[2001-01-06-WWC] Ray Gonzalez vs Curt Hennig

[soup23]

Hennig’s gear is awful with a T-shirt under his singlet but they are still battling it out in front of a big crowd in the baseball stadium. Horace Hogan comes out for a closer look. Real basic mat work throughout the match. I can appreciate a slow moving match but it felt like we were still in the table setting when everything ended. Gonzalez works the leg a bit and Hennig keeps coming back. A figure four is locked in and then we get a big brawl for the DQ.  Nice to see Hennig in 2001 but this didn’t look like we were missing much at all. NR

[GSR]

I downloaded this from YouTube when I restarted the project but couldn’t find a date.  I had a hunch it may have been from the same show as the three-way, which I also got from YouTube, but that is no longer online so I couldn’t check the arena/crowd.  Joined in progress.  Hennig, who looks pretty big here, is wearing a black T-shirt under his leotard, like some powerlifter.  Horace Hogan and another dude take a seat at ringside while Gonzalez works over the leg.  Curt does take a nice bump when Ray kicks that leg out from under him.  He slaps on an abdominal stretch, cleverly manoeuvring his position to keep the ref from seeing that he’s pulling the tights for added leverage.  Gonzalez escapes and is back to working over that leg, which primarily consists of both men lay on the mat while he bends it.  Hennig fires off some solid rights to the jaw from the bottom.  Ray locks on the Figure Four when someone sprints from the dressing room and drops an elbow on him for the DQ.  That brings in Horace Hogan and it looks like a brawl is about to ensue as my version ends.

Hennig’s fleeting appearances in WWC in 2000 were nothing more than curios, same applies here in all honesty.

[Reel]

I want to watch a bunch of Gonzalez, mostly because he seems like a guy who has gone almost entirely unremarked upon. He comes around during the doldrums of wrestling in Puerto Rico so he doesn't really have the sort of reputation that TNT or Carlos Colon have, but in a lot of ways he seems to be in the same mold as both, a top guy with a long run of prominent matches in major promotions in PR, just without the international notoriety of Vega or Colon. 

All that being said, there's not a ton here, Curt Hennig is just not very good, he's not in the bad way he was in early TNA, but he's wearing a shirt under his singlet, so this isn't the precursor to his fleeting Royal Rumble resurgence either. The vast majority of it is Gonzalez in two different periods of a very prosaic leg submission on Hennig, and its horribly uncompelling. There's a brief glimmer of an old Mr. Perfect spot where Gonzalez kicks Curt's legs out from under him, and that plays into the leg submission, which is fine I suppose, but its not anything I'm going to get all that excited about. Thankfully, outside interference brings this to a conclusion rather quickly, or I fear even more of Perfect lackadaisically slapping the mat while Gonzalez grapevines his leg would have ensued.