Hacksaw Butch Reed Brickhouse Brown Master G Guess I liked the black guys. I also met The Fantastics once at a mall signing. One Man Gang I liked when they used to show NWA wrestling on WTBS for a while - Ole and Arn Anderson, etc. It was like they wrestled in a little room, with the audience being a couple of rows of fold-out chairs, not big arenas. Mid-South was like that too. Great stuff.
I guess I had grown up by the time the second coming in 1996. I remember as a kid/teen loving that stuff.
It wasn't for a few months that I realized they showed the same show on Saturday night, but it was 30 minutes longer. I guess it started at 10pm ... I was watching a match and it started to go past 11; I was like "wow, they're just going to keep showing this all night!" "Pandemonium in the ring" - great phrase from those days.
When I say "glory days" I mean the years when wrestling truly became the most popular thing on the planet. Not to say I wasn't a fan back in the day ( I was the Ultimate Warrior for Halloween is first grade), but the years to me that were truly awesome was back in middle school. To go home and watch 3 hours of Nitro while taping Raw was an orgasm to me.
four horsemen arn anderson, tully blanchard, ric flair, lex luger the road warriors and dusty rhodes the had the best matches ever called the war games when wcw was called nwa wrestling at the sam houston coliseum was the best
Bingo. Wrestling was never more popular than it was in the late 90's. Nitro was like the number 1 rated show on television for weeks. Pulled in ratings that wrestling promoters don't even dream about now.
The RAW vs Nitro days were pretty good IMO. The competition between the two products made them both better because they were always trying to out-do each other. Nitro reached its peak with the rise of the NWO (before it got watered down) RAW reached its peak with the Austin vs McMahon feud. Greatest feud ever IMO. Once RAW bought out Nitro (or whatever happened), the competition was over, so both products went downhill. I stopped watching soon after and haven’t watched since.
hacksaw butch reed vs hacksaw jim dugan in the battle of the hacksaw name match where when butch reed lost he became the natural butch reed
I was excited to see that ESPN Classic had started showing old UWF cards several times a week. Unfortunately, it is this UWF, started by Bill Abrams in 1990, and not this UWF, which was the good one started by Bill Watts (formerly Mid-South Wresling). Apparently, Watts never bothered to trademark the name, so Abrams used hit for his fed. I've watched a few of the episodes so far - Dr. Death, Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff, Greg 'The Hammer' Valentine, Ivan Koloff, and Captain Lou Albano are some of the bigger names featured, but it's still not very good.
The Fantastics v. The Sheepherders in the Sam Houston Coliseum those were some blood baths A young Sting was in a few shows there also
remember when the killer bees started wearing those masks. And they would confuse the refs, because they could switch in and out without tagging since the refs couldnt tell them apart. And then they had a 3 man tag match with Koko B Ware as their 3rd. Jessie the Body Ventura comments "I know which one is koko"
Watered down nWo was terrible. Remember when they had a group beating of Ric Flair at the end of every episode for about 3 months straight? The day McMahon bought WCW was the dark day of that era. Terrible.
I started watching the WWF in 1989. I always consider that the glory days. My favorite was the Ultimate Warrior. In retrospect, he was kind of a one trick pony but I was a kid and didn't care. I thought he was awesome at the time. That match between Hogan and Warrior is still one of my favs.
5 minute mark with Christain is where my gut started hurting. <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/laiZgrIpbcA&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/laiZgrIpbcA&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>
Go back and watch that match on youtube. Brutal. I was a Warrior fan too when I was a kid, but now looking back, he was awful.
I agree that in retrospect a lot of the older stuff sucks, but it holds sentimental value. I never really got really hardcore into wrestling but I have friends who were and still are. One of them let me borrow the Warrior DVD that came out a few years ago. Yeah, some of those matches sucked, but they were cool at the time.
Comparing the legendary characters of old with the new, high-flying hurt yourself genre is hard to do. I was at Wrestlemania for TLC II, and was amazed. I was also at a house show with Hulk in his heyday when I was eight. I love wrestling overall. I started to watch TNA because WWE is so awful now, but I can't seem to get into the new stuff.
Ironically, during this storyline Rick Rude actually did have a real life affair with Cheryl Roberts, Jake's then-wife....at least according to Jake.
Also meant to mention that meeting Kamala was a surreal moment for me, growing up on Houston Wrestling as I did. Weird when you realize he's just a regular black dude named Jim Harris from Mississipi. I said "Hey" and in a Southern accent he goes "How's it goin', brother?".
