[1984-03-17-MACW-Boogie Jam '84] Dick Slater vs Greg Valentine (Cage)

[paul sosnowski]

Dick Slater defends the United States Title in a "No DQ Steel Cage" match.   Talk about it here

[shoe]

This was a great cage match. We get a glimpse of Valentine as a face. Another great Valentine performance and a guy I'm glad I started reevaluating his career 10-15 years ago. The dude has tons of great matches and performances in his ledger. Love how these guys lay their shots in on one another. This is very physical, and you get that this needs to be settled in a cage. I love the cage tease early, though the payoff we'll have to wait for. Greg's chinlock  shine was eh. I loved the progression of violence.Valentine gets meat grindered . The visual of Valentine's blood on Slater is just nasty. Slater just peppers Valentine with punches working over the cut. They do a great job milking Slater going into the cage. Once he does, he becomes a bloody mess. Valentine is great at working over the cut. This turned into a hell of a fight. They didn't over due the cage spots, and made the ones they did matter. Up until this point their was no blood on the show so it made the match more impactful.Instead of the chin lock shine I would have preffered Valentine did some leg work since the Figure 4 played into the finish. This was gritty and violent. 4*

[KB8]

This was quite literally a Greg Valentine slobberknocker, with all that entails, occurring within a metal cage that could be used as a weapon, with all that entails. It was fucking awesome. Babyface Valentine is a bit of a rarity and he totally ruled. He worked much the same as he would as a heel and was pretty reserved for the most part, at times almost embarrassed by the fact the people had adopted him as their own. But then as time went on he seemed to realise that it didn't matter how much of a mean bastard he was being; it just mattered that he was being a mean bastard to Slater. "Oh so I can punch him in the neck and elbow him in the ear and we're still good? Well hot damn, I'll do lots of that!" By the end he'd come to welcome the peoples' support and maybe even feed off it, though ultimately, when you get right down to the root of it, he was driven by the need to kick the living shit out of Dick Slater. Nine days a week I could watch Valentine beat the brakes off someone. It started almost immediately as Slater tried to trade body shots, and of course Valentine won that exchange and then just clubbed him in the throat because why the hell not. There was some headlock work early, but it was tight headlock work and more of a punctuation point between the fists and forearms. Slater was pretty great in this too. I'm not a huge Slater guy and sometimes his hamminess can be too much even for me, but he took his licks like a trooper and when it was his turn to dish out receipts he sure made the most of it. He took over with a fairly standard cage spot, where he grabbed Valentine's trunks and yanked him into it, but the set up for it was cool. Valentine was hammering away on him as was Valentine's wont, and Slater practically had to keep hold of those trunks just to stay on his feet. Eventually he goes down, but in doing so he can use his momentum and hurl Valentine into some steel. All of his headbutts looked nasty, his jab flurries, the way he'd just grab Valentine by the hair and repeatedly slam the back of his head off the canvas. The latter was one of those instances where he looked genuinely crazed, like he was trying to make an end of someone. Valentine's big revenge spots were home runs and I loved him choking Slater up against the cage, taking in the moment afterwards with a raised arm as the crowd went nuts. The finish also came across as something you'd get between two guys on their last legs, which was fitting considering how much they laid into each other in the last few minutes.