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Jake Roberts v Lord Humongous (Cage Match) (11/29/85) 

I thought this was a really cool Jake performance. Part of it reminded me a little of babyface Dustin Rhodes, where he's a tall guy working smaller than he is to project a sense of underdog. To begin with he worked bigger, even for a tall guy, which maybe he needed to do when going against Humongous, who's bigger still, more imposing, and possibly indestructible. Making a shift like that mid-match could've come across as jarring or maybe not all that credible, but I thought he nailed it. All of the stuff around Jake wearing his own hockey mask was great. Humongous may not be Jushin Liger when it comes to masked wrestlers communicating through body language, but I did like the way he sold bemusement at how nothing was getting through Jake's mask. Humongous would headbutt Jake and rather than it splitting his head like a coconut, Jake would fire back immediately, unfazed, his mask doing what it was supposed to do. They brawled onto the floor between apron and cage, Jake rammed Humongous' head into the cage and it did nothing, then when Humongous paid him in kind Roberts was similarly unaffected. Jake really worked that opening stretch with the swagger of a man who knew he had his opponent rattled. Of course he was never lasting the whole match like that and as soon as Humongous rips the mask off him Jake was up against it. The transition was great, with Jake going for the big kneelift and taking his high-angled bump in the corner. Humongous threw him head-first into the cage right after that and about 30 seconds later Jake is bleeding profusely. Humongous has some pretty cumbersome strikes, some awkward stomps to a nearly upright Roberts and generally looks a bit clunky, but his scoop slam looks decent and he has a nice legdrop. He's also about as jacked up as the original Mad Max character he's based on and Boesch opines that a body like Humongous' wasn't attained through mere weightlifting. In order to get built like that he must've done it "away from the world of scheduled athletics," so I guess Boesch is implying that Humongous is on the gear? Or that he is in fact a serial killer and got yoked like that from burying bodies in the wilderness or maybe just from lugging furniture around perhaps. It's impossible to truly understand the mind of Paul Boesch. The big Humongous kick out of the DDT is met with an almost stunned silence from the crowd and it might actually have been the first time anyone had kicked out of Jake's DDT. Then Jake gets tangled in the ropes and Humongous goes to smash him with a chair, but Roberts manages to kick free and hit another DDT on the chair. Even the hockey mask isn't saving the big fella from that.

Mid-South Project