khawk20

Made a really nice find that arrived today, a 4-hour dvd convert of the first Winnipeg AWA TV from Norberry Auditorium in August 1984-onward. Arena promos galore for the Winnipeg shows. Quality is so-so but I've never seen a lot of this before and it doesn't appear to have circulated before. I picked this up from a guy that had some of the clips up on youtube. I don't usually have much luck with youtube guys for things like this (with a couple of exceptions), and it was like pulling teeth to get even this, but for an AWA guy like me this is a real score.

Martel's matches vs. Jumbo in Japan with Rick as AWA champ are very good. Martel also had a match with King Tonga in Montreal from 1984 that I put on my 1984 set that is decent.

Yeah, Tolos was in for a bit. He battled Lawler on the Super Sunday show the following month. Superstar Graham appearing for a few months from the end of 83 through January 1984 was, to me, more bizarre than Tolos coming in.

It would be interesting for folks to see that match with the original commentary (IIRC Rod Trongard did it live) to see if it changed their opinion/ranking of the match itself. While I'm confident that the posters here are adept at fighting through bad commentary and properly reviewing a match, seeing that one with the live commentary would certainly add to the experience when viewing it.

It is possibly the worst AWA commentated match ever.

Spent some time in Indy teaming with Dick the Bruiser, so there's that. Some of it exists on the Bob Luce films.

Been a while since I've seen jdw really "go".

Garvin would have been moving around some at that time. He came into the AWA shortly after that and won the TV title, and departed for the WWF in what, early 89?

To restore my credibility a little, I've been following the AWA Set talk from afar and have enjoyed virtually everything I've sampled from there - Rockers/Rose & Somers feud, Bock/Hennig, High Flyers/Sheiks cage, Hogan/Bock, Guerreros/Badd Company, etc. Just messing with you a little. If you ever decide to invest further into watching stuff from the area, shoot me a PM. There's lots of goodness there that didn't make the 80's set that is, IMO, worth checking into.

I know that there were a lot of face and heel interviews complaining about Bock getting the title on a silver platter in the months immediately after it happened (Jerry Blackwell going off about it in an interview comes to mind right away, with Bock and the Heenan Family coming out later to present a rebuttal), so they were smart enough to work what would be the normal, natural reaction of the other wrestlers in the area into the TV right after it happened. From a 'fabe standpoint, magazine wise, I don't remember the mags going off on the decision too badly but it was there. The mags were written so much differently that even if the writers of the mags were doing a head-shake at the decision, they would have mostly kept it to themselves. Editorial opinion was limited. From a fan standpoint, there was a lot of eye-rolling and, to a point, I believe it affected business a little bit. Bock's first title defense in the Twin Cities after getting the belt back was in June 1981 against Baron Von Raschke, who had just re-entred the area as Mad Dog Vachon's avenger against Blackwell and Studd. H was white hot as a face, so the matchup should have drawn a big house. It did not (The Minneapolis Auditorium is noticably empty for this matchup). Subsequently, Bock was programmed into a series against Sheik Kaissie (White hot as a heel wrestler, completely hated by everyone), which was able to draw sympathy for Bock as the default-face in their feud (they hated him less), and thus legitimize his claim to the title in the fans eyes. After that, fans were more forgiving and when Hogan came in a few months later and turned face, things got "back to normal", so to speak. The decision is looked at now as being awful with the full benefit of hindsight on any message board discussing the AWA, but, at the time, it only had a limited effect on business in the AWA and how the fans viewed the title.

Never mind those Lucha dudes, just never say anything bad about the AWA and you'll be fine.

In terms of kayfabe presentation, my recollection of mag portrayals of both pre-1986 (if a bar needs to be set, time-wise) falls in line with what you're trying to say.

Jerry, I don't know if you are old enough to have read the Weston/Apter mags (PWI, Inside Wrestling, etc.) from the 80's, but what you're saying here is almost exactly how Flair and Bockwinkel were portrayed by those magazines in kayfabe terms back then. What those mags never talked about were Bockwinkel's clean wins in blowoffs (by design, of course, to reinforce their portrait of his championship reign). Their writing angle was Bock only retained the title by cheating, at all costs, and that he couldn't win a match cleanly to save his life. Obviously not true but the idea behind their stories was to build the face challengers' obstacles they faced in trying to win the AWA title from Bock (from Heenan interfering, to Bock always disqualifying himself, to refusing to grant deserving guys title shots). Flair, on the other hand, was portrayed as the greatest thing since sliced bread from 1981-83. You'd have thought he was beating two guys at once in every title defense going by the articles of the day (and they always seemed to note that Flair actually DID beat guys, like Race, DiBiase, and others that you never heard about taking a pinfall loss cleanly, without something unusual happening to cause it). Where I think those mags ran into trouble was the WWF Expansion, where they literally had to start portraying the NWA as the vastly superior territory, and, by extension, built Flair into even more of a "greatest wrestler ever". At least for a little while. As Flair became more visible as Champion during the 84-88 period, it was impossible to hide his in-ring antics/cowardice/cheating from their articles, but the mags always implied that Flair could beat them on his own if he chose to do so. I therefore conclude, after reading Jerry's arguments in this thread, that JerryVonKramer is, in fact, Bill Apter (or maybe Steve Farhood).

I think someone that looked like Hawk took Jerry's lunch money at school every day while he was growing up.

I don't think so, personally. I've always seen Bockwinkel as more "foiled" than "weak" when he can't get any offense in, or his opponent is dominating him. As a compatriot of the ever-cowardly Bobby heenan, this is almost expected behavior in some respects.

I wouldn't think of it in terms of "fair", more in terms of a comparable that makes for an easy visual. Whether you agree with it or not you can see what he's saying.

He suffers, at a base level, because he was a JTTS for the WWF for so long before getting the gimmick. Most fans at the time, self included, could not look past that when watching him as a manager. I liked the gimmick, but it would have been infinitely better if he had been named "The Genius" right out of the gate when he arrived in the WWF circa 84-85. When you see Hogan and Beefcake teaming against Hennig and Poffo circa 1991, for example, it didn't feel like it could be a "competitive" matchup since the Genius had just spent several years losing to pretty much everyone. Plus his schtick on the mic was pretty much just "evil" Leaping Lanny, where the regular, poetry-reading Lanny was a dead gimmick a long time before that. Lots of potential for Poffo to excel in the role, but it happened too late.

Eek. If that's the case you must think I spend way to much time in the sun.

It would be worth tracking down a match or two from his AWA run circa 89-90 to see if he had improved much by the time he was in this match. Pretty sure he had a match with a "name" competitor or two in the AWA near the end.

The last one lacks the "lol" quality of the first three. He just included it so the post would have meaningless depth.

Never heard of it until now. Sounds...bizarre.