Ted DiBiase & Terry Taylor v Michael Hayes & Buddy Roberts (Country Whipping Match) (10/12/86)
Lots of nasty choking in this. The belt whippings looked plenty stiff and all, but the Freebirds were really swinging guys around like they were doing the hammer throw. I completely blanked on DiBiase having yellow trunks at any point in his career. They're not quite as dapper as his white Money Inc. trunks, but they're not a million miles off it. Buddy Roberts has grown his hair out a bit and it's amazingly fluffy with incredible bounce. He's really fun in this kind of match because he's obnoxious enough that you want to see him constantly get lashed, but he's also a believable little frenzied bastard when he's on offence. At one point Taylor whips him clean in the face with a belt and Roberts looks at him like somebody is gonna get strangled soon. Taylor takes another crazy throat bump here, this time into the guardrail, so that's twice in a few days I've seen him do something reckless like that. I'm wondering if unprotected throat bumps weren't a regular thing with him. This wasn't really up there with the best country whipping matches on the Texas set; it was more of a regular tag where the participants were allowed a belt to smack people with, but I dug it.
Ted DiBiase v One Man Gang (11/18/86)
Nice TV main event. Gang moved around so well in this, hitting the ropes with some real speed (well...haste), taking a couple snap bumps, and his splash looked like it knocked all the air out himself when it missed and knocked all the air out of DiBiase when it hit. The one he hit off the middle rope looked pretty great. Some fatties will try to break the impact a little by putting their knees down first. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do as a wrestler, especially if you're 400 lbs and don't want to break the ribs of the person taking it. But now and then you'll get something like a Jerry Blackwell splash or a Vadersault where it looks like the guy on the mat got absolutely crushed like a grape. This wasn't full on squashed kidneys material, but it did look real good. As did the running splash he hit before it, which DiBiase took while lying on his front. I assume DiBiase added the dropkick to his arsenal after he turned babyface, because I don't remember him hitting a single dropkick in all of the heel DiBiase stuff on this set or the NWA On Demand footage.
Terry Gordy v Dr. Death (12/26/86)
These Gordy/Williams matches are starting to blend together a bit now. This feels like it might be the weakest of their matches, but it's hard to tell since it's literally been years since I watched some of the others (I wrote about their 6/86 match in January 2012). Most of this was made up of Gordy working the bearhug, and it was alright and everything, but after watching the Texas Death Match from the Houston footage you can't help but want them to maul each other rather than work a bearhug. I did like Williams' late bursts of offence, especially the piledriver (which Gordy sold by crumpling in a heap when Doc tried to Irish whip him), and his shoulder tackles are always really good. You know Gordy will bump big for all that stuff, too. Finish was kinda shitty and I could've done without Ross constantly going on about how champions in the UWF are athletes who don't go around posing after matches, but this was fine.
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