[1992-09-26-SMW-TV] Down and Dirty: Dutch Mantell / Interview: Ron Wright / Tim Horner & Dirty White Boy

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Robert Fuller's promo about the decline of rock and roll due to drugs and alcohol, calling himself a God-fearing Christian, is a MUST SEE.

 

Ron Wright is then interviewed by Bob Caudle. He says Tim Horner has hounded him more than any bill collector ever has! He would love to sign a contract to give Tim Horner a title shot, but he has arthritis so bad in his hand that he can't even sign a contract! DWB ends up attacking Horner from behind and handcuffs him so he can slap him around. Then he puts a noose around his neck and drags him around the ringside area. Part of me liked this and part of me saw this as a really overly desperate attempt to get Horner over.

[Cox]

They really laid it on thick with Horner to get him over as a main event babyface. The next three or four TV shows are all about getting him over at that level, and he simply wasn't charismatic enough to be that guy. Thankfully for SMW and its lack of a true main event singles babyface, Tracy Smothers is coming soon.

[Tim Evans]

Pretty hardcore angle to get Horner over. The Fuller interview was really good but man Jimmy Golden can't really cut a promo.

[shoe]

Fuller was gold. The Horner angle was great. DWB shows what a pro when he realizes he isn't going to be able to drag Horner to the ring, and calls an audible for the better. It looks like Horner goes with the condem in the mouth.

[El-P]

Man, the Horner angle was pretty brutal. Stiff chair shot, hanging, bleeding from the mouth. Not the kind of stuff you'd see on WWF or even WCW TV. Ron Wright is pure gold here.

[Kevin Ridge]

Really intense angle. Horner may not be charismatic but he was able to make the hanging look really convincing.

[PeteF3]

The Stud Stable deserved a big WWF push at the time, the way they're promoting a drug-free lifestyle. They and Lawler could have formed a proto-Straight Edge Society.

 

Tim Horner has been hounding Ron Wright more than any bill collector has! Caudle's reactions to Wright's ranting are hilarious, and I love how Wright goes from loud and angry to quiet and afraid as soon as Horner shows up. Tragically Wright's crippling arthritis has prevented him from signing a title match contract. Horner gets nailed from behind by the DWB, handcuffed, and wrapped in a NOOSE (!), where he's dragged to the ring. This is a semi-redo of the infamous Dirty White Girl black eye angle in Continental, but it's not quite as effective as that was. Robbie "The 'Stro" Eagle makes a cameo appearance trying to make the save, and Horner is spitting up blood! This is crazy as hell, and maybe more than a little desperate. If anything, it undermined what's to come with Brian Lee and the Master.

[WingedEagle]

Studd Stable with Dutch talking about their interference in tag title match. Wright with a promo about Horner winning last week, who's out wanting a title shot b/c he won the non-title match. Wright calls him a liar and DWB nails him with a chair, cuffs him and hogties him with a noose. Drags him to the ring and hangs him. Horner bleeds from the mouth.

 

Fuller is awesome on the mic and this is a great angle putting good heat on DWB. But I'm not sure there's anything that'll have me look at Tim Horner as a meaningful figure.

[DR Ackermann]

At this point Dirty White Boy is my favorite wrestler/character in Smokey Mountain with Ron White & the Studd Stable not too far behind in the character department. The Studd Stable's promo was great. I like that someone gets heat with a bunch of hillbilly fans while saying drugs are bad. The image it creates is really interesting. The Tim Horner hanging was cool, but there's no way I could get behind him in a sustained main event role.

[GSR]

Down and Dirty opens with clips of last week's Rock & Roll Express vs Heavenly Bodies match and Robert Fuller would like to clear the air about what happened. They got drawn up in all the action and that bought them down to ringside to get a better vantage point of what was going on. As Robert Gibson came into the ropes he clumsily tumbled over them and nearly fell on to Jimmy and he, and if they hadn't been there he may well have hit someone in the audience. When were helping him back in the ring they noticed that his eyes were all glazed and at this point goes on to talk about the real rock & rollers, God fearing men like Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson, personal friends of his who never touched a drug in their life. Now you have Guns 'n' Roses, Aerosmith and all you have are the drugs and the drinking, things you never see good God fearing men like Jimmy and he doing. He tells the Rock & Roll Express to dose themselves up and stick needles in their arteries cause they'll need it when they take the ride on the stretcher.

 

Bob Caudle thought that Ron Wright was having a heart attack last week when Tim Horner defeated the Dirty White Boy. Wright says how Horner has hounded him more than any bill collector, has been calling him 24 hours a day and sending the police out because he wants a title shot. He claims that he never promised him a title shot and now he is out there lying through his teeth accusing him of promising him to give him one if Anthony got beat. He tells Caudle that the gentleman Ron Wright would never go back on his word, he's just down and out on his luck trying to raise enough money to get to the hospital to have his hip implant and open heart surgery! At this point Horner comes out and Wright's voice and demeanour change instantly and he goes back to clutching his chest. Horner says that they told him if he beat them he'd get a title shot and asks where his contract is. Wright claims to have arthritis in his shoulder and arm so bad that he couldn't even sign it, but has watched the tape back and states that he never promised him a title match. He they starts accusing him of lying though his teeth, calling him yellow and can't say what he would like to him as he would probably be arrested! Horner starts back at Wright when Anthony appears and nails him in the back with a chair. He then handcuffs him with his arms behind his back and Wright gives him a noose which he puts round Horner's neck, before dragging him to the ring and hanging him from the top rope. Robbie Eagle, Ben Jordan and Newton Steffey all try to help, but the Dirty White Boy beats them all down. Horner bleeds from the mouth and does a pretty spectacular sell job with his facials, whilst Anthony lifts his legs up off the floor to aid in the hanging. The Rock & Roll Express, Dixie Dy-No-Mite and Danny Davis eventually make the save, stopping the attack and saving Horner from any further punishment.

 

The Stud Stable interview (or should I see the Robert Fuller promo) was great and all kinds of WTF! He has such wonderful delivery and the subject matter was something else, saying that all Rock & Rollers these days are drunks and druggies and telling the Express to stick needles in their arteries! The Horner angle was very heavy. Ron Wright, as ever, is absolute gold in everything he does and the way he completely changes when Horner came out to confront him was hilarious. The angle was very reminiscent of the one with Dr Tom in Continental and Horner was superb with his selling of the hanging. They're going to some serious effort to try and make Horner seem a legitimate threat and top contender.

[garretta]

I haven't seen the match from the previous week yet, but it makes sense that the Studs would interfere.

 

I found Fuller talking about how drug-free Ricky Nelson and (especially) Elvis were to be rich. Look, I like Fuller's bullshit as much as anyone, but I'd have preferred more talk about the stretcher match that they were supposedly put there to promote. Sometimes Foghorn Leghorn/Yosemite Sam is amusing, but at other times we need The Terminator: short, totally serious, and deadly. Unfortunately, Fuller doesn't seem capable of that, and Golden doesn't seem capable of stringing more than three English words together. These guys are headed for comedy match heaven in a runaway truck.

 

Maybe it's because I watched the Garvin-Orndorff stuff before this, but I really didn't care for the hanging at all. Between hanging and plastic bags around the head, SMW did entirely too many angles that would have meant instant death outside of a wrestling context. Then Corny turned around and went after Heyman and ECW for being too extreme. Yeah, sure. At least the violence and weapons there were so cartoonish that you knew no one was going to die, at least not then and there. Couldn't Tony have just done the standard kick-and-punch beatdown? Didn't someone tell Corny that they'd just televised Garvin's hanging the week before, and that two in a row was entirely too many? They probably did; he just didn't give a damn. What a waste of great mic work from Ron Wright, at least in my eyes.

[dawho5]

I thought the Robert Fuller promo was great.  The idea of a Fuller/Lawler alliance in the WWF and being anti-drug in a heel ways is super fun.

The hanging was really well-done, but I didn't buy Bob's "I've never seen anything like this!" line.  Did we not just see Orndorff do the same with a torn up towel a week or two ago?  And yeah, Horner was never gonna be your main babyface.