The Name on the Marquee: The History of the Intercontinental Championship #7

Posted by Adam Nedeff on 09.18.2009

Honkymania runs wild!...And then it stops.

-When we last left off, the least likely suspect on the roster, Honky Tonk Man, had captured the gold and pissed off the fans in spectacular fashion by actually managing to hang onto it with an iron claw grip. We open up with Honky proclaiming that we can forget Tito Santana, Randy Savage, and Ricky Steamboat, because he’s the greatest champion of all time!

-Your host is Jack Korpela.

HONKY TONK MAN (Champion, with Jimmy Hart) vs. BRET “Hit Man” HART
-Your commentary team is Roger Kent (when Vince was stealing commentators just to REALLY dick around with Verne Gagne) and Superstar Billy Graham. Graham claims that Honky has had major plastic surgery (“like Michael Jackson”) to make himself look more like Elvis Presley. This was during Bret’s failed singles push, and to show you why it failed, he immediately retreats to the locker room and returns with Jim Neidhart to stand in his corner. So they attempted to push him as a single without severing him from his tag team or finding something new for Neidhart to do.

-Bret throws a series of punches and drops Honky with an elbow to start off. Headbutt is sold in awesome fashion by Honky. Boot to the gut and Bret follows by grinding Honky’s eyes over the top rope. Bret’s being unusually aggressive here, but Honky’s ready for that and sends Bret into the turnbuckle (quite fabulously sold by Bret).

-We come back from commercial with Bret mounting a comeback with elbows and ten to the turnbuckle. More punching and a forearm from Bret. He chokes Honky in the corner, keeping up his uncharacteristic assault. He charges at Honky, but Honky dodges it and Bret goes shoulder-first into the post. Honky capitalizes with elbows and a knee to the affected region. Honky chokes Bret on the top rope, then tries his own corner charge. It’s Bret’s turn to charge and Honky does a Heenanesque sell when he hits the turnbuckles. More punching and elbows from Bret, and a roll-up gets two. Bodyslam and Bret heads to the second rope for an elbow, but Jimmy Hart clubs his knee with the megaphone. Neidhart goes to avenge it and Honky attacks from behind. Jimmy & Honky double-team the Anvil on the floor until Bret comes out to help his partner. Honky winds up getting pinballed between the Foundation until the referee makes it to ten for the double count-out. 0 for 1. Shockingly, a punch-punch-punch exhibition from two guys who can do better.

HONKY TONK MAN (Champion, with “Peggy Sue”) vs. BRUTUS “The Barber” BEEFCAKE (with “Georgia”)
-Okay, a little background here…After a time, Honky took to coming to ringside with both Jimmy Hart and his girlfriend, Peggy Sue. And after a time, Honky Tonk sort of turned into the Anti-Cena, drawing insane heel heat with basically the same formula: He’d be booked into matches with some stipulation that made the match hopelessly impossible for him to win (cage match, lumberjack match, Jim Neidhart in his opponent’s corner, etc.), and then he’d piss off the fans by overcoming the odds and actually managing to the retain the title despite what had been stacked against him. So this time around, the stipulation was that Jimmy Hart was banned from ringside for this match to prevent outside interference. However, Honky was still allowed to bring Peggy Sue to ringside, and for this particular match, “Peggy Sue” is clearly Jimmy Hart, dressed in drag to get around his ringside ban. Beefcake, aware of Honky’s shenanigans, engages in shenanigans of his own, bringing a girlfriend of his own to ringside, named Georgia…yes, it’s George “The Animal” Steele in a dress & wig. As a nice added touch, Mine is in drag too.

-Between entrances and stalling, we manage to go about ten minutes before contact is actually made. Honky, sweating like he’s just gone 60 minutes with Jack Brisco for some reason, attacks Brutus, but Brutus rams him into the turnbuckle for ten shots and atomic drops him. Beefcake drops an elbow to the midsection, brings him back to his feet, and punches him right back down. Georgia bites and punches Honky while the referee is distracted by Brutus. Series of punches by Brutus, and then a clothesline. Elbow after elbow after elbow by Brutus, and he clamps on the sleeper. That brings in Peggy Sue, who tries to attack with her megaphone, and Georgia comes in to stop that. They end up in a…well, catfight, I guess, over Mine, and that distracts the referee long enough for Honky to KO Brutus with the megaphone, and the referee turns around in time to count the pin. Brutus takes out Honky with the megaphone, and Jimmy Hart gets his disguise ripped off. “It wasn’t Peggy Sue at all!” Thank you, Sean Mooney. 0 for 2. 10 minutes of pissing around and then five minutes of actual match.

SPECIAL INTERVIEW
-Honky Tonk Man promotes his match against Brutus at Summerslam ’89, noting that the contract stipulates that it’s the last time Brutus will wrestle Honky for the title. Dude, finally, some hype for an angle on this show!

BRUTUS “The Barber” BEEFCAKE vs. TOM BURTON
-From WWF Superstars of Wrestling in Wheeling, WV, and aired two days before Summerslam ’88. Outlaw Ron Bass is pissed off because Beefcake used his clippers to destroy his whip & hat, and he vows revenge. I bet that’s just a lot of talk.

-Leapfrog is bungled and Beefcake recovers with a kneelift. Burton fights back with shoulders to the stomach, but Beefcake reverses an Irish whip and backdrops him. Bodyslam by Beefcake and he goes in for the kill with the sleeper, but in comes the very angry Outlaw Ron Bass, sending annoying referee Jack Kruger over the top rope and strangling Beefcake with Miss Betsy. Bass whips out the spurs and cuts up Beefcake with it. The screen is suddenly covered by the legendary “CENSORED” X that the WWF used in this era to protect us from anything that threatened to be interesting. Having seen an uncensored version of this, the X is actually there to hide the fact that Bass didn’t come anywhere close to Beefcake’s eye like Vince was insisting. 1 for 3. I’m giving a point just because I’m delighted to finally see an angle on this show.

HONKY TONK MAN (Champion, with Jimmy Hart) vs. ???
-From Summerslam ’88. So Honky, being a man of the people, insisted on defending the title even though Brutus couldn’t make the show. And because he’s so cocky after being able to keep that belt for 15 months, he refused to be told who his opponent would be. That’s a fatal mistake because he’s totally unprepared when the Ultimate Warrior arrives and absolutely mauls him with clotheslines and slams until Honky’s fucking DEAD, and Warrior pins him in about 30 seconds to take the belt. 2 for 4 for an awesome moment.

And here's Game Show Utopia now.

The 411: A bit disappointing this time around, with a match that seemed like a guaranteed thumbs-up failing to deliver and another match where editing would have been more than welcome. You can watch the title change by itself elsewhere on WWEClassics.com, so take a pass on this episode.

Final Score:  5.0   [ Not So Good ]