Our boy elliott from the PWO/GME board has been running through a metric ton of 90s WWF on his twitter recently and I've started cherry-picking some of it. There's a second Jake/Martel blindfold match out there!
Shawn Michaels v Jimmy Snuka (MSG, 1/31/92)
Really fun early heel Michaels performance. He wasn't as obnoxious and adept at heat-garnering as he'd be in '97, but it's fun seeing him sort of find his feet as a heel on a big stage. This is Madison Square Garden after all, where about a decade ago his opponent was as over as anyone on the planet. You knew he'd bump around admirably for Snuka and within about a minute he was getting kicked over the turnbuckle to the floor. His stalling was amusing if basic and you bought Snuka wanting to throttle him, a bit like when Dick Slater tried to ragdoll Sting because he got a little FLIRTATIOUS with Dark Journey. These young guys are too fulla themselves, says Snuka. I assume. There was nothing especially ambitious about anything they did here. Structurally it was as simple as you can get - Snuka ran up the score early, Michaels eventually took over, Snuka fought his way back into it and they briefly went back and forth before the finish. The transitions weren't spectacular and there was no unique story hook. It was just really solid stuff and sometimes that's all you need. Michaels rammed Snuka into the ring apron and started throwing shots at his kidneys and midsection, nasty little pot shots that, as Gorilla might put it, contained Snuka's flowing Fijian fluids. Heenan hadn't a clue either. Snuka is kind of a desiccated husk by 1992 but he really didn't need to do much here anyway. It was a canvas for Michaels more than anything else, although whether Snuka liked it or not he got drilled with a running knee and took himself a nasty spill to the floor. Michaels was using the back suplex as a finisher at this point and it's not the flashiest thing in the world, but the thrust kick to set it up did look great. Maybe he'd use that more often going forward.
The Undertaker v Bret Hart (MSG, 1/31/92)
I don't want to sound like I've gone full hipster here, although I know that I will, but I swear to god I think this is my favourite Bret v Undertaker match. I don't care about best, I don't even know what that would be at this point, but if I had to pick only one Bret Hart v Undertaker match that I could ever watch again then I think this is the one I would pick. I thought it ruled like crazy and it was a brilliant Bret performance AND a brilliant Undertaker one. Look, I'll level with you, I am not an Undertaker fan. I think he's been damn near hopeless for large stretches of his career and those Helmsley matches at Wrestlemania a decade ago were so bad they turned me off wrestling for most of the year afterwards. His renaissance as a workrate zombie in the mid-to-late-2000s had some good stuff, but in general even that run, the one I imagine most people would point to if making a case for him as a great worker, mostly falls flat for me. I honestly think this period, the one where his gimmick is probably least conducive to what would normally be considered good work, is my favourite stretch of his career. The unkillable zombie stuff obviously has a ceiling, but by and large I think he plays it well. In fact, if we're talking about playing all the way to a character then I think he maybe kind of knocks it out the park? The slow sit up, the gradual, tiniest show of vulnerability, the stalking down of opponents, the weird eye-rolling. It's goofy at times but fair play to yer man for leaning all the way into it and owning it for about six years. He's also very athletic and can get major hops on a clothesline, so when he rips one of those off it's actually jarring. You've got this shambling cadaver with his slow walk towards you and then blam, he'll just fucking soar through the air and smash his forearm off your neck. The one he hit in this was captured perfectly by the camera person and it looked amazing. He has incredible balance as well, like when he took a clothesline over the top on the announce desk side and managed to course correct on the way over, balancing almost horizontally across the top rope for a second so Heenan could clear out the way, before flipping over and landing on his feet anyway, staring dead-eyed up at Hart. The first Old School (I would assume it wasn't called that then) made him look like a terror, the way he towered over Bret before crashing down. Heenan says he's 20 feet in the air and then Monsoon tells us, aghast, that he "nailed him on the external occipital protuberance!" Heenan - "he waffled him in the back'a the neck!" When he tried it again later you knew it would be reversed, and it was and Undertaker fuckin yeeted himself the whole bastard way across the ring and it looked spectacular. Really other than one down period where he applied some kind of face claw thing he was just about always doing something interesting. I thought it was a great performance all told. Bret ruled as well, of course. He had to stick and move and whenever he got to take shots he made the most of them. His punches looked great, he hit one super crisp atomic drop, absolutely heaved himself like a bullet at Undertaker with a plancha, hit maybe the best Russian leg sweep he's ever done, at times he'd even flat out jump on top of Undertaker when the latter tried to sit up, like he knew he had to stay on the offensive or the big ghoul would just keep coming. I loved the bit too where he went for the middle rope elbow but of course Undertaker sat up, so instead Bret just flew at him with a cross body. Actually it feels like half of Bret's offence here was him chucking his body at Taker like a projectile and that's pretty awesome when you think about it. Like you would expect he also made Undertaker's stuff look killer. The sternum bump in the corner was lunacy and you maybe buy it when Heenan says the ring moved six inches. That Undertaker had to resort to fully wellying him in the face with the urn to finish him puts Bret over about as strongly as possible in defeat. What a shockingly awesome match.
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