[1993-10-16-SMW-TV] Rick & Scott Steiner vs Heavenly Bodies

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Highlights. Much of this is centered around the Steiners having a dog with them and teasing the dog going after Cornette or the Bodies. Good action. I always love Del Ray's floatover DDT. Because it's SMW, of course there's a ref bump and a DQ when both teams start using a tennis racket as a weapon. Cornette comes in and throws powder in Scott's face. I know it's his territory and all, but wow did Cornette push himself hard.

[El-P]

I agree. I love Cornette, but at some point, too much Cornette kinda hurt Cornette. I hate the dog gimmick too (plus I can not get that Brickhouse Brown story out of my head, be it false or true).

[Kevin Ridge]

Van Horn briefly mentions his Egyptian Prince who we see on 94 Yearbook. What a long build for that guy. Steiners doing a British Bulldogs routine with bringing a dog to the ring. This bulldog named Arnold is way more aggressive than Matilda though and looks to want to tear a piece out of the Bodies. They keep the dog at ringside tied on a leash but it keeps jumping up on to the apron into the ring. I am totally fascinating by the dog here as it continues to bark and rage that it wants a piece of the Bodies. The Bodies must have pissed off this dog backstage to get riled up or something. The Steiners have to keep removing the dog from the ring as wants to jump and get involved. This should be building to a six man with Cornette and Arnold involved. That hot tag to Arnold would blow the roof off the building.

[PeteF3]

Oh goody, Daryl Van Horn is with us.

 

The Bodies run, hide, and stooge for Arnold the Pitbull, who looks and acts suitably vicious. More intimidating than Matilda, at least. Arnold is actually chained into the corner in the ring, which has to violate some Commission ordinance of some sort, even in Kentucky. Another fun match, a lot like SummerSlam with some of the same spots, but it seems to go longer--and the Bodies get to show off more. Scott accidentally levels Mark Curtis with a clothesline before hitting Del Ray with the Frankensteiner, but Cornette whacks him with the tennis racket and puts Del Ray on top. Curtis recovers and is about to count a cheap pin, but pulls up at 2.9 when he sees the tennis racket laying in the ring! He doesn't stop the match, though, until Rick takes the racket and goes nuts with it, having not learned a damned thing from their tag title loss. Cool to see the Bodies go over here, regardless of the circumstances. They even get some heat afterward with a quick beatdown on Rick before Arnold makes the save. That makes for two babyface cornermen hyped in advance whose charges nonetheless lose anyway.

 

Cornette and the Bodies act like this was the easiest victory in history. This nicely sets up the Bodies as SMW and WWF tag title contenders again. Cornette hypes another new tag team in his employ, since the Bruise Brothers didn't do the job correctly. Then Caudle hypes ANOTHER mystery team, who wants to wrestle the Bodies on TV with an SMW tag title shot on the line. Two mystery teams at once is a tad excessive.

[GSR]

The Steiners are accompanied by their pitbull Arnold who is a feisty thing (according to the Observer he legit bit both Cornette and Tom Prichard during the tour, which is no surprise in the slightest when you see him). Arnold is tied to the bottom turnbuckle and is at times in the ring as the action is going on, while the match is similar in places to their one at Summerslam. Del Ray ducks a clothesline from Scott and he hits Mark Curtis with it instead. Scott with a frankensteiner to Del Ray and he makes the cover (not sure why seeing only seconds earlier he had taken out Curtis and he was still laid out at this point). Cornette gets in the ring and nails Scott in the back with his tennis racket and then pulls Del Ray on top of him. He shakes Curtis to wake him up, who starts to count the fall but just as he is about hit the mat for the third time he spots the racket in the ring and stops. The Bodies double team Scott but Rick grabs the racket and starts hitting them with it. Cornette powders Rick and they go to work on him until Scott gets Arnold and he then clears the ring. The Bodies end up winning the match as the Steiners were DQ’d when Rick used the racket, although no idea therefore why Curtis either stopped the count or didn’t DQ the Bodies when he first saw the racket in the ring.

 

This is followed by a studio interview and Cornette says how the Steiners thought that they were going to come to Smoky Mountain Wrestling and bring their big, bad reputation and take care of them, but they showed and handled them better than anyone else ever has. He can’t believe that the Rock & Roll Express are so consumed with jealousy that they’ve followed the Heavenly Bodies all the way to the WWF. The Rock & Roll Express, after all these years of never wanting to go to the WWF, all of a sudden now show up! It’s pure and simply to try and keep the Heavenly Bodies from getting what they want up there, just like they’re trying to keep them from getting what they want down here. He has made a few phone calls though and has a tag team coming to Smoky Mountain in the next few weeks that’s going to take care of them. They’re coming to Smoky Mountain Wrestling and they’re going to keep the Rock & Roll Express out of their hair so that they can go to the WWF and win the tag team titles there, and when they come back, there will be nothing left of Ricky Morton & Robert Gibson and they can pick up the SMW belts too. When Bob Caudle asks him about the Bruise Brothers he says that it’s not often he has failures, but he bought them in to do a job and they didn’t do that job correctly. When you don’t do a job correctly you get demoted and that’s where the Bruise Brothers are now, they’re still on probation and observing the top tag teams to learn what to do. Caudle tells him that a tag team has contacted SMW and have asked for, and received, a match against his men to determine who the number one contender’s are. Cornette tried to find out who it is but Caudle doesn’t know. He then decides that he doesn’t care who it is and this team has no business coming to Smoky Mountain, where they dominate, to demand anything much less be given a shot against them on TV. He keeps track of every top team in the world of wrestling and if it was anyone important he would know about it. It’s probably a couple of ‘Johnny come latelys’ and they’ll take care of them next week before going on to bigger things in the future.

[garretta]

I must be in a bad mood, because this is another one I actively hated.

 

First, what the hell was Arnold doing in the ring? Okay, the Matilda tributes at the beginning and end were funny, but why leave him in the actual corner inside the ring? You've made the ring into a three-sided enclosure, and it's only because the Bodies and Steiners were as good as they were that they managed to work around that. One Irish whip the wrong way and that dog would have either bitten someone's leg off or been crushed to death himself, and either accident would have been deserved on grounds of blatant human stupidity, not to mention animal cruelty. At least they got him out of there at some point, thank God.

 

Second, I understand that the Bodies are the hometown team and will be here next week and for weeks to come while the Steiners are headed back up north for good, but the way the match was clipped made it seem almost like a Bodies squash. Rick and Scotty looked either overmatched or stupid when they weren't siccing Arnold on everything that moved, and that's just wrong. Any team from SMW could have been in the Steiners' place as long as they had a dog with them to harass Corny, so why spend the money to bring Rick and Scotty in to begin with?

 

Last, Mark Curtis/Brian Hildebrand looks clueless for the second match in a row. Disqualifying the Steiners was technically the right move because Scotty Steinerlined him, but to ignore that and do it for the racquet shots Rick gave out after​ he'd made such a major deal of spotting the racquet and seemingly questioning everyone in the arena about it? Either DQ the Bodies because it's Corny's racquet or pitch the damn thing into the third row and keep the match going. Don't let it lay there unattended, then disqualify Rick for using it when you failed to do your job in getting it out of the ring. I know, it's wrestling and all that malarkey. That doesn't excuse making your most visible referee look incompetent in back-to-back matches by painting him as suddenly being unable to tell what a foreign object is.

 

Corny's promo took the bad taste out of my mouth a bit. I'm pretty sure I know who the first mystery team is, and if they do on this side of Tennessee what they did on the other, look out. The second mystery team, as we know from this month's listings, are the Harrises, and I would have loved Bob Caudle to end the interview by letting Corny know that just to see his reaction. As Pete said, two mystery teams makes things a lot more confusing than they need to be, even if it's only for a week.

 

I wish we actually had a Rock 'n' Roll match from the WWF prior to Survivor Series so we can see how Vince promoted them. I have a hard time believing that their feud with the Bodies wouldn't have gotten over with the proper promotion that we all know Vince is more than capable of delivering when he chooses to.

[PeteF3]

In fairness to Cornette, and later WCW when booking them with the NWO, the Steiners *are* stupid.

[soup23]

Arnold drives me nuts. I know I am down on the Steiners but they have a chained dog in their corner at all times. The action looked pretty good though and I liked Curtis stopping the pinfall when he sees the racket. Agree that Cornette was probably pushed a tad too strongly here for my liking. The interview back in studio wasn't one of the better SMW offerings as it revolves around too many mystery teams and trying to set up matches in the future without giving away who they would be against.