah Elliot uncovered another version of it. It is more of a TV match then the arena and Starcade matches we have, so it was trying to do a different thing, but the interactions were first rate, with Pipers handspeed and activity contrasting with the power of Valentine's strikes. It really feels like a boxer vs. a puncher. There is a an incredible section where Valentine bull rushes Piper into the corner and Piper just uses head movement to avoid and parry all of Valentine's shots and fire back. Whenever Valentine landed you could feel Piper's body shudder and react, Valentine was one of the great power punchers in wrestling history, everything he landed felt organ shifting. Finish was a good bit of business, although less satisfying then a clean finish would be. Really wish we had gotten the Parajas Piper and Valentine vs. Orton and Slater match this seemed to be setting up
ER: This is just the best. You spend 10 minutes of your night watching this and you fully understand why so many people in the south rejected the wrestling product of the north. This is a bell to bell fight and then somehow ends with a different, just as good fight. I've been watching a lot of 1997 Piper and Valentine (although never against each other in 97, sadly) and I love them. It's crazy how good they both were in their mid 40s. But 1997 is not 1983. Nowhere close. It's like how I enjoy watching current Negro Casas and always will, but then you watch any 80s or 90s Negro Casas and go "oh, yeah. Right. He was this." Just because I love old man wrestling an inordinate amount, I don't know if anything else could ever compare to this era of JCP. No shit people watching JCP wouldn't be enthralled by Tony Garea or Swede Hansen or Sal Bellomo.
It's all hammering Valentine punches or straight rights to the head. I forget how quick he was, how spry. Seeing a Valentine elbowdrop off the middle rope performed with a luchador's speed and grace feels almost anachronistic, my eyes having seen so much more Old Valentine than Young Stud Valentine. How wild is it that Piper's rabbit punches hit just as hard as Valentine's famously heavy fists. Look at that camera shot from the floor when Piper is punching to comeback, Valentine's head mostly obscured by the camera being aimed up at the lights of Carolina Civic Center. It's perfect. Piper's jittery style of selling damage is so electric when he's in with a real fighter like Valentine. They're perfect for each other. The way he stutters and moves his head when he starts fighting back and the way Valentine glances his blows while walking into Piper's fire. Piper's airplane spin was a real impressive surprise, and I love how it quickly turned on him when Valentine held the ropes and forced a momentum shift. Slater and Orton run in and act just as violently as Piper and Valentine and at this point I expect Bugsy McGraw matches to also look super violent. Orton wrecks these men with cowboy boot stomps and Dick Slater is like pissed off Tenryu. It's all so beautiful.
Arandu/Vulcano vs. Villano III/Panterita del Ring
MD: This was something. We come in with Arandu and Vulcano with the advantage. Vulcano was mostly matched up with Villano and they were working the mask. Just a big beatdown. Villano was able to sidestep and take over but before they could press the advantage, Vulcano lost his head and pulled the loosened mask off to draw the primera DQ. Immediately thereafter, after Villano had put his mask back on, Vulcano charged back in and this time both took it off and ripped it up. Villano rolled to the floor and some kid ran up and immediately put his shirt over Villano's head so that he could be helped to the back. Just a super wholesome moment that you'd think you'd see more in lucha but that I haven't come across much if at all.
From there, the rudos pressed the numbers game, hanging Panterita up and laying it in until Villano could come in with another mask to break things up and get revenge. Get this, though, he was punching them with the white shirt around his hand! Super iconic moment. Apparently he either fouls or Vulcano feigns a foul as they have Arandu hung up (for revenge!) so the rudos get the segunda. In between falls Villano ups Vulcano up in the stands and things settle back in for a loose and chaotic tercera of them going back and forth until Villano crashes into the ref on purpose and then pretends Vulcano had fouled him. Such beautiful bullshit in this one. The best.
ER: 2/3 of this match is somebody being pinned in the corner or held in the tree of woe while being punched and kicked and yelled at. I'm sure some would read that sentence as a criticism but I'm also sure that none of those people are reading that sentence here. Arandu is a south Texas Mocho Cota, with less shtick but somehow better hair. Vulcano does an incredible thing where he's so focused on keeping V3 in a modified abdominal stretch that he just ignores Panterita Del Ring's strikes as he's trying to break the hold. Vulcano is laser focused on Villano and Panterita is just going to have to throw better elbows if they are to be acknowledged.
I was enjoying this and would have honestly enjoyed just a light punching and choking and fake ball shots kind of match...but nobody could have seen one of the greatest REAL moments in pro wrestling history happening. Who could have been prepared? Now I'm sure this has happened before, on camera, and I'm sure the matches that it happened in are all common knowledge, and I'm sure I have written about this kind of thing happening before but my memory is so bad that the only thing I remember about wrestling anymore is that the date 6/3/94 is significant for some reason. Old language. The moment happens when Vulcano rips and tugs Villano's mask off and Villano rolls to the floor covering his face. As he hits the floor, a sweet chubby kid is seen literally giving Villano III the shirt off his back so that he could protect his identity! A reverse Mean Joe Greene! What a sweet boy, who sprang immediately into action the moment he saw a hero unmasked. Villano returning, masked, from the back with the white t-shirt still in hand, wrapping his fist in it and throwing blows? Incredible. No American child would have given their wrestling hero the shirt off their back. The closest anyone in the states came to this was when some 10 year old in Revere handed a frying pan to John Kronus.
Satanico vs. Hector Garza CMLL 1/6/95
MD: We had 9 minutes of this title match previously. This gives us the entire 20 and you can really get a sense of the narrative at play. One thing that makes Satanico stand out even more is that he could implement narratives that would be more conventional elsewhere, even in places like title matches where you usually get things along different lines. Here, in the primera, he controlled Garza on the mat, Garza was able to get back into it once things got moving, and then Satanico, realizing that, hit a cheapshot and started to lay things in. Garza was able to use his speed to turn it back around, dodge a shot in the corner, and lock in the torture rack. Just a nice and neat story executed well and engaging to the crowd.
The segunda is where things turned a bit. Satanico came out with a handshake attempt but Garza would have none of it, taking him down and starting on the leg. Satanico spent the entirety of the segunda as Honky Tonk Man, basically, already down a fall but playing the vulnerable champion. This lasted a few minutes until Satanico was able to shrug Garza out of the ring by countering a camel clutch. He pressed that advantage with lift up/drop downs until he could put on Satan's knot.
For the tercera, it started as back and forth nearfalls, before Satanico got a mini beatdown in until Garza was able to toss him out and hit a dive. Finish was very clever as Garza locked in a back bridge. Satanico ensured that he himself was pinned, a sacrifice, to also ensure that Garza's arms were trapped down. Just an absolute confident leap of faith in his own ability to ensure mutual destruction knowing that in the event of a draw, he would keep the title. I can't think of almost any other time in wrestling I saw a heel pull off that trick to keep his title. Very clever stuff.
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