[1993-08-28-USWA-TV] Jerry Lawler and Vince McMahon

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Vince McMahon and Pat Patterson are at ringside. Lawler is chasing Paul Neighbors when Vince trips him! Lawler goes to confront him and Patterson gets in his face. This ends with Pat holding Lawler while Vince slugs him! This is all during a match against referee Paul Neighbors, where he gives him five piledrivers to win a stretcher match. Still wild seeing Vince in this setting.

[Kevin Ridge]

I love that Patterson is McMahon's bodyguard. Vince trips Lawler outside the ring. McMahon slowly taking off his jacket and then nails Lawler with a punch! Neighbors gets nailed with five piledrivers. So in one of the most hilarious things I've seen as Neighbors gets stretchered out, Jerry drops a fireball on his face for good measure!! What fun with McMahon in Memphis.

[PeteF3]

Vince in the role he was born to play. McMahon in this setting is still almost too weird for words--in 1993 it was like...I dunno, UWFI doing a crossover show with W*ING or something. There was that much cognitive dissonance. Vince & Paul Neighbors is almost a weirder duo than Bret Hart & Bert Prentice. Vince & Pat team up to do a number on the King! Crazy shit, even through today's eyes. Unfortunately Paul Neighbors isn't quite Jim Cornette as a wrestler, so he doesn't capitalize for very long. You can't fault him for lack of energy, though.

[soup23]

Clips of the Neighbors vs. Lawler match. Huge heat for Vince and he has Pat Patterson as back up. Vince tripping up Lawler was awesome and him taking forever to get his jacket off and deliver a good looking punch. The clips looked fun and Lawler giving a fireball to a stretchered Neighbors was a nice touch. Give me more McMemphis please.

[garretta]

I get the feeling that the fireball was to have been the finish, but Lawler piledrove Neighbors once or twice too often and legitimately knocked him out. Lighting the neckbrace on fire was a good save under the circumstances.

 

I hionestly thought that they may have been setting up a one-off between Lawler and Patterson, and even at Pat's age he looks like he could have pulled off at least a short match. He took a nice bump into the post, that's for sure.

 

Vince looks so much more realistic here than he ever did as the "Genetic Jackhammer" or whatever bullshit name he called himself. He was still arrogant and evil, but he didn't feel the need to actually compete with the wrestlers on an equal basis. His punch looked good for a noncombatant who was supposed to be angry enough to actually take a swing at a wrestler, but no one, not even he, had any doubt that if he'd done more than trip Lawler they'd have had to find a second stretcher to take him out of the MSC on.

 

If Mr. McMahon (the character) had confined himself to stuff like this, plus of course the occasional round of evil machinations, he would have been a hell of a lot more palatable. He only needed to put the fox in the henhouse once in a while, not go on a killing spree, shoot the hens dead and burn the feathers in the city dump. He got a great reaction here, as the Memphis fans wanted to see him humiliated and sent back to Stamford with his tail between his legs. If he got that reaction again after, say, 2001, I'd be shocked, yet he and his family are still the driving force behind every TV episode to this day. And don't use USA Network/NBC Universal as an excuse; there are other outlets, including his own network, that he could move his programming to if he wanted to get off-camera completely in spite of their wishes. But he's trying to recapture the magic he created on nights like this, and if what I've read for the last few years is any indication, he's failed miserably at least 99.5% of the time.