Rocky Johnson, Brett Sawyer & Steve Regal vs. Buddy Rose, Rip Oliver & Matt Borne (2/3 Falls) (2/20/82)

[goodhelmet]

Rocky Johnson, Brett Sawyer & Steve Regal vs. Buddy Rose, Rip Oliver & Matt Borne (2/3 Falls) (2/20/82)

Disc 4

[AstroBoy]

This is the 15th anniversary of Portland wrestling and an extremely interesting match because the post comes undone midway through the second fall changing the complexion of the whole match. How they work around that moment and integrate it into the story is a real treat.

 

Match starts fun enough with Rocky, Hack, and Regal using their quickness and staying one step ahead to work over the Army, primarily with armbars and armdrags. Good guys get a flash pin off a sunset flip to take the first fall. I don't want want to forget Matt Borne being awesome in this, showing up late to the first fall, constantly avoiding being tagged in, and shrinking away any time the faces (particularly Regal) want to get their hands on him.

 

The post breaks and the match breaks down for a few moments but this leads to the Army taking control on Rocky. Borne uses the turnbuckle for a few very smart cheap shots that lead directly into the finish. The use of the turnbuckle was so well sewn into the match that I wondered for a moment if it could have even been by design.

 

That seems unlikely as the final fall takes place with no ropes and the partners all hilariously just standing behind an invisible rope waiting to be tagged in. Rocky seems pretty silly in this fall, overselling to an insane degree from stomps to the face. Borne gets in some cheap shots and the heels work on Sawyer's back. Finally in a schmozz the Army crotches Rocky into the post and the match is thrown out. Regal and Borne brawl and it gets broken up. This was fun and a really cool novelty if only for the ring post situation. I could not imagine many modern workers finding such a cool way to not only get around that but use it to their advantage.

[garretta]

First fall: ​The Army has its problems from the start, as Matt comes to the ring late after being embarrassed by being stripped down to a pair of pink shorts in an earlier confrontation with Regal. Even when he finally gets to the ring he isn't much help, as he avoids Regal like the plague unless he (Regal) is in an obviously vulnerable position.

 

This means that Buddy and Oliver take a pounding for the first part of the fall before finally gaining the advantage on Regal and working over his back. But Regal eventually makes a blind tag to Hack, who comes in with a beautiful sunset flip off the top to get the pin on Buddy and grab a one fall to none lead for his team with about thirteen minutes of disc time remaining.

 

I loved the heels trying desperately to delay the start of the match until Matt arrived, only for Sandy to have none of their shenanigans: "We're going to start the match, and I don't care if Borne ever ​shows up!"

 

Frank sure had a lot of appearances by Buddy to plug: his and Rip's trip to WTBS and the Omni and his stint with Portland's hockey team, to name two. I liked his comment when Buddy called up to the Crow's Nest to demand even more plugs: "If I plugged any more of your appearances, Buddy, we wouldn't have time to wrestle!"

 

Matt really took avoiding Regal to an extreme here, at least from the Army's perspective, No wonder they had a problem with him; he was perfectly willing to let Buddy and Oliver take most of the beating, deliberately short-arming almost every tag attempt. How someone didn't call him out on it I'll never know.

 

I liked the trophies we saw at the start of the bout. A six-man title wouldn't have been out of place here, since both Buddy's Army and Oliver's Army had at least three men in them at all times. Any combination of babyfaces would have worked against them, because every babyface in the territory had an issue with one of those groups at a given time.

 

Strictly speaking, Don's wrong to refer to this as a three-sided team match. A true three-sided team match would consist of three two-man teams, not two three-man teams,

 

Second fall: ​This is the fall where the ringpost breaks, and I have to give these guys credit for not only continuing to wrestle the match, but finding ways to use the ropes as weapons. In fact, they figure directly in the fall, as Buddy literally whips Hack with the top rope, causing him to lose his balance against Oliver, who then puts him away with a shoulderbreaker. We're even at a fall apiece with about eight minutes of disc time remaining.

 

I saw Buddy actually break the post when he was whipped into the ropes, and he hurt his back, which doesn't surprise me one bit. He's lucky he wasn't dumped on the back of his head out on the floor.

 

To everyone's credit, there wasn't a second of wasted time or "What the hell do we do now?" The Army looked even more dastardly than usual using the broken ropes and turnbuckles as weapons, and it seemed at times like their strategy was to choke and hold the faces against the ropes until the ring collapsed, which hopefully would injure the babyfaces worse than them.

 

Rocky really sold the stomps to the face, as Astro said above. My guess is that he had a lose tooth or some other type of dental work which was giving him problems, though not enough to let the heels know not to hit him in the face.

 

Third fall: How this stayed a regulation match with no ropes is beyond me. Actually, it's a good thing that it did; without the ropes, if the wrestlers had rolled out of the ring on the wrong side, they would have ended up in the laps of the poor people in the first row.

 

Speaking of which, great tease by Buddy of trying to throw either Hack or Regal (I can't remember which at the moment) off the apron and into the crowd. Sandy makes the save by pushing the wrestler in question (I think it was Hack, but I can't be absolutely sure) on top of Buddy for a close two-count.

 

The fall eventually ends out of camera range when Oliver and Buddy team up to crotch Rocky on the good side of the post. The DQ is immediate, and Rocky's in obvious pain afterward. The Army tries for a repeat performance, but Hack and Regal run them off before they can do it again.

 

Frank's impish side comes out a bit when he says that he won't explain what happened to the ropes just so those who tuned in late will go crazy (and presumably kick themselves for not tuning in earlier). I've really grown to like Frank; he wouldn't have been in JR's or Gordon's class if he'd lived, but he'd have been on par with the likes of Tony Schiavone and Bob Caudle, and a definite step above what Vince became in the late eighties and early nineties.

 

I'm guessing that the reason they went with no ropes is that fixing the post would have necessitated completely tearing the ring down, which they had neither the time nor the space to do with an arena full of people waiting to see a match concluded, to say nothing of a network of TV stations demanding a product. Today, WWE would have probably just canceled the taping and offered refunds, knowing that they could plug in repeats or other related programming to fill the TV time.

 

What a way for Portland Wrestling to celebrate its fifteenth year on the air. I wonder if Rocky, Hack, and Regal ever got their trophies.