Bill Watts, Hacksaw Duggan & Dick Murdoch v Skandor Akbar, Kamala & Kareem Muhammad (7/28/85)
How about that for an all-time walking tall babyface unit. You can probably guess how this went. Three guys with amazing punches punching three guys who will bump all over the shop for them, especially Kamala and Muhammad who take some awesome big beefy dude bumps. Kamala ruled in this, actually. He spent a fair bit of it on the back foot getting jabbed in the mouth and shoulder tackled around the ring and his general pinballing was great. A few times he'd sort of stagger like he was out on his feet and then faceplant to a giant pop. We also got a collector's item of Captain Redneck in peril. Dicky Morton! Akbar mostly directed traffic from out on the apron and would only get in there when it was safe, so he passes the manager-pulling-wrestler-duty test fine. I guess I'd have liked an actual hot tag, but at a certain point you can understand why Watts and Duggan threw their hands up on the whole thing and just came in swinging. And Watts planting Kamala with the body slam was about as satisfying a finish as you could ever get in front of this crowd.
Dr. Death & Bob Sweetan v Al Perez & Wendell Cooley (8/30/85)
I've watched a fair amount of studio/TV lately. From a bunch of different territories - Crockett, Memphis, Portland, Georgia, Houston, Mid-South. I didn't think this was a great match or anything, but within that context of studio wrestling something like this will always stick out. It gets plenty of time; way more than your standard studio match (Portland aside, I guess). It's worked more like an arena match than a studio match, at least in that they use their time to slow things down a bit and build to more significant transitions and momentum shifts. The crowd don't really care about Perez and Cooley to begin with, probably because it's a title match and nobody thinks for a second they'll actually win. Before the bell Jake and Barbarian talked Williams and Sweetan into giving them a title shot the following week on TV, so everyone is looking ahead to that anyway. Then the longer it goes the more people start getting behind the babyfaces, start cheering those hope spots and comebacks, maybe even start to believe they could pull out the victory. The final sequence was a little ragged, but Perez's German suplex is gorgeous and it made for a pretty awesome moment. For a TV match it's hard to ask for too much more.
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