Falls Count Anywhere

05-22-08

Remember the days when I talked about wrestlers that were still active? Those were good days.

I should mention that I missed one last week. There was another very significant card in 1985. There was the classic Polynesian Hot Summer Night held in August of 1985 at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu. It was the last big show in Hawaii, which had been a wrestling hotspot dating back more than 30 years. The event was Ric Flair going to a Double DQ with Siva Afi, who would later be a WWF jobber but was a big star on the islands. There was an Antonio Inoki vs. Bruiser Crody match, as well as Magnum TA, Dusty Rhodes, Kevin Sullivan and Jimmy Superfly Snuka. It was a combo show with guys from the NWA, the WWF and AWA, as well as Japan. That’s a big show for me to miss. One of the reasons I did is that I’ve often looked for video and never found it!

1986
Wrestling changed a whole lot between 1985 and 1986. The slower style that the WWF was using during the period leading up to the first WrestleMania had been replaced with a faster style, part of which had to do with new rings that had tighter ropes. There was more flying, shorter matches and a lot more TV. The style you’d see in the WWF was much like it was up until 1996 or so. The NWA had started to fold into a single entity called Jim Crockett Promotions. The style they used was stiffer, bloodier and more realistic. The matches were longer and the main events were incredible with Flair on top.

The smaller promotions were starting to hurt a lot. The AWA was doing good, but they were certainly on the downward slope when they lost a lot of their talent to Vince McMahon. They did draw a big card, but a lot of the stuff was pretty average. Florida was dying and World Class was bleeding heavily but staying alive and drawing fans to some shows, but not to others. Smaller territories were drying up and the shows were getting harder to draw with the WWF going all over the country.

Let’s start with the Big One: WrestleMania. The second WrestleMania was so typical of second entries: big, over-reaching, retreads coming back and the audience having enough of them. There were tons of celebrities, none of whom really made much impact on the buy-rate or the enjoyment of the audience. Robert Conrad was the ref for the Hogan-Bundy main event cage match. It didn’t draw a single buy or sell a single seat. Cab Calloway, Chocolate Thunder Darryl Dawkins and G. Gordon Liddy as judges for the Piper-Mr. T boxing match?

The only really strong use of celebrities was in the Battle Royal with the various NFL players. It got a fair bit of media attention (I remember seeing ESPN covering it) and the Refrigerator Perry pulling out Big John Studd storyline really worked. It was a good thing.

The show came from three different arenas and the crowd seemed kinda annoyed from having to watch 2/3 of the show on the screens since they were coming from different locations. The crowd at the Nassau Coliseum turned on Mr. T and basically made Roddy Piper into a Face. They made a lot of money on the show, but it was over-kill and they sorta learned and moved things around and ended up with WrestleMania III being amazing the next year.

World Class was coming off a strong 1985, but things were obviously down from the peak in the 1983 peak. The first Supercard that WCCW held was the Wrestling Star Wars show in January 1986 at the Convention Center in Fort Worth, TX. The event wasn’t headlined by the Von Erichs. Bruiser Brody, who I think was booking at that point, main evented with One Man Gang in a Steel Cage match where the guys were connected with a chain.

Now, I always thought that the Bruiser Brody, Lance & Kerry Von Erich against the Freebirds was the Main Event, but it was the Brody vs. Gang match. This was also the Chris Adams vs. Gino Hernandez match that I’ve seen a few times and always thought stood as the monument to the possibilities of their feud had Gino not ODed.

The show drew 8000 people, which was a good number. The July 4th show was held at the Reunion Arena and drew 11000+. Absullah the Butcher wrestled twice, including once against Bruiser Brody. The show was headlined by three Von Erichs vs. Butch Reed, Buzz Sawyer and Matt Borne, three guys who worked for Mid-South at the time.

The Labor Day Star Wars card was headlined by Abdullah the Butcher vs. Bruiser Brody. Again, it seems to show that Brody had a lot of power. WCCW Champ Chris Adams wrestled a bunch of times on the card since there was a tag torney thing going on and he even defended the WCCW title against Rick Rude. The Von Erichs were thin on people because Kerry was injured and Kevin wasn’t around.

The Thanksgiving edition, up against Starrcade, featured Abdullah against Tony Atlas on the undercard and Abdullah losing to Fritz Von Erich in the main event. Mike and Kevin Von Erich were back, but they only managed to draw 6,000 people. The Christmas edition was up to 7,000 with Bruiser vs. Abdullah as the Main Event (the last SuperCard that Brody would headline), and the show was pretty bland otherwise.

The other WCCW big shows were very different from each other. The Annual David Von Erich Memorial show drew 24,121 to Texas Stadium and Rick Rude vs Bruiser Brody on the show and then there was a Six Man Match with The Von Erichs vs. The Freebirds show. It was the last of the Texas Stadium shows that mean t anything.The Cotton Bowl show on October 12th, 1986, was a bad draw (5,835) and a bad show save for the Bruiser vs. Abdullah match on top. They also had a match that’s listed as Ricky Steamboat vs. Mighty Zulu. I don’t think it was actually Ricky Steamboat, but I believe it was his brother who I think worked for WCCW for a while.

The AWA had a huge show in April, a big show a week later and a and two more later in the year. The first show that made huge impact that the AWA never managed to achieve again was WrestleRock, their answer to WrestleMania. They had a huge show at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. It was huge with a ton of stars. The Road Warriors were there, as were Giant Baba and Tiger Mask (who would become a legend under his real name, Mitsuharu Misawa) from Japan. The most interesting thing was that Verne Gagne came back. Bruiser Brody was on this show too, making him the King of the 1986 Supercards! The show drew 22,000, which is huge for that number three promotion in the US at the time.

The next week they had another show with the NWA, this time the Rage in a Cage, which only drew 5000 people to the Meadowlands. That’s a bad thing. The show featured Bruiser Brody, NWA US Champ Magnum TA, Dusty Rhodes, Tully Blanchard and Rob Garvin. The Main Event was The Road Warriors, in what I think was the last time they worked for the AWA, against the Russians, Ivan adn Nikita Koloff. This show was actually far better than you’d expect, though I’ve only seen about 2/3 of it from fan cams in the crowd.

The Battle by the Bay from the Oakland Convention Center was a disaster drawing only 1500. Here’s how bad it was from the promotional point of view. I didn’t hear about it until after the show happened. They showed it live on ESPN, but it wasn’t papered locally. It was a typical AWA card, maybe slightly bigger than a regular card, but really, it was nothing special. I did see a replay of the card a week or so later. In all, it was average.

As was the final show of the year, the Brawl in St. Paul on Christmas Day. It was shown on Twin Cities PPV, which probably means it got a couple of hundred buys on the show and there were 8000 in the arena, which is not a good number. The show was decent though, I’ve seen a tape of it, and the Nick Bockwinkle vs. Curt Hennig match was really good and the Midnight Rockers (Jannetty and Shawn Michaels) vs. Buddy Rose and Doug Summers was a good steel cage match from two great tag teams. It was obvious that the territory was on hard times and it was only gonna get harder.

Speaking of hard times, There was Florida. They were still running a regular, full-time promotion like they had for years, but they were drawing poorly. The Valentine’s Day show was pretty good, Lex Luger, who was green as a leaf at the time, had a good match with Jesse Barr. Well, good for a guy like Luger before he had a couple of years working with guys like RIcky Steamboat, Sting, Barry Windham and Ric Flair. Bruiser Brody, the King of 1986 (OK, Hogan really deserves that title), battled with Wahoo McDaniel in a good match. The Main Event of Ric Flair vs. Barry Windham was a good long main event, like these two always had.

The second Florida Supercard was at the Ocean Center and drew 8000. The show had a Ric Flair vs. Lex Luger match that went 34:40 and was called a Time Limit Draw. As I understand it, It wasn’t good. The Barry Windham vs. Ron Bass match for the Florida title was good, far better than the fact that Ron Bass is best known as a WWF Jobber. They also brought in Nick Bockwinkel, the AWA champion.

Mid-South was about to try and go national as the UWF, but they did small numbers for the Superdome shows, and they only did two shows. The first brought in Ric Flair as the NWA Champ, which I think was one of his last times appearing for Bill Watts as Champ. They did have Steve WIlliams as their big draw, but he was never as over as Junkyard Dog. They did have the Freebirds, but they weren’t the draw they were in 1983 and 1984.

Starrcade 1986 was the biggest Starrcade yet and most folks point to it as the best up until the 1990s boom period. The main event was Flair vs. Nikita Koloff and it was a very good match. There was a Scaffold Match, which was a bad match, though folks bought into it as a big deal and the way they pushed it made it seem like a HUGE deal. I was impressed with the Andersons, Arn and Ole, taking on The Rock ‘n Roll Express in a cage. The matches all had great heat. They finished off a bunch of storylines, like the Paul Jones wanting to shave Big Mama’s head angle with Boogie-Woogie Man, Jimmy Valient. That had a ton of heat. There was a good Dusty Rhodes vs. Tully Match as well. The video tape was a favorite for years and I still have mine. It’s one of the best of the era and it looked like the NWA was going to be going up and up in 1987. It didn’t quite work out that way.

1987, which I’ll cover next week, showed the direction that things were going even more than 1986. There was a huge show from the WWF and a couple of new inventions from them as well. AWA still went on, as did WCCW. There was some more fun, but things were starting to crack. And that’s next week!

Chris Garcia