The Name on the Marquee: WWF Championship Wrestling (5.4.1985)

-Originally aired May 4, 1985.

-Your hosts are Vince McMahon & Jesse Ventura. Vince explains that Bruno Sammartino is “on assignment.” What assignment do you give Bruno? Watch the entrance for anybody delivering drugs and then leave the box in a corner of the locker room so the other guys can throw them in the garbage properly?

RICKY STEAMBOAT vs. DAVE BARBIE
-Albert Brooks! That’s who Barbie looks like! That’s been driving me crazy…

-Steamboat dodges all of Barbie’s attempted offense and then goes to work on the arm. The Junkyard Dog will be in action tonight at Reading High School Gym, by the way.

-Armdrag by Steamboat and he stays on the arm, and the crowd is starting to turn on him. Wow, are they actually chanting “Steamboat sucks”? Apparently, they aren’t chanting it enough because Steamboat is holding onto the arm and not trying to do any more. He’s trying to retrain the fans, it appears. Bold move, let’s see if it pays off for him.

-Corner charge by Barbie and Steamboat meets him with a foot to the head. Chop from the top seems to finish but Steamboat goes for more. Double chop off the ropes once again looks like Steamboat is gently tapping his opponent’s chest, and a bodypress from the top finishes. Not one for your Steamboat comp tape, that’s for sure. Post-match, Jesse complains about how all these South Pacific wrestlers always want to jump off the top rope and assures us that he’d wrestle a better match than Dave Barbie.

UPDATE, BROUGHT TO YOU BY CASTROL
-Lord Alfred Hayes examines Greg “The Hammer” Valentine. Hayes calls him a warrior before showing us footage of Valentine beating on a jobber.

,b>KING KONG BUNDY (with Jimmy Hart) vs. MARIO MANCINI
-A rematch from Bundy’s debut. Bundy shoves Mancini around and then clubs him to the mat. Jesse boldly states that, in his opinion, this is a mismatch.

-Kneedrop by Bundy gets two when Bundy pulls Mancini off the mat. Bundy yells at Mancini for not standing back up fast enough and beats on him more just for pissing him off so much. Fans chant “Ding-Dong!” at Bundy, which didn’t catch on like they seemed to be hoping.

-Chops by Bundy lead Vince to proclaim that Bundy is like being in the ring with a bus, showing that Michael Cole doesn’t hold the monopoly on insane descriptions for large wrestlers. When have you EVER been chopped by a bus? Buses use forearms.

-Avalanche gets the win after a five-count. Jesse wonders if Hulk Hogan is watching.

-Freddie Miller talks to Rowdy Roddy Piper and Cowboy Bob Orton about their upcoming tag match at Boston Garden. They’re going to stand face-to-face with Snuka & Hogan, and Piper says that everything you need to know about an American like Hulk Hogan comes from reading American history: When Americans are pissed off, they just throw a bunch of tea into the ocean. Piper’s not afraid of that.

“Mr. Wonderful” PAUL ORNDORFF vs. CHARLIE FULTON
-Bobby Heenan sort of sneaks out to the ring after Orndorff has already entered, and when Finkel announces him as Orndorff’s manager, Orndorff grabs the microphone and reiterates that Heenan is fired.

-“Weasel” chant erupts while Heenan stays at ringside, seething and scowling while Fulton gets an early edge on Orndorff. Vince speculates that Heenan really came to scout Charlie Fulton, because Heenan hates having money, apparently. And believe it or not, Heenan actually goes to Fulton’s corner of the ring, and once Orndorff notices, he tosses Fulton out to the floor, aiming for Heenan and barely missing him.

-Orndorff rams Fulton into a table to drive the point home, and back inside, the piledriver gets three. Heenan leaves in a huff, audibly firing off a “GODDAMN IT!” near the camera and vowing revenge for being embarrassed.

-Freddie Miller talks to Greg Valentine, who is pissed about the way that JYD embarrassed him at Wrestlemania, and he’s using his Intercontinental Title to get that “nasty black person” back into the ring and “slap you around, boy.” He vows that JYD will be back to his old job shining shoes and sweeping floors when their match is over.

BRETT HART & JIM “The Anvil” NEIDHART (with Jimmy Hart) vs. JIM POWERS & JIMMY LONDOS
-Jim roughs up Jim and then tags in not-Jim. Jim almost pins Not-Jim with a bodypress until Jim breaks Jim’s pinfall. Jimmy (or as Vince calls him, “Mike”), tags in, and Jimmy gets hammered by Jim, whose offense consists of throwing Jimmy into the ropes, catching him, and then just tossing him into the ropes without doing anything. Jim tosses Jimmy to the floor, and Jimmy gleefully taunts Jimmy, who rolls around on the dirt floor so much that his white tights have a hilarious looking shart stain on them when he gets back in. Hart Attack—and a pretty cool early variant on it, with impact being made immediately after the jobber is lifted instead of waiting for Bret to hit the ropes—gets the pin.

PIPER’S PIT
-Piper interviews Mike Rotundo and Barry Windham. He presents them with rolls of toilet paper so they have something to cry into. Rotundo calls Piper a has-been who’s never held a title to lose. Rotundo and Windham tie Piper up in the toilet paper, which Piper totally no-sells and removes immediately, so Barry just chucks an entire roll of paper REALLY hard right in Piper’s face.

MAGNIFICENT MURACO (with Mr. Fuji) vs. JOE MIRTO
-Vince speculates that Mr. Fuji might interfere in this match and Jesse pretty reasonably asks why. Muraco rather methodically goes to work with chops and facelocks. Mirto gets some offense, but he’s so dazed that it has no effect, and when he charges off the ropes, Muraco just lifts him and makes it a tombstone for three.

BRITISH BULLDOGS vs. RUSTY BROOKS & A.J. PETRUZZI
-Jesse admits that he’s not going to be on his game for this match because he can’t figure out ways to describe the moves that the Bulldogs do in their matches. Davey Boy flies off the ropes at about 170 MPH for a bodypress. Dynamite adds a snap suplex and a gutwrench on Petruzzi. Running powerslam by Davey Boy looks to finish, but Rusty heads in and breaks it up.

-Petruzzi gets some offense and tries to finish Davey Boyhimself instead of tagging his partner. Smith doesn’t make the same mistake and tags in Dynamite, who lays a total beating on Petruzzi. Brooks finally tags in and fires a series of punches at Davey Boy. Davey boy attempts a slam, but Brooks is too heavy. I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen that spot done with a jobber.

-Brooks tags Petruzzi back in. Petruzzi, a quizk learner, tags as soon as he gets his token offense in. Melee breaks out. Jobbers get whipped into each other. Petruzzi crashes on the floor and Dynamite gets press-slammed onto Brooks for the win. I’m better than Jesse Ventura.

-Freddie Miller chats with Tito Santana. He says that he knows that Brutus Beefcake is learning a lot from hanging around Greg Valentine, but he promises to come fighting, because he knows that if he wins, he’ll be the #1 contender.

-Next comes Hulk Hogan, who tells “Fearless Freddie” how much it bothers him that Cowboy Bob Orton is the one with the broken arm, because Piper was the one that he was really trying to injure. He wanted to fight Piper & Orton himself in a handicap match, but Snuka wanted a piece of the ne’er-do-wells himself, so Hogan agreed. Hogan says that he wants revenge for Piper breaking the coconut, and Orton for just standing there and laughing through the entire attack, so Hogan’s memory is a bit hazy. He tells the fans to be there in the Boston Garden, because it’ll be bigger than Wrestlemania.

End-of-column plugs!

-I haven’t been plugging the website of the guy who gave me all the DVDs of these old TV shows; sorry, Robert! Here’s a link to Game Show Garbage!

-And hey, remember that time that I wrote a book! Well, I wrote four more books. You can find all of them at Amazon.

The 411: Decent week with a fun angle between Heenan and Orndorff and a tag team division that's coming alive after being just-there for the entire history of the company.
Final Score:  6.1   [ Average ]