PeteF3

Remember Shamrock was a wrestler first (working SAPW as Mr. Wrestling Vince Torelli) and a UFCer second. Still, there was a point when I was going through AJPW '90s TV that I got more excited about bizarro random imports than about the upcoming Misawa/Jumbo 6-man. I'm not sure anything will top longtime WWF TV guy Brian Costello showing up in '94, though the State Patrol, Barry Horowitz, Randy Rose, and Sunny Beach all come close. That, and Prince Iaukea (the original one and real son of Curtis, not the WCW guy) and his gimmick of throwing a giant net on his opponent before the bell. Also: Joe LeDuc's two-taping run in the WWF circa 1989. Got Frenchy Martin as a manager, lost to a prelim by DQ for excessive headbutting in the corner, lost to Tito Santana, and appeared in his most prominent role at Randy Savage's coronation and ensuring decades of Internet people asking, "Who was that guy?" High Chief Afi debuting as Bobby Heenan's new charge, slapping hands with the fans on the way down the aisle, and not even getting the pin in his debut 6-man before disappearing. Weirder than pre-paint, pre-savage Kamala turning up on WOS would be Tyler "Big Sky" Mane as The Skywalker, doing a one-off match with Pat Roach. I didn't even know Mane was wrestling that far back.

Hector Guerrero as the Gobbledygooker. Why do you even need to book a wrestler for that? Was there actually a plan to have him wrestle at some point?

Showapuroresu.com says that was his only NJPW tour pre-'90s. He did work in the UWF in 1985, but obviously wouldn't have met Fujinami there.

Definitely remember The Man name from PWI. If it's legit, it may have just been for an odd house show and maybe just a placeholder name.

I think the "held back" question was a joke relating to how 47-year old Raven and 41-year old Dreamer were kayfabe classmates.

"Bad patriot" was Sgt. Slaughter's gimmick in the summer of 1990 before he was hitched full-tilt to the Gulf War. Before Adnan was brought in, Slaughter's beef was with Americans going soft by cheering that pinko commie Nikolai Volkoff, and in fact I think some of his early vignettes actually criticized the U.S. for not invading Iraq. Traces continued afterward. There's the match in the Tito Appreciation Thread where Slaughter tries to force Santana to salute the Iraqi flag after cutting an anti-immigrant promo.

Sorry, I went from talking about the babyface retaining the title Dusty-style to talking about the Dusty Finish in general (which happened quite a lot with Bockwinkel). It does make a bit more sense with a heel champ but it was still overdone.

Actually from a geographical and style standpoint, Gagne should be Terry Ryan. Not to derail this from the AWA/wrestling talk but Jerry Jarrett was very Beane-esque as well. ECW took a lot from Memphis so of course that comparison is going to hold up, but I'll concede that Heyman was able to build up a cult following as a "mastermind" that Jarrett really didn't and that would put him closer to Beane's level.

Verne Gagne = Billy Beane? They've both had movies made about them, too. Martel's innate Frenchiness may well have prevented him from ever being a truly top-tier draw in the U.S. when Verne needed a champ on Slaughter or Blackwell's level. That said, it's hard to get a babyface World Champion to draw when he can't seem to beat anybody. Other than the return bout with Jumbo in St. Paul (?) and the blowoff bouts with Zhukov, it seems every Martel defense ends with him getting pinned and the new heel champion getting screwed out of the belt--in my mind, just as backwards as the common WWF complaint where the heel is often in control ready to make the pin when the bell rings for a draw. With whom are the fans' sympathies supposed to lie in these situations? Like any finish it might be okay in moderation, but it was not only insanely overdone throughout AWA history (I'm guessing much more often than any promotion Dusty booked) but it made Martel look weak--at least to this after-the-fact observer--when he couldn't retain his title over Michael Hayes or Jimmy Garvin without help from Wally Karbo.

You could argue that it was "class-based" but that's totally Andy Kaufman in Memphis. Tammy Fytch in Smoky Mountain too, for that matter.

No correlation between Vince getting Hayes and his departure from the AWA. Hayes was out of the AWA by mid 1980, and it wouldn't surprise me if Hayes didn't start for Vince in early 1984 but not earlier. Hayes is backstage interviewing the Iron Sheik after his WWF title victory, so he pre-dated expansion by a tiny bit, but it can't have been by much. He had a in '82, managing guys like King James and Billy Robinson and also doing commentary, leading to a feud with fellow commentator Johnny Weaver.

Other pre-'80s guys besides Berry who seem most qualified: Dr. Ken Ramey, Saul Weingeroff (deserves special recognition for the sheer audacity of a stereotypical Jew managing two Nazis in the Von Brauners), Prof. Boris Malenko, Sam Bass, J.C. Dykes, and Bobby Davis. And Bobby's year-long stint in Georgia shouldn't be overlooked, either. I admit he was kind of a weird fit for the territory but it was a fresh new setting for him at a time when he needed one.

Getting back to Solie with partners, his GCW partnership with Roddy Piper (who pre-dated Ventura as far as being a national, permanent heel color man) is generally well-thought-of. Solie's dignified, low-key approach combined with Piper's manic screeching sounds like a train wreck but they did have chemistry together and it's a big part of what made the angle where Piper saves Solie from Don Muraco so memorable. Solie & Buddy Colt were a longtime team in Florida but Colt didn't add much. It was thought that a cripple like Colt couldn't be a heel announcer so he was made into a babyface, which didn't suit him at all. Solie & Bobby Heenan at various times in WCW was a train wreck. Actually the biggest problem is Solie laughed at Heenan too much, even when Heenan was making fun of him directly. I'd like to know if Solie & Ventura ever teamed up. They were in WCW together for awhile and I'm curious if either one did at least a fill-in on the other's show.

Robinson has the Comiskey Park main event with Verne on his resume (22,000 in 1974 and the biggest event in AWA history to that point, maybe ever or up there with Super Sunday). Someone else is going to have outline specifically what he did or didn't draw in Japan, but his match with Inoki was a big, BIG deal and upon jumping to AJPW he was positioned at the top of the card for several years and given the PWF Heavyweight title, so Baba must have had some faith in him. "Drawing" in the UK is a whole other matter and it was probably not even considered when he was decided on (pretty sure Billy was a charter member), but he was clearly a top-of-the-line draw among heavyweights, on the level of Kendo Nagasaki and Albert Wall. There are other little things, like Memphis main events while Jerry Lawler was on the shelf for a year. I have no problem buying Robinson as a bigger draw than Ivan.

The first black heel of any note (maybe the first ever, period). That was a pretty bold move at the time and has to count for something, though I'm not sure how much. Not saying it's enough to keep him out, but if work is a factor then he's going to get docked. Even his biggest fans admit that he wasn't much in the ring and got by on presence and likability far more than skill. I can't fathom how he could have been as big of a deal as Bobo, either, and once we start talking about "second-biggest" I personally start looking elsewhere. (Which, again, doesn't mean "no"--but it's pretty unlikely). Colt is still alive. It was Bobby Shane who died in the same plane crash, while Colt had his career ended. Stuck around for almost the entire rest of CWF's existence as a color commentator, though not a good one, thanks to being miscast as a babyface. I have to think he's in that category with Magnum T.A., Bo Jackson, and J.R. Richard. Even if he was HOF-bound, he didn't actually get there.

Sometimes it was the same as syndie TV, where they were on an elevated set-up back near the wrestler entrance. Other times it was upstairs in the pressbox. Heenan has always talked about being told to watch the monitors and not the ring when doing commentary. That's how they were able to react to certain camera shots and to people running in and so forth.

The Tito/Savage no-DQ match from MSG. Not just Gorilla to be fair, but also Alfred Hayes and Ernie Ladd on color analysis. Even though Finkle shouts plain as day that there are no disqualifications, the three completely ignore that and spend the whole match bitching about the officiating and screaming for Savage to be DQ'd. I'm sort of agnostic about Gorilla as a HOF candidate and lean more towards the positive side than negative when looking at him overall. But that one match was a great one that I find to be a very tough watch because of the announcing.

If you want an example of actually using a football background to get somebody over instead of just to blither, Bill Watts knew how to do it with Jim Duggan. Duggan didn't just play for SMU (back when they were a powerhouse), he was the "wedge-buster" on kickoffs--i.e., the craziest most suicidal position on the roster. It was also where Duggan developed his flying tackle finisher. Even the WWF telling us Jim Neidhart quit the L.A. Raiders because it "wasn't rough enough" worked, goofy as it was (plus the Raiders themselves are sort of American sports shorthand for cheating and underhandedness). In the abstract, football and athletic backgrounds are just fine. Hell, when Brian Jordan played baseball for the Dodgers, even Vin Scully would often relate his NFL career to the game at hand. If Scully does it, that makes it okay in my book. That said, Ross did tend to overdo it and many times it was counterproductive, like talking about Stan Hansen's alleged career with the Baltimore Colts. I don't need to be told about how Stan fucking Hansen was a football washout, thanks. As an aside for Lex, thanks to Ross he's the only wrestler whose college GPA I know (3.8).

I'd say the playoff system, which is inherent in all American sports to a degree not seen almost anywhere in soccer, is a much bigger impediment to any one team (or small group of teams) dominating a league year after year. Imagine if the Premier League standings meant nothing except seeding for the FA Cup (okay, and imagine seeding for the FA Cup). One bad leg could knock ManU or Chelsea out of championship consideration, the same way the New York Yankees can buy everybody they can, dominate in the regular season, and then trip up in the first round of the postseason against Detroit.

Dusty was still much higher on the pecking order than Tito (and the WWF roster at this point was just absurdly imbalanced in favor of the babyfaces, and it would get worse before it got better with Boss Man turning and Von Erich arriving). I don't know for a fact but I'm guessing that it was Akeem doing 99% of the jobs in the tag title matches, as he did in the 6-man at SummerSlam. Obviously you're not going to have Dusty going over the BBM on a Survivor Series preview show, but Beefcake was also on that team and he was actually in a higher spot than team captain Rhodes. None of this should be read as a complaint, as this is probably Tito's last major win (trying to block that Jeff Jarrett fiasco from memory) and Lord knows we'd all rather see Tito in that match than Brutus. I still just find the result very odd.

Two mindblowing things about this: Boss Man busting out a frigging Doctor Bomb as a fairly throwaway move, and Santana going over. I mean, Boss Man's time as the #1 heel in the company was over and Santana wasn't quite the JTTS he'd become as El Matador, but that still surprises me that even with Dusty interfering that they'd give Santana a pinfall here, to the point where I wonder if it wasn't a punishment of some sort for the Boss Man. EDIT: Piper name-dropping Truman Capote at the ad break would be a third one.

Punisher was the future Bull Buchanan.

Does Doug Furnas count in either category? He did have a "World's Strongest Man" gimmick in the U.S., after all. Not at Patera or Henry's peak level and not the best worker of his team (the Can-Ams, that is...not Doug & Mike Furnas), but I'd put him comfortably ahead of Scott Steiner and Davey Boy.

Poffo had a gimmick (poetry and Frisbees), a nickname, and did get some house show wins (specifically I remember seeing him win on Prime Time over Jose Estrada and Sika). Even in quick syndie matches he got an offensive flurry that a regular scrub wouldn't get. That's enough for him to definitely be at SD's level, even before the Genius push.

At one point early on in the WM8 hype for the match, it was teased that Hogan vs. Sid would have a guest referee. That idea was quickly dropped. It may not fit this thread because without any actual knowledge of the plans, it would make sense that this guest ref would be the Ultimate Warrior, who returned anyway. Or was someone else in mind for that spot?