Tommy Rich v The Bullet (Georgia, 9/88)
Rich is in 100% stooge mode here, begging off, stalling, flying around the place for everything. The ref' checks him at the start and finds a chain hidden in his trunks, and that leads to a cool bit later on where he gets knocked to the outside and finds tape or wire or something beside the ring. He doesn't have a chain anymore, but he's found a new toy to play with. Ref' is kind of crummy and doesn't really do anything about it whenever Tommy uses it, so it doesn't get the sort of heat it should, but it was a cool touch either way. Rich also takes a fucking NASTY posting, straight into it with no hands up for protection. Naturally he hits a gusher and bleeds all over the shop. Bullet is fine and everything here - he holds up his end and plays off Tommy well enough - but I thought this was mostly a Tommy Rich show. It's a tragedy there's no video footage of that cage match with Sawyer (which is something I tend to think after every Tommy Rich match I watch).
Steve Austin v William Regal (Strap Match) (WWF Smackdown!, 11/29/01)
Totally badass violent sprint. Austin was the best wrestler in the world in 2001, and when this - a match I couldn't remember ever seeing or hearing about before - started being pimped I got super excited. Match goes about ten minutes, and they leather each other up and down the whole time. So it's basically just what I was hoping for. There's one crazy table bump (Austin takes a backdrop on the announce table and almost lands on one of the monitors, which probably would've punctured his kidney), but other than that they don't mess around with any fancy shit. It's all about the whipping and face punching. There's one bit where they're both returning to the ring area after knocking lumps out each other in the crowd, and as Austin is stepping over the barricade Regal punches him right in the neck. It was pretty a low key moment in amongst all the other craziness, but it was a little bit of trademark Regal brutality that you come to expect in a Regal match. Have these two had any other matches together? This was like something you'd find on the Texas set along with all of those short Von Erichs/Freebirds ass-stompings, and if they did anything else in the same mold then I owe it to myself to check it out.
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