Dynamite Kid & The Assassin vs. Buddy Rose & Curt Henning (2/3 Falls) (11/12/83)

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Dynamite Kid & The Assassin vs. Buddy Rose & Curt Henning (2/3 Falls) (11/12/83)

Disc 7

 

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First fall: ​This is the third match in the four-match tag series between Rose's Babyface Army and The Clan. In this one, the newly crowned champions Buddy and Curt are defending against Dynamite and Assassin even though Oliver was Assassin's partner last week when The Clan lost the titles.

 

At any rate, like most first falls lately in Portland this fall could have been a whole match in itself. Assassin gets his arm dissected by Curt and Buddy until he catches Buddy with one of his patented loaded headbutts. The challengers pound on Buddy both inside and outside the ring for a while until Curt gets the hot tag and cleans house. Eventually, Assassin eats the Ax, and Buddy runs across the ring to cut Dynamite off while Curt gets the three count. The champs lead one fall to none with about twelve minutes of disc time remaining.

 

It continues to amaze me that four men who hate each other as much as these four aren't having pull-apart after pull-apart. Don't get me wrong; that's a wonderful thing, as we get to see just how good of workers they are. The chain wrestling sequence between Buddy and Assassin is especially good, not because they do anything earth-shattering but because they're two of the last people you'd expect to see well-executed chain wrestling from, considering their reputations.

 

Maybe it's because I've been watching so many Assassin matches back-to-back lately, but the loaded mask gimmick is starting to wear thin with me, not because of anything Assassin does wrong but because Sandy has to know by now that there's something in the mask most of the time, even if he can't prove it, but does nothing about it.

 

When a gimmick like this starts getting heat on the referee for appearing clueless instead of the guy who's doing something illegal in the first place, it's time to not use the gimmick quite so much. Multiple headbutts per match, and even an offense based around headbutts in some matches, aren't doing Assassin any favors. We know he can wrestle, so let's see him do a lot more of that and only use the gimmick as a finisher or a game-changer.

 

It's nice to see the Ax for the first time on the set; Curt should have been using it as his finisher all along. If I saw what I thought I saw, though, he hit it in the wrong place, as Assassin's forehead is where he keeps his object. Curt should have been selling pain even as he scored the pin .

 

I wonder how long Chavo Classic stayed in Portland. Apparently it wasn't long enough to make much of an impression, as I didn't remember ever hearing about anything he did there.

 

​Second fall: ​This fall went long enough that I thought the time limit was going to expire. Curt plays face-in-peril, with most of the heels' attention directed toward his neck and throat area. Curt comes back to take control briefly, but Dynamite executes a drop toehold so forcefully that it knocks the wind out of him. Dynamite then quickly goes up top and nails a flying kneedrop to get the three-count. We're even at a fall apiece with just three minutes of disc time remaining.

 

Big guys doing aerial moves impress the hell out of me, so it's a treat to watch Assassin throw a dropkick. He's done it in many matches so far, and each time it looks really good.

 

The Clan owes a lot of their popularity to Stasiak, who puts them over as superior athletes and wrestlers every chance he gets. Much like the Four Horsemen, it's their undeniable in-ring skill that makes them stand apart from most other heel groups.

 

At last we know Rip's in the building, as Stan mentions that he was probably in the middle of any between-falls strategy meeting that Assassin and Dynamite may have had.

 

Unless Irish Pat McGhee wrestled in the WWF or JCP under another name, what Stan says here about him being one of the top wrestlers currently on the East Coast is a lie. (I just looked it up; it's Scott McGhee, who actually was​ a decent hand in Florida around this time, although he wasn't trained by Piper, but rather by the odd triumvirate of Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, and Buddy Rogers. Of course, being introduced as Piper's protégé was a great way to kickstart his career in Portland and get the fans behind him right off the bat. He's best known for being one of the first jobbers to be tortured by Jake Roberts' snake Damien after a match at Madison Square Garden, which was documented in Jake's Coliseum Video tape.)

 

As much as Stan and Coss praise Curt, they don't bring up his second-generation background much. Usually promotions at this time brought up and hyped second-generation wrestlers' backgrounds as much as they could, even if the sons wrestled differently from their fathers. I don't think they were making a conscious effort to ignore Larry, because he came in to team with Curt several times. Did Don believe that Curt was over enough on his own already that Larry didn't need to be mentioned? Was he not over enough (which I find hard to believe based on the crowd reaction I've heard)?

 

​Third fall: ​This just isn't Curt's fall. He accidentally costs his team the belts when his and Buddy's doubleteam backfires; his dropkick off the top causes Assassin to fall back on Buddy (who'd been holding him). Buddy's shoulders are down, and he gets pinned. The Clan then celebrates the return of the tag belts by knocking Buddy out of the ring, then executing what can best be described as a triple spike shoulderbreaker on Curt. I guess this is how he was injured and missed over a month of action.

 

I loved the finish; the heels still win by a fluke, but it's a legal ​fluke caused by the other team's inadvertent mistake. If Buddy and Curt hadn't just finished a major feud such a relatively short time ago, I'm guessing that they could have used this as an excuse to turn Buddy heel again.

 

The shoulderbreaker looked sloppy, but it was a miracle that they were able to do it at all. It's much harder than a spike piledriver, where as long as the victim's head hits the mat everything is fine. Actually, it looked like Rip completed the shoulderbreaker before Dynamite ever came off the second rope. No matter, though, because Curt sold the arm like it had been amputated. We know perfectly well that we won't see him again for weeks, if not months.

 

I forgot to mention Assassin's $2500 bounty payable to anyone who can take his mask off. I wonder why they didn't make a bigger deal of it. It certainly sounds like something Don would want to promote the hell out of, especially with Assassin heavily involved in the promotion's hottest feud at the moment.