Buddy Rose vs. Matt Borne (2/3 Falls) (6/5/82)

[goodhelmet]

Buddy Rose vs. Matt Borne (2/3 Falls) (6/5/82)

Disc 4

[dawho5]

So this match...yeah. Buddy starts off by assaulting Borne as he's taking off his sweatpants. Borne finally lands a good shot and Buddy goes into bump-and-feed mode which is incredible with Borne knowing exactly what to do. The earlier Borne/Rose rivalry had a very inexperienced Matt Borne and it showed. This time around Borne is way less green. Quick (very well executed as well) counter sequence and Borne puts Rose away. Buddy starts off the next fall by knocking Borne into a ringpost. A chairshot follows and Buddy distracts the crowd while Borne blades by menacing a few people in the front row with a chair. Brilliant stuff that, you forget Borne is even around while Buddy is making like he's going to hit a fan with a chair. Rose destroys Borne with a big chairshot from outside in and gets the second fall. Borne makes a comeback in the third and bloodies Rose. It's payback time and the crowd is loving it. I love how they are re-establishing Borne as a face with this match. Shows a wonderful grasp of how to work a crowd. Match spills outside and we get a countout, but it doesn't end there. They continue brawling and Buddy starts swinging a chair at anyone who comes out to stop the fight. Dutch Savage comes out and after ducking a chairshot or two informs everyone that Don Owens is PISSED. Next week is a lights out match where anything goes. With lumberjacks. BUT NOT ON TV???? FUCK YOU!! As it turns out, my completely valid (and not over) reaction to this not being on TV is too soon as Borne and Rose are hooking it up in a lumberjack match two weeks later that wasn't supposed to be on TV.

 

One aside here is that this was only 13 minutes long in it's entirety. I like the style, but a lot of the 2/3 falls matches could benefit from shorter falls. There's a lot of meandering and just back and forth stuff to keep things moving. It works, but it takes a condensed and hate-fueled brawl like this to make me wish ten minutes had been cut off of most of the TV main events. You throw in even a good headlock or armbar sequence and it kills the momentum these guys kept all the way through. Imagine if a few of the Piper matches had been this length!

[Lee Benaka]

I thought this match was just terrific. I liked Matt invading Buddy's space as Sandy Barr was doing the pre-match inspection. With all the attention paid to Buddy's hand, I thought that would come into play, but no. The highlights are covered nicely by dawho5 above, but I just loved how Buddy faced the crowd after the second fall and licked his (presumably bloody) finger, shrugged, and indicated that he was #1. I also found efforts to minister to Borne after the second fall bizarre but compelling. I guess the medical best practice to relieve massive blood loss is to rub one's shoulders and slap the back of one's neck hard. Things really got crazy in the third fall when Borne picked up the big wooden box and hit Rose with it, and then followed up with a microphone to the forehead. Exasperated Dutch Savage was perfect. I have to say that I appreciated the brevity of this match, although longer 2/3-fall matches don't really bug me when Buddy Rose is involved.

[Lee Benaka]

I forgot to mention two other great things about this match: (1) Buddy Rose's extensive mooning of the crowd early in the match, and (2) Matt Borne's severely dick-ish move of stepping onto the side of Buddy's stomach as he walked over him after winning the first fall. That looked painful.

[garretta]

First fall: ​This one was quick. Buddy not only jumps Matt as was mentioned above, but hits his finisher (the flying elbow), which doesn't put Matt away. From then on, it's all Matt, and the piledriver gives him a 1-0 lead with about eleven minutes of disc time remaining. (Frank says there's about eight or nine minutes of actual wrestling time left.)

 

This is the second match in a row that I've seen where Matt's been jumped while he's taking off those long pants he's been wearing to the ring lately. Those things look like they're a bear to take off under any circumstances, let alone when a 275-pound wrestler's waiting to take your head off. Maybe Matt should leave them in the dressing room next time. Even Frank comments that Matt ought to have known better than to turn his back on Buddy to take them off, which means that it's a major​ screwup on his part.

 

Who didn't like Don's editorial comment during the ring announcements? You get the feeling that he'd be perfectly happy if Buddy and Matt killed each other......until he saw a few weeks of diminishing gates at the House of Action.

 

I liked the quick falls too, especially in a brawl like this. But I've also seen some great tag matches on this set that needed a long time to tell their stories. I guess it all depends on what the guys do with the time they take.

 

Matt's interview sounded a wee bit brazen, considering that he's only won one fall so far. I'm surprised the reference to Buddy and Oliver's women having had a sex change made it to TV, quite frankly. Frank only raises his eyebrows slightly, which works here in Portland as well as Lance Russell saying "Aw, COME ON, Matt......" would have in Memphis.

 

Second fall: ​Matt starts fast by nearly stripping Buddy of his trunks, then hitting an atomic drop on the floor. But Buddy turns the tide by posting him, then driving a chair into his forehead. From there, the Playboy teaches a doctorate-level class on how to tear opponents apart, leaving Matt a bloody mess despite Sandy's best efforts to stop him. A second chair shot finishes Matt for good, and we're even at a fall apiece with about five minutes left.

 

Nice move on Buddy's part to avoid Sandy taking the chair from him by swinging across his body rather than winding up and over his head. It's small touches like that which make master heels who they are.

 

Was it really Buddy's strategy to beat Matt up so badly that he couldn't come out for the third fall? If it was, he's a fool; that would only net him a draw, unless Portland's rules would give him the match on a referee's stoppage (which hasn't happened yet in a two-out-of-three match that I've seen).

 

As far as I know, Sandy was looking right at the second chair shot that Buddy gave Matt, the one that led to the pinfall. So why would he count it? At least make Buddy perform some type of legal maneuver first if you don't want to disqualify him. (In New Japan, I believe, referees don't count pins attempted after illegal moves.)

 

Third fall: ​This has to be one of the wildest falls on the whole set so far. Not only do Buddy and Matt attack each other with everything they can pick up or pry loose from its hinges, the wrestlers called on by Dutch to restore order get their ​shots in too. Finally, Dutch says that he and Don have had enough, and that there's going to be an untelevised lumberjack rematch next week where there two can cripple each other to their heart's content. I'm guessing that the match was declared a no-contest, but there's no official decision that we're made aware of.

 

Shades of ECW with one fan willingly giving Matt a chair to clobber Buddy with. Also, I've heard of microphones and ring bells being used as weapons, but never, not even in ECW, have I seen a guy use the box that the bell came in as a weapon. If that was solid wood an inch thick like Frank said it was, it's a miracle Buddy didn't end up with a fractured skull.

 

I haven't gotten to Buddy's matches with Hack Sawyer yet, but they must have been something else for Hack to nail Buddy with a chair while he was supposed to be restoring order. I've seen wrestlers do stuff like that before, but not white-meat babyfaces like Hack, even against heels like Buddy.

 

After a bloody match like this, I'm not surprised that the rematch is going to be off TV. Or is it? There's a lumberjack match coming up next on the set from two weeks later, and I'm wondering if that's the match that was supposed to be held the week before. If so, I wonder what changed Don's mind about televising it. Could this be a legit case of Tom Peterson asking that a match be shown that wasn't supposed to be?

 

Line of the Night goes to Frank during the first fall: "Maybe Don's right. Maybe they do ​deserve each other."