WWF Monday Night Raw, New York, NY
A request! When I was going back over the first year of Raw some years back — again, we’re talking like a decade ago at this point, which is actually Very Funny and not concerning — this was one of my favorite matches on the show for the year.
At the time, I liked this better than the famous early Raw Flair vs Perfect match, but I’ve also probably made clear I’m not as high on that one as some are, probably wouldn’t make my ’93 Raw top 10.
I also realize it’s surely not astounding to anyone that I like a Bret Hart match, or if you’re a real TAPE lore fanatic, that I would be high on a Tag Guy Working a Singles Match match, which we also have here as Fatu is still one-half of The Headshrinkers.
Rob Bartlett is doing a fantastic Elvis impersonation. Actually, he IS Elvis! They keep talking to him. As Elvis. He’s about six weeks from disappearing from the show, never to return. Bret takes his time doing the sunglasses routine so that the incredible comedy trio of Vince McMahon, Rob Bartlett, and “Macho Man” Randy Savage can do some of their famed and beloved skit work.
Bret’s got red on his nose coming in here. A little nick on the schnozz. Elvis notices it. I honestly have no memory of whether there was a current “Elvis is alive” craze, like an abnormal one, or if this is just the usual bullshit that filtered through the brain geniuses like Vince and his doofus cronies, the least funny people on the planet.
The wrestling here is, of course, very simple, it’s all about the execution and the perception of effort, basically. That’s how it used to work. There’s this belief with Dave Meltzer, who lost whatever fuckin’ marbles he ever had in the last decade, that wrestling is, like, for scientific fact better than it ever was before. This is, of course, debatable, because this is not baseball, basketball, football, or juggling, this is, however lowbrow, an artform. Being able or willing to do more does not make something better. But one thing he’s right about is that you just can’t compare the styles of different eras straight up, the same as you can’t flatly compare the baseball Babe Ruth played to the baseball played by Shohei Ohtani, or the special effects in movies from the past to today, other than to say often they used to be better, but that’s just because everyone has gotten so lazy and cheap about it now.
The ideal, I think, is to keep the era and place and purpose of a match in mind. Does a match stand out compared to what’s out there at the time? Bill James once compared Stan Hack and Pie Traynor, with Traynor having long been seen as the “obviously” superior player, but when you compared what they did in the environs they played, he calculated Hack actually came out a little bit ahead. On this note, Meltzer also grossly overrates a massive amount of matches now, and I don’t just mean the “six-and-a-quarter stars!” stuff but a lot of what he does for week-to-week TV. “Three-and-three-quarters! Four!” But is it really? Does it actually stand out? Will anyone remember it happened in a week?
But this is a whole day wasted if we go any deeper on this, and anyway it’s pointless. The truth is that there’s usually one to four “styles” of match that happen in any era/territory/promotion for a while, and outside of laughable incompetence (which is also good, in its way), the only thing that really separates one from another is how much you like watching the people in the match. I’ve seen good Paul Roma matches that I enjoyed fine; if I liked or cared about watching Paul Roma more than I do, I might argue they’re fantastic. A lot of people are very high on Alex Wright’s short WCW peak. I am not. I’ve seen it. I saw it then and I’ve watched it back. He just never much clicked for me, and thus I get very little out of watching him. On the other hand, I like watching guys like Katsuyori Shibata, Bret, Roddy Strong, CM Punk, FTR, Chris Hero, or Eddie Kingston so much that surely it would not be hard to say I “overrate” those guys frequently.
Hart, the WWF champion and headed to WrestleMania IX to face fellow Samoan and Anoa’i family member Japanese sumo man Yokozuna, is the far more accomplished and experienced singles wrestler, of course, so he seems capable of staying a step ahead of Fatu, plus he’s just better. This is a great 1-seed against a pretty good 9 in the second round, this is UConn vs Northwestern.
They’ve decided to say this is for the title, which it might have been announced as being, I don’t actually remember. And why not? There you go, a televised defense to hype. Everyone knows this dude Fatu isn’t gonna win.
To go back to the UConn-Northwestern thing, this is of course a pro wrestling match between two non-jobbers, so you have to adjust for how that works, mainly that Bret isn’t gonna go up 40-18 at the half and get to cruise. It’s mainly about what you know, chiefly that no matter how much Fatu controls the match, in terms of time, he IS NOT going to win. So it might as well be 40-18 going into the damn thing. The rest is Northwestern’s feeble, useless 40-35 second half advantage.
In short, Fatu’s going to get some offense in, and some of that offense is A NERVE HOLD!!! “Rest holds” have also fallen by the wayside, and I don’t think it’s because the wrestlers of yore could not do go-go-go, but because it was how matches were worked then. You started quick, you slowed it down, pick it up, slow it down, pick it up, slow it down, and the majority will probably be slow. It takes longer to work a NERVE HOLD convincingly than to land a clothesline, really that simple. The way time was eaten was just different.
With Fatu in control, Samu makes his way down, joining the already-there Afa. Afa distracts that pile of hick garbage Earl Hebner, allowing Samu to do some damage. More of Fatu’s offense is biting the damaged noise, which Afa enjoys because he’s a weird pervert. “So far the Headshrinkers have not noticed that Elvis is sitting over here with us. Apparently they don’t care!” Vince offers. That puts the Headshrinkers right in line with everyone else.
So what really works here is how physical this is. That’s where it stands out for the time on TV, especially for the WWF, wouldn’t really be too noticeable on any random episode of WCW Saturday Night for ’93. Would be fine, good even, but wouldn’t stand out as much there. But that superkick above, every little shot Fatu lands, Bret’s work was always tight. Bret takes the corner hard in his chest-first style. Fatu gets crotched nasty on the turnbuckle and takes a hell of a superplex but gets the shoulder up at two, just barely.
Hart gets into the finishing run. The backbreaker’s struggle with the big guy who doesn’t want to go up for it. The elbow hits. The sharpshooter is on. Afa distracts dummy Hebner again, and Samu runs in to clobber Bret, then do the ol’ switcheroo for a two-count.
They switch again right after, for whatever reason. Maybe they figured they couldn’t really get away with it if Hebner actually paid attention. Headshrinkers get collided, Afa gets dropkicked, and Fatu falls victim to the sharpshooter after all, with Samu hung up in the ropes by his neck. Dimwit Hebner tries to count a pin.
Still liked this a lot. Cuts a nice pace, doesn’t last forever, Fatu gets his work in and Bret does his thing fighting from underneath, they work the interference stuff in nicely without being absurd, and Earl Hebner tries to count a pin in a sharpshooter. CLASSIC.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 