I was originally intending on watching the whole show, but time has been limited of late and so I cherry-picked. The Garvin/Bubba Louisville (or was it Louisiana?) street fight was a super fun 10 minutes. I considered watching the Flair/Nikita main event but I chose to spend that half-hour doing not that. Maybe another day.
Dusty Rhodes v Tully Blanchard (First Blood Match) (Starrcade, 11/27/86)
I loved all of the horse shit at the start of this. You've got three guys who are god-tier heatseekers in JJ, Tully and Dusty and they decided they wanted the people rabid for blood before the bell even rang. The people in question wanted to see Dusty punch and elbow Tully in the head enough times that it cut him open. That very thing had happened often enough that JJ and Tully both knew it was a very real possibility again, and if it happened here then that would be the match. So JJ decided to bring some head gear and somehow couldn't understand why that wouldn't be allowed. He tried applying vaseline on Tully's face and couldn't believe that was against these particular rules either. Earl Hebner is generall a terrible referee but his penchant for overexcitement worked great here because he was blowing a gasket at everything, which in turn seemed to rile everyone else up in the process. JJ getting clobbered with a bionic elbow and bleeding over his white shirt is quite the visual and I love him subsequently yelling at Tully about the importance of covering up. It made you buy into the gimmick before the wrestles themselves had even touched. Tully is sublime getting knocked around while trying to avoid being hit in the face. Dusty has to take out the legs so Tully can't run, throw body shots to open up blows to the head, and Tully eats it all better than just about anyone in history. With the way they build up to that first elbow to the head the people legitimately believe it could be a match-ender. You knew Tully would get desperate before too long and sure enough he grabs one of JJ's shoes as a weapon. Hebner has been cleaned out at this point after getting caught under a suplex, so when Dusty takes the shoe you think he's about to give Tully everything he's earned. I kind of love that instead he just throws the shoe aside and opts to beat Tully bloody with elbows and mounted punches. You can probably guess where things are going when Dusty tries to revive our boy Earl, JJ using the distraction to clean Tully up with a towel and vaseline. Not for the first time in 1986 Tully managed to save his own bacon with a roll of coins, clocking Dusty with a fistful of them, Hebner coming to just as Dusty sits up bleeding like a pig.
A really great tag match, one of the very best Crockett produced in a year where they produced a goodly amount of them. They wanted to establish right away how dangerous that cage could be as Arn and Ole never even bothered targeting an arm or leg, instead trying to throw Gibson's face into the cage. Gibson was always a step ahead and there's nobody like Arn when it comes to getting caught between the ropes and the cage and getting the back of their head repeatedly slammed into steel. The RnRs were super aggressive early on and I loved how whenever it looked like an Anderson was about to come in and double up, Morton and Gibson would beat them literally to the punch. They knew better than anybody how the Horsemen operated and Morton especially understood what it was like to be locked in a cage with one. Eventually the Andersons do take over when Gibson misses a high knee in the corner and Arn seizes his opportunity, smashing the leg off the cage. The heat segment isn't the longest but it's excellent stuff, which shouldn't really be a surprise. Then when Morton tags in it takes about 1.8 seconds for the Andersons to cut him off. There was no time at all for Morton to build momentum, this was instant and it told the broader story of the match from the Andersons' perspective. As soon as they saw their chance to take control they would, and from there they wouldn't let it be relinquished. It meant running plenty of distractions, cutting the ring off and liberal interference, one of them hooking Morton by the leg so he couldn't crawl away while the other came in and measured their next shot. The attack on Morton was two-pronged. First they went to work on his bloodied up face, just like every Horseman did when they were in there with Ricky Morton, especially when surrounded by a cage. It was driven to begin with by Flair earlier in the year, almost entirely born of insecurity, but all four of them were intent on disfiguring the guy and the best way to do that here was smash his face into the cage and grate it up and down the steel mesh. The second point of attack was Morton's arm, because these are the Andersons after all and I guess old habits die hard. As you'd imagine Morton was incredible and it's one of his very best beatdowns, building and building heat until the place was molten. When it looked like Morton had finally managed to turn the tide with a DDT on Arn, Ole came in IMMEDIATELY and broke the count. That maybe rubbed off on Gibson because when Arn hit the spinebuster Gibson was straight in before the ref' counted to one. Those moments created a sense that both teams believed it could end at any moment, especially when looking at it from the RnRs' side given how much punishment Morton had taken. The finish played into that a bit while also being unexpected. It averted the expectation of the hot tag, of Morton rallying and getting Gibson in, of recovering enough himself for one last push. That tag never came and instead Gibson, coming in to thwart yet another Anderson double-team, saw an opening to save Morton and the belts along with him. Gibson even sold that leg until the very end and both crawled out the cage beaten and bloody. The Andersons looked like a well-oiled machine, but on the night they were a step slower than the champions. I guess it pays to be resourceful.
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