[1991-03-24-WWF-Wrestlemania VII] Rick Martel vs Jake Roberts (Blindfold)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[flyonthewall2983]

This might have been Jake at his best as a face in WWF. I love it when Jake tells the story about this match in shoot interviews and such, saying that he had people come up to him, saying that they were screaming at their televisions, telling him which way to go.

[BruiserBrody]

Worst part is that they accidentally exposed that Jake's hood was see through as the refs were tying it on him.

[Yo-Yo's Roomie]

This is a lot of fun, and a masterclass in how to work this kind of match. I honestly think this might be the best Jake WWF match I've seen, and probably the best heel Martel work I've seen too. Martel really embraces his role.

[Loss]

This is not at all a great match, but it's a really smart performance and the perfect blowoff for my favorite WWF feud of this time period. Jake gets a lot of credit for this, but Martel came up with some pretty clever ideas himself. Total crowd pleasing match, and one that for whatever reason has some real replay value.

[WingedEagle]

I haven't watched this in ages, but when I was younger I thought this was the funniest match ever put on.

[shoe]

A super fun match. Jake just works the crowd like a master. Martel was good here too. I loved how he thought he knew where Jake was and ran right into the ropes and took a bump right off them. His chair spot on the floor was good too. Martel was a good foil here.

[Childs]

I can't imagine them doing any better with a tough gimmick, and those kinds of matches are always fun/memorable.

[PeteF3]

What a creative audience-participation-style match. Jake did a really great job of getting that aspect over on Prime Time and it works here. There's probably a little too much pointing and near misses here, but Martel provides some amusing comedy spots to show how out of his element he is. Scott Keith and other people who only rate matches based on how many power bomb variations are in it have always held this up as a worst-match-ever candidate, but it's a satisfying payoff to a surprisingly intense feud.

 

Afterwards Marla Maples disappears in a crowd of Jimmy Hart proteges as the Nasty Boys celebrate their tag title win as only they can do.

[Kevin Ridge]

Wow, I’m happy to see that this has a mostly favorable view here among the posters. This is one of my guilty pleasures. I loved Jake using the crowd with the pointing and them being very vocal on where to go. Must have been fun to be live in person. Martel does his part well with some of the physical comedy. Good suspense for a match that had essentially only had three wrestling moves and no brawling.

[soup23]

This is the first year that in addition to ranking each match, I am assigning star ratings. This has been the hardest one so far because from an execution standpoint it is really high, but from an actual workrate standpoint, obviously it is lower. I do have a conviction to make it my #100 match of the year though for the amazing payoff it provides for the feud as a whole.

[garretta]

As a class in how to work a crowd, very few matches compare to this one. If you're expecting physicality, or even much contact, forget it.

 

Part of me wishes that they would have at least had a brief sequence where they actually touched each other for more than five seconds at a time. It's tougher to appreciate the audience participation aspects of this twenty-four years after the fact, at least to me; I think I'd have rather seen a cage or Snake Pit match (basically, no DQ) where Jake could have actually gotten physical revenge, possibly leaving Martel and his pretty face a bloody mess. I can't deny the connection Jake has with the crowd, though; it's kind of a shame that that connection won't last much longer. Martel made an excellent fish out of water, and his performance only served to enhance Jake's. I loved the postmatch too, with Jake crushing the Arrogance atomizer beneath his feet, then putting Damien all over Martel (which didn't happen to most big-name heels in those days).

 

I guess part of what detracts from the match is the bad commentary. This is about the time Gino started doing the same overexcited constant screaming that all the WWF announcers did, and when there's next to no physical action to describe, that can get on people's nerves in a hurry. More importantly, Heenan actually put the match over better than Gino did, and that's rare. He talked about his experience with the hood on Prime Time, and correctly pointed out that as much as the crowd and Jake thought that they had the advantage, it could be very tough to hear and breathe in the hood. Gino had nothing to say to that, and before long we were reduced to a bunch of Monsoonisms, lame insults of Bobby, and the annoying "I can't hear you!" bit from Bobby that I talked about a few posts back.

 

It's a general rule of thumb from here on out that the more Gino gets on the Brain's case, the less he has to say about the match, good or bad. Here, it's kind of excusable since so little physical action is going on, but we'll hear it more and more until Vince takes over as the pay-per-view play-by-play guy in '92. I can't really blame Gino himself like so many others do, though; the actual matches are starting to be less important than ever in the WWF now, and this is the kind of style Vince wanted from his announcers. Being loyal to Vince Sr. and the McMahon family from way back when, it never occurred to Gino to object like he probably should have, even if doing things Vince's way made him look more incompetent and out of touch by the week. Unfortunately, since he's the one on camera playing the part, he gets the blame, and that's not fair.

[dawho5]

Really good stuff here for wearing blindfolds. I caught that Jake's was see-through as well, but it's wrestling. Martel's chair-into-the-post spot was brilliant. Great way to blow off the preceding angles.

[cactus]

You couldn't get more anti-workrate than this, but it's fun for what it is. I like the small touches they added to make this work, such as Roberts trying to find Martel by using the crowd's reaction and luring Martel by clapping in one spot and moving to the next. Martel also deserves some credit for making this work as well as it did, his hammy comedic acting did wonders for a match like this. 

★★½