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Sara Del Rey vs. Cassandro (9/27/08)

This match is from the second round of the 2008 Ted Petty Invitational Tournament, which is IWA Mid-South’s annual weekend blowout of indie wrestling dream matches designed to determine who the best wrestler on the indies is. For a long time, the TPI tournaments, held in honor of “Flyboy” Rocco Rock of ECW fame, had the reputation of being the best, weirdest, most innovative shows of the year, with the 2004 tournament in particular held by many as the best in the history of independent wrestling. Though I was once involved on the independents, my knowledge of IWA-MS and the scene in general before 2011 is sketchy at best. I’d seen some Ring of Honor shows and things like CM Punk vs. Eddie Guerrero vs. Rey Mysterio Jr. (also from an IWA-MS show), and while I respected the skill and craft of the wrestlers themselves, something about the presentation—the announcing, the incredibly hostile crowds, the shock of seeing 60 or 100 people in a crowd after a lifetime of packed arenas—always scared me away. I still think that is the biggest barrier of entry for the world beyond WWE and “sports-entertainment,” or for the fan of a promotion like CHIKARA who wants to check out their favorite wrestlers more than once or twice a month. But this match is an example of what a fan might be rewarded with if they can get past all that. A match between Cassandro and Sara Del Rey is only possible in independent professional wrestling, and, for a long time, was the exclusive province of a company like IWA Mid-South, which was experimental enough to look upon a meeting between a female wrestler and a Mexican exótico as a dream match.

Del Rey, as I’ve written before, is my favorite wrestler. According to the announcers she’s just starting to pattern her mannerisms and methodical approach to wrestling after the thick, domineering women of Japanese wrestling, but she will one day be hired as the head female trainer at the WWE Performance Center without having ever wrestled a match for Vince McMahon. Cassandro is one of my favorite wrestlers of whom I’ve seen very little from, the undisputed king of the exóticos. Exóticos as performers are something else, a sub-genre of Mexican lucha libre where men wrestle in drag. Some, like Cassandro, are openly gay. Others, like Máximo, are straight, and homosexuality is their drag. The best exóticos are hugely popular, world-traveled, and frequently wrestle for important championships in Mexico’s largest promotions. Cassandro is probably the most well-known exótico in the United States, as he was the subject of an exceptional profile in The New Yorker, has appeared on Colt Cabana’s The Art of Wrestling podcast, and often wrestles on American lucha libre shows. The crowd here is very respectful towards both competitors and remain engaged with the contest throughout. Intergender wrestling is hotly contested territory for fans of indie wrestling, but Del Rey and Cassandro are both masters of the niche, and the usual man vs. woman tropes never come into play. This is just a wrestling match: Two wrestlers wrestle; the best one wins.

To that end, Del Rey is having none of Cassandro’s fun and games; as soon as the exótico turns towards her, she slaps the gum out of his mouth. Cassandro isn’t taking any of that, though, and he responds with a slap of his own. Having disrespected each other, the two tie up and jockey for position, neither wrestler giving an inch as they hit the ropes and turnbuckles, where they separate. Cassandro’s years of experience come into play as he outwrestles Del Rey, sending her to the canvas with a hip toss. From there, he flows into a beautiful-looking key lock variation that Del Rey tries to bridge out from, only to have Cassandro sweep one of her legs. Del Rey rolls out and takes control, dragging her opponent over by both of his arms. Back to their feat, Cassandro offers a test of strength but takes Del Rey into a full-arm drag and twist, instead. He twists again and goes into another hammerlock. Del Rey hook her arm around Cassandro’s head, and he tries to use this position to suplex her, but she has the leverage and scores a headlock takeover. Having settled down from the opening exchange of slaps, what’s clear is that both wrestlers are very evenly matched. Cassandro kicks out of an odd pin attempt, then bridges up. Del Rey tries to bring him up by the arms, maybe to put him in a double chickenwing (the vaunted hold that Rickey Steamboat developed to defeat Ric Flair), but Cassandro manages to bring her over. It’s a nice spot, something you don’t see in every bit of chain wrestling.

From there, Cassandro works on his opponent’s arm, but there’s hatred in his eyes, and he starts pulling Del Rey’s hair. I hate comparing things to WWE, but there’s a lot of hair pulling in WWE’s women’s division, and this isn’t that. Cassandro is yanking Del Rey’s hair, and this pisses the woman known as Death Rey off. She battles up to her feet and takes Cassandro over with an arm drag. Now she gets a key lock, but Cassandro rolls her over and gets a two count. Del Rey tries to reassert her advantage but can’t; Cassandro takes control of her arms and leads her back to a standing position. Del Rey attempts to wrestle out, but Cassandro keeps and arm hooked and leverages her back to the canvas with an arm drag. They reset and go for a test of strength again. This time, Cassandro kicks Del Rey in the gut and puts her in the Gory Special, that most excellent of lucha libre submissions. He transitions it into a pinning predicament for Del Rey, who has to keep kicking out while Cassandro tries to keep her shoulders to the mat. After a succession of near falls, Del Rey pulls herself up and onto Cassandro’s shoulders and rolls into a sunset flip!

Cassandro kicks out and Del Rey takes control with a headlock. Cassandro sweeps Del Rey’s leg, though, and takes her down to the canvas. Del Rey isn’t compromised for long, though, as she takes Cassandro down with a drop toe hold. Before she can sink in a chinlock or a rear naked choke, Cassandro grabs the ropes. Del Rey brings him up to his feet and snapmares him over to a seated position, where she gets a sleeper hold. Cassandro gets to his feet, though, and the two start wrestling again. Del Rey takes Cassandro to the mat, where they go through the see-saw routine, and Del Rey scores a near fall. Cassandro tries to reassert himself, but Del Rey cuts him off with a knee to the gut and another armdrag. They both get to their feet and stand off. Del Rey’s the first to move, but Cassandro blocks her punch, interlaces his fingers with hers, then takes her out with an arm drag from the top rope. Del Rey gets up and gets kicked in the stomach, and Cassandro moves away from her to climb up the turnbuckles. This is the first tactical mistake of the match, and Del Rey takes advantage, kicking Cassandro from behind, which sends him spilling to the hardwood floor below. Del Rey follows up with a senton off the apron onto a dazed Cassandro. She rolls him back into the ring and drops a knee on his head, but Cassandro is soon back to his feet, hammering away at Del Rey. He gets a headlock in, but Del Rey shoots him into the ropes and drops down, which is when this happens…

Sara Del Rey is frustrated now, and now she charges in with a kick to the chest. She whips Cassandro across the ring to the other turnbuckles, but Cassandro evades Del Rey by jumping onto the ring apron, hitting her with a shoulder block to the stomach, then leaping from the top ropes, where he grabs her by the head and sends her out of the ring. Del Rey takes a breather in the front row while the fans get out of the way. Cassandro’s not about to give Del Rey a time out though, and just as soon as she’s sitting down, he’s through the ropes with a tope suicida that takes his opponent and the front row!

Del Rey recovers and rolls into the ring, where Cassandro kicks her in the face. He takes Del Rey up with a butterfly and drops her with a facebuster. He gets a two count and checks with the referee to make sure it wasn’t a three. It wasn’t, so he takes Del Rey back down to the mat with a trip, deathlocks her legs, and wraps her in an interesting pinning combination for another two count. Del Rey ducks a clothesline and picks Cassandro up for an atomic drop but just throws him on his ass. She follows quickly with a body scissors, which she rolls over into a pinning combination for a near fall of her own. Cassandro rolls out, but Del Rey takes him over to the other side for another two. He rolls back to a seated base, and Del Rey pulls his hair, getting revenge from earlier. She pulls him up to his feet by the hair and then throws him across the ring! Cassandro fights back by headbutting Del Rey in the stomach, which sends her staggering back to the turnbuckles. She moves out of a charging Cassandro’s way and he ends up shouldering the ring post. Del Rey follows in with a cross armbreaker, and Cassandro has no choice but to submit!

This is a really good match. Not quite as good as the announce team’s constant refrain that we’re seeing is awesome with several os, but beyond the occasional transition that’s not as snug as possible, there’s so much to like here. Neither wrestler is working as a heel here, but Cassandro works the entire match like he’s pissed off about Del Rey’s opening slap. He is always in Del Rey’s hair, always pleased with himself. And the match-long focus on the arms of both competitors pays off in the end with the finishing sequence, Cassandro hurting his own shoulder with the missed attack in the corner, and Del Rey pouncing on it with the cross armbreaker. For ten minutes, Del Rey and Cassandro wrestled as equals in a match where a minor mistake would end it. That’s what happened in the end, and what could have been a novelty match was instead a very good, very smart contest that’s just as engaging the fourth or fifth time as it was the first.

This match was found for free on Highspots.com and uploaded to YouTube to make it embeddable on this website for critical purposes. Support IWA-MS by subscribing to their YouTube channel or buying a show from SmartMark Video.

January 1, 2015
Free Wrestling: Sara Del Rey vs. Claudio Castagnoli (Cesaro) (7/31/11)

I don’t know how, but I was sitting in the front row of what was formerly known as the ECW Arena for this match, which is still the best I’ve ever seen live. My experience at live events covers a lot of ground, too, from WCW and WWF shows as a child to working Absolute Intense Wrestling cards as an announcer to WrestleMania this year. This match still stands out to me even watching it today for the first time in a year. I remember everything about that day, the last of a three day trip from Detroit to Cleveland to Reading to Philadelphia. Four days of driving and three nights of wrestling, Sara Del Rey on each card. We were in Philadelphia early enough to go to the Mûtter Museum and the Edgar Allen Poe house. To be frustrated by the lines at both Pat’s and Geno’s and settle instead for a mediocre pizza place down the block. To stand in line at the arena on Swanson and Ritter, waiting, chatting about the match that got me and two friends to drive all that way, occupying the cheapest, sketchiest motels any of us had slept in, driving on no sleep and three or four energy drinks. Sara Del Rey and Claudio Castagnoli wrestled three years ago, but it feels like three persons ago, as if the chubby dude in the Colt Cabana shirt slapping five with Dasher Hatfield and yelling dumb shit at all of the heels never existed. When I see myself sitting there, or hear the things that I yelled, I cringe.

The concept of intergender wrestling was not new to me in 2011. Men and women occasionally mixed it up in WWE—Chyna was an Intercontinental Champion before she ever wrestled a woman, for example, and there was a 2003 “Battle of the Sexes” tag team match that pit Christian and Chris Jericho against Trish Stratus and Lita. But Chyna’s run and that tag team match were built around the premise that it was odd that women might compete with men, break out from their section of the roster and shoot for something greater than a gendered championship. That shouldn’t be a big problem on the independent wrestling scene, but even in 2014 it seems to be a sticking point for some. There are size differences and muscles and societal norms and, really, it’s about realism in professional wrestling. This match, and Del Rey’s entire 2011 and 2012 (before she was hired by World Wrestling Entertainment to train women at their Performance Center), were part of breaking this perception. Every intergender wrestling match that has followed in the United States can be traced back to this one.

From the start, the story this match tells is brilliant. And that’s without the actual story this match is telling. Put in context, Claudio Castagnoli is the leader of the BDK, a villainous stable of wrestlers who made it their business to conquer CHIKARA and were quite successful in doing so. Castagnoli and his partner Ares were successful tag team champions, and they used Sara Del Rey and her partner, Daizee Haze, as a shield, positioning them against other teams that were on the verge of challenging Castagnoli and Ares. Del Rey and Haze were quite successful, accruing enough points in CHIKARA’s contendership system to challenge their leaders, but they never did. When CHIKARA instituted a Grand Championship, they decided to crown the first singles champion with a 12-person Round Robin tournament. Each wrestler on the CHIKARA roster was allowed to vote somebody into the Round Robin, and Del Rey made it thanks to the votes of Madison Eagles and Daizee Haze, who disobeyed BDK dictum by voting for Del Rey over Castagnoli. This wasn’t the final match of the tournament, but it was the most heated: Sara and her partner had grown tired of being held down by the BDK, who promised them opportunities in a promotion that hadn’t given women too many, and this match was an opportunity for her to make a statement against the man most responsible for holding her down. The match has since been presented without any of that context, and it doesn’t need it. Claudio Castagnoli, though not quite in the shape he’s in now as WWE’s Cesaro, was the most imposing man on the independents, 260-pounds of muscle, a man of old-school strongman strength. Del Rey wasn’t small by any means—against most American women wrestlers, she was more akin to the likes of Bull Nakano—but Castagnoli outweighs her easily and has every conceivable advantage. He knows it, too, and isn’t shy. He shoves Del Rey to the canvas and slaps her when she refuses to take the easy way out, and Del Rey responds with kicks that’d cause a lesser human being to crumble.

Castagnoli needs the outside interference of Tursas to gain the advantage, but once he has it he never really lets go. As hard as Del Rey’s kicks are, the Swiss superman’s European uppercuts are just as visceral, catching his opponent on the chin and sending her down to the canvas. The way he hoists Del Rey up from the mat in a gutwrench position and walks around the ring before suplexing her might not seem impressive given the monsters he’s lifted and slammed since becoming a member of the WWE roster, but as close as I was to it, and for how hot it was in the arena, his strength seemed impossible. His strength is certainly why he continues to treat Del Rey as an afterthought, taunting her as he doles out punishment. The match teases and teases an improbable Del Rey win via a surprise pinfall as she tries to bring Castagnoli down with a sunset flip (only to be crushed with a leg drop) or a schoolboy (only for Castagnoli to kick out and complete his attempted suplex), but he’s too strong and too fresh for Del Rey to ever really make a comeback on. A Castagnoli victory seems like a sure thing at every turn. When Del Rey’s bridges out of a fourth Castagnoli elbow drop, it’s like witnessing a tiny miracle just before the apocalypse: Nice, but meaningless.

All of this, of course, makes Del Rey’s eventual comeback feel that much more special. She’s beaten, exhausted, and dehydrated. Her opponent has been hitting her with his best strikes for the better part of eight minutes. It’s 100-degrees in the ECW Arena and this is her third match of the weekend. But she dodges a Castagnoli shoulderblock in the corner, takes Tursas out with a cannonball senton, and dives onto her rival with a crossbody block. When Claudio kicks out, she takes his outstretched arm and applies a cross-armbreaker submission maneuver and wrenches back like her future in wrestling depends on the outcome of this match. Because it does. But Castagnoli struggles and gets his foot on the ropes, and the match continues, which allows Castagnoli a knockout blow with a bicycle kick and, when Del Rey manages to get her foot on the ropes, this absolute nightmare of a move, the UFO:

Del Rey’s comeback from this is unreal—the audio doesn’t quite capture it, but the sold out crowd, mostly silenced by the heat, comes unglued when she kicks out and manages to go on the offensive again, hitting Castagnoli with her signature capo kicks in the corner and reapplying the armbar. It’s the second time, and Castagnoli has been selling his arm, but his freakish strength allows him to lift Sara up from the canvas and onto his shoulder before he sends her smashing back down to the mat… only for her to reapply the armbar! This is one of the coolest sequences I’ve seen in wrestling, a perfect crescendo relying on power, emotion, and positioning, and the explosion when Del Rey once again gets the arm bar is the most genuinely impassioned reaction I’ve seen in on an independent wrestling show. Had Castagnoli tapped out, the match would have been perfect, but he’s a final boss on his last legs, and the big bastard, now desperate, has some fight in him yet. There is nothing pretty about the lariats he clubs Del Rey with, nothing held back from his Ricola Bomb finish. They’re raw and brutal, and the powerbomb should end it, but having been embarrassed by the fight in Del Rey he lifts her shoulders up and positions her for an uppercut. That doesn’t satisfy him either, but this time Del Rey is present enough to cradle Castagnoli, roll his shoulders to the mat, and score the win.

You can see me pop out of my seat, lean over the guardrail and scream in adulation. You can hear the crowd. After this video’s runtime, Claudio gets his revenge, bicycle kicking Del Rey and chokeslamming Haze, but he is soon on his way to WWE developmental. Del Rey had another year on the circuit—she was signed by the WWE as a trainer in July and reported to their training facility in September. That year, though, she was unquestionably the best wrestler in CHIKARA, working a number of matches that were among the best of the year. But none were better than this one, and few matches, in fact, mean as much to me in terms of my development as a fan or as a person. I forget, exactly, what I’m leaning over to tell my friend Caleb as the bell rings, but the conversation we’re having and will continue over the next few weeks will grow and expand as we finish our respective degrees. We talk about maybe doing wrestling school together, but when he and his girlfriend break up he goes to wrestling school by himself because he needs a distraction. I give Absolute Intense Wrestling some money in a Kickstarter and they let me call a match as a try out—Sara Del Rey vs. Mickie Knuckles—and I do well enough that they call me back, and for a year and a half I get to live out my weird kid dream of being a professional wrestling announcer. Caleb finishes wrestling school, but he only wrestles a few times before he moves to Philadelphia to attend the writing program at Temple; I never get to see him in the ring. When I graduate with my MFA in creative writing I take the prize money I won from a fellowship and go to wrestling school myself. I don’t last a night before I get a concussion, before I get so mad at myself for bumping too soft that I decide to really throw myself down to the mat and, in doing so, land head first, but the essay that I write gets me into a PhD program in Georgia, where I am now, and out of an office gig in Detroit. It’s weird, how connected these things are. When I watch this match now, when I watch myself react to it, it’s like I’m watching a ghost.

November 13, 2014
Free Wrestling: Johnny Gargano vs. Chris Sabin (AIW: 5/24/14)

Here’s how it works: you get into a car accident the first day you move to a new city and don’t drive again for nearly a year. When you do, it’s not because you want to, but because you’ve booked yourself on a solo three-day roadtrip across the United States of America to see some professional wrestling. You fly from Atlanta to Detroit. You are given a Nissan Sentra at the Hertz counter though you are promised a Ford Focus. You get behind the wheel, turn the ignition, put the car in drive, place your foot on the pedal, and drive all the way to Cleveland, Ohio, which was a second home for you once, because once, you were part of a wrestling promotion there that was starting to build a reputation for itself before you moved. That wrestling promotion is Absolute Intense Wrestling. Before you can go to Easton, Pennsylvania to watch the rebirth of CHIKARA, you’ve got a double-shot of AIW, The J.T. Lightning Invitational Tournament. It’s AIW’s wildest night of the year, a two-day party thrown by 24 of the best wrestlers in the world, but you’re tired and you’re catching up with friends and everything is a blur, and holy shit you need to be awake early tomorrow to make it out to Easton. So Johnny Gargano and Chris Sabin are in the ring having their match and it just kinda passes you by. Jesus, how does that happen?

This match is Chris Sabin’s AIW debut, and Johnny Gargano is AIW’s ace wrestler. Whenever there’s a big debut, it seems Gargano is the hand-picked opponent, and it is hard to question the logic of that choice. Gargano, as Pedro DeLuca’s introduction lets you know, is a son of Cleveland. He was born there, trained there, and lives and wrestles there still. He’s one of the top names in Dragon Gate USA, he wrestles in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, and he was a major part of CHIKARA’s roster until their relaunch, but in AIW he is unfettered by DGUSA’s storyline expectations or where he’s placed on PWG’s show. In AIW he is the attraction, and any match against him is the main event. When Gargano stops to flash a money sign to the crowd after driving his knees into Sabin’s gut, it’s not because he’s a prick, but because he is Cleveland, Johnny Wrestling to the Brown’s Johnny Football, and nobody standing across the ring from him will leave an encounter forgetting it.

This match has a definite “showcase” feel to it. Gargano had wrestled in PWG the night before and was recovering from a dislocated jaw. There was still novelty in seeing Sabin on a show that wasn’t promoted by TNA Wrestling. Wedged in-between rounds of the JLIT tournament, there were no storyline implications and nothing on the line between the two but pride, as they say, so the feeling-out process between the two is prolonged and the action, while heated, never threatens to overwhelm the rest of the show. What ends up happening is that this encounter becomes an example where good, competent announcing elevates the entire match. Matt Wadsworth and Leonard F. Chikarason are both storytellers, and halfway through the match Wadsworth’s point about Gargano’s dislocated jaw making it harder to breathe through his mouth as the match goes on segues into Chikarason saying that Sabin knows about Gargano’s injury because the two follow each other on social media. And then Sabin dropkicks Gargano in the jaw and follows with a European uppercut, and it all syncs so well with what’s being said at the commentary table that you remember the impact that wrestling moves must have on the anatomy.

Maybe it’s because of Gargano’s jaw, but the match never quite makes it out of first gear. Granted, when you’re talking about Johnny Gargano and Chris Sabin, first gear is going to get you pretty far. The two do a good job of working around Gargano’s big spots—the corner lawn dart, the grounded kicks, and the Garga-No Escape—but late in the second night of a two day wrestling orgy, it’s pretty clear that the audience at Turners Hall is saving themselves for the conclusion of the tournament. The attention they pay to the wrestlers in the ring is polite, but reserved, and beyond a suicide dive that nearly sees Gargano fly into the first row and his two transitions into the Garga-No Escape (which has grown into a beautifully applied submission maneuver), there’s not really much for them to get out of their seats for. This is two of the best on the independents firmly in cruise control; good but not great. Gargano continues building his name, and Sabin continues reestablishing his reputation on the independents. It’s a good debut, and Sabin would later return to AIW to face Kevin Steen in the opening match of Absolution IX (which, wow—the opening match?), but both men are capable of more. With the introductory phase now behind them, I’d be interested in seeing what they’d do in a rematch.

This match was provided for free courtesy of Absolute Intense Wrestling. Follow them on YouTube. Buy the J.T. Lightning Invitational Tournament from AIW, or from their partners at Smart Mark Video. Full disclosure: I used to work for AIW as an announcer and as a member of their social media team. Fear of a Ghost Planet is also the sponsor of this video.

November 7, 2014
Free Wrestling: Repo Man vs. Randy Savage (1/25/1993)

Background: The Repo Man—one of Barry Darsow‘s many faces once the Demolition well ran dry—is, in my humble opinion, one of the great bad gimmicks of all time. (For the record, Darsow’s stint as angry golfer “Hole in One” Barry Darsow on WCW Saturday Night is another.) During this time, with Vince McMahon fresh from federal trial and casting aside the notion that wrestling was a legitimate sport to throw off the yoke of state athletic commissions, it wouldn’t be farfetched to accuse the chairman of having a persecution complex, and the things McMahon hates, loves, or finds funny often manifest themselves in his product. So in the early 1990s, he had two men running around stealing things from his good-hearted fans: I.R.S., who’d take your money, and The Repo Man, who’d take your ride. This wonderful clip should explain Repo Man’s motivations quite nicely:

Where most bad WWF gimmicks of this period (Bastion Booger, Mantaur, Phantasmo, and so on) came and went before developing a catchphrase or receiving a theme song, Repo Man came to the WWF fully formed with a truly great Jim Johnston theme song and the kiss-off line of “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine!” Also unlike the majority of goofball jobbers the WWF would come to feature, Repo Man actually had a televised feud with “Macho Man” Randy Savage, notable for its sheer weirdness. Savage had been around the WWF block a few times by 1993, and everything he could possibly feud with another wrestler over, he’d already done. Miss Elizabeth, Queen Sherri, crowns, and championship belts were meaningless to Repo Man, who had his heart set on hooking his towing claw into the one thing he really couldn’t be without: his hat.

The best thing about this mini-feud, beyond how passionate Macho Man is about his hat, is Repo Man’s insinuation that the sequined monstrosity required multiple payments that Savage was somehow delinquent on. Boiled down, the two-week program is a familiar one, where the unappreciated mid-card guy gets a shot at somebody way above his pay-grade because he destroyed their property. Think Kofi Kingston wrecking Randy Orton’s NASCAR, or Paul Heyman stealing The Undertaker’s urn and forcing the Deadman to wrestle The Dudley Boys and bury Paul Bearer in a concrete tomb. The difference, of course, is that Repo Man is a cackling, C-level Batman villain riding shotgun in a tow truck, and Randy Savage is God. Nothing about this can end well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2M61oURweM

The Match: Savage is so angry that Repo Man enters the ring wearing his hat that he bombards the poor bastard without so much as being introduced, which is too bad considering how infrequently “Pomp and Circumstance” played on Raw. He is all over Repo Man from the opening bell, beating him up so badly that Repo Man tries high-tailing it out of the Manhattan Center, which, of course, Randy Savage does not allow.

In Rob Bartlett news, pay attention to the commentary when Repo Man takes over. The guy was a hack comedian and a worse broadcaster, which becomes increasingly obvious as he makes fun of Savage’s bald spot, something a face commentator would never do. McMahon covers for him as best as he can until, finally, Bobby Heenan asks Vince where he found the schmuck. Sure, it goes along with Heenan’s character to be exasperated with Bartlett, but his exasperation seems genuine and is something a heel commentator generally gets away with. Vince McMahon is somewhat infamous for the way he dresses down his commentary team during broadcasts—an entire chapter of Mick Foley’s Countdown to Lockdown is dedicated to the subject—and Heenan and Jim Ross have told stories about how Gorilla Monsoon, who produced segments backstage, could pick out bad announcers and tell the regular crew “not to remember his name” almost immediately. Bartlett only lasted 13 weeks—long enough for him to roll out various match- or show-length impersonations of Mike Tyson, Elvis, and Vince McMahon—but his last few weeks with the company were spent mostly being the butt of jokes. Years later, the WWE would make the mistake of hiring another guy ill-suited to professional wrestling to fill the shoes of Joey Styles and Jim Ross before cutting him loose, but at least Mike Adamle was funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAfTuhC8FJA

Repo Man maintains his advantage for awhile, but it isn’t long before Savage gets the better of him, nails the flying elbow drop, and puts Repo Man away, reclaiming his hat and his manhood. Like the match between Shawn Michaels and Max Moon, this is another example of what Raw did very well in its early days: the showcase bout. Repo Man manages to look like a legitimate threat for awhile, much like Max Moon made a brief bid to take Michaels’s Intercontinental Championship, but he’s eventually put in his place and forgotten about so Savage can go on to train his buddy Crush for a WrestleMania clash against Doink the Clown.

Guys like Barry Darsow aren’t fixtures on television anymore, and that’s too bad. Not that Darsow was the most brilliant wrestler, but as he shows here and in his 1994 feud against Dustin Rhodes in WCW, he makes for an able foil, and manages to look good even in a losing effort. The advent of the Monday Night War did away with Darsow’s role on flagship programming, as the need for marquee matches led to matches like Arn Anderson vs. Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage vs. Ric Flair being given away for free instead of being used to sell pay per views. WWE didn’t start giving away marquee matches until the end of the brief Invasion era that followed their buyout of WCW, but when 225,000 people purchase a pay per view and four million watch Raw, it’s perhaps understandable why Alberto Del Rio wrestles The Big Show on a weekly basis.

February 25, 2013