[1979-04-14-Portland-TV] Buddy Rose vs Hector Guerrero

[GOTNW]

This is my first time seeing Buddy Rose. One thing that immediately stood out is how well he hit the ropes. I've seen a million matches where a babyface/lower ranked guy takes the beginning of the match with armdrag/armhold combos, here it was pretty much the entire match. Rose's selling was good enough to keep me invested, and there was some nice work over the keylock with him pulling the tights and repeteadly getting countered back into the keylock by Hector. But for a promotion and worker I've never seen before it felt incredibly mundane and familiar, and I wasn't big on how it was paced and how insignificant Hector taking the entire match looked at the end of the match. Hector had some babyface offence and took lunatic bumps for Rose's Flapjack which made it look deadly. Rose's Billy Robinson Backbreaker looked very good and whoever his associate was hit a badass diving knee drop after the match. But......but..........I still had to sit through a lot of uninteresting armlocks and they didn't provide satisfying transitions out of them. It was weird that Rose would just hit his stuff and go over after showing ass the entire match. It could've worked but I don't think it did here. **3/4

[corwo]

Solid TV match. Hector has impressive high spots for 1979. This was heavily one-sided, but Rose's bumping and selling was enough to make it engaging. The babyfaces going after Rose's arm in their matches after the big angle with him and Jay Youngblood is a small detail I love. I do find it odd that after Hector controlled most of the match, Rose came back and won anyway, especially since the decision was reversed immediately.