Sheik Adnan Al-Kasey

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[goc]

I don't see an argument for this guy as a worker although I did enjoy the team with Blackwell on the AWA set. But I just wanted to say I think the guy is a fucking awesome manager and I don't understand why it feels like in certain places on the internet he gets a bad rap in that department. He was a good promo and a heat magnet. He was a great manager for the Blackwell/Patera team and for guys like Abby and Brody. The Adnan's Army vs. Blackwell feud is one of the last great things AWA did.

[Loss]

Can someone please confirm the right way to spell his name? The thread title is a fourth version of it that I have seen.

[Grimmas]

Can someone please confirm the right way to spell his name? The thread title is a fourth version of it that I have seen.

I copied from Parv.

[Grimmas]

 

Can someone please confirm the right way to spell his name? The thread title is a fourth version of it that I have seen.

I copied from Parv.

 

Wikipedia says

 

Adnan Al-Kaissie

[JerryvonKramer]

Adnan Al-Kaissie is best remembered as a manager, of course, but in the 1970s, he was a wrestler and a good one, who was particularly good at bumping at a time when some guys refused even to do the most simple of back bumps.

 

However, his time as Billy White Wolf is most notable -- and I'd love to say I nominated him for this reason alone -- for how he split up with his tag-team partner Chief Jay Strongbow.

 

Strongbow and White Wolf had been the tag champs. But doctors found a lump on Kaissie's neck, it was non-cancerous but he had to have an operation to remove it. Here's what he said:

 

That split up the team between myself and the Chief. He was a very, very difficult person to get along with, in the ring, outside of the ring, on the road. The man was just too much -- and I'm a straight shooter, I'm honest and I'm naive, but he was so difficult. So when I did the operation it was also just to get away from him.

Kaissie was perfectly fine to wrestle, but used it as an opportunity to give up the tag belts and leave the territory because he just couldn't STAND to be with Strongbow. For THAT alone, he should be a consideration.

 

However, in the AWA, we also saw him bounce off cages for fun and was really pretty good carrying his end in some of those matches, and it gives you a good glimpse of the worker that was.

 

But really, his case is carried by the stuff with Strongbow. I also want to say that he's not the worst performer in the main event to Summerslam 91.

[Dylan Waco]

As a manager I love him and think he's criminally underrated. I'll have more to say about that in podcast form soon.

 

As an in ring worker I like him. He's about as basic as it gets, but in a good way where he doesn't try to overshadow his teammates or opponents who were almost always positioned as more skilled than him. He was an underrated brawler in the AWA, where he had some really strong performances bumping, bleeding, and adhering to that old time psychology religion when working on top as a dastardly heel.

 

He actually had 3 different matches that finished in the AWA best of the 80s top 20, all Cage matches where he was central to the storyline that made them so epic. He was also in the actual main event tag match of Super Sunday, and the wild taped fist brawl that set that match up and nearly triggered a riot at the St. Paul Civic Center. He did have some fun singles matches that didn't make the 150 either because they were JIP, or because they just weren't quite up to the standard we were looking for (I did love the Adnan v. Raschke match, but not enough to go to the wall for it). That said he was clearly limited, and not a guy you would want to put on a big stage without the benefit of a partner or a gimmick.

 

In a weird sense I think he's kind of comparable to JBL in that he had a heat garnering heel gimmick that he played very well, had some really great gimmick matches where he was critical to the matches success from a storyline perspective even if he was clearly not the best guy in the match, and not a ton else that jumps out at you.

 

I haven't watched more than a bit of Billy White Wolf stuff but I always thought it was funny as fuck that Adnan was ever a sympathetic babyface. I will say that if he had some really good performances there, I think you could probably cobble together a case for him as a bottom two or three guy.

[ohtani's jacket]

I don't know if anybody is going to take him seriously as a candidate at this late stage, but there are three of his 60s matches available from Iraq and another 70s bout from WoS.

[Dylan Waco]

I actually watched two of the Iraq matches before but was so interested in the spectacle of them, that I didn't really pay much attention to the match quality.

[ohtani's jacket]

From memory they have jump cuts, which makes them difficult to watch.

[JerryvonKramer]

Here's one of the matches from the World of Sport run, if interested:

 

 

Cropped up on the side when I was watching the Spiros Arion match.