khawk20

I'd love to see those but I doubt they were taped.

Going back to the Duluth AWA Card I saw and posted about in the House Show thread, I remember before the Larry Hennig-Michael hayes match started, someone threw something at Hayes that missed and hit hennig square in the eye, causing it to swell up instantly. hayes had to run over right away and attack the eye to cover it. I don't remember if it ruined the match or not but it likely sent it down a different path since Larry's swollen eye was Haye's focus from then on out.

My earliest live show memory is from around 1980-81-ish. Lars Anderson's World League Wrestling promotion began airing on Duluth TV which we got as our ABC/NBC/CBS affiliates. They began to run the local arena a month or so after getting on TV. If I'd have watched it as an adult I probably wouldn't have liked it so much, but as a twelve year old (or so) I was mesmerized...Lars Anderson defending against "The Bounty Hunter", complte with a false title change and blood. Also a Tommy Rich knockoff ("Timmy Rich", if you can believe it) wrestling another lighter weight guy whose name escapes me (I think he was a Duggan...weird, I know), and JR Hogg and Cousin Jed, a hillbilly face team. Good stuff there. The run International Wrestling out of Montreal had here was phenomenal. That was 1986-87. Bigger names including Gino Brito & Tony parisi, Dan Kroffat and Alofa, Abdullah the Butcher, Hercules Ayala, and Steve Strong, plus the debut of "Billy Fury", aka Vampiro, on their second show. I think they were actually pretty stunned they did as well as they did...the first two or three shows were sold out (over 6,000 capacity), and they were still drawing 2500 - 3000 when the promotion folded. Probably my favourite show was a summer 1985 Duluth, MN house show that had a great Ray Stevens/Nick Bockwinkel vs. Greg Gagne/Sgt. Slaughter match, with Larry Hennig vs. Michael hayes and Buck Zumhofe vs. Boris Zurkov on the undercard.

Biggest one for me, by far.

I miss the days where the mere suggestion of possible impropriety within a territories "higher ups" was enough to get you thinking. Nick Bockwinkel being awarded the AWA title by Stanley Blackburn in 1981 after Verne retired is a good example of that. Heels, faces and the magazines of the time all publicly decried the decision and suggested there were shenanigans afoot. No on-air maniacal GM or President to confirm it, rather a few very politically worded interviews on air and in print from the possibly corrupt person. The rest was left up to your imagination. I liked that. Dusty's first title win over Harley Race in 1979 and the ridiculous stips attached to his rematch is another example.

I don't know if Buck was drunk, but I had this story e-mailed to me by a guy I was talking with on KM about some AWA stuff. This e-mail was from December 12, 2003: This happened in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Don Fargo during his brief stint as an AWA jobber in Vegas in 1986. It felt like he could give you a disease just looking at you.

I did not know this.

Getting Slaughter to win the title from Backlund in December 1983, and then get him into the Iron Sheik feud around the same time it actually happened, to turn him while he was holding the belt *might* have done it. I would argue that the Sheik-Slaughter feud might have even been hotter if the title was included in the mix. All Vince would have had to do was delay his expansion plans by 6 months or so. Slaughter-Sheik would have been a helluva main event to debut with in Minneapolis, or Chicago, or wherever else they wanted to begin their expansion drive. Could it be sustained after Sheik? That is another question entirely, although the Patriot vs. the foreign heel dynamic was something that they could have mined for some time.

They did some Greg Valentine promos (done by Vince in front of the WWF set) where Valentine was announcing that he was coming to the AWA. PWI and a few other Apter Mags even rated Greg in their AWA Top 10 for a month upon that bit coming out. Valentine never ended up coming in. The AWA would often have guys do interviews on coming in or back from the territory they were currently working in. As an example, Blackjack Mulligan did a heel promo on the Florida set with Solie in January 1984 before coming in to be Bockwinkel's tag partner for a St. Paul clash between them and Crusher/Vachon (eventually morphing into a Blackjacks reunion for a few months). Mulligan, as far as I know, was a face in Florida at that time. Further to that, the AWA returned the favour when necessary. Baron Von Raschke, in the midst of being as popular a face in the AWA as there was, did a promo or two with Okerlund while in the AWA talking about coming into the Mid-Atlantic to feud with Jimmy Valiant, doing the promo as a full heel. This bit obviously never aired on AWA TV, just Mid-Atlantic Television, as it would have completely contradicted the Baron's good guy persona at the time. i assume the Mulligan Florida heel promo was for AWA-eyes only, too, for the same reasons.

I'm into some high-alcohol beer and making AWA Super Mix #42, which includes an extremely rare Zurkov/Ustinov (AWA Tag Champs) vs. Midnight Rockers non-title match, from Continental TV of all places. Martinez-Macklin on HBO Boxing is also on while I'm doing this and it's a pretty good tilt.

His TV title win on UWF TV over Buddy Roberts was the first time I ever saw him. I'm surprised you never ran across him in that time frame of UWF TV as I would ahve assumed it was the most commonly seen Mid-South area stuff before video trading was popular.

Dylan may have recently watched enough of these guys to give them a try here: J.T. Southern Soldat Ustinov The Russian Brute Tommy Jammer Mitch Snow

I've always been a big fan of this match. I'll also second the Adonis/Murdoch vs. the Briscos match from 12/84 at MSG.

Bobby Heenan, 1980-81, AWA. For starters. I was watching some 80-81 AWA stuff last night and even though I've seen the matches and angles dozens of times, it never fails to amaze me how hated Heenan was in that time frame....and that might not even have been the worst of his heat (his Chicago stuff from the 70's, for example).

Everybody has their own personal line for stuff like that. Mine was the Papa Shango-Ultimate Warrior Voodoo angle, which put me off of watching pretty much any wrestling for two or three years at least. Everybody's brain is wired differently in terms of the "this is too stupid even for me and I feel embarassed watching it" signal. We all have it, though.