Gorilla Monsoon

[Loss]

Is part of the problem that the WWF had two color guys and no play-by-play guy on many shows?

[Goodear]

Think of it this way, if he called football games, Monsoon would say that giuys threw bad interceptions or that a coach called a poor fourth down play but he wouldn't call them bad players or coaches.

[Mad Dog]

I'm going strictly by the 1980s here.

 

I thought Gorilla was pretty good. He wasn't as partisan with the face/heel dynamic at this point as Vince was. He would rag on the heels but you could also tell that there were heels who he respected for their technical prowess. It hasn't come up yet but I still love how he always talks about Greg Valentine being a slow starter. Valentine will be getting owned in the early goings and you'll have Monsoon sitting there saying "remember folks, sometimes it takes Valentine 10-15 minutes to really get warmed up in there." I know when I watch house shows that I'm always crossing my fingers that it's going to be Vince or Gorilla doing the commentary.

 

Watching Superstars and Wrestling Challenge from the start. Jesse Ventura has bothered me more than Gorilla Monsoon has. I wasn't really expecting that to happen.

[JerryvonKramer]

Can you elaborate on that? What has bothered you about Jesse? I consider the guy almost untouchable and permanent contender for MVP on every show he calls.

 

Me and you aren't on the same page today Mad Dog, lol

[Mad Dog]

There's just been a couple of moments where I've just wanted him to shut up. He comes across like he's trying to hard to be the cool guy during interviews and stuff. He doesn't play off of the wrestlers as well as Mean Gene. In the booth, I think Bruno has been part of the problem. I might change my tune once I start pushing into spring and summer with just him and Vince.

[JerryvonKramer]

What's the time-frame you talking here? I remember watching Prime Time from 1985 and thinking that Jesse wasn't yet at the races. But then Jack Reynolds was truly atrocious and gave everything a very stilted air.

[Mad Dog]

I'm talking 1986. I started with Superstars and Wrestling Challenge from their debuts forward. I'm a couple of months in.

[ohtani's jacket]

Because if the announcer doesn't think what we're watching is any good, why should we?

 

What do you think of Kent Walton?

 

Because in the last three WoS matches I watched he rubbished one guy's television debut, outright said a tag wrestler wasn't a good singles competitor, gave a smaller man no hope going up a weight, and criticised a big man for not wrestling the bout properly.

 

And that's from a Hall of Famer.

[PeteF3]

One thing about Walton is that he was an ITV broadcaster with an assignment, not a Joint Promotions mouthpiece. Now it was obviously mutually beneficial for Walton to get the product over, but he didn't have the same obligations that guys like Ross and Monsoon did. Maintaining his own credibility, or even trying to effect change in what was broadcast, may have been a more important issue than it was for other wrestling announcers.

 

Did the Japanese or lucha announcers ever do anything like that? I'm pretty sure most or all of them are also station employees as well (which is why as I'm watching the early-'90s stuff Dr. Morales is calling both CMLL and AAA, or how Ichiro Furutachi went from calling '80s NJPW to hosting a newspanel show).

[ohtani's jacket]

I don't think it's ever been clearly established whether Walton was an ITV employee or an independent contractor. Nevertheless, Walton could bury a match with the best of them. It's actually quite fun listening for Waltonisms, but I think it's bollocks that he got into the WON HOF without so much as a single bit of critical appraisal.

[Al]

Jesse comes off as annoying at times on the Saturday Night's Main Event broadcasts. But I think a lot of that is him trying to help the heels save face because they have to draw money post-Hogan.

[Loss]

This thread has made me realize that I need to erase or at least put in their proper place whatever biases I have as it relates to 1980s WWF and give it a chance fresh when the time is right. Not all wrestling has to be presented like Jim Crockett Promotions, nor should it be. Because that was the first wrestling that really excited me as a fan, I think I have been subconsciously holding 80s WWF to that standard, which is appropriate in some cases but not in others. So I'm done with the Gorilla Monsoon argument until I dive into more matches he called with a fresh set of eyes. And I'll try to be optimistic.

 

Who says these arguments never result in anyone changing their stand on anything?

[Johnny Sorrow]

Jesse comes off as annoying at times on the Saturday Night's Main Event broadcasts. But I think a lot of that is him trying to help the heels save face because they have to draw money post-Hogan.

I think both Jesse and Vince turned up the volume ,for lack of a better term, on SNME.

[BigBadMick]

It did not. And when Jim Ross tried that approach in 1993 WWF, it was incredibly awkward. So I won't deny that Gorilla fit in with what the WWF was. I just don't think he was particularly good when held to universal standards of what a great announcer should be. And such standards have to exist if we're going to compare announcers in different promotions and eras.

What approach, Loss? Couldn't quite follow what you meant there. Also, watched the three Bret matches at King of the Ring 93 last week, and Ross sounded very good there.

[Loss]

At King of the Ring, Jim Ross was talking about how Shawn Michaels grew up on a military base and how IRS went to Syracuse. It was awkward, because it humanized them too much which is something the WWF went out of their way not to do at the time.

[JerryvonKramer]

It also exposed the fact that Irwin R. Shyster was secretly Mike Rotunda. NWA-style Ross was completely wrong for WWF. I haven't seen WWF from 93 for ages, but did he ever bring up Luger's 4.0 grade average when calling Narcissist matches?

 

Not that it would have ever happened, but I'd love to have heard David Crockett call some cartoon-era WWF matches. I think he would have been perfect in many ways. Imagine how much excitement there'd be in a Vince-David Crockett commentary team!

[Loss]

He did bring up Luger's 3.78 GPA and that he turned down a trip to the Naval Academy, yes. It might have worked if he was billed as The Smartcissist.

[BigBadMick]

God, that's really saying the wrong stuff on 1993 WWF! Don't remember any of that, but can see that it's fish-out-of-water stuff.

 

Now I'm wondering if anyone pointed out the differences in WWF announcing to him or prioritised laughing at the 'dumb okie'.....

[PeteF3]

He also said IRS was a multi-time tag champion with multiple partners, more or less outright saying that he was Rotunda. That doesn't top Vince McMahon referring to "Mr. Rotunda" during a Raw interview, but it was weird.

[Loss]

No, when Vince signed him, he talked about it publicly like they had the John Madden of their genre working for them now, and he initially encouraged him to call the matches exactly as he always did. Vince was really open to new ideas at that point - keep in mind he was also working closely with the USWA and SMW around this time. He was probably the most outside his bubble he had ever been to that point in time.

[PeteF3]

Ross unquestionably had his fingerprints over TV from the very beginning. The Challenge intro was re-done with him as basically the featured attraction, plus both syndie shows suddenly had long feature matches almost every week. He would also do things like acknowledge otherwise anonymous job guy Brad Anderson as being Gene's son. Challenge even had a 6-man tag that got the "we're out of time!" treatment with the conclusion shown the next week.

[Loss]

He was also booking in early 1995 WWF leading into Wrestlemania, which explains stuff like Ernie Ladd's involvement in the Wrestlemania build, all the strategy talk from the announcers (even Vince) and Diesel revealing himself as a married man named Kevin Nash with a history of knee injuries.

[jdw]

 

This is comical. I get a kick out of you guys.

 

This is the same mindset that says Steamboat/Savage at WM3 sucked because Steamboat wasn't "mad" enough. Everything in context. If you lived it, you knew how fucking great Gorilla was. As good as he was with Heenan, his chemistry with Jesse on the early PPVs and the All-Star/Maple Leaf show was even better.

 

 

The thing is... some of us are old enough to have "lived it", and happened to think Monsoon sucked back in the day.

 

Some may have changed their view on that when rewatching stuff from the 80s. Some of us haven't.

 

So maybe you have the wrong "you guys". There are a fair number of people here who watched the shit in the 80s.

[Matt D]

I was reading the Stan Stasiak bio from the Observer and they mentioned that Gorilla Monsoon served as a manager for Pedro during his title run. I'd never heard of that before. What was the deal there?

[CarpetCrawler]

So I've never seen early episodes of Monday Night RAW and am not very familiar with the 1993-95 era of WWF in general so I've been watching each RAW and PPV from that timeframe. Gorilla's commentary on the WWF monthly arena shows in the mid-80s is awesome and I freely admit I could watch Monsoon and Okerlund/Hayes shoot the shit over an awful 20 minute draw with SD Jones any day of the week. The casual conversational style Monsoon has on these shows is really relaxing and really reminds me of watching with a friend who also watches wrestling. On these shows Monsoon makes you feel like you're right there with him. I know I'm in the minority in that regard though.

 

That being said, I'm up to the period in 1994 before Jim Ross returns where Monsoon does commentary again because Vince is busy with the trials and man this is sad to watch and listen to. He's basically become a caricature of himself, not knowing the product that well and shouting over promos while overusing the cliche stuff that made him charming in the 80s. However in 1994 it just makes everything he calls a chore to listen to. Savage is his color guy and Savage is just as bad (if not worse. I swear up and down he was, to put it bluntly, verbally shitposting in the hopes that Vince would get fed up and fire him. It's unbelievable how bad Savage is in the booth in 1994. He just doesn't want to be there anymore) and is really no help whatsoever. This combined with the poor in-ring product at the time (I've seen enough Kwang squash matches for one lifetime) just makes 1994 RAW a slog to get through. There's one point where even Savage is clowning on Monsoon's awful commentary; Monsoon makes a comment during a Nikolai Volkoff/1-2-3 Kid match in which the winner gets a title shot against Bret on a future RAW along the lines of, "you know, it makes me wonder if Ted Dibiase didn't buy Nikolai this title shot matchup" and a totally exasperated Randy Savage goes "gee, I wonder what gave you that idea, Gorilla?" which Monsoon completely no-sells and then he goes silent for a few seconds. I really cannot wait for Jim Ross to come back, because man this is hard to listen to, and I really love Gorilla's work and will defend it usually.

 

I dunno if it's him getting older and giving less of a shit about the product or what. I imagine losing Heenan didn't help. Other than Johnny Polo I don't think Gorilla was good with anybody after Bobby left. Polo does a pretty good job (and by all accounts Raven has said in shoots that both him and Gorilla liked working with each other) though, which makes me wish we got more out of the Monsoon/Polo tandem than we got. Once Ross returns for good in 1995 or so and Monsoon gets paired with him in a color commentary role he's a lot more tolerable, but what probably helps that is that Ross and Monsoon both liked each other.

 

Jesse comes off as annoying at times on the Saturday Night's Main Event broadcasts. But I think a lot of that is him trying to help the heels save face because they have to draw money post-Hogan.

 

oh god, yes. I always felt like I was alone in that regard, and this goes back to Monsoon. I love Jesse but there were times with McMahon where he'd be completely insufferable and just walk all over Vince, and Vince is just so bad at rebuttal stuff at this timeframe that Ventura just dominated the broadcast and sometimes got himself over more than the guys in the ring (love Heenan too but this was a habit of his as well). It's not as bad on Superstars (but that's not to say it's great), but on SNME it definitely can be a major detriment to the show at times. Monsoon would actually trade barbs with Jesse and Jesse is a MUCH better guy in the broadcast booth when he has someone that can keep up with him, which is why Monsoon and Ventura are a far, far better team to me than McMahon and Ventura.