Tommy Rich vs. Abdullah the Butcher (June 1988)

[El Boricua]

Tommy Rich vs. Abdullah the Butcher (June 1988)

[elliott]

Hey Tommy Rich in Puerto Rico I wonder if he’ll bleed. This is awesome right away with Abdullah on the ground on the baseball field and Rich just wailing away on him. Abby is already covered in bloody and Rich is enormous. Hugo just said “Tommy usually behaves like a gentlemen. At least I think he does under normal circumstances.” 10,000 stars. Rich gets, presumably, a beer can and is bashing Abby with it. There’s a terrific shot of Abby trying to crawl back in the ring and Rich is just destroying him with punches. Great punch off the 2^nd rope and Abby sells it by having a seizure. Next Rich hits a Bret Hart 2^nd rope elbow as the crowd goes bonkers. He even hits it off the top rope damn! Abby is completely dazed. Finally Abby has had enough and starts to work towards sneaking some sort of foreign object, I think a fork, into Rich’s face and or eyes as we go to commercial. We come back and Rich is stumbling around foul territory with Abby stalking him and finally stabbing him again and Rich is busted wide open. Rich tries to fight back but keeps getting stabbed in the face. Ref finally sees it and calls for a DQ. Rich fights back with his great punches and Rich gets the fork or whatever and gets his revenge to my and the crowd’s delight. Post match brawl is great. This is exactly what you want and expect this to be. Crowd is great. Tommy Rich baby! Oh. Abby may have peed his pants at some point.

[dawho5]

There's not a lot going on here except Rich and Abby beating the shit out of each other and bleeding. So basically it's awesome. Apparently the match got called somewhere in there, but I'm not sure anybody cares. This is one of those matches where if you like the style of wrestling in PR, you'll love it. It's just instead of Colon brawling around with Abby it's Tommy Rich and somehow the crowd are almost as into it. Favorite moment was when Tommy was stumbling around the field being stabbed and comes across the camera cable he was choking Abby with before. So he grabs it and ha;lf clothesline/half chokes Abby to stop the offense coming his way. Awesome.