I will take this every day of the week, thank you. Southern style tag wrestling in front of an absolutely bonkers crowd? With four awesome wrestlers? Every single day, please. I'm being dead serious, the Rock 'n' Rolls were about as over as any act in wrestling history here. Give me any crowd going nuts for the Crush Gals, the Omni or the Garden or the Astrodome losing its mind for Piper or Bruno or Austin - this crowd on this night in this auditorium in Columbia, South Carolina didn't take a backseat to any of them. There was no question about who they were rooting for. I get that 1986 is a different time than 2006 or 2024, but you'd be hard pressed to pick out a single person rooting for the heels. The Andersons tried to hem Gibson into the corner so Gibson smartly scooted through the ropes to the floor, asking Arn if he wanted to come out after him. At that point someone in a baggy polo and trucker hat rushed the guard rail and if this was MSG, with a teeny bopper heartthrob babyface bailing out the ring rather than going blow for blow, I'd have bet money on that fella in the trucker hat calling Robert Gibson at least half a dozen slurs. But this guy came roaring to the rail with both middle fingers in the air and they were for Arn and Ole and nobody else. He wasn't the only one flipping them birds either. The Rock 'n' Rolls were gods in this arena. It was a perfect crowd for this sort of match. It starts like you'd expect, with the RnRs running the Andersons ragged. Morton and Arn have some stellar exchanges, including Moron sliding under Arn's legs and tripping him from behind with the smoothest version of that move ever committed to tape. Morton must've only recently stopped wearing his protective face covering and makes a point of reminding Arn what the Horsemen did to him, then punches Arn in the nose and drops him with a face-first DDT! The RnRs give Arn a rolling wishbone and keep rolling through to the opposite corner, just close enough where they can both pop Ole in the face with a punch. They were working a longer match than usual for TV here so the formula deviated a little. Instead of the singular FIP segment we got a chance to see both Express members get worked over, first with Gibson having his arm taken apart by the masters of it, then after a brief but molten comeback it was Morton's turn. If Morton got some satisfaction out of throwing those shots to the face earlier then Arn and Ole made him regret it tenfold. Arn was ripping at Morton's nose while twisting his neck with an ugly chinlock and Ole was trying to stomp his face into the ring ropes. We got all of the Anderson cutoffs and tag work they're famous for, always making a point to trap Morton in their corner, never allowing him to crawl more than a few inches as they tag between each other. The momentum breaks down a bit towards the end as they're building to the time limit, and we get a rare Tommy Young clanger when Gibson comes in without tagging and Tommy just kind of...lets him stay in, which was of course still nuclear in the moment but deprived us of the surface-of-the-sun level pop we would've gotten had Morton actually tagged him properly. It's hard to complain too loudly when we're getting ~25 minutes of these four, though. It was about as great as you would expect.
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