Cox

I'm sorry, but Roddy Piper gets permanent announcer immunity from me for his call of the first Saba Simba match. "THAT'S TONY ATLAS!"

He started doing this from early on. There is an otherwise-great backstage brawl in '92 between the Fantastics and the Heavenly Bodies, but Cornette pushes himself almost as an equal to the wrestlers, not really selling anything and getting occasional shots in when he should be cowering, hiding, or getting his butt kicked.

As an aside, if anybody has episodes 33 and 34 of SMW TV or knows where I can get them, please drop me a PM. As it turns out, my set was missing those two episodes.

Just watched the first Fire on the Mountain card. This show wasn't as clipped as the Volunteer Slam video, which was a plus, since they only showed five matches. From what aired: -Tim Horner/Buddy Landell was a disappointment. This was an I Quit match and it just wasn't violent enough to be a good I Quit match. I can understand saving some of the gimmicks for later in the show, but the next match showed just how to be a violent wrestling match with limited use of gimmicks. The problem seems to be Tim Horner got in too much offense, when one of his strengths is selling, and he's not great at bringing the hate-filled violence needed to make an I Quit work. Landell is pretty good at the hate-filled violence but wasn't bringing it like he normally does, maybe because he knew he was finishing up after this tour. They tried to do more of a mat-wrestling I Quit match, and after they had done a good job establishing this as a blood feud, it just didn't feel right. -Ron Garvin/Paul Orndorff was pretty enjoyable. Garvin rarely disappoints, and it's kind of surprising he didn't carve out a niche here in SMW as a babyface's tough-guy tag team partner for big events, as I think he could have excelled as a special attraction 1-2 times a year. Orndorff also brought it here more than I had seen in the past. Only downside here is the finish, this was a "piledriver" match where you had to hit the piledriver to win, and somehow Garvin won this match on a DQ, which seemed pretty lame. If you promote a piledriver match, you pretty much have to have one of the guys eat a piledriver, the only guy who got piledriven was Danny Davis. -Really enjoyed Rock 'n' Roll/Stud Stable, but I'm a Stud Stable mark so that was to be expected. One thing that was quite noticeable here was how much better the Rock 'n' Roll are than the Fantastics. Better workers, better double-team moves, oodles more charisma...this match was clearly the beginning of the end for the Fultons, especially since Japanese tours kept them from being around full-time. For their part, the Stud Stable unleashed a nice beating on Ricky and made this one fun. Looking forward to more stuff between these teams. -DWB/Lee wasn't as good as their match from Volunteer Slam, but wasn't bad. Lee took most of the match since he was losing, and Dirty White Boy did a good job selling for him and making him look good before the interference finish, which started the Sullivan/Lee feud. With DWB selling most of the match, it didn't have as much of his awesome beatdowns as I'd have liked, but it was overall an OK match. Looking forward to both of these guys doing other things, since I'm sure I'll have plenty of Lee/DWB matches to watch in '93 and '94. -Fantastics/Bodies was a fun hate-filled barbed wire cage with lots of blood. The Fultons both hit gushers in the barbed wire, and it felt like both teams were really trying to maim each other in the barbs. This might not hold up in a post-death match world, but I'm sure in 1992, this seemed crazy violent and scary. The post-match interview with Bobby and Jackie Fulton with them both looking bloody and scarred was pretty ghastly, and made it seem like they went through hell to win the tag team titles. Overall, a better show than the Volunteer Slam, though it felt a little overdone with gimmick matches. Every match on the show had some sort of gimmick, with White Boy having to leave SMW if he lost the match to Brian Lee, and an unaired taped fist match with Killer Kyle and Dixie Dy-no-mite also on the show, and it disappointed me that it didn't make the commercial video as I bet that was probably pretty good. It did make the show seem overcrowded, though, and I think it did hurt the Landell/Horner match since they couldn't use much in the way of gimmicks to get over the I Quit match. But overall, a good show.

I'll have more thoughts about various stuff later, but I just love how at one of the TV tapings, they have a wrestler flat-out wearing a swastika called "The Stormtrooper" and neither Bob Caudle nor Dutch Mantell find this particularly heinous. He's just casually a Nazi wrestling for Smoky Mountain Wrestling doing job work.

I put this on YouTube:

Which is why it's an absolute shame that he does so at a website that will harm your computer if you visit it.

I was actually doing this a lot on my UWC commentary until I was politely told to stop. I was ripping off a lot of old Gorilla stuff without realizing that some of it works against the matches.

Which of course, led to the funny Schiavone story where a friend of Beverly's had competed on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and lost when they had called Beverly for their lifeline and he had given the wrong answer. So Schiavone, on Nitro probably 8-10 years after Beverly had made that call, Schiavone says, "Mexico is bordered to the south by Guatemala, not Nicaragua, as everybody knows," the question Beverly had gotten wrong.

I think it's been said that Tony Schiavone didn't really work well with Heenan and Ventura because he came from a completely different school of wrestling announcing. He wasn't as good setting up their jokes and wasn't good at banter. He wasn't meant to play a straight man for a comedy routine, and he came from a sports background, and a territory that treated itself pretty seriously. It's why he didn't really last in WWF and why he never developed strong chemistry with the former WWF guys. I think he probably could have developed good chemistry with Tenay, but he also allegedly felt threatened that Tenay would one day take his job.

Did Mark Curtis manage DiBiase in this one? I thought I had read somewhere years ago that he did, which made me want to see the match since I've never seen Curtis' managerial work.

I think a regular standing dropkick could get over with our crowd. I bet the old lady with the cane would love it!

I'd say of the stuff I've seen so far, the clear highlight for me is Ron Wright. His promos are really great, and they've somehow managed to make the crippled guy in a wheelchair and made him villified for it. Between that and DWB bringing it in the ring every show, the two of them have been a real highlight.

I like his promos and such, but I just find him to be a bore in the ring. Who knows, maybe some of his TV matches will change my mind, but his match with Horner did nothing for me, and I'm a Horner fan.

So I wound up pretty disappointed by the Volunteer Slam overall. This was the commercial version, which clipped most of the matches on the show, in some cases severely (Brian Lee/Buddy Landell and Robert Gibson/Paul Orndorff are barely on here). Here's thoughts from what I did see: -Was disappointed that DWB/Dixie Dynomite was clipped, as I thought that looked like the best match on paper. Too bad. -I know there was a thread about this on the board, but Paul Orndorff sucks. There just seemed to be places in his match with Tim Horner where he didn't know what to do, so he'd stand around for a while before doing whatever it is he decided to do next. I think I'll like SMW more later in the year because they'll have a talent infusion (Morton, Smothers, Sullivan, Candido) but they'll also stop using Orndorff, who I won't miss at all. -Lee/DWB was probably the best match that they showed, with Gibson/Golden second. Gibson/Golden was good but not anything special, but I liked Lee/DWB, and thought it was a good brawl. They'll get plenty of other chances to be rematched in the future and I look to see how their matches progress, particularly when they switch roles 2 years later. -The finish was a total clusterfuck, though. First, Brian Lee wins the SMW heavyweight title on a DQ? What the H? They're pushing Lee as their top babyface and he can't win the tournament final by pinfall? Second, when Orndorff and DWB jump Lee after the match, Bob Armstrong runs in and pretty much singlehandedly clears out the ring and starts beating up pretty much everybody, I'm pretty sure I saw him take out Joey Maggs for absolutely no reason in the post-match brawl. Why is the commissioner coming out of this show looking stronger than the guy they were planning on building around? I'm not the biggest Brian Lee fan, but he deserved better than this. The poor guy needed all the help he could get, and this show did him no favors. No wonder he never got over as the top babyface. And I get that they probably wanted to protect Orndorff so they could do rematches, but if that's the case, beat Orndorff in the semifinals and let Lee pin DWB to end the tournament. I dunno, this left a bad taste in my mouth.

It seems like June is usually the month where WWE likes to try something different as a shock to the system, that they give up on before too long: June 2005: ECW One Night Stand June 2006: ECW on Sci Fi debuts June 2007: Vince McMahon's limo blows up June 2008: Raw set collapses, paralyzing Vince June 2010: Nexus debuts June 2011: Punk shoot promo (I'm sure something crazy happened in June 2009, but I can't remember what it was right now) They all seemed like cool, revolutionary things at the time, but before too long, it was business as usual. ECW was pretty much forgotten until a year later, ECW on Sci Fi basically became the new Velocity after a few months, Chris Benoit dying kind of ended the limo explosion, I don't think they ever did anything to explain what happened when the Raw set collapsed, and the Nexus was just another group after a few months. It seems like they always get to the same point this time of year, "Hey, we really need to do something to shake up the show, it's getting really stale," and then after a week or two, they backtrack on the whole thing.

He's almost definitely talking about Dustin. He worked a mini program with Dustin right before he got fired from WCW, back when Dustin was still taking some shit for being pushed hard by Dusty. He might have taken the "Daddy say sell" line from George Gulas but it seemed pretty clear he was bitching about Dustin to me.

Oh, and two things I left out of the original post: -Stan Lane's rug keeps distracting me. His hair suddenly and inexplicably became ten times thicker from one taping to the next. Even accounting for the time period and accounting for it being a rug, that hair style is ugly as hell. -Twice now, SMW has ran graphics saying "Jimmy Golden is hard to handle." Now, granted, he's using the Black Crowes song as his entrance music, but when you're a Fuller cousin and you're described as "hard to handle," well the jokes kind of write themselves.

I've watched all of the TV leading up to the Volunteer Slam, which I'll watch either tomorrow or Tuesday. -Paul Orndorff's heel turn was done really well. He went into a segment as a face, turned heel on the fans and Hector Guerrero, and it ended with four babyfaces laid out in the ring from the piledriver. In a promotion without any particularly big guys (well, Terry Gordy was around for a taping, but is already gone by this point), the piledriver almost makes Orndorff into a monster heel with the way it is protected and sold as a lethal move. He's also doing some pretty good dickhead heel promos too. -Doug Furnas makes a random TV appearance. I don't think he comes back again until '94 to introduce his brother Mike, who as far as I know, never really made it anywhere outside a small prelim role here. -The Heavenly Bodies won a tag team tournament that I'm guessing was all sorts of fucked up. First, the Koloffs missed a TV taping, which meant that in addition to the Fultons/Koloffs feud never getting a proper blowoff, they had one show with no tag team title tournament matches and another show with two (since Cornette was saving the debut of the Bodies for last). Then, I'm guessing the Fultons got pulled from the Volunteer Slam by AJPW (after Cornette had already moved the date once because of what he claimed were Japanese commitments) so instead of the tournament finals being at the Volunteer Slam, they were held in an impromptu match on TV which the Bodies won, and then they "injured" Jackie Fulton to keep them out for a while. Oh welll, at least they got the belts on the Bodies, even if the Volunteer Slam tag title match went from Bodies/Fantastics to Bodies/Rich Cousins, which is a lower marquee title match. -Feuds are starting to round into form. DWB/Lee is set up as Lee's first title defenses, Jimmy Golden/Robert Gibson is setting up the return of Ricky Morton down the road, the Bodies/Fantastics feud is starting to round into shape...with most of the top personalities set, it gives Cornette a chance to tell some stories now, so the TV, while not bad, should get better from here. -Brian Lee has looked a little better than he did at the beginning. I'm guessing getting regular work here is helping. I'll stop ripping on him for now, but I wish he would keep his height consistent in his promos. In one promo, he's 6'7", in another, it's 6'8". -Buddy Landell did a pretty hilarious interview leading up to the Volunteer Slam talking about his experiences in the other promotions where he was scolded for hitting other wrestlers too hard and the wrestlers crying backstage, "Daddy says sell! Daddy says sell!" Since this was a few months before Erik Watts debuted, I'm guessing he's talking about Dustin here? He also made reference to needing extra thick kneepads to work for the other company. Man, I loved Buddy Landell. I have to get that promo up on YouTube sometime. And of course, he brings the pain in the squash matches. -Speaking of bringing the pain in squash matches...man, Bob Holly killed poor Ben Jordan with a nasty top rope kneedrop during a squash match. Did the same to Bart Batten and he looked pretty pissed about it, kicking out right after the pin and no-selling it. And at this point, Bob Holly was pretty blatantly ripping off Bret's tights, wearing a black tanktop with the pink long tights. The only thing his gear was missing was "HITMAN" on his ass. Alas, I think Hollywood Bob has quit SMW by this point to go back to his stupid welding job, as they've stopped listing him for matches he was announced for a few weeks ago. -Something that could never happen today, and was pretty questionable even in 1992: Jimmy Golden using a dropkick as his finisher. Granted, Jimmy Golden throws a hell of a dropkick, especially impressive for a guy his size, and because he's so big, it looks believable enough for a guy with that height to be able to generate good power on a dropkick. But still...I'm guessing this is pretty much the last time any wrestler ever used a dropkick as a finish ever again, at least until I talk somebody in UWC into using it as a finish. Overall, fun stuff...I'm looking forward to checking out the Volunteer Slam.

That's strange, I used to live with two Jewish girls, and SLL or Bix can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but in the Jewish faith, you are considered Jewish if your mother is Jewish, which makes Rock a Samoan. Or Jewish, I'm not quite sure.

If it wasn't on a freaking Tuesday night, I'd probably buy a ticket too. Alas.

Some of the biggest marks are the ones who follow backstage elements.

Alright, I'm eight episodes in now, and they aren't running tapes from quite so long ago anymore. -Great promo work from Ron Wright and Bob Armstrong to set up Dirty White Boy debuting as Wright's new wrestler. Seriously, Bob Armstrong might be the best guy to ever pull off the no-nonsense commissioner role of all time. Also, you gotta love how politically incorrect the Ron Wright angle is. Here is a guy who is crippled and confined to a wheelchair, and somehow they've made him a heel out of all of this. -Kind of a shame the Koloffs missed a TV taping, which kept them from blowing off the Kolofs/Golden vs Fantastics feud. Nice to see Tommy Rogers back in the ring, as he looks fitter than either Fulton brother. Was he working anywhere at this point? Kind of weird that this was his only match here in SMW, and he did have that weird career revival in 1997 where he wrestled Fulton on Raw and then had a run in ECW. -Also a shame that Terry Gordy wound up going to WCW before the SMW heavyweight title tournament, as they pushed him for a few weeks as a major name to watch for in that tournament. I wonder how that affected plans? I'm guessing Gordy probably goes to the finals and loses to Lee, since his All Japan commitments would keep him from being in the territory regularly. -Loved the Rip Rogers/Tim Horner squats mini-angle, with Rip Rogers doing squats using a chair over the course of an entire episode of TV and then Tim Horner kicking the chair out right as he's about to end the show. Normally that would be kind of a dick heel move, but Rogers really sells being an annoying ass throughout the hour so by the time Horner kicks the chair out, you're begging somebody to do something similar. Just a nice little effective angle. I kind of hope Rogers is sticking around for a while. Overall, it feels like they're still trying to establish the guys in the territory and find roles for everybody, very much a feeling out process early on. The first couple of shows had the Fultons/Koloffs feud and the Mantell/Lee feud but those both feel as though they've largely been dropped by this point and there isn't a whole lot going on. I expect business to pick up with the tag team tournament starting. Very weird to see Rip Morgan and Jack Victory here in 1992, as I had no idea they were teaming this late, or that Rip Morgan was even still in the US at this point.

I think the reach is expanding for sure, though. I've had a friend who I've known a long time who used to not know anything as far as scoops go, I mean he just enjoyed wrestling as a "thing to watch on TV" level. I went to his house for the Royal Rumble this year, though, and he knew all about the Booker T and Kevin Nash surprises, so I think on some level, fans are "smarter" about scoops and such than they used to be.

Should I be worried if I am who you think I am or If I am not who I think I am. Or who I think I was? I'm confused now. Yes this is Justice, I really wanted to see Smokey Mountain especially the Gangstas run. That's what I thought. Note to self: don't bury Blackhearted Justice on PWO.