My initial thought after watching this was, "I wish people still worked like this today." Then after four seconds of consideration my next thought was that I don't actually watch enough of today's wrestling to know whether or not people DON'T work like this. It at least FEELS like what these two were doing is something mostly lost to time. I started thinking about when wrestling in the US shifted away from what this was towards what it became in the 70s and then the 80s and then every decade after that. I always used to hear about how wrestling was much slower in the 50s and I guess that might be true if you ignore what they were doing in France, but this was nothing like the sort of thing I would've expected when I first started reading about wrestling on the internet however long ago. I know wrestling moved towards having more high-impact moves and general ACTION~ as it went along, but there was and is still matwork and grappling and working of holds in US wrestling. By the 80s there was pretty much no matwork like this, though. Even your most go-go-go Flair matches didn't have half as much energy from the perspective of actually working holds. They didn't even do a lot here -- Gagne largely worked around a headlock while Goelz went after Venre's arm with a few different holds. The difference was the intensity and aggression with which they approached all of it. There was no slapping on an armbar and sitting in it, no ponderous side headlocks where the person on the receiving end was content to lay there for a minute or two. You'd maybe call the pacing of that "deliberate," and there's lots of 70s and 80s matwork where they work deliberately and I can enjoy it, but the pacing of this was almost frenzied and the difference is stark. Gagne's headlock work was some of the best I've ever seen. It was damn near torturous, like he was trying to squeeze Goelz's brains out his nose. He was grinding the headlock with his right arm then did a standing switch to apply it with his left and it looked like the fucking thing was in fast forward. There was absolutely zero daylight between temple and forearm on this headlock. Goelz is tremendous and I feel like if we had a bunch of his footage we'd be raving about him as an all-timer. He was ferocious going after Gagne's arm. At one point he took him down with an armbar then floated over into a gorgeous hammerlock. He wrenched the absolute fuck out of that thing as well, repeatedly, like he was trying to yank the arm clean out the socket, and you know Gagne had to sleep on his other side that night. When Gagne kept wringing Goelz's head with the headlock Billy just dropped to the mat and curled up like a turtle. There was another moment where he managed to pop out of the headlock by sort of jumping and throwing himself backwards and I love how he sold being discombobulated as he tried to get up to his feet quickly. Really the struggle over everything was sensational and somewhere along the line that sort of thing got lost in the States. The rope running parts ruled too, with rapid fast leapfrog attempts and dropkicks, sometimes connecting at full speed, while sometimes one would try a leapfrog while the other would just charge into them as they were in mid-air. An awesome 20-minute draw that feels like it would've been the first half of a classic 40-minute war.
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