Matt D

Did the Dream Machine ever feud with Dirty Rhodes?

Really great Frank Dusek turn and promo to set up a future match, but that's neither here nor there. Buddy vs Stasiak - 2/3 Falls - January 19, 1980 Buddy starts out by challenging Martel and Piper for a Playboy Hair Match. Stan comes out boxing and Buddy goes out to stall. The audience participation part of the first fall is Stasiak winding Buddy around with a headlock fifteen times. He hangs on to the hair to keep Buddy in the headlock but breaks it and we have more stalling. Buddy goes for the Robinson backbreaker too early and gets pummeled for his trouble followed by a heart punch tease. After more stalling and another reset, Buddy goes for a hammerlock but gets his leg tripped out an Stasiak works over the ankle before trying to make a wish. He goes back to the ankle and this goes a little long though Buddy's desperation grabs for the ropes and general selling makes it. Stan's doing a good job too but it's just not that compelling. Buddy finally rakes his eyes and locks o a headlock only to get knee-breakered. Stasiak starts punching and kicking the hamstring/knee which Buddy sells huge. Another heart punch tease but Buddy gouges again and finally takes over, while still limping about. He chokes Stasiak on the bottom rope and forces him to roll outside and we get a mini king of the mountain which makes a bunch of sense here and gets the fans riled. Stasiak reverses a whip into the corner once he gets in and clobbers Buddy with the heart punch for the first fall. This was pretty good but I've seen better out of them. Second fall starts with Buddy complaining about the heart punch. Stasiak just smiles grimly and tries to do it again but misses and hits the turnbuckle. Buddy hits the floor, but jumps back in and goes for a quick roll up and then a funny little spot where he keeps trying to pull the tights and gets caught. Stasiak powers out of the full nelson and then does a goofy tight pulling roll up of is own to the delight of the fans. Funny stuff and Buddy gets furious. Knucklelock test of strength. Stasiak gets the better of it and when Rose starts to pull back, he gets hit by a pretty good dropkick. Stasiak locks on a nervehold and Buddy's selling is funny. He's really stooging here. He gets a couple of knees in and hits a slam leading to the inside backbreaker. He's pissed off though and picks up Stasiak at 2 so he can nail a top rope kneedrop into the spine. He gets the three fall and then hits another and almost gets dqed. And, actually we don't have the third fall so I have no idea how this one ended. It didn't really hold a candle to the other matches between them but the comedy stuff was a lot of fun.

I'm 2 of the 3 falls into it and I have a decent amount to say about it and Harley at some point. I think it's a great example of a lot of the criticisms against Race but also pushes back against the Angle comparisons as well. What it does best though is shows how Frank Bonnema was actually a pretty damn good announce for this sort of thing. once I watch the third fall, i'll write something.

PM Sent. He breaks up the 2/3 falls matches by fall which is a little annoying but you get what you pay for. I love seeing Portland in context, as much as we have at least, as the action's almost universally great, the angles are good, the announcing is enjoyable, and even the sponsors just add to the feel of it all.

Honestly? If you have the time and care about this stuff at all, there's absolutely zero reason not to go on youtube (it's all on one channel) and go through the near entirety of 1979 that's posted there. If you want to go for DVDs for quality and to watch on your couch, or whatever, nab Will's Buddy set, but that doesn't have all of the matches posted (and some aren't quite as good as the rest, of course, but I think all are worth your time). In general, there are over 25 chronological matches from 1979 posted right now, surrounded by angles and promos, and I can't think of a reason why anyone wouldn't watch that way if they had an interest. I'm very, very happy that I took the time to do so and excited to continue watching that way.

Give me a few months. I just started on January.

Thanks guys. Back to the write-ups. Rose/Bass/Sheepherders vs Piper/Martel/Savage/Stasiak -2/3 Falls - 1/5/80 Well on paper this sounds great. There's a level of excitement here as this is right before the Martel vs Race match and Borne/Martel just ALMOST won the big tag titles (it was reversed). Faces work over Bass to start. Buddy comes in and sizes off against piper to the joy of the crowd. This is probably the fastest I've ever seen Roddy moves as he does a good job of keeping up with Buddy. It ends well with a cool little roll up out of a leapfrog. Heels get Piper in their corner and take over. Miller has a great knee drop to the throat. I love Bass' elbows into a chinlock too. He does them repeatedly and they keep it interesting. He keeps his knee on Piper's head to contain him to make the tag. Piper has come backs but they keep him in their corner. The faces keep trying to get in but they just make it worse for Piper who is selling this stuff like a dead man. Miller tosses Piper into the corner and it's actually really great. He does this jumping finish to it. Just little things. The heels are swarming on the apron and everywhere else. Bass goes up to the top but gets nailed by Savage on the outside leading to the hot tag to Stasiak. Good FIP, good hot tag. And Stasiak cleaning house is awesome before Martel gets to come in and look like a million bucks vs Buddy who dives into the ring post for him. He also takes this cool little double kick to the gut from Savage and Martel like it was a bazooka hitting him. Faces take over on the arm. There's a crazy feel to this match given all the guys here. Martel has a lot of good arm offense even at this point and Buddy is really selling for him. Faces keep switching off as Williams ties to sneak in repeatedly. I like how Stasiak and Savage work together. Great old man pairing. Buddy is just getting wrenched to hell here. Someone needs to bring back Stasiak's pumphandle winglock. He pumps it fourteen times as the fans count along. Buddy finally makes it out mercifully and they start on Williams with Piper hitting some great arm drags. Buddy takes a powder mid-match after all that arm punishment making it 4 on 3. heels are getting overwhelmed here. One guy after the next ends up in an armlock. Buddy tries to come out with an elbow pad and haphazardly walks right into Dutch Savage's fist unknowingly. This is a long face control segment after the lengthy FIP on Piper but it's pretty entertaining considering who's in there. We're pretty deep into Heel in Peril territory though with the faces screwing around and cheating behind the ref's back and little heel hope spots after eye rakes and what not. After a heart punch tease on Bass (Who drops down), they finally get Savage into their corner and the heels take back over. Buddy hits a DOUBLE AXE HANDLE on the prone Savage using his loaded elbow pad, but then he misses an elbow drop. Miller comes in, eats some knees on a big splash attempt and Savage gets a hot tag into Stasiak. Heels pull into the corner and go nuts on the corner pole with his leg which was hurt last week vs the Sheepherders. Buddy its another prone double axe handle, this time onto the leg. Great stuff. Bass puts him into a half crab and despite Piper trying to break it up. There's the fall. I would have liked it if they built up the Stasiak leg situation a bit more at some point earlier in the fall but what we ended up getting was really good. Really fun fall with the Buddy Arm stuff building to the finish in an interesting way. Second fall: As per Portland rules a limping Stasiak has to start vs Bass. Bass is trying to get the leg so we get some circling/positioning. They play up that Savage and Stasiak were working up a plan. It takes one touch for a tag to be possible. Bass gets a kick in on the leg but Stasiak immediately dives to Savage. Very cool stuff. Bass refuses to get out of his corner and Savage tosses him into his partners finally drawing him out. I haven't gotten to see much of Savage in this so it's good to see some. He's full of tricks. Piper tags in. Bit of stalling before a reset and a series of lock ups with Bass outpowering Piper. Roddy fails on a slam and gets slammed huge by Bass.They do a knucklelock test of strength but with Bass winning soundly. He's got great facial expressions. Crowd is behind Roddy who outfinesses Bass and hits some dropkicks. They move on to a headlock/headscissors exchange. This has been a pretty good story within a story. Savage at one point grabs Roddy's legs when he's in the headscissors to try to get him out. Eventually Roddy ends back up in the corner. Williams does a back elbow followed by a cool jumping elbow drop. Miller comes in and tries a back elbow but Piper ducks it for a hope spot that after three well-done detours leads to the hot tag to Martel who hits a rana into a pin on Buddy. Martel hits some nice offense on Buddy but the heels keep breaking up pins. Faces grind down on Rose including Piper doing a killer barrage of punches. There's only a minute left here and everything breaks down with all 8 guys in the ring fighting in the corners. Faces do a unison battering ram into the center of the ring with the heels' heads. Piper is in control as time runs out. Heels win since they got the only fall. This had some of the best action I've seen and I really liked the first fall. The second fall had a few mini stories building towards the chaos of the end before it just petered out. The guys in this were just so good at what they did.

You know, Heyman honestly and earnestly trying to help Punk, caring about Punk, only to be spurned like a jilted lover, genuine to him when he's never told any other honest truth in his life, only for it to not matter. That's pretty poetic.

Guy's got a movie to promote next year.

I just think it'd be more of a "Destiny" thing if he had the case, which is more of a summerslam story to me. IF they do bring in the Bellas and play that up, it's different. That's why they want to do it in the first place after all.

They still have to figure out how he gets the title shot. It's going to be a beat the clock or battle royal or whatever. I think Bryan winning and saying that he was cashing in at Summerslam would be a much more believable way to give him momentum than any of the usual suspects.

Ok, I've got nothing/ If Bryan wasn't winning then there's no reason Henry couldn't have.

RVD vs Henry as the main event for Summerslam would have been surreal and MAYBE even worked.

I need to head out in a sec so I've tuned out, but I could see this backfiring somewhat if the crowd is so into RVD that they shit on Bryan winning.

I don't see how else it could have worked. They're building to Cena vs Bryan at Summerslam and especially to Bryan winning the case. Everything they've done on TV for a month was leading towards it. Bryan was much more the centerpiece of the show than the Cena/Henry feud. On the one hand, I think Bryan vs Cena could have been an attraction match, if only because they DID build him, but in that case, with the belt and the case not involved, I don't know how they would have built to it. I also don't know who they would have put up against World Champion Henry except for maybe Orton and that doesn't seem like enough to main event Summerslam to me (nor does Bryan vs Cena sans belt). This is pretty much the way it had to be.

Now that I've finished the available matches for 1979, i wanted to double back and talk about Buddy's year before moving on. I've gone over this before, but, to me, to really judge and analyze and understand a wrestler, you have to look at an entire body of work. You learn something different in a five minute squash than you do in a sixty minute broadway. You learn something different in a tag match than a singles. You learn something different seeing the wrestler against a smaller opponent than a larger. You learn something different in a gimmicked blood match than a more straightforward title matches. The range of output we have from Buddy Rose in 79 is amazing. He has all those things and more. He has 2/3 falls matches, tag matches with two main partners of wildly varying experience and style, six man tags, squashes vs JTTS, blood feuds, gimmick matches, hair matches, and a ton of promos to go along with them. It's staggering the variation in the twenty-five or so matches I saw and wrote about. Even more staggering is that these are just the Saturday shows. So many of his actual blow-off matches were in Portland on Tuesday and as far as I'm aware we don't have those. Portland television is a lot like Memphis as went through the same loop every week as well as having frequent Tuesday night arena shows. They weren't every week but were often three times a month when things were hot, which they were in 70. Also, like Memphis, they had to utilize a lot of the same talent to fill the same buildings every week. The big difference is that the Portland Saturday show was also in the main (promoter-owned) arena, and they make the claim that the sponsors demanded high-level matches, which may be kayfabed and may be not, but it means that there were lengthy, high-end matches, quite often with real finishes every week. The other big difference, of course was one of style: Portland had a ton of 2/3 fall matches. I love Memphis TV but you didn't often get long meaningful matches on it. That was for the Monday night MSC shows. People judge wrestlers and matches differently. One thing that is very important to me is to try to figure out what a wrestler is trying to accomplish or achieve in a match and to see if they manage it or not, and how they do so. Buddy, in my opinion, had to accomplish two major things. 1) First and foremost he had to draw people to the Tuesday show and the weekly loop of shows. Whatever happened on Saturday had to incite the fans to spend their money on Tuesday (when applicable) and throughout the rest of the week. Since Owen owned the arena, being able to promote as many well-drawing Tuesday shows as possible was a huge deal moneywise. 2) It was also important people both attended and tuned into the Saturday night show, so while leaving the fans wanting more was important, giving them something substantial, their money and time's worth, was also essential. Moreover, he had to manage this while keeping things fresh and interesting despite the fact they were building to weekly live shows in front of the same audience and all of this had to be done with what I understand to be one of the least star-studded rosters in all the territories. Portland was considered a starting point and did not draw in most of the biggest names on a regular basis. On top of that, the 2/3 falls matches were something of a duel-edged sword. they allowed for all sorts of different structural experimentation and storytelling possibilities and ensured that the matches would be meatier and longer than in other territories on a weekly basis, but they also forced Buddy and friends to come up with an extra two finishes a night, basically, maybe even more considering that they were running in front of the same crowd twice a week most weeks. It meant pulling out every trick in the book and inventing a number more on top of that. Combined with the fact they really wanted to draw people in for the Saturday night show, they couldn't run the constant-match ending brawling breakdowns that were such a staple of Memphis TV. I'll admit that I'm judging what I've seen from concept and performance levels alone. I don't have attendance or rating figures before me. A lot of what I'm judging on is whether I thought something was well done or if it SHOULD have worked. I think there's every sign that it did work. The Portland show was absurdly highly rated and, dealing with one of its biggest challenges in years in 79, being forced to move to late night, still stayed highly rated. I think attendance was good. I'm going to focus on the in-ring though. In short, I think Buddy Rose had an amazing 1979, that he wrestled in numerous different situations, almost all successfully, that he made himself look credible as a heel ace while still showing a ton of ass and making his opponents, big and small, star and undercard guy look exactly as good as they needed to look. He had incredible timing, not just in executing the moves or exchanges in his matches but in knowing when to stall and when to go and knowing when to sell and when to take, and most of all, he was able to give fans more than their money's worth while still making them want more. Very few wrestlers get put in a position where they have so difficult a role to play but also have the time and the means to prove themselves in it. Buddy was in the position and he succeeded magnificently. It's me writing this, so we're going to lead with structure. He didn't wrestle the same match twice in the ones we have. More than that, he barely, if at all, wrestled the same segment of a match twice. The two-three falls are all broken up by fall on youtube. and the times for the falls in various matches are wildly different. More importantly, just about everything is really logical and well-set up. He often uses the 2/3 falls medium to set up something in fall #1 that gets paid off in fall #3 either in a transition or in a finish, which makes a lot of his matches almost poetic in their storytelling. Most of his offensive flurries are body-part related and it's not always the same body part either, even if most often he works over the back, logically, to set up his finisher. I think the most impressive thing Buddy does, past the sheer amount of logical variation, is his ability to be a chickenshit heel that gives a huge amount while still being completely and utterly credible as an ace. At the beginning of the year and really throughout, he was still able to live off of his crippler gimmick. He could hone in on a body part and within three or four minutes believably take a pin in a fall. It was believable no matter who he was facing, jobber Jim Gagne or former WWF champion, Stan Stasiak. At the same time, he could spend a whole fall running from the Heart Punch or trying to avoid being in the ring at the same time as Roddy Piper in a tag match. He could take a powder after getting punched in the face or do one of his elaborate matwork/holds openings where he kept getting shown up by the babyface no matter what level of escalation he tried. He could do any of this stuff and he did, but at a moment's notice he'd be able to underhandedly or even legitimately take over and the fans would buy it completely. There aren't many guys in the history of wrestling that could manage that so believably and so well, and they're the guys who often come up when discussing the GOAT. There's such a community feel to Portland whether it's plugging referee Sandy Barr's flea market or pointing out a local newscaster's brother in the crowd. When the time change happened, these people went home and watched the show again so that they could see themselves on TV. It was that sort of community. They knew Buddy and Buddy knew them. He was great at knowing when to stop the action to acknowledge them, when to jaw with Barr for a while or let Barr get one over on him by reversing a hair pull or to use Dutch Savage or Down Owen in their role as management as a prop, even in the middle of a match.. He knew when to argue with the ever-present granny in the front row. He knew when to swarm an opponent from the outside in a tag match. He knew when to beg off. He knew when to take a powder and he knew when to hide in the ropes. He knew when to bring in humor and to make himself look bufoonish and when to bring the intensity and make the crowd yell for his blood. He just had a great sense of what the people would react to and when to pull it out of his arsenal and he varied it. You wouldn't often see him stall in the same way for the same reason two matches in a row. All that stalling and jawing and what not didn't mean he couldn't go. He has great opening stretches in his matches, able to keep up with anyone they brought in. He has that really entertaining shtick where he gets outwrestled which shined brightest against guys who could really work holds like Johnny Eagles, but that he was able to utilize to make greener guys look a lot more interesting too. He has not just varied and believable offense but a lot of innovative offense too. I know that's not a high selling point in most situations but I think when you're in front of the same crowd so much it is important. He and Wiskowski had a crippling second rope kneedrop/backbreaker combo that was years before its time. I asked Dave Meltzer about it in an e-mail and he said he couldn't remember anyone doing that sort of thing before then. The Billy Robinson backbreaker is a great finisher for not just the time but any time. More than that, he has these finishing segments, especially in big matches where there are not just finisher teases that are again ahead of their time, but where he even occasionally tries to steal his opponents finisher as a FU, almost always leading to his comeuppance. Most of all, he was able to deliver on what he had to do. He would work elements into his matches that foreshadowed or forced the upcoming gimmick blowoff, but he would use these elements in logical ways that were absolutely organic parts of the action. Yes, it was him keeping away from the person he'd be wrestling in a tag match and teasing the crowd with it or getting over an opponent's finisher in a tag match as something that could finally be the thing to vanquish him in a singles match. It was more than that, though. He would give the fans just as much as they needed to get riled, would give the babyface just as much as he needed to really seem believable as an opponent, would attack in the right sort of underhanded manner to inflame the passions of both for the match to come. Some of it was absolutely the booking, but that Buddy was able to work these forward-looking stories into his matches through his work itself was really the sign of being a master of his craft. So just how good was Buddy in 1979? He was good enough that, based on what we have from TV, I can't think of a wrestler that had a more complete year in the role of a television ace. Some of that is the selection of what we have and the opportunities he was given, but when you take a look at what we DON'T have: the big blowoff matches where he would be given even more of an opportunity to shine, it makes it all the more astounding the sheer talent, expertise and pro wrestling quality we can see in him in what we do.

I am okay with this. It's all Parv being a laggard and just getting to this that is the issue.

I will say that part of why I do dislike it so strongly is because of the other strengths in the match. They have this match that should have been great and they just utterly destroy it. And then they run it a few weeks later and make it absolutely great. Wrestling isn't math. It you add up the composite parts, the first cage match is probably mathematically great. Instead, it's chemistry. There's one element added to the mix and it causes the whole thing to turn sour. Obviously, I realize my position is extreme and maybe a little overblown. I'm still sticking to it.

i haven't seen Final Conflict in years. I think there's a "Road to Greensboro" thing on youtube that leads up to it, no? I'd like to watch all that again and then watch it before commenting and I've got a lot on my plate right now, but I'll get to it. I'll look at the rest of what you said and give you a reply on Monday. It's a sort of busy weekend here.

I don't know if I regret not ending up having time to listening to this one or if I'm glad?

Can someone set that to Fandango's music and loop it on youtube?

I can't stop watching that.

I love the way Dylan says "Kofi Kingston" when talking about Cesaro. There's such disgust and disdain and disbelief.

Which is a relief because I'm not sure if I would be able to remember if I liked that 86 Rockers vs Rose/Somers cage match or not without it.