Jimmy Garvin

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[JerryvonKramer]

From 1983 to about 1987 he is a perfectly fine wrestler. I really like the cage match with Flair when he passes out to the figure four. I've seen some people really low on that match but I've never got why exactly.

 

Fans of WTBBP, of course, know how much I hate him in the early 90s. In fact, he's won that Billy Graham award so many times, it's become kind of endearing. "YEAH YEAH YEAH"

[Dylan Waco]

SLL was a huge advocate of his during the World Class process. I'm not sure he'd advocate for him in a top 100, but he loved the guy. I think he had some good stuff in World Class, but I was mostly unmoved on the idea of him being a hidden genius in that setting. I have liked some of his Crockett stuff, but Freebirds era Garvin really is horrific.

[DR Ackermann]

One of my absolute least favorite wrestlers. I can't bring myself to watch him unless ironically its in the awful tag team with Hayes which I find amusing at times simply because it seems like its their gimmick to suck and be out of touch even if that wasn't the original intention.

[goc]

Yea I remember SLL pimping him hard when the Texas 80s set came out. I didn't really see it. He had a good act with Sunshine and then bringing in Precious and all that stuff but as far as Jimmy in the ring? He never did much for me.

[soup23]

In watching the stuff WWE Network has of World Class, he comes out as my favorite guy in the promotion and has more moments of strength in those clips shown than the Freebirds who are married to the Von Erichs constantly.

[Matt D]

I think, even towards the end, he was a very smart wrestler. The 90-92 Freebirds just used their powers for evil and that's probably enough to keep Hayes off my list and it's definitely enough to keep Garvin off.

 

This is what I wrote about Garvin vs Badd:

 

 

 

There are various ways to view and judge a match, or even a performance within a match. One is focusing on how good it is, on a very subjective (though often not inconsistent) aesthetic level. This usually leads to a star rating or a letter grade. Another is to weigh things like card placement and how well it ultimately drew. This is a little more objective though maybe not quite as easy to delve into and discuss. The first looks at the little picture. The second, the big picture. Somewhere both in the middle of these and far outside as well, is the idea that you can figure out what the booking of the match was trying to accomplish and whether or not the wrestlers were able to use their performances to accomplish that goal. Every match has needs. Every match has goals that it’s trying to accomplish and every match has constraints that limit it. Too often I think we, as a wrestling community, focus on the big picture or the little, and leave this third area unexplored. That’s one reason I am trying to break down individual matches on these cards as I am. That said, sometimes a performance comes along that’s so outrageous, so subversive, and so disruptive that it needs to be explored in even more depth.

Probably the most well-known example of this would be Shawn Michaels’ overbumping hissy fit at Summerslam 2005 vs Hulk Hogan, but it’s hardly the only one in wrestling history. Some are far less malicious. JJ Dillon tells a story of his early time as a manager where he was booked for a match and after serving in a non-wrestling role for a little while, he really wanted to go out and impress the “boys in the back.” He wanted this so badly that he gave the very best performance he could. He worked hard and bumped heavily and worked the mat and was shooting for four stars (my words, not his). Afterwards he was chewed out by the promoter because no matter how good the match was, it wasn’t the match he was supposed to work. It didn’t get across the cowardly and weak manager persona he was supposed to portray, that was supposed to help draw money for the promotion in that scenario. It undermined completely what they had been going for.

Another example, and one that mostly everyone can watch easily, is the Johnny Polo vs Marty Jannetty match from the December 27, 1993 Raw. It was meant to set up the Jannetty/123 Kid tag team title win on the First Year Anniversary Raw in January and the concept behind it was that Polo was supposed to portray a craven, cheating, desperate little worm while Jannetty looked to steamroll him. In the end, after getting beat around the ring, Polo would pick up a cheap win. That’s not at all what happened. Instead, Polo, so frustrated that he was relegated to a backstage and managerial role when he was a trained wrestler, tried to have a stand out match to get noticed. He took control for large portions of it and fought back for the rest, including hitting a dive, which was a rare enough move on 1993 WWF TV for a wrestler let alone a manger. It disrupted the story being told, to the point that they washed it away on the next Raw, Vince talking about how thoroughly he had been dominated by Jannetty when that hadn’t been the case at all. It was all a little embarrassing to say the least.

Then, much more like Shawn Michaels at his conniving but brilliant worst, are the early 90s Fabulous Freebirds, embarrassing and remarkable all at once. Michael Hayes had seen better days. He was only in his early thirties, the start of the prime of many careers, but pop culture had left him behind. Buddy Jack Roberts and Terry Gordy had left him behind too, leaving him to tag with Jimmy “Jam” Garvin, who was almost forty and who, despite having a successful enough earlier career, had never quite caught up to pop culture in the first place. Garvin had started teaming with Hayes and Gordy in 1989, holding the NWA Tag Team titles with Hayes. After Gordy left, they continued to have kayfabe success, serving as transitional WCW Tag Team champions in early 1991 (they lost the titles six days before even winning them!), and holding both the US Tag Team titles and Six-Man Tag Team titles. They also changed up their act, or tried to, coming out with Oliver Humperdink as the ill-transformed Big Daddy Dink or Diamond Dallas Page and the Diamond Dolls, and taking on Brad Armstrong under a mask as Fantasia or Badstreet as the poor jerk to basically take the bumps for them now that Buddy Jack was retired. They had stopped teaming with Armstrong by the time of Halloween Havoc 91, and had, in fact, just pretended to be a team from England, the Screaming Eagles, in order to challenge the current World Tag Team champions, the Enforcers, on TV earlier in October. That had made them closer to the babyface side of the spectrum but they were still utilized as tweeners on house shows, depending on the location. To point, someone in the crowd at Havoc had brought a “Sadd Street” sign, mocking them, that was prominently featured on camera.

Michael Hayes was never a physical specimen and while he was better in the ring than he’s generally remembered to have been (due to how he was positioned as the talker in the classic Freebirds line-up), there was a duel-talent that he possessed as deeply and strongly as almost anyone else in wrestling history: he knew how to manipulate a crowd and he had the charisma to actually pull it off. When you combined that with an absolute addiction to the crowd’s adulation and maybe, just maybe, with the realization that time was passing him by early, suddenly WCW had a monstrous creature on its roster that was going to hijack matches and try to get himself over above all else. You could see it all the way back at Halloween Havoc 1989, the almost gleeful way he leeched off of the Philadelphia crowd’s disdain for the Dynamic Dudes and snatched up babyface status for the match.

If Halloween Havoc 89 had been opportunistic, a crime of the second degree, Halloween Havoc 91 was outright premeditated theft. The craziest part was that he didn’t even wrestle on the show. He was supposed to, booked to put over new prefabricated product Van Hammer in his second televised disaster of a match, but he somehow got out of it by, in character, faking an injury, and apparently convincing someone that it would add to the Freebirds’ heat and to his partner’s match. Instead, poor, talented but forgotten, Doug Somers was thrown to the guitar wielding, spot blowing, wolves. Hayes, wearing a cast, would second his partner down to the ring to face Johnny B. Badd, the #8 wrestler in the world according to the WCW Top Ten and soon to be voted both the PWI and WON Rookie of the Year. Jim Ross, announcing the match with Tony Schiavone, made sure to point out he was on a hot streak. He was someone who, through his flamboyant antics, was expected to carry part of the crowd in this match; his face turn was impending, less than a month away at this point. Badd did get something of a mixed reaction on his way out and a halfway decent one for the Badd Blaster confetti popper. So far, so good.

The problem was that three minutes before, the Freebirds had emerged. We need to set a little more context here, so bear with me. The Atlanta Braves, that frustrating baseball team which preempted WCW’s programming so very often when I was a kid, were exceptionally hot in the early 1990s. They had an amazing line-up of pitchers, one of the best in my lifetime, and due to TBS’ broadcast reach, they were popular all around the country. They won their division eight times during the decade and made it to the World Series five times, winning in 1995. On the very day of Halloween Havoc, they were in Game Seven of the World Series, playing against the Minnesota Twins. Considering that Chattanooga, despite being in Tennessee, was only one-hundred and twenty miles or so from Atlanta, half the distance that, let’s say Savannah, was from Atlanta, the hearts and minds of a lot of the fans were focused on the Braves that night. The Freebirds were billed, of course, from Badstreet, Atlanta G A. Can you see where this is going?

There are pops. There are cheap pops. And then there was this, quite possibly the cheapest pop one can imagine. The Freebirds, those vaguely over the hill tweeners, came out to face one of WCW’s up and coming stars, clad in full Atlanta Braves’ merchandise, doing the Braves’ token tomahawk chop (Hayes with his free arm, as the other was in the sling). The crowd had been chopping all night. The crowd was chopping before ring announcer Gary Michael Capetta even told the them that the Freebirds were about to appear. Once they reached the ring and climbed the corners, it was a full-on chop-a-long. I’m sure that there were some die-hard baseball fans who decided not to go to the show and some die-hard wrestling fans who couldn’t care less about baseball, but in Chattanooga, for the WCW fanbase, there sure seemed like a lot of overlap. Badd never had a chance. He, no matter the bookers’ plans on that night, or in the long term, had been sent out, to haplessly get eaten alive.

Still, no wrestling match is just an entrance, and a strong enough worker could have recovered, either feeding off of the crowd with a heel performance or winning them over with a babyface one. Badd was green as grass and Garvin and Hayes were savvy as hell. Garvin walked around the ring chopping, and Badd, when he finally went up on a corner to pose, found that Hayes, the guy not even in the match, had moved into the ring to pose in the opposite corner. Ross half-heartedly said the crowd was going to be split, but the DDT chants in support of the Freebirds (that Garvin was now doing the chop in rhythm with) said another story. Teddy Long, Badd’s manager with a few years in the business now as a referee and then the manager of Doom, saw what was going on and tried to get the crowd behind Badd from the outside, but Hayes just slammed the apron louder in response.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; the first big spot of the match pretty much sealed things. Badd and Garvin locked up and tussled around the ring, each trying to arm drag the other. They went all the way to the ropes with this and Badd sailed over. It made sense on some level. He was younger and could and would bump more. Once he hit the floor though, Hayes lost the sling, walloped Badd in the face, and winked to the camera in the most over the top Shawn Michaels-esque expression possible, making a farce out of pretty much everything going on, especially since his match with Hammer was supposed to be later in the night. In the ring Garvin shouted “I’m a badddddd man,” mocking Johnny more. They followed with the chops again, as JR exclaimed that the Freebirds had conned the crowd into loving them, basically, which didn’t make Chattanooga look all that great either.

The bleeding away of Johnny’s credibility continued back in the ring. After a Garvin powerslam, Badd had the unique honor of being part of the following spot: Garvin ran the ropes back and forth six or seven times as his opponent watched confused, doing nothing, until he just popped him in the head with a forearm and knocked to the floor. Schiavone tried to sell it on commentary as an experienced wrestler tricking an inexperienced one but it was pretty brutal.

Even when Badd finally got on offense, it didn’t go much better. Garvin was so far across the ring that when he went for the top rope sunset flip, he didn’t quite make it and it looked terrible. He followed up with two more top rope moves, getting nailed on the way down for the third. Immediately thereafter, Garvin moved out of the way of a shot in the corner and Badd took a bump over the top rope. After he made it back to the ring again, and they ran a collision spot, Johnny finally went for his finish, but Garvin ducked the punch and hit the DDT. Long distracted the ref who missed the pin. Then, only after Garvin went after Long, did Badd hit the punch. Even so, Garvin got his foot on the rope and the ref missed Long pushing it off. To sum up, Badd, an up and coming star who had really pressured top babyface Sting the month before, got completely clowned by the less prominent of the over the hill cheap heat tag team act, to the point where he should have lost the match after being ineffectual for the better part of ten minutes, but instead won due to two distractions and his manager pushing Garvin’s foot off the rope. Hayes rushed into the ring post match to hit Long so that Badd most certainly couldn’t celebrate his win. The last image of the match was Hayes raising Garvin’s hand while Schiavone helplessly noted that Badd only won due to Long.

The difference between the Sting match from the Clash and this was amazing. That match had managed to get over both wrestlers while protecting both, even as Sting ended Badd’s undefeated streak. Here, Badd won but came out looking completely exposed and hapless. The difference was, first Sting understanding that the better your opponent looks, the better you look in beating him and also being professional enough to work the match the way he was supposed to, and second the sheer talent that Hayes on the outside, and to a lesser extent Garvin, brought to the table. The Freebirds understood the crowd, what they wanted, and what actions would generate the responses they desired more than anything. Hayes inserted himself not just into the match but into the night as a whole, as a force that could move the crowd any which way he pleased. It was just a shame that he and his partner had decided to move them in a way that made their rookie opponent look like a fool. Out of context, a casual viewer might think that the Freebirds were WCW’s biggest stars but the next day they were really no better off than they had been the night before and Badd was actively worse off. It was the definition of using one’s powers for evil or at least for wholly selfish purposes. I almost wish Hayes hadn’t backed out of the Hammer match, just to see how much further he might have gone there. As it was, it was an incredible performance, a way to expend twice the effort in order to garnish an extreme result. Unfortunately, all that effort and skill led to not just failure at achieving the result needed, but actually managed to do quite a bit of harm.

 

[S.L.L.]

I absolutely stand by Garvin's World Class run as being a marvel of schtick, with a deceptive ability to hang in brawls and on the mat, which is remarkable for a guy who had no memorable offense to speak of. That said...it's one year. He has some good stuff in AWA and Crockett, but the magic is basically gone, and by the time you get the Freebird years, he's terrible. I do feel a certain connection to '83-'84 Garvin, but there are a ton of wrestlers with equivalent runs who aren't gonna make my ballot, so neither is he.

[El McKell]

He offers nothing but cool entrance gear, very boring once the bell rings, if he's gonna do a whole routine of stalling and then a babyface gets their hands on them he should at least sell getting beaten down like it's the end of the world for him but he doesn't, and he's even worse to watch when he has the upper hand.