The more Mid South the better although not only is this show currently on Youtube they may actually be using the youtube version for the Network 

 

The network version is said to be a few minutes longer than what's on Youtube so it doesn't seem to be that version.

Ok...this is weird....the 6 man with Watts is before the Flair match.   After Flair's match ends, the announcer says "this concludes the wrestling portion of Wrestlefest 85".   And then somehow there is a previously unknown and undocumented North American Title Match 

The Champion (Randy Colley// Moondog Rex) vs Wahoo McDaniel

The Champion vs Wahoo hasn’t been out there before . 

For Thursday May 2nd.   Holy crap, I kinda mentioned this one the last time they put up a PWUSA show!!!   The Flair match is listed as 34 minutes...can it possibly be complete??

08/16/1985 – Sarge’s Hunt for Gold [Duration: 1:00:33]

Ric Flair battles Sgt. Slaughter while The Fabulous Freebirds face The Road Warriors and Paul Ellering from Pro Wrestling USA.

I would imagine it is complete with only two matches and a duration of one hour. Should be fun, I loved that little clip we got on AWA wrestling back in the day.

Yea, the Road Warriors match is probably less than 10 minutes

I'm really hoping this is complete too. (I wouldn't mind that Martel vs Larry Z match from that card; I feel like the one from July 85 is unsatisfying). 

We don't have the Backlund vs Robinson match from the February 85 Meadowlands card, right? We have a lot of it but not that or the Valiant/Youngbloods vs Larry/Nick/Dory match.

 

It appears to be complete, with intros and everything. Program rundown:

0:00 Promos: Slaughter, Freebirds

0:05 Flair vs. Slaughter

0:45 Road Warriors vs. Freebirds

I'm about to watch it now. If I have any revelatory thoughts about it, I'll scribble them down.

The ring announcer says the match ends at 34:15, but I time it at 2 minutes less than that when Zukhov runs in and hits the ref.

For Thursday May 9, 2019

• 1977

  • To Tame a Madman – 02/28/1977 (Fort Worth Convention Center – Fort Worth, TX)

  • Texas Death match between The Sheik and Fritz Von Erich 

• 1980

  • Becoming World Class – 10/27/1980 (Sportatorium – Dallas, TX)

  • Fritz, David, and Kevin Von Erich team with Bruiser Brody in one of the only surviving episodes of Texas Championship Wrestling.

• 1981

  • The Battle With Brody – 06/07/1981 (Reunion Arena – Dallas, TX)

  • The Great Kabuki battles Bruiser Brody in a steel cage 

A texas death match against Fritz in Texas. If the Sheik was ever gonna do a clean job, this is probably the match he would do it in. Will be interesting to see.

...Also Brody was pinned by Kabuki in this time frame, and it made video and is out there. Maybe this is a clean version of that match.

Potential Brody and Sheik jobs in the same footage drop? that would be nutty if true...

8 hours ago, khawk20 said:

A texas death match against Fritz in Texas. If the Sheik was ever gonna do a clean job, this is probably the match he would do it in. Will be interesting to see.

Fritz wins after both guys get counted as down and Fritz ends up being the first to get up. So I guess that's technically a clean job by Texas Death Match rules?

How were they?

14 hours ago, Matt D said:

How were they?

Fritz vs The Sheik had about ten minutes shown but the first five minutes was The Sheik selling the stomach claw and the second five minutes was them milking a "both men counted down, first man up wins" finish. It was like the wrestling version of the final twenty minutes of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. There was some fun gaga though and the crowd went nuts for it.

The Texas Championship Wrestling episode is a fun watch, but dont get your hopes up too much for the eight man as it begins with 6 minutes left in the broadcast and they run out of time after only one elimination (though it does mean the most for storyline purposes as they did a "first man pinned cant wrestling in Texas for six months" gimmick). There are perfectly competent 12-minutes matches spotlighting Killer Brooks and Brian Blair though, and a rare "pinned in the middle of the ring" Bruiser Brody match. 

I had not gotten around to watching the cage match just yet. 

The cage match has a If Brody beats Kabuki, then Fritz gets Gary Hart alone in the cage stipulation. So a portion of the run time is Fritz stripping Gary to his underwear and putting him in the claw. It's certainly nothing to write home about.

So Bret Hart vs Tom Magee. Good match, but three flaws stick out at me about Magee, even in his best setting.

1. He moves like a motion capture video game character. He just never looks natural moving when he's not doing a spot.

2. He blew at least one, maybe two spots taking offense from Bret. The legdrop being most notable.

3. Bret had Magee work Magee's best spots but Magee's biggest offensive moves were rollups. I don't know if I remember Magee executing a single move designed to actually hurt Bret.

But all in all an interesting program, and a good match to actually study and see what makes a match work and how to work around someone's limitations. And frankly it was great to see Tom Magee now looking like he's aged well and recovered from that home invasion. He seems like a good guy.

Magee was clearly a hell of an athlete, but he was also nowhere near ready for prime time. He couldn't even take an inverted atomic drop properly, and he kept moving out of position for Bret's offense. With that said, it really is astounding that with his look, size, and physical gifts, nobody could figure out how to draw money with him. I guess the issue was that he needed someone who had experience working with guys like Tiger Mask and knew how to really accentuate his strengths. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone from that period other than Bret who fit that bill. Looking at the house show results on thehistoryofwwe.com, Magee spent 1987 working with the likes of Terry Gibbs and Frenchy Martin. No wonder he never progressed as a worker.

2 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

Magee was clearly a hell of an athlete, but he was also nowhere near ready for prime time. He couldn't even take an inverted atomic drop properly, and he kept moving out of position for Bret's offense. With that said, it really is astounding that with his look, size, and physical gifts, nobody could figure out how to draw money with him. I guess the issue was that he needed someone who had experience working with guys like Tiger Mask and knew how to really accentuate his strengths. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone from that period other than Bret who fit that bill. Looking at the house show results on thehistoryofwwe.com, Magee spent 1987 working with the likes of Terry Gibbs and Frenchy Martin. No wonder he never progressed as a worker.

I think Waltman hit the nail on the head on this. Magee was someone who could've been coached into being at last being carried to good matches but he would basically have needed to work with a Bret or Ted level worker every night on the house show circuit. But that's not the way they did business back then and those workers were maybe fewer and farther between than later on.

If they were still interested in actually training people like that today, Magee probably would've ended up pretty good just from being parked on the NXT Florida loop with experienced workers and just shown sporadically on NXT TV for squashes.

 

I thought the doc was really excellent and it was great to hear from TJ, Davey Boy jr, Waltman and of course Bret Hart and Tom Magee themselves. The scenes with the woman who discovered the tape were well done too.

The doc did make me wonder if there are any other random Bret matches that he had copies of, but WWE either doesn't have or hasn't located in their archives.  I'd certainly like to see the 1989 Magee rematch just to compare the two.  They also used a few other Magee pictures from matches that looked like probable TV taping squash wins but haven't surfaced.

There is another Magee match in WWE Hidden Gems on the Network, against Ted DiBiase from December 7, 1988

I also added to the site 

Tom Magee vs Riki Choshu AJPW 1/1/86 (Martial Arts Rounds match)                                                               

Magee vs Isao Takagi, AJPW 3/27/88

Magee & Big Bubba Rogers vs Jumbo Tsuruta & Tiger Mask Misawa AJPW 4/4/88

Magee vs Hiroshi Wajima, AJPW 4/22/88

Magee vs Tim Horner, Boston 5/13/89

Magee vs Terry Gibbs, Challenge taping 3/16/87

Magee vs Arn Anderson, Challenge taping 12/6/88.                                 

This may be every televised Tom Magee match ever to make tape.  If there are more, feel free to add them

I don't understand the reason why everyone is talking about the match between Bret Hart and Tom Magee. What makes Magee so special and appealing ?

45 minutes ago, paul sosnowski said:

There is another Magee match in WWE Hidden Gems on the Network, against Ted DiBiase from December 7, 1988

I also added to the site 

Tom Magee vs Riki Choshu AJPW 1/1/86 (Martial Arts Rounds match)

Magee & Big Bubba Rogers vs Jumbo Tsuruta & Tiger Mask Misawa AJPW 4/4/88

Magee vs Hiroshi Wajima, AJPW 4/22/88

Magee vs Tim Horner, Boston 5/13/89

Magee vs Terry Gibbs, Challenge taping 2/17/87

Magee vs Arn Anderson, Challenge taping 12/6/88

This is from 3/16/87 house show in London, ONT, not from the 2/17 Challenge taping.

29 minutes ago, Pterois said:

I don't understand the reason why everyone is talking about the match between Bret Hart and Tom Magee. What makes Magee so special and appealing ?

Someone else can doubtless fill in more details than me, but the gist of it is the match had the reputation of being an almost supernatural carry job by Bret but hardly anyone had ever seen it, to the point where it was a bit of a joke that it was a "holy grail" of lost matches. People assumed we would just never see it but it surfaced recently in a completely random way, so people got excited to finally see what all the fuss was about.