[1990-10-06-WWF-Superstars] Brother Love: Rick Martel and Jake Roberts

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

One of the most memorable segments from my childhood sees Rick Martel "accidentally on purpose" spray Arrogance in Jake's eyeball, leading to some fascinating promos over the next few months. Jake's selling of this is incredible.

[PeteF3]

Martel is still hawking Arrogance, and this time Brother Love asks him to stick around due to the presence of guest Jake Roberts and his stinking snake.

 

"I have always been the hired gun for my own stable / I am what Cain was to Abel." Goddamn, Jake was the man. I love the fact that he could drop lines like that as a babyface.

 

While that goes on, Jake takes offense at Martel spraying Damian's bag, and when he confronts him about it a second time he gets Arrogance full-force in the eyes. While I still question if cologne can fuck up an eye as badly as Jake's will get, Jake sells it great and would continue to do so in scarily effective fashion.

 

At 8 years old I was about as cynical a wrestling fan as you could get--I was smartened up at an early age and the Zeus push followed by the Warrior push had really soured me on the company as a whole. But holy shit, did this whole angle creep the fuck out of me. Chintzy set-up or not, this really is a preview of the multitude of intense WWF angles that would come the following year.

[soup23]

Also a vivid childhood memory as I can always recall Vince screaming "Right in the EYE" Great segment to watch again.

[Kevin Ridge]

Brother Love wants The Model to stick around to keep things smelling fresh as the guest will be Jake Roberts. Yes! Jake takes offense to Brother Love while the Model sprays arrogance once and then another time at Damian. Jake goes after Model but ends up getting Arrogance in his eyes. Everyone’s selling it from Jake rolling around on the ground to Love/Model being like what did we just do was great. Awesome segment.

[garretta]

You can always tell when an angle's going to go down on Brother Love's show because he gets verbally aggressive with the guest. Here, he constantly makes reference to Damian being slimy and stinky, which he knows he can get away with because Martel's right there ready to do his thing. I love how he and Martel sold this as an accident (in storyline terms) and even pretended to argue a bit over what Martel did. Of course, that's total bologna, as would become clear over the next few weeks with Martel's sneeringly insincere (but well-delivered) apologies. I think he finally hit his groove as a heel with this feud, and not a moment too soon.

 

Not that it really matters, but was that water that Bossman was using to flush Jake's eyes? It looked like coffee or soda. Maybe it's just the lighting and how it reflected off the liquid, because no one would be stupid enough to use coffee or soda to wash out a blinded wrestler's eyes, even as part of an angle.

 

Piper was tremendous here. I couldn't tell much of what Vince was saying after the first few seconds because he insisted on talking over the officials, who sounded like they were wired, much like in the Hogan/Quake angle. If they were and Vince still insisted on talking over them, thus rendering the whole point of wiring them moot, that's.........par for Vince's course, unfortunately. I did catch him saying that he thought the whole thing might have been an accident, which Piper openly scoffed at. These two are starting to develop some chemistry; we'll see how well that continues over the rest of the year.

 

Can't wait to relive this feud!

[drew wardlaw]

It seems like at this point Rick Martel is kind of the Ed McMahon to Brother Love's Johnny Carson, which is really funny. Never seen any of this before, but I'm aware of the feud. Another great moment is Martel spraying Arrogance at Jake as he walks up.

[dawho5]

Great stuff from everybody involved. Jake in particular is incredible selling his eye being hurt.