PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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I think the blame for that would go to whoever booked a guy wearing sunglasses to try and look up into bright lights and catch a guy falling off a scaffold. You mean the guy who booked a non-wrestler to take a 20-foot bump and get caught "like they catch cheerleaders at the football games"? Don't see what could have gone wrong with that.
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Gilbert is on the short list for promo man of the year. I honestly think they're rushing into the barbed wire match, and it's been my one constant complaint about this feud--sometimes they draw things out slowly and then one week just completely bombard us with all kinds of crazy stuff. They could run 2 weeks of "straight" Lawler/Gilbert matches while Funk is in Japan before going to the crazy stips.
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This must be a fairly big roster crunch for Lawler to have to pull double-duty like this. Great promo to sum everything up, though. Funk's gone to Japan for 21 days, so Lawler has to go after the Southern title to ensure that he'll have first ups when he gets back. But he has to get through the Internationals in a LLT match first.
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Definitely. Downright Crockett-esque, as the show goes off the air with the beatdown ongoing. Animal actually looked better than Hawk here, which surprised me, showing some nice crispness to his moves even accounting for the fact that Tanaka could make Santino's Cobra look like a killer strike. LOD dominates the match until Fuji waves to the locker room for help, and it's a 6-on-2 attack.
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This makes for two weird Survivor Series matches in a row involving the WWF Champion going up against a team captained by an opponent he doesn't have an issue with. Hogan vs. DiBiase and now Warrior vs. Perfect. Somehow Kerry Von Erich gets more lip service than the ostensible New Ace. Demolition's masks certainly don't do anything to help shed their image as S&M aficionados, and they seem to have trouble talking in them to boot.
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The thing I like about Gilbert's heeling here as compared to Lawler is that he makes an honest effort of things at first. He goes after Lawler guns a-blazing with his fists, but Lawler has a counter for all of it. Then and only then, after his attempt at wrestling more or less straight-up has failed, does Gilbert resort to the chain. That's Tully Blanchard's SOP to working heel and is more befitting of an ostensible title contender or champion than what Lawler was doing, regardless of how enjoyable it was. Both guys pay back the other with various moves like DDTs and piledrivers, and Gilbert gets some near-falls both with and without foreign objects, while Lawler is just hanging on trying to get in desperation moves like the sunset flip attempt and roll-ups that fail due to a distracted referee. Cactus Jack blows his attempt at interference to give Lawler the win. Best "straight" Lawler match of the year that we see.
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Dylan mentioned Windham's ability to "work small" in the thread that begat this one. That is one of the Boss Man's primary strengths. He was a 357-pound badass with a nightstick who, once he turned babyface, was able to legitimately work sympathy against guys like DiBiase and the goddamned Mountie. I'm glad that the entire BBM/Mountie match apparently made the '91 yearbook, because leaving aside the brilliant jail antics I remember it being quite a solid match. Probably the best Mountie match ever, which isn't high praise or anything, but it was good. BBM/Barbarian from the Rumble is probably the best Barb singles match in the company. I really, really like the 3-odd-minute match with Doink which is a virtual squash for Borne with Boss Man getting tied into knots. And incidentally he was an excellent squash-match worker for the company and the time period. It's rare for a guy to improve that rapidly working for the WWF but Traylor did it. He went from never saying a word and never working as a (pushed) babyface to being a very good, underrated interview and a good babyface worker. I haven't seen that Garvin match, but the dude fucking no-sold a wooden chair that Klondike Bill forgot to gimmick. No-sold a taxi door getting slammed on his fingers too, until he got inside. That has to count for something, maybe even enough to make up for fucking up Jim Cornette's knee permanently.
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Jesus, that's not even accounting for the ring announcer with the super-long blond mullet. This is quite the Japan indy version of Jerry Lawler vs. random monster. Pogo basically sucks but Onita is such a compelling seller and his fired-up headbutt comebacks are so brilliant that it doesn't matter. I don't know if Onita was coming out to "Wild Thing" yet but man do the music overdubs kill this, worse than the Demolition dub at WM6.
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This is twice now, the other being the initial Gilbert return, where they set up an obvious double-cross tag match and pay it off immediately when I think the could have milked the "will he or won't he?" factor for a little bit. And both matches looked promising on paper. Brickhouse doesn't really look like he was too hurt to wrestle on his post-match run-in, but makes the same mistake he made earlier in the show when he gets too busy ground-and-pounding on the DWB and leaves himself open to a chairshot from Doug Gilbert. His sister Sweet Georgia Brown catfights with Kimberly and somehow that runs the heels off. Ken Wayne gets in some licks on Davis at the announce desk.
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The whole heel locker room is out with streamers, noisemakers, and a cake for the man that Tojo Yamamoto claims to be the Real New King of Wrestling, Eddie Gilbert! Gilbert rattles off an absurd top 10 that includes Terry Gordy, Ricky Steamboat, Bam Bam Bigelow, and most of the bigger names in the Unified title tournament. The idea of Steamboat working Memphis at any point much less now is giggle-worthy. Jeff Gaylord awkwardly poses in the background during all this. There have been so many stories about Gaylord that I didn't think he could possibly live up to them once I got a chance to see him, but he has surpassed those expectations with flying colors. While all this is going on, Gilbert loses a match by countout to Chris Champion. Eddie Marlin breaks things up. The Dirty White Boy walks back to explain his side of a story wherein he gave some lady a piledriver. Brickhouse Brown levels him and takes him down, but gets hit from behind with a chair by Doug Gilbert.
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Great stuff all around. Lawler and Maggs have a nice little studio match with Maggs bending the rules, paying for it, and getting a public dressing-down from Dan Davis. Pulling hair and throwing fists isn't just against what Davis taught him, it seems like bad strategy to me. Trying to go fist-for-fist with Lawler is usually a losing proposition. I suspect Jarrett/Gilbert would be a strong Memphis MOTYC contender based on the clips we see and the talent involved. Jerry Calhoun gets bumped. Jarrett drops Sam Bass Lowe with a piledriver but takes a fireball from Gilbert, and Gilbert keeps his hair and wins the Southern Heavyweight title. Lawler and Brown brace themselves for Gilbert's inevitable talk about being the new King of Memphis. Lawler rattles off names who had previously tried to put him out--Hogan, Savage, Andre, LeDuc, Funk, Brisco--and none of them could do it. The big Lawler/Gilbert title match is something I can't wait to see.
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I didn't realize Sapphire was still around at this point. This is a rare opportunity to see DiBiase work a non-squash in the WWF as the dominant guy, as the story of Dustin's heart vs. DiBiase's experience takes center stage and DiBiase controls 90% of the match and gets to act like a gigantic prick while doing it. Well-done finish as Dustin is trapped in the Million Dollar Dream as the clock is counting down, but manages to avoid having his arm drop for the third time right at the expiration. Dustin eats a Million Dollar belt to the head afterward but also gets the official win. I was expecting the Tornado to show up at this point but I guess that comes later.
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