I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a show from the LA Sports Arena (home of the third stint of Wrestlemania II). Gorilla Monsoon is the host and he is joined by Superstar Billy Graham. With all due respect to Graham, his time as a commentator was one best left forgotten. I understand he was a charismatic character during his promos but there’s a difference between a two-minute promo and two hours of commentary. It’s like when they tried to milk a segment on Saturday Night Live into a full-length movie back in the 90s or when they tried to make Jack Black into a leading man. There are just some things better in small doses.
August 13, 1988 was just a week or so away from the inaugural SummerSlam so it will be interesting to see how much of that card will play out here. It was also the day before Ricky Rudd won at Watkins Glen. (Earnhardt came in 6th.)
If you want to check this out on YouTube, this is amazingly clear considering it’s almost 35 years old.
The opening bout is Black Jack (that’s it, just Black Jack, even Graham says it feels like there should be another name after it) vs. Sam Houston. Wow! This is a rather historic match as it might be the only time that Houston was in a match that wasn’t against Danny Davis. They do reference his matches against Davis, however.
Black Jack, who’s got a decent build to him, runs into three hip tosses in a row. I gotta be honest – if you showed this match to someone who knew nothing about wrestling in 1988, they’d guess that Black Jack was going to go over with ease. Meanwhile, I am starting on my Christmas list while I am recapping this match and every time I look over, Houston has Black Jack in a headlock.
But it’s a bulldog (that Gorilla calls a steerbuster) that gets Houston a victory over Black Jack.
Barry Horowitz (pre-mid-90s face turn) takes on the Blue Angel. Who in the heck is the…OHHHH!!!! It’s Owen Hart before they changed his name to the Blue Blazer. (You can tell from the Stampede Wrestling tights and the blonde hair sticking out the back of the mask.)
I could never figure out why they didn’t just bring Owen in as Owen Hart. I guess it was so that they didn’t have to create a storyline between Owen and Bret at that point. Actually, by the summer of 1988, Bret was a face so they could have just had Bret do a short segment welcoming his brother into the World Wrestling Federation and looking forward to great things. Then Owen could have gone on to a great singles career from there.
Owen…er, I mean the Blue Angel, is impressive throughout the opening stages of the match. Horowitz does take over during the middle portions. Ironically, Horowitz wrestled as Brett Hart in Florida, I believe. Actually, the longer this match goes on, the more I think it has too much offence by Horowitz.
I will say that Hart nailed Horowitz with a sweet looking off-the-top-rope dropkick and follows it up with a knee off the second rope. Horowitz survives until Hart, er…Angel comes off with a backflip off the top rope onto Horowitz. That gets the three count for the Blue Angel.
The next match is a tag match. The Bolsheviks are here but not Slick. Here comes the Powers of Pain, doing their best Road Warrior impression. I remember the NWA was all set for a program between the LOD and the Powers of Pain and then suddenly the latter team was headed to the WWF.
I think this might have been a match we saw again at SummerSlam.
I figured the Powers of Pain were going to just end it within minutes but the two teams do end up having a lengthy match. Having said that, the purpose of this match was definitely to establish and get the Powers of Pain over. The Powers of Pain are in control for the bulk of the match and the Bolsheviks need to come in and break up the pinfall. Volkoff and Zhukov do have some double-team offense but it doesn’t last too long.
The Warlord powerslams Zhukov and the Barbarian comes off the top rope with a flying headbutt for the victory.
As we get ready for the next match, Gorilla and Superstar are joined by Jesse “The Body” Ventura who has a total different look. He’s in a SEAL Team t-shirt and a ball cap. He also talks about the recent Hollywood writers’ strike and how wrestlers should go on strike.
Our next match isn’t Mr. Perfect. It’s Curt Hennig who takes on S.D. Jones. In about two or three minutes, Ventura proves himself to be 10x the commentator that Superstar Billy Graham has been. They keep trying to talk to Jesse about his movie career.
They finally get back to the action, as Hennig turns Jones into a short-lived Boston crab and grabs the rope for leverage. Ventura is okay with that, not so much for Gorilla but the exchange leads to Ventura’s quote “Win if you can, lose if you must but always cheat!”
Every time I look over, Hennig is in control. Although as Hennig walked in, Jones nailed him with a left hand and just dropped the future Mr. Perfect. That leads to some offence for Jones, including a reverse atomic drop that Hennig sells to the point he almost falls over the top rope. As much charisma and skills as Hennig had, perhaps the best skill he had was the ability to sell moves. There are a number of top stars (including the Road Warriors and the Undertaker) who wouldn’t sell but Hennig knew the importance of making your opponent look good as well.
As S.D. Jones sends Hennig into the corner, Hennig replies with a lariat (a throwback to his father’s Ax move) across the face and, if you can believe it, that’s enough to get the pinfall for the victory. Wait, really?
I have to be honest, as much as I always thought they should have just left Hennig as Curt Hennig, without the “Mr. Perfect” moniker, I can see where the Perfect-Plex made for a much better finisher that the clothesline.
Mid-way through the card, it’s time for a World Championship match. Andre the Giant (with Bobby “the Brain” Heenan) challenges Randy Savage (with Elizabeth) for the title. Prior to the bell, Heenan confronted Elizabeth, leading to the Brain being ejected from ringside. Okay, I don’t know who came up with that idea but eliminating Heenan from ringside was a bad idea.
Savage uses his speed to keep away from Andre but the Giant gets hold of him and has the Macho Man in trouble in short order. Savage is sent to the floor and when he returns, he falls into the grasp of Andre with a choke hold and headbutts. Savage tries to get some offense but finds himself stuck in a bearhug.
Savage does stage a comeback and Andre falls back and gets his arms caught in the ropes. (I think he did that once a match from 1988 onward.) Once Andre gets free, he soon gets back in control.
Andre takes the turnbuckle padding off but ends up headbutting the turnbuckle himself and Savage takes advantage of the situation, sending Andre into the corner multiple times. Once Andre falls to the canvas, Savage heads to the top turnbuckle (ironically the same corner where the padding was taken off) and lands the flying elbow.
However, Andre tosses Savage off and rolls to the outside. Savage follows him out but gets sent back into the ring. For some reason, Elizabeth is up on the ring apron and Andre grabs her leg, bringing Savage back out in her defence.
At this point, the bell rings and as Macho Man carries Elizabeth to the back, it is announced that both men were counted out. (The only issue is that Savage went back into the ring while Andre remained outside. Savage losing is a miscarriage of justice!) Andre remains in the ring with the championship belt but we are assured he is not the champion.
Coming back from the break, they show some of the things that went on during the previous match, mainly as a way to justify that Gorilla suddenly is back in the locker room to interview the Brain and Ravishing Rick Rude. Monsoon definitely gets under the skin of both Heenan and Rude during their discussion of the upcoming match against Jake “The Snake” Roberts.
Okay, so they go from Gorilla in the locker room with Rude and Heenan to being back at ringside with Superstar to discuss the interview to being back in the locker room again, this time with the Rougeaus. You know, for a big guy, Gorilla sure can move. He’s got Mean Gene Okerlund-type speed there.
The Rougeaus were in the beginning of their “We Love the USA” heel turn but no Jimmy Hart as their manager as yet. At least after the interview, they go to a commercial to let Gorilla get back to the announce desk. The Rougeaus are in action against the Hart Foundation in a tag match.
As the Harts hit the the ring, Jacques makes the ring announcer tell the crowd that the Rougeaus will soon be moving to the United States. Ironically, Jacques would later return to Canada and join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and become “THE MOUNTIE!!!”
The Anvil and Raymond start out and while Raymond get a nice dropkick in, the bigger surprise was that Neidhart got up for a similar move. A moment later, both teams have tagged and we’re seeing Jacques vs. Bret – which would be a match-up for the Intercontinental Championship about 3-4 years later.
It strikes me, as I am watching the opening moments of this match, that the Rougeaus played the jerk heel role wrong. There’s a difference between the Honky Tonk Man or Ric Flair who played that role so well that you went into the match just wanting the faces, no matter who they were, come out on top. The Rougeaus were just so annoying you didn’t care who they were facing, you just wanted the match to be over so you didn’t have to watch any more.
It was similar to the “talk shows” that the WWF had at the time. You watched Piper’s Pit and no matter who Piper had as his guest, you were captivated by the segment and, when he had a face on the show, you wanted that wrestler to have the better of Piper. With Brother Love, however, it was a case where you just wanted things to be over.
Gorilla says Bret has “the mastery of execution” so obviously the “excellence of execution” tag was still in the early stages. It’s like watching Curt Hennig or “the Blue Angel” earlier on in the card. They were trying things on these house shows before they showed up on TV. I remember hearing them announce that “The Midnight Rockers” would be appearing on house shows. Of course, the Rockers left the WWF before they showed up on TV and it would be a year or two before they returned.
Bret is playing Ricky Morton as the Rougeaus have double-teamed him and isolated him from the Anvil. I would have loved to have seen the Rock’n’Roll Express show up in the WWF about this time. I’ve often thought that the Midnight Rockers were brought in because McMahon couldn’t sign Gibson and Morton and wonder if, in some alternate universe, there’s “The Heartbreak Kid” Ricky Morton.
Hart finally makes the tag and the Anvil comes in to clean house, even bringing out another dropkick. Eventually, all four men are in the ring and Hart excellently executes the piledriver on Jacques. However, as the referee is ushering the Anvil out of the ring, Raymond comes off the second rope with a double axhandle that Bret sells as if he’s dead.
Out goes Jacques and Raymond gets the pin. Looks like Montreal wasn’t the only place that Bret got screwed. (Too soon?)
After the break, Gorilla and Superstar are surprised to see “the Macho Man” coming back to the ring. Savage says he’s got a message for Andre the Giant. Elizabeth is scared and hurt (and apparently only weighs 103 lbs. – TMI?) Savage is upset and says he’ll kick Andre’s ass. Basically this is to build to the rematch.
Ravishing Rick Rude – now without Heenan as he’s been thrown out of the building – vs. Jake “the Snake” Roberts. I know that Heenan was sent to the back during the Savage/Andre match but why have him come out to L.A. if he was only going to be in action for two or three minutes.
In a cringe-worthy moment, as Rude does his pre-match pose, some moron in the audience literally presses his kid about his head. The kid has his shirt off and is doing his own poses. Superstar says the kid is six years old and has a better body that Rude. To quote Gorilla, “highly unlikely” plus the kid looks probably more like 8-10 years old.
By the way, that kid would be in his early 40s now. Maybe it was a young Kevin Harvick?
Apparently, this is a rematch from the previous month’s card. See, this is what they did for house shows back in the day. They would build to rematches for the next month to bring the crowd back. This is why the cowardly heel, when done right, worked.
Take, for example, the Honky Tonk Man as Intercontinental Champion. He would come into a town, and defend the title against a face, and it didn’t matter if it was Randy Savage or Koko B. Ware. The face could get a lot of offense in and make it look like any moment he was going to win the title. Then, Honky Tonk would do something cowardly (get counted out, have Jimmy Hart or Peggy Sue interfere) and would retain the title.
The crowd would be sure they were on the verge of seeing a title change. So imagine the response when it was announced that, next month, the WWF would return to the arena with a rematch for the Intercontinental title, with some sort of stipulation attached. Heck, we saw something similar earlier on in this show. Macho Man battles Andre to a double-count out, at the same time Elizabeth is injured. Savage comes out and vows revenge. Odds are that they announced another match between Andre and Savage, possibly a Texas Death Match or a Steel Cage match, at the next show.
Prior to the match, Jake says he’s disappointed Rude didn’t wear the tights (with an image of Cheryl Roberts, Jake’s then-wife, air-brushed on them) he showed up on TV with, and Jake’s going to kick Rude’s ass. This is now the second time in about 10 minutes that someone has uttered the word “ass” on TV in the 1980s PG era.
Funny moment as Superstar says Jake is “fighting for the rights of Americans to be moral and upright people.” Uhh….okay? He later says that “we’re moving into the 23rd century.”
As good as Ravishing Rick Rude was in World Class, the NWA and the WWF, he really turned it up a notch in WCW in 1992 and then as a commentator in ECW. Meanwhile, I’m not sure why by Jake Roberts always reminded me of Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati.
As the end of the match looms, Roberts tries three times for the DDT. To be a bit of a mark here, you ever notice just how easy it is to get out to the DDT. I mean, first of all, the executer of the move pretty much telegraphs the heck out of the move and then you can counter it a number of different ways.
Rude ends up tossing Jake outside the ring and keeps trying to get a count out victory only for Roberts to repeatedly return to the ring. Eventually Rude goes for a body slam but Jake hangs on to the ropes and topples Rude for the pinfall. (Although I think Rude might have kicked out at the last second.)
Rude puts the boots to Roberts who falls out of the ring. You ever notice that Jake always seemed to sell like he was half-dead for most of his matches.
That’s the end of the show. The video I watched didn’t include the customary signoff from Gorilla and Superstar. I also realized about midway through the show, they never mentioned SummerSlam once, despite the fact it was two weeks away. For a company that was very skilled in marketing their events, this one was a weird miss.
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