Was Chief Jay Strongbow...actually pretty great???

Greg Valentine v Chief Jay Strongbow (WWF, 7/21/79)

Strongbow is a weird animal. For one I can't read his name on a match list without immediately having flashbacks to my teenage years of drinking 2l bottles of cider down the park, or indeed my 20s and now 30s, drinking 2l bottles of cider down the park. As an actual wrestler without any of those cheap cider connotations, he'll take an absolute whipping in some circles for being awful, terrible at selling, having shitty offence, just not at all good at the pro wrestling. In other circles - much smaller ones, I'd imagine - there's a recognition that you don't end up that over with a crowd as consistently as the Chief was without knowing how to fuckin WORK. Those chops didn't look great but you better believe he knew when and how to use them! Prolly. Maybe Chief Jay is the poster boy for Smart Work, right next to old broken down Andre. I have no dog in that fight and I've probably seen four Chief Jay Strongbow matches in the last twenty years, but I know what I like and this was a super fun busted old man performance from Strongbow. The staredown before the match starts is amazing, with Strongbow on the floor looking almost pensive, an old warhorse ready to saddle up again, years past the point where he thought he'd need to, staring a hole through Valentine. The camera pans around Valentine's shoulder and the look on his face would pin a man to the floor, staring straight back at the Chief. The WWE go for all sorts of cinematic nonsense in their camerawork these days and most of it is legitimately nauseating and not a single instance of it has come off as great as this (the commentators not ramming it down our throats didn't hurt either). This is a revenge match from a previous angle where Valentine went after Strongbow's knee, so the Chief comes in swinging chops to the head, wearing a big knee brace that he uses as a weapon. He rams Valentine's head into it, throws kneelifts with the braced-up knee, and after a few minutes Valentine is bloodied. Strongbow really leans into the revenge aspect, bonking Valentine in the head with a microphone, using the chord to choke him, then bringing in a wooden stool, bonking that over Valentine's head, snapping one of the legs off it and bonking THAT over his head as well. Strongbow's fired up war dance was more of a dying ember at this stage of the game, but that added to the charm of his performance and the crowd were ballistic for it. Any time Valentine tried to bail or create some distance Strongbow would be on him, at one point dragging him out to the floor and winging him head-first into the barricade. The finish is one of those rage-inducing things that, as a fan in the arena that night, you'd immediately hope would lead to a rematch. With any luck it would be one that would prevent Valentine from shithousing his way to another count out victory.