January 1980

I haven't heard many promos from Humperdink over time and he is someone clouded for me by his awful run as the Freebirds manager. This was decent enough with Dink calling out Bubba Douglas and him trying to assert himself that he is the superior athlete. Solie gives us a clip of Humperdink getting taken apart by Douglas and then we cut back to Dink who has indeed lost his cool.

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A great match! Feels like something that should be a staple for the "joshi for people who don't like joshi" pile. It has the legwork/tease the Figure 4-story that so many wrestling fans can understand, plus a classic story with Aoyama having a go at the ace. It also has that "Wow!" factor with state of the art flying moves and big time bumps used for great drama. Aoyama is pretty overzealous, but Sato is pretty much her ideal matchup and Sato has such a tremendous connection to the crowd that anything she's in automatically becomes above average. The matwork is all freaked out and luchariffic with a ton of indian deathlock work and a bunch of twisting around to escape the…

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I loved this match. It was for the Johnny Valentine Cup. This was the Houston 2 ring special. This was all action Gino is sporting the blond hair. Kerry already is an incredible athlete here working a really fast pace. We see Kerry with an adominal claw which is how all the brothers start with till they master the head claw. Conway jr. looking really good throughout the match. In a pretty cutting edge spot Conway Jr. with an Ohtani boot scrape. I loved all of the Lothario/Gino interactions, especially the punches. Gino was the glue to his team. Gino telling Tiger to shine his shoes was heated. Kerry duplicating the 2 ring dive that Kevin did was great just as Paul was tel…

I liked this, and if it got another few minutes would have taken it to the next level. I enjoyed Thornton's arm work. It was compelling and looked real hurty. His European forearms were just plain nasty. I liked Boyd's constant movement and fight underneath. This is the wrestler verse the brawler. Boyd started working the leg. Thornton dung it on a kneelift. Then we get a finish. I would have liked a few more minutes of the leg work leading to the finish. Still they had a pretty good match with the time given. 2 1/2*

I loved the opening stuff. The salt ceremony always works. JJ Dillon was great in his role. The crowd was into this as an undercard bout. Kozack saluting the flag got the crowd really behind him. I really like Hito's work on top. The leg work was well done and set up the narrative of the match. Kozack was solid as a babyface and seemed solid in his role as fired up babyface. So for what they were doing on the card it worked. 2 1/4*

This is an incredible Spoiler performance. Baker is a great character but a terrible worker. The psychology and storytelling is a masterpiece. They work around all of Baker's limitations. and push the story forward. I want to say I dug Baker's cross arm choke. Baker's strikes looked poor early, but they were fine towards the end.The story boiled down to Spoiler going for the claw throughout/ Baker focus was a 3 pronged attack. One he went for the Spoiler's mask, secondly he would work over Spoiler's back. and also would work over Spoiler's claw hand. I loved how Spoiler would try to get seperation when Baker went after the mask. They also built to a fun draw. Again this w…

We get an Andre interview which didn't have a wrestling feel to it. Then a Gino one which was awesome, and a text book wrestling segment. This was fun, and had a cast of characters. I thought Wahoo and Gino were the stars here. They did a good job of pushing a feud between them.

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Handicap Match: Hulk Hogan vs Ben Ortiz & Angelo Gomez January 12, 1980 Hamburg, PA Availability WWF All Star Wrestling - January 5, 1980 WWE Hulk Still Rules

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