411's AWA on ESPN Classic Report 04.25.08

Posted by Randy Harrison on 04.26.2008

After the torture of the past three nights, can it possibly get any better to close out the week? Come on in and find out in the last AWA on EPSN report of the week!!


411's AWA On ESPN Classic Report


Right to the action on this show, and maybe that's for the best, because if I dwell on any of the other shows from this week for too long, I'm liable to burst into tears and curl into the fetal position under the shower for a good six hours or so.


AWA Championship Wrestling (Originally aired ...)

Lee Marshall is your commentator for tonight's action and apparently he's flying solo. This looks to be taped in Memphis because they have the gigantic Renegades chewing tobacco logo in the middle of the canvas. Diamond Dallas Page is in the ring and he's already bagging on Memphis saying it's full of square dancers and rednecks. He keep running down the town, asking if Bon Jovi or Guns n' Roses or anyone GOOD came out of Memphis. With the music that is apparenly Bad Company..by Bad Company, here comes BADD COMPANY!!! Lord, the audio is horrible with tons of feedback happening the whole time.


Match One: AWA Tag Team Championsip
Odyssey and Shawn Baxter vs. Badd Company w/Diamond Dallas Page (c)

Apparently we're in Nashville, not Memphis, but it's the same territory so I was close. Tanaka and Baxter lock up and Tanaka takes over with a ton of chops before they do a quick running the ropes sequence that ends with Baxter hitting a couple of deep armdrag takeovers. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Baxter looks like he went into the wrong building and was looking for the Poison cover band auditions that were being held the next block over. It's ridiculous-looking because he's 5'8", but his hair is teased up to 6'3". The face team gets the crowd into it before Tanaka pushes Baxter into the corner and hits a couple of chops. Irish whip into the corner by Tanaka gets reversed but he thrust kicks Baxter in the face, sending mascara and fake eyelashes flying across the ring. Diamond tags in now and he takes over with some punchy-kicky before picking Baxter up for a BIG vertical suplex. Tag in and Diamond presses Tanaka down on top of Baxter with a headbutt that gets a two-count. Another tag in to Diamond and he continues working over Baxter before tagging in Tanaka for a Hart Attack-style move and both members of Badd Company try to exit the ring, forgetting who was legal. Diamond just stays in and stomps away at Baxter before he gets a front facelock and tags Tanaka back in. Chop to the body by Tanaka and he whips Baxter in and hits a HUGE chop for a two-count. Tag to Diamond and he Irish whips Baxter in, ducking for a back bodydrop but Baxter gets a sunset flip for a long two-count. Diamond takes over again and whips Baxter into the corner but misses the charge and eats a turnbuckle, allowing Baxter to tag in Odyssey. BIG slam from Odyssey on Diamond and a dropkick off the ropes follows that up and he's on FIRE!! Irish whip into the ropes and Diamond gets a back bodydrop before whipping Diamond into the corner, accompanied by even more feedback. Diamond reverses and Odyssey tries for the second rope splash but he misses it and Diamond tags in Tanaka for a SWANK crescent kick into a german suplex double-team move for the three-count. Baxter lackadaisically tries to get into the ring to stop the count but he's WAY too late.

Winners: Badd Company (pinfall, crescent kick into german suplex)

Match Analysis: Fun to see Badd Company again, but the jobbers weren't very good and the audio howling in the background was REALLY distracting. Really fluid tag-team wrestling from Badd Company though and you could see how good Diamond and Tanaka were and that they were at the top of their games at this point in their careers.


Match Two:
Manny Fernandez vs. Sonny Street

Fernandez gets a decent-sized pop from the crowd and then spends a good couple of minutes taking off his semi-gay biker leathers. Great, now we've got Verne Gagne along with Lee Marshall. This should make it MUCH better to listen to. They lockup and stalemate with Fernandez shoving Street off the ropes. Fernandez moves to a standing arm wringer and then takes Street over for a one-count. The feedback is coming from the way the ring is miked up as far as I can tell, because when someone lands in a certain spot, the screeching begins. The referee is Frank Morell, who used to work in the Jerry Jarrett and Nick Gulas promotions as The Masked Spoiler, and with good reason since the man is ugly as sin, but that's beside the point. Fernandez pushes Street into the ropes and hits a couple of chops and then a big headbutt before whipping Street in for a reverse elbow. Snap mare over and Fernandez drops a heavy knee down before moving to a reverse chinlock. Fernandez blatantly calls some spots and Street shoots Hernandez into the corner but takes another reverse elbow. Street gets Irish whipped into the ropes, almost trips over Hernandez, almost trips over himself and almost falls bouncing off the ropes before Hernandez puts him out of his misery with a BIG dropkick. Fernandez covers him for a one-count and then picks him up before dropping an elbow and chopping him before hitting another snap mare and another reverse chinlock. At least Manny's not calling spots this time. Headbutt from Fernandez and another kneedrop and Street stands up into another big headbutt and another. He puts Street down and then chops him when he gets back up and Fernandez rams him into the top turnbuckle before choking him across the top rope. BIG right hand from Fernandez and he's stepping on the throat of Street now. Street with a couple of rights to the body and a side headlock but Fernandez shoots him into the ropes. They REALLY mess up either a leapfrog or a Thesz press spot, and Fernandez looks PISSED off. I expect the trip to the potato factory to come in 5...4..3...2...1. Fernandez whips him in and hits a HARD reverse elbow and then whips him in again for a HARD cross-bodyblock that finally gets the three. Fernandez throws Street out of the ring like yesterday's trash just to add insult to the many injuries.

Winner: Manny "I played for the Dolphins" Fernandez (pinfall, cross-bodyblock)

Match Analysis: Fernandez looked vicious here and once the jobber screwed up, he was STIFF as hell. A real beating and I don't think Street got in even one offensive move. I guess they were building him up to feed him to Wahoo.


Match Three:
Wahoo McDaniel vs. Sid Striker

No bullshitting around this time, it's just match after match on this show. They lockup and McDaniel gives Striker a clean break off the ropes. Wahoo gets a side headlock into a takeover and Striker gets a foot in the ropes to break the hold. Another lockup and Striker pushes Wahoo into the ropes, giving him a clean break back, somewhat shockingly. Wahoo pushes Striker into the corner and then chops the PISS out of him, forwards and backwards and he Irish whips Striker into the turnbuckle and tomahawks him down before McDaniel moves to a standing leglock, dropping a knee into the hamstring, and cranking on the ankle. McDaniel lets go of that hold and just chops at Striker, knocking him down with them before he stands on the throat. McDaniel picks him up and drops him with a backbreaker before dropping a chop down onto him. Verne shows his racial sensitivity stating that McDaniel nearly scalped him. Kneedrop for McDaniel now and another big chop and ANOTHER and he Irish whips Striker into the ropes for another HUGE chop and gets the 1-2-3!!

Winner: Wahoo McDaniel (pinfall, running chop)

Match Analysis: Short and fairly inoffensive, except for Gagne's racism. McDaniel was old and really starting to show his age in the ring so it had to be kept short and with what Wahoo could do, which was chop people. At least it didn't last long enough for McDaniel to gas out.


Match Four: AWA Women's Championship
Wendi Richter vs. Madusa Miceli (c)

Madusa comes out to "Simply Irresistible", and at this point it fits her cause she's still pretty hot. A few years from now, not at ALL, but now she looks good. Funny how sometimes surgery can just make things worse. Wendi Richter comes out to her Cyndi Lauper song from when she was popular three years before in the WWF. Nothing like living in the past there Wendi. Miceli threatens to beat the piss out of the referee with the belt before she kisses it and hands it over. The bell rings and they circle before they lockup and Miceli pushes her off and struts a little. Another lockup and Richter gets an armdrag into an armbar but Miceli reverses out of it with a headscissors. Richter gets out of it and the referee gets in the way of a move and Miceli gives him shit over it. Richter gets a knee to the gut and a knee to the head before she snap mares Miceli over for a one-count. Front facelock by Richter and Miceli forces her back into the ropes and tries a right hand that Richter blocks. Richter fires back with a couple right hands of her own and Miceli begs off with Richter offering up a handshake and Richter kicks her in the gut, taking her over for another one-count.

Reverse chinlock by Richter and she misses a legdrop as Miceli pulls on Richter's arms and stands on her hair, running the soles of her boots across Richter's face. Richter fires back with right hands and she slings Miceli off the ropes back into the ring and follows it with a BIG bodyslam for another one-count. Miceli goes to the eyes and then tries for a Boston crab but Richter reverses it into a sunset flip. They're in the ropes so there's no count and Miceli takes over on Richter, stomping away and just shoving her over and scrubbing the canvas with her face. Miceli drops some knees and kicks away at Richter before stepping on her hair again and paintbrushing her. Miceli slings Richter into the ring, giving her a taste of her own medicine and Miceli hits some forearms before Irish whipping Richter off the ropes. Richter catches the boot to the gut and fires off a right hand that puts Miceli down. Irish whip from Richter and a big reverse elbow gets another one-count as Richter picks her up for a shoulderbreaker. ANOTHER one-count and Richter tries for an Irish whip into the corner but gets reversed, though she hits a double kick to the chest as Miceli charges in. Sunset flip by Richter gets a two-count and she slams Miceli's face into the mat before picking her up for an Irish whip into the ropes. Kick to the stomach and Richter picks her up for a vertical suplex and another one-count.

Richter with a POWERBOMB and HERE COMES BADD COMPANY!! Richter tries to fight them off but gets dropped across the top rope by both Tanaka and Diamond in a double-team move. Miceli moves in and all three of them start with the stomps and punches on her and from the back come The Top Guns to save Richter from a worse beating. Lee Marshall heads into the ring to see what the hell is going on (with more feedback) and Gagne starts performing some amateur medical diagnoses from ringside.

Winner: Wendi Richter (disqualification, Badd Company interference)

Match Analysis: Pretty good match until the shitty ending, and it shows just what women's wrestling can be with two professionals in the ring. No blown spots, no real slow points, and they kept a fairly decent pace the entire time. It would be fun to see these two get an extra five minutes and a clean finish.

Lee Marshall is in the ring and just disgusted, moving to talk to The Top Guns and he asks Jon Paul what's going on. Paul yells about Badd Company and Richter screams that she beat Madusa and she should be the champion. Ricky Rice calls Badd Company yellow and says that they better beware because The Top Guns are on their trail. Richter freaks out again and Paul raises her arm and calls her the champion.


We're back from the commercial and we get to see a clip of Sgt. Slaughter on G.I. Joe and that cuts into a clip of Slaughter saying that everyone wants to see this match. Iron Sheik and Sheik Adnan El-Kaissie are in an empty arena threatening Slaughter before they start talking Arabic. Slaughter brings up the hostage crisis and Sheik shows a picture from what appears to be an Arabic copy of Penthouse of him in a wrestling ring with a title belt and President Reagan and the First Lady cowering in the corner outside the ring. Slaughter threatens, Sheik threatens, lather, rinse, repeat. What a weird segment. I mean it was good and all, but as a stand-alone segment it was a little weird and jarring to watch.


Match Five: World Class Tag Team Championship
The Samoan Swat Team w/Buddy Roberts vs. Michael Hayes and Steve Cox (c)

Again a really weird edit as the teams were introduced coming out of commercial and then it's right back to a commercial before the match starts. Lee Marshall gets joined by Ray Stevens now and Hayes does a little strutting and shimmying before he takes off his Stars and Bars robe. Hayes stomps and gets the crowd right into the match as Buddy Roberts yells at him from the outside. Samu and Hayes trade right hands with Hayes getting the better of it and going back to some strutting. Another lockup and Hayes gets a headlock before Samu shoots him into the ropes. Hayes gets a right hand after avoiding a leapfrog and then moonwalks back to his own corner and plays to the crowd again. They lockup and Samu shoots Hayes in again, going down for a reverse monkey flip but Hayes just stomps on Samu's head. Hayes gets an armwringer and tags in Cox who comes off the top with a shot to the arm. Cox with a standing armbar and Samu goes to the eyes to break the hold before slamming Cox down. He misses an elbowdrop and Cox takes him back over with an armdrag into the armbar again. Samu pulls the hair and yanks Cox into the heel corner, and we get a repeat spot from the SuperClash match as Samu knocks Fatu in the head with a forearm.

Cox and Fatu in the ring now and they lockup as Fatu gets a standing armbar and Cox reverses it, yanking on Fatu's arm before Samu attacks from behind and breaks it up. Samu tries to get out of the ring but Hayes runs over and crotches him with the middle rope to a BIG response from all the Nashville hillbillies. Cox is back to the armbar, taking Fatu down to one knee before Fatu goes to the eyes to break it. Headbutt from Fatu and Cox reverses a hiptoss into one of his own and armdrags Fatu back over into the armbar. Irish whip in and Samu on the floor trips Cox coming off the ropes and the heels take over, stomping away on Cox and hammering him in the corner with double-team right hands. Samu with a BIG chop and he Irish whips Cox in for the swinging facesmash into the canvas for a long, long two-count. Reverse chinlock from Samu and a headbutt as the heels tag out again and Fatu spits on Hayes to drag him in. They work over Cox illegally and Fatu Irish whips Cox into the ropes for a HUGE clothesline that gets two. Fatu to the eyes and he snap mares Cox over into the nerve pinch as Hayes fires the crowd up from the outside.

Cox breaks out but Samu grabs Cox's hair on the outside and drags him down, prompting Hayes to come in and break up that little tea party. The heels take over and stomp at Cox while the referee heads Hayes back into his corner. Fatu with the nerve pinch again and Cox looks in bad shape. Hayes tries to get the crowd into it again and Cox gets to his feet, elbowing out of the pinch but he eats a HUGE thrust kick from Fatu and then a double thrust kick from both of the SST. Legdrop from Samu into a front facelock and Samu moves to Irish whip him into the corner, missing a charge that lets Cox get the HOT TAG TO HAYES!! IRISH WHIP TO FATU AND A BIG BACKDROP!! BULLDOG FROM HAYES BUT SAMU COMES OFF THE TOP WITH A HEADBUTT!! THE FIGHT RAGES ON!!! The referee is trying to raise Cox's hand and there's no bell, but apparently the match is over.

Winners: Michael Hayes and Steve Cox (disqualification, SST interference)

Match Analysis: A longer version of the SuperClash match that I just saw the other day, which isn't to say that this was bad, just that a lot of it felt like deja vu. A pretty good tag match that was made WAY better by having Hayes there to keep the crowd into it. It could have very easily tipped the other way to being boring, but Hayes kept bringing it back from the brink.

The SST gangs up on Cox but they end up taking each other out again when Cox ducks and the faces stand tall in the ring before heading out to the floor to continue the fight. They brawl all the way to the backstage area and in amongst the crowd with Hayes slamming Fatu's head into the wall of the arena before the show closes out!!



Final Thoughts

Not a great show, but definitely better than the past few nights. Like I seemingly said during every match analysis, the matches were good, but nothing really popped or made me take notice. Fernandez is tough, McDaniel is tough, Badd Company is bad, we get it. The only saving grace was the last two matches, which were probably the best two matches out of the last three or four shows. On to comment time!!!



Fun With Comments

From Frozen:
"I like how Verne had DeBeers team up with the Iron Sheik and Sheik Adnan.
Because as everybody knows, white supremacists simply adore Arabs."

It never has to make sense because it's wrestling and they say so.



From Andres V:
"An okay show. Good to see more World Class stars I grew up watching. My
thoughts:

First, did Jarrett get legitimately hurt for the title to change, or did he
just do a good job of selling it?

Also seeing a young Rikishi/Sultan/Junior Fatu, etc. before gaining all that
weight years later.

After these years, I think about how Steve Cox won the UWF Rookie of the Year
back in '87. Nothing against Steve, but his career didn't exactly take off.
Especially when Shane Douglas (the one who came in second) obviously had a
better one overall."

Just a good job selling from Jarrett as they needed to have a bit of a reason why the match ended in five minutes and came up with the injury angle. Funny to think about how when guys are young, they can be so close and then one will just wildly surpass the other in the end, as in the case of Cox and Douglas.


From Tiger Mask 69:
"It's in pretty bad taste now (I guess it was in fairly bad taste then as well),
but I thought Wahoo's promo was kinda cool. It's not often you hear feuding
wrestlers wish straight-up death on each other in promo's."

Yeah, pretty bad taste, but it didn't stop Verne from replaying it a ton of times on his television shows, so I guess he wasn't that shocked by it.


From G-Walla:
"Christ, sounds like I didn't miss anything last night. Would have been nice to
see the Samoan Swat Team, but fuck if the rest didn't sound like horseshit.

So, hooray for getting home at 2 am (just in time for the Simpson's on the
California Fox feed)."

If I had had my drothers, I would have been watching Simpsons then too, believe me.


From Tristan:
"I'm pretty sure the crowd was chanting "Shoot the Referee", especially
with Cox making a shotgun blast motion at the ref. Considering those days, I
hope the ref left either before or way after the crowd."

That could very well have been, and I wouldn't be shocked. The thing about those crowds is that they were WAY better than the late-70's and before crowds, where knifings and fan attacks were seemingly the norm.


Finally a trio of comments on Larry Nelson. Firstly, from Scrotum Pole:
"From listening to Larry Nelson talk and the prissy way he holds the microphone
I'm pretty sure that the only thing wrestlers in AWA at the time needed to
worry about was him coming up from behind them in the showers offering to help
soap the cracks of their asses."


Then from Teijo Kahn:
"Yes, I think "prissy" is the word I've been trying to think of to
describe Larry Nelson. Didn't Bischoff say Nelson got fired for an OWI, and
Bisch replaced him?"


And finally again from Scrotum Pole:
"If you watch closely Larry Nelson has a hint of Mr. Garrison mixed with a slight
canadian lisp."

Firstly, I would say that Larry was effeminate but not gay, because of how lecherous he behaved talking about that lingerie battle royal. Prissy is a good word to describe him though, and yes he ended up getting shelved for a DUI (not his first), and Bischoff replaced him. Finally, I see the Mr. Garrison, but you're mistaking the Canadian for the Midwestern/Minnesotan, which can sound fairly similar.

That does it for another week of the AWA, and it seems like watching this week of shows has aged me terribly. If next week isn't better, I might be dead before Memorial Day. Have a great weekend folks, and I'll see you all on Tuesday.