khawk20

I need to get this book, but buying it for my ereader was still pretty pricy the last time I checked. I have heard and read nothing but good things from old school fans about how it is written and the level of detail. Sounds amazing.

Dammit Parv, you need to put a SPOILER tag on posts like that!!!!!

Really? If he does he's the only one. That has never made it out to trading circles. Maybe he has some other rare Backlund as well? If someone is successful in getting that match from Backlundfan please let me know. I do have a collection of Backlund filmed matches from the 70's that I would be willing trade (amongst other things) if he is looking for something return. Blackwell mark that I am, I would LOVE to see him and Bob wrestle, even though the Blackwell in the WWF pales character-wise to the Blackwell of the AWA.

Fight hard, man...and stay as positive as you can.

Watched a ton of Brick's WWF 1987 set today. Great stuff. I may crank 88 up tonight if the Hawks-Canucks game ends up sucking.

I suspect the reasoning behind not doing that is they wouldn't want you or I to look at the schedule, not see anything being added in the next three months that we like, and then cancelling our sub until we do see something we want or like.

I can't believe I'm older than he was. Puts things in perspective pretty quick. RIP

Began watching the next AWA Superstars episode. There's definitely a sense of "Verne left for the evening and we are unsupervised" feel to the wraparounds, as the next episode begins with Larry Nelson sitting on the floor with a woman named Kathleen (another Gagne daughter?) who is covering his face with Shamrock stickers because it's St. Patrick's Day. It's been said on many a shoot by different former AWA guys that Verne didn't even watch the TV when it was hot. So, Nelson et al doing whatever they pleased makes a lot of sense. Why not have fun with it?

You know, Larry Nelson talked about what I think was this show in his book, and I remember thinking to myself at the time "I don't remember ever seeing that show", especially with how randomly weird it seemed to be in terms of presentation with Larry. My guess is it was something syndicated in small doses, perhaps in the Minneapolis area so the "home" Base had some sort of different or local content, but that show, besides what Larry talked about in his book, is unfamiliar to me.Talked to one other big AWA guy that I know and he's never seen it either. Would love to see a match/segment list if anyone wants to break it down when they watch it.

So is KHawks. My heart explosion is being saved for if they go back to 70's and 81-83 TV uploads. This is very encouraging though.

Yeah it was pretty brilliant on Vince's part. It was common practice to send footage or interviews from an area a wrestler was leaving to the area he was going (There is a Greg Valentine interview conducted by Vince talking about Greg coming to the AWA, for example, that has appeared on some AWA specials over the years). So, when Vince came calling to showcase footage from other areas on his All American show, I think a lot of promoters didn't think twice...better exposure for their own current stars in major markets, right? Then after Vince had introduced a bunch of those wrestlers via footage sent to him, he promptly took them from their other promotion. WWF fans were already a little familiar with them because of that. Even more brilliant was not just taking footage of guys he was planning to poach. Gagne and Brunzell, for example, were not leaving Verne for new York. It's also why you get footage from other areas in libraries that don't make sense sometimes. There was an Iron Sheik vs. IIRC Butch Reed match on an AWA PPV years back, for example. It's why Bruce Tharpe has AWA studio matches and maybe a few others in the Houston Library...sent along to promote someone incoming.

JIngus: Can't use the quote function at work for some reason, but I did not mean it to come across as "If you weren't there you wouldn't get it" or that general vibe. The division was there back then too, I concur, but in the present tense there are less of us that are in the "Camp 1" Gagne-supporter group as opposed to when the AWA was running full tilt. It's a great point about Heenan and other workers of the day, and it extended to fans too, no doubt. It actually helps the argument about how Divisive opinions on Greg are, and were.

Excellent idea!

Greg Gagne. There are two distinct camps with Greg: Camp 1 states that Neopotism is the only reason he ascended to the top of the tag ladder with Brunzell, that he was not believable as a worker, and so forth. A lot of this camp were first exposed to Greg in the dying days of the AWA (when Greg was past his prime but still prominent...he could be trusted not to bolt, after all). Camp 2 are people that both saw Greg actually wrestle back in the 70's and early 80's (admittedly there are less and less of us around now) and recognized that while he was Verne's son, he was a good worker and a good talker in his own right, AND people that have watched his footage with a critical eye and found him "not nearly as bad as they had heard, and cast just about perfectly within the AWA structure of wrestlers" in that same 70's/80's time frame. Each camp is a loose representation of what I have encountered over the decades in terms of people's attitudes and opinions about Greg and the AWA in general, but trust me, for AWA guys, there has never been someone that had the "He's great/he sucked" dynamic argued over more.

I'm old. Sometimes it helps.

I cut this from the Bockwinkel RIP thread, I was about to talk about this at the very end, when we got cut off, to close the show... *** Back about a decade ago (maybe a little more even), I sent a tape of some of Bock's matches to a friend that lived in Vegas to give to Nick at one of the CAC weekends that he was going to. Nick actually took the time to videotape a personalized thank you note to me after he got the tape from my friend, on the spot, in the middle of everything else he was involved with at the CAC. Extremely classy to do something like that and it confirmed that his style and class wasn't just an act, it was a real thing. RIP Champ.

Bob Backlund vs. Adrian Adonis MSG February 1982 says "Hello"... ...and probably a bazillion other personal choice Grail-ish matches each of have stashed in our "Please relase the goddamned thing!" pile in our brains...

He's on most of the ones I've seen. He may be a funny comedian (I have no idea), but as a talking head, he's about as effective as any random fan would be - not very. He's a regular on @Midnight with Chris Hardwick, and he's always throwing old-school wrestling references in on that show. Huge fan. He dressed as Ric Flair and did the Flair character for the whole Halloween episode. He's very funny on that show, I like him.

Nick Bockwinkel being assigned as the Special Referee for the Larry Zbyszko-Mr. Saito rematch in St. Paul after Saito won the title in Japan a few months previous. Larry went ballistic because he expected Nick to screw him over (since Saito was his long-time tag partner and he and Curt Hennig had hurt and retired Nick from wrestling three years prior). Then, in a classic bely-to-back-suplex-into-a-pin-combo, Nick counts three and everyone assumes Saito has retained the title...but Nick had actually noticed Larry lift his shoulder at the two count and had, in fact, counted out Saito, thereby allowing Larry to regain the title. The look on Larry's face when he figured out that he had won was great, but the post-match interview with Larry is absolutely fantastic. It's a neat little thing from the end days of the AWA so it doesn't get much love, but it followed a regular thing Verne tried to do...remembering past feuds and playing off of them. Bock-Larry started feuding in 1985, and looked to have concluded finally after Nick was hurt in August of 1987 as noted previously by Larry and Curt...but those underlying feelings and the feud itself were brought back, noted, and even celebrated in this bit from 1990, and Nick holding his intergrity and counting out Saito was sort of a swerve (especially if one remembers the Larry-Bock 1987 Vegas match where Nick blasted Larry with a roll of quarters in full view of refere Scott LeDoux...Nick screwing Larry was almost a given, there was so much glee in Bock's face when he did it in 87) pointed towards how the history of a feud indeed mattered in the AWA. FWIW I think Saito and Bockwinkel ahd a match in early 1991 in Japan (possibly on the same card as Thesz-Chono), but I do not know if there was any sort of reference to their bad feelings after Saito was counted out by Nick. I like to think that if the AWA was still remotely viable by that point that they would have noted it and furthered the history of Bock-Larry-Saito even more. It would have been both fitting and consistent. If that bit is on youtube check it out...especially if Larry's post-match promo is attached to it. Great stuff.

RIP to one of my two favourites of all time. Such a classy man. Back about a decade ago (maybe a little more even), I sent a tape of some of Bock's matches to a friend that lived in Vegas to give to Nick at one of the CAC weekends that he was going to. Nick actually took the time to videotape a personalized thank you note to me after he got the tape from my friend, on the spot, in the middle of everything else he was involved with at the CAC. Extremely classy to do something like that and it confirmed that his style and class wasn't just an act, it was a real thing. RIP Champ.

A bit of a different spin for myself...Larry Zybysko as AWA Champion. I hated he was the Champ because of how it looked compared to the NWA/WCW Champion and the WWF Champion at the same time. I mean, there was just no comparison, and it spoke volumes to me about how far things had fallen for my favourite promotion, that I hated seeing him out with the belt week after week, knowing there was nobodyaround to beat him that could be thought of on the level Hogan, Warrior and Flair were. Larry's success was a constant reminder of the failure of the AWA, and I hated that he held the title because of that. Larry as the mid/upper card heel without a title was a different story entirely. Him with that belt though....fuck I hated that.

Ox Baker and The Russian Brute, circa 1989-90 AWA. Awful.