I haven't watched a damn thing in months. It's been busy. And then I went back to Scotland in November and spent entirely too much time in the pub but now I'm back in Texas with a proper routine again and I want to watch everything we have from the Duggan/Kamala feud from '85.
Jim Duggan & Butch Reed v Kamala & Hercules Hernandez (Mid-South, 2/10/85)
Kamala is rocking the SWANK green skirt/loincloth thing that I don’t remember seeing before. Reed and Duggan are definitely the two best pro wrestling Hacksaws ever prolly so this is quite the dream team. It’s been damn near two decades since the DVDVR Mid-South set came out so I think we’re mostly all hip to the fact that Jim Duggan was fucking awesome and one of the best brawlers ever, but I think we can also talk more about how good he is as an apron worker. That’s a quality we tend to talk more about these days in general, maybe because we’ve been watching wrestling for so long that we need new angles from which to approach our analysis of this nonsense hobby, and Duggan absolutely belongs in that conversation of great apron-workers. There’s an authenticity about him firing the crowd up, marching up and down the apron leading a “GO REED GO!” chant, reaching out for the tag that inevitably gets cut off, deflating along with everyone in the crowd in that moment, then finally coming in blazing hot to clean house. There's a Dustyish quality about Duggan, every bit as authentic and REAL as the Dream but rougher and grittier, the sort who'd stand by the wall with a beer and tap his feet to the music, more low key than Dusty who'd weave and flow with the music in the middle of the floor, the full focus of everyone. What did Duggan's old man do for a living? Hacksaw may not have been the son of a plumber but you could absolutely buy him as the son of a mechanic. You’d run through walls for him because you know he’d run through walls for you. I don't know if there's ever been a wrestler more perfect for their environment than Duggan in Mid-South. There was one sequence towards the end where he was laying into Kamala and Hercules with lefts and rights while the crowd went bonkers and it was incredible. Kamala also wasn’t fully clued in on the rules of a tag match yet and went for his own partner when Hercules tried to tag him in with a slap to the back. I forgot that Hercules was a pretty athletic guy at this stage too, with some real nice snap to his bumps and fun stooging. Only a couple years later he’d be juiced to the point where merely turning his head looked troublesome and then by 1992 he was practically cadaverous.
Butch Reed & Terry Taylor v Kamala & Ted DiBiase (Mid-South, 3/10/85)
This was supposed to be Reed and Duggan again but the heels must’ve laid out Duggan before the match, so Terry Taylor subs in. Kamala was a real hoot in this, leaning even further into his unfamiliarity with cooperation and the strictures of a tag match and such. He’d be pacing up and down the apron muttering to himself and slapping his belly and sporadically he’d start climbing the turnbuckles ready to jump off, Akbar and Friday trying to coax him down. DiBiase would get progressively more exasperated at this and when he’d extend a hand to tag out Kamala would just walk away again, oblivious to it all. When DiBiase took matters into his own hands and tagged himself out a bit too forcefully Kamala immediately waylaid him. There was a great spot where DiBiase had Taylor in the heel corner while Kamala had gone AWOL again, then Taylor started firing back, but as he turned to bolt over to his own corner Kamala had come in the ring somewhere else and shut him down with a thrust kick, the camera swinging around to catch it like a jump scare. Kamala’s running splash looked great as always and I loved his falling palm thrusts to the throat as a cutoff. The finish also ruled, with DiBiase loading the glove and clocking Kamala by accident, Kamala obviously swinging on him in response, Reed and Taylor capitalising on the mayhem.
Jim Duggan v Kamala (Mid-South, 4/15/85)
I watched a couple Duggan/Kamala singles matches years ago and at its best it’s a match up full of mayhem. This was an earlier iteration of it, before Akbar tried to blind Duggan with a fireball, so it wasn’t as chaotic as some of their later matches. It was maybe even a little subdued, although the crowd not being as nuclear hot as most Mid-South crowds around this time might’ve contributed to the feeling of that. They packed a decent amount into eight minutes and you could tell they weren’t ready to go all out on it anyway, Duggan always being thwarted by Akbar’s bullshit before he could really turn loose. The ref’ bump finish with Duggan eating a chair shot keeps things ticking along as well.
We'll come back for part 2 in a couple days. Perhaps.
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