Roddy Piper v Rick Rude (Cage Match) (WWF, 12/28/89) - EPIC
Well this might be the best WWF cage match ever. I had it as a nice ***1/2 affair back in 2010 and once again I am disgusted by the stupidity displayed in my youth because that's about four and a half stars too low. These are two of my ten favourite wrestlers ever and I'll have Piper top 30 on my GWE list so it was damn near impossible that I wasn't going to love it in the year 2023. It doesn't have the regular WWF escape the cage rules, there's a referee this time because pinfalls and submissions count. So you can win by escape or decision and Monsoon and Hillbilly Jim do not know what to make of it. Gorilla wonders if Finkel's rundown of the rules was actually correct. Did he go off script? Did Howard Finkel decide to go into business for himself and create a new version of cage match? Surely this added wrinkle of pinfalls in a cage match cannot be correct, can it?! Piper and Rude conk heads late in the match and the ref' puts on the 10-count and Gorilla calls him an idiot who clearly doesn't understand the rules and I'm like motherfucker NEITHER DO YOU! Right at the start Rude takes a crazy back bump into the cage and it's the big blue one so you know it sucked. Piper starts biting him and takes Rude down whilst gnawing at his forehead, no half measures from the Rowdy one. Rude actually bleeds after a face-first cage bump and I did not recall any deliberate bleeding from this period of WWF, so that was a welcome surprise to the bloodthirsty degenerates among us. Rude was an awesome chickenshit and really just wanted out of there. He'd try and climb the thing and one time Piper cut him off by biting him on the arse! I said the other day that the near-escapes through the door in Slaughter/Backlund were the best ever, but these weren't far behind. There were a couple amazing struggles, plus this had the added benefit of Heenan at ringside being a nuisance, trying to help Rude escape while preventing Piper from doing so. Piper drags Rude back into the ring by his trunks and in very Rick Rude fashion he wrestles the last seven minutes with his bare arse out. They do a restart after both of them escape the cage and drop down at the same time, then when they get back in Rude hits the Rude Awakening but crawls to all of the wrong corners because of the blood in his eyes, which is a pretty great way to circumvent the whole "just walk out the door there" issue with the escape rule. Rude is a narcissist on the level of Christiano Ronaldo so him climbing the cage to hit a kneedrop off the top rather than, you know, leaving, works well for me. You pretty much need to make at least one allowance for that in all of these cage matches and this one was fine. When he goes up again Piper shakes the cage and leaves Rude hanging upside down with one leg caught in a cable and it looked fucking wild. Heenan slamming the door on Piper's face as he goes to walk out was amazing and I thought for sure Rude was winning after that. The comeuppance with Heenan handing Rude the knuckle duster and it backfiring was of course the perfect finish. One of the most fun WWF matches ever.
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