[1992-09-07-SMW-Shinnston, WV] Rock & Roll Express vs Heavenly Bodies

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This may have been the first match in SMW between the two teams, I'm not sure. I like this better than the Loser Leaves Town cage match. It's similar to their Survivor Series '93 match as far as running through tons of classic tag team sequences and executing them very well, but it plays better because the crowd is more into it. The pre-match stuff where Cornette asks the audience to keep the noise down because of Stan Lane's busted eardrum is great.

[Tim Evans]

Yay a Handheld match. I always like hearing the crowd during these cause the guys work the crowd a lot more. Good match but a little on the long side.

[shoe]

This is what I said about the match for the SMW project. Plus, Loss I'm shocked that you didn't give this a rating. Under 3* is kinda wow.

 

I really like this match and I would classify it a strong nomination. This felt like a greatest hits. It's so fun to watch good wrestling when the crowd is super hot. Everything that both teams did looked great and got over. So many great touches throughout. The finish was great. We got comedy,great work, mixed in with some great heated work also. They just ran the guantlet of stuff in their arsenal.

[Kevin Ridge]

Stalling to start. Felt like a comedy match for most of it. Pritchard is running the ropes and Cornette gets in the ring and they collide. Bodies do the MPro arm wringer spot! They were totally setting the table for that one and it got a good reaction from the crowd. Last few minutes finally gets a bit more serious when they beat up on Ricky. Express get the win with the double drop kick. I presume the titles were not on the line.

[WingedEagle]

Maybe we can wait a little on the RNR. Lots of stalling by the heels early before the match begins - over 8 minutes before they lock up. This feels like a house show match not designed for mass consumption. I wasn't in the house, so I didn't really love this even though the crowd seems crazed for everything.

 

**1/2

[PeteF3]

What a fucking crowd this is. And these guys know every trick in the book to keep them as loud as they were in the beginning. There's not a lot here you haven't seen before, except maybe for Cornette getting his jacket pulled over his head and swinging wildly with the tennis racket. But what they do, they do perfectly. Good stooging comedy spots, a classic Morton-in-peril segment, and a hot finishing stretch including Gibson kicking out of a racket shot that I was sure was the finish, and this is a hell of a match. The Fantastics/Bodies match that ranked as the best in SMW through this point didn't have a long reign at the top.

[garretta]

I didn't like this much for one reason: a monumentally stupid performance from Gibson.

 

Look, I know as well as everyone else that almost the entire secret to Rock 'n' Roll's success is that Morton gets the hell kicked out of him in every match. That's all well and good, and maybe in matches taped for TV how they get to that point isn't quite as obvious as it was here. But in this match Gibson did distraction spot after distraction spot, and most of them ran much longer than they needed to; the Bodies would be two or three moves past a missed tag, and Gibson would still be arguing.

 

I've seen plenty of tag matches with a spot like that, and most of the time, the man who should have been legal does a "What?", an "Aw, man!", and then goes back to his corner. But Gibson just kept going and going to the point where I was screaming at my computer, "Get back to the corner, you idiot!" Let's not even start on the spots where Lane would aim a kick at Gibson just to get him into the ring; they did too many of those too. I can see the first one working to establish the pattern, but after that the face should have enough sense to ignore the provocation. Maybe it was because they did two of those spots in less than a minute; Lane kicked at Gibson, Gibson charged in and did his bit, and Lane almost immediately kicked at Gibson again, who charged again, That's just too much of a not-very-good thing, in my view.

 

I didn't mind the stalling since the crowd ate it up, and Corny didn't overly interject himself, though the spot where Lane ran him over could have been done at the start of the match instead of in the middle. I loved the blind arm wringer, and it played up the fact that the Bodies aren't the well-oiled machine Corny likes to tell us they are. I wonder if Corny thought at one point about turning one of them after a while, although which one would have been the face I don't know. I don't recall a lot of this stuff going on once Del Rey replaced Lane.

 

Line of the segment goes to Morton: "We're here to rock your ass off!"

 

You can tell this match wasn't really meant to be seen, but in spite of my complaints above, I'm glad I saw it. It's always a thrill to see a great local crowd who's into a solid wrestling match.

[dawho5]

Love seeing this match.  While it may not stand up to the more polished-for-TV matches it will eventually be compared with, I love how they worked this crowd.  For what it was meant to be it is perfect.  Lane and the ref ducking Corny's wild, blind tennis racket swings is absolutely amazing.  Shit, anytime Corny gets involved the match gets incredible.  Not that any of the wrestlers are bad, but Corny just brings things up a level.  Probably due to the crowd hating him so much.

What was the crowd chanting at him that got him so mad?