I've gone down a Jerry Blackwell rabbit hole lately and let me tell you, it's been an absolute hoot. What an awesome portly boy. It's been over a decade since I last watched this and I'm happy to report it's still amazing. Honestly it's one of the simplest wrestling matches ever put together, which makes sense considering two of the participants are near pensioners and another had settled into a semi-regular role as a manager by this point. Plus simple is all you really need when you're working with absurd, volcanic crowd heat. People always told me it was the southern territories that had the raucous cauldrons and the AWA was a stodgy homestead for headlock-merchants. What a lotta horse shit that turned out to be. There were no headlocks here, not a one of them! Your opening segment is basically two broken down legends punching and biting the heels while the heels lean into everything and get bumped everywhere. It was perfect. Vachon grabs Kaissie by the head at one point and bites his ear, then walks over and spits a chunk of it at Blackwell. Loved the bit as well where Vachon was beating on Kaissie in the corner and you could see him looking sideways because he knew Blackwell would try and blindside him, then when Blackwell does come rushing in Vachon moves and Blackwell obliterates Kaissie in the corner. It will always infuriate me to lose a transition spot because of a tape jump, but the heat segment on the Baron was obviously great. He bleeds and the heels kick his broken carcass up and down the place. The crowd is somewhat loud during these few minutes. Hot tag is one of the hottest in recorded history and Von Raschke slapping the claw on Blackwell about blows the roof off the place. They'd teased throughout the match how much the babyfaces want to avoid getting clobbered by those ridiculously thick taped fists of Kaissie and Blackwell, narrowly avoiding or blocking being hit by them at previous points in the match, so when Kaissie wallops the Baron in the back of the head and Blackwell squashes him like a bug you know it's over. And of course the post-match is one of the craziest near-riot scenes in wrestling history, with Verne coming in to stop a mugging only to get mugged himself, the Sheiks having to be escorted to the locker room by actual police while fans surround them on all sides swinging punches. Okerlund grabbing the house mic and shouting "will someone get the paramedics up here!" adds another layer of insanity and I'm surprised nobody tried to legit stab one of them. The very best pro wrestling.
Jerry Blackwell v Colonel Debeers (Ladder Match) (AWA, 11/27/86)
Man does Jerry Blackwell have an awesome elbow drop. This thing looks like it would shatter ribs and puncture lungs, like having a piano dropped on you. Blackwell was babyface here so it wasn't a performance built on fatboy pinballing or stooging or getting walloped by mad old bastards with four teeth. He got to break out a little more offence, the elbow drops of course, but also his amazing running powerslam that also looks like piano murder. A man the size of Jerry Blackwell in a ladder match is a terrifying prospect and the couple times they used the ladder as a weapon made every climb feel like it could go horribly wrong. It also made those slow climbs feel necessary, not just there for building drama. Debeers - a large man in his own right - gets slammed on the thing, Blackwell hits a running splash and catches nothing but ladder, the ladder is thrown about the ring haphazardly; if I'm 400 pounds you better believe I'm climbing with some trepidation. Debeers taking a wild hotshot off the ladder was pretty crazy for 1986.
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