Ric Flair v Butch Reed (No DQ) (8/10/85)
This was what it was. I could count on one hand the amount of people I'd put ahead of Reed on a favourite wrestlers list and still have fingers left to spare, but I've seen these Flair matches before and I wasn't all that excited about revisiting any. Especially not the longest of them, and this one goes an hour. You know what you're getting with Flair. He'll either start out sporting and progressively unravel, or he'll be unravelled in the first place and just get worse. By this point him and Reed already had beef, so we got the latter and he was throwing cheapshots and begging off inside a minute. I liked the first third and final ten minutes well enough. That first twenty minutes is largely Reed working a headlock and...look, it was fine. Sometimes it was even really good because Reed has an awesome grinding headlock and it always looks like he's trying to wring a guy's head off. Flair will go for the shinbreaker and Reed will just grind the hell out of that headlock until Flair's equilibrium is shot to bits. They milk Flair grabbing the tights to try and roll him up, Reed gets annoyed and throws mounted punches, back to the headlock they go. Flair isn't all that interesting working holds from below but I can get by. They then transition into working a font facelock and I'll always like the spot where Flair tries to suplex his way out of it only for Reed to hold on, roll over and squeeze even harder. They lose me a bit in the middle though, and part of that isn't really their fault as there's a jump in the film and we miss about ten minutes. It's just that before long I'm kind of waiting for the bell to ring and that's never a good sign. Last twenty minutes are your Flair on the Ropes extended finishing run. Objectively it worked because the heat built and built, and they did some stuff I liked a lot. Reed has awesome punches and he threw many of them, great combos that were capped off with his big winding uppercut. Obviously he works the leg and applies the figure-four, but I liked the twist here with him refusing to let go even when Flair got to the ropes and the ref' being powerless to do anything about it. That no DQ stip came into play best of all when they started hucking each other over the top rope and we got a couple great splats to the concrete, including one of Flair's best off an uppercut. Flair just picking Reed up and crotching him on the ropes was another great spot, basically kicking off his only semi-extended run of offence the entire match. Reed's shoulder tackle off the top was absolutely top banana as well and maybe if he wasn't so fatigued he'd have hit the gorilla press slam in time. I guess I'd have liked Flair to work a bit more from above. I get the rationale behind him not doing that and I did think he looked like a hardy bastard for toughing it out, but I thought Reed needed to overcome a little more. Tommy Gilbert was also kind of annoying at points. I eventually got used to him going through the set the first time, but he has a touch of the Kiniskis about him where he wants to be super involved, and it stifled some of the stooging Flair would do in the corner. A few times you wished Reed would actually pull the trigger and put him on his arse.
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