With a longer heat segment and a halfway proper finish this is one of the best tag matches of the 80s. As is, it's merely an awesome match that's one of the best tags of 1986. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. This crowd is absolutely fucking molten for the newly-turned Nikita and Dusty is also perhaps somewhat over so obviously the atmosphere is bonkers. We get 10 minutes of Flair and Tully bumping and stooging and showing a GARGANTUAN amount of ass and it was glorious stuff. Flair backs Dusty into the corner on a collar and elbow tie-up, then starts to back away clean so he can show how good a sport he is. He doesn't take more than one step before Dusty slaps him clean across the face, in no mood for any of the shit he's seen Flair pull a million times before. Flair is almost flabbergasted and definitely livid. Dusty was bamboozling everyone with his footwork and rhythm and hypnotic HIPS, blitzing Flair with punches and elbows and it's nearly impossible to conceive of a crowd that could eat anything up more than this crowd ate this up. There's one sequence where Dusty took on both Flair and Tully at the same time, unloading with those punches and elbows, stopping to bonk JJ on the apron who takes an amazing tangled up bump in the ropes, before putting the exclamation on it with a double knife edge chop, and it was as close to impeccable as you can get. Flair spits on Nikita so Nikita asks the crowd if they want him to get in the ring and let me tell you there is not a single thing this crowd could want more than that. Flair goes flying off a tie-up, Nikita points to his biceps, the place erupts. Then they did it again and the place erupted more and sometimes it doesn't need to be difficult. Nikita shrugs off a vertical suplex before cleaning house with the sickle, and there's a wide shot of him standing tall in the middle of the ring while Flair and Tully lie motionless on separate sides of the apron, Dusty coming in to rev things up another gear and I could watch this 27 hours a day no problem. The heels take over for a spell when they go after Dusty's hand, the one that the Horsemen broke during a recent parking lot mugging, and it was a wonderful three minutes. If they kept it going for seven I think someone might've tried to jump the barricade. This was particularly evident by how a GOODLY amount of people were fully irate when Flair thrusted his hips in their general direction. Him and Tully stomp on Dusty's hand, punch it, wrap it around the ropes and twist, Flair drops the knee on it, JJ wallops it with a shoe, then they exploit Nikita's soviet temper by drawing him in so they can both try and break the hand together. I thought the timing was weird on Dusty making his comeback, how he just sort of grabbed Tully in a figure-four abruptly, but you gotta love Nikita STEAMING across the ring to cut off Flair with so much venom he nearly piledrives himself horizontally into the turnbuckles. I don't remember top rope moves resulting in DQs many other times in Crockett so it felt like a bit of a cop out here. Again though, a few more minutes in the heat, a relatively decent finish, and this is up there with the reddest of red hot tags of the 80s.
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