Posted June 26Jun 26 comment_6031831 LES THORNTON vs SCOTT MCGHEE (09/23/1985; WWF MSG; New York, NY) - Les Thornton is the original “Man of 1000 Holds”. Thornton controls the arm early on and they do some sweet arm work. Two hop tosses rolled through into the arm bar. Wow. McGhee tried the head scissors and Thornton dumped him while maintaining the arm. McGhee does a flip and gets his own wrist lock. The fans don’t know these guys and we get random boring shouts but this is awesome. Thornton breaks the hold with a ram to the buckles and some European uppercuts. Those uppercuts get a response. McGhee counters a Les snapmare with his own. Back to the arm. McGhee does the snapmare counter again. This time he is working a cravate. They do some nice full nelson reversals back to the snapmare reversal into the cravate. Beautiful. Wow… Les gets a powerslam and before a pin, Scott bridges and gets the snapmare reversal AGAIN. This is a chess match! The crowd is turning on the match. They pick it up but McGhee goes back to the cravate and the crowd is upset. Not random boring chants… but active booing of the match. The strikes are stiff. The counters are on point. Crowd doesn’t care. McGhee fights out of a head scissors and drops a knee. He attacks with stiff uppercuts. Thornton and McGhee brawl briefly but go back to the mat. They work pins in and out of a crucifix. Thornton goes to drop a knee. McGhee counters with a Boston Crab and the crowd actually appreciates it. They do cool matwork and pick it up but the crowd is tapped out. They do a spot where McGhee dropkicks Les out of the ring and if they did that at the beginning, I think they would have hooked the crowd from the beginning. The ending is a backslide battle turned into a double leg takedown flip pin for Scott McGhee. This is going to be at least an EXTRA. However, I want to nominate it so it can be on your guys radar. I loved the match but the crowd prevented it from ever going on the set. LOW LEVEL NOMINATION.
