NWA Pro Wrestling, Gainesville, GA
The Southern Boys are Steve Armstrong and Tracy Smothers, if you’re a youngster who doesn’t know that. They were a terrific tag team, workhorse types who could play face or heel, probably better as faces. They were never the top team and we’re gonna be, but they could have a good match with just about anybody. Hayes and Garvin were not “great workers” in the action sense but usually still able to hold up their end if the other team was good; they were veterans who knew their trade.
“The first match in the series for the southern tag team championship,” says Gary Michael Cappetta. I can find basically nothing on this and don’t remember it really being anything but these teams feuded for like a year. This was a period where they tried to figure out how to make mostly Southern wrestling fans consistently hate the Freebirds (they didn’t always want to) and so he pushed what was, being honest, a pretty reliable button: make the men wear makeup (they’ve gone with a lot of glitter) and act flamboyant.
Tweeting about this, I get this information: “The storyline, which mainly played out in syndication, was that the Birds claimed they defeated the Southern Boys in a tournament final in Tupelo, MS. The Southern Boys contested this because the match never even happened. They also started rumors that the Southern Boys were actually from Wisconsin and would say stuff like, ‘I smell cheese!’ any time they came to the ring for a match.”
Apparently the Freebirds had secret cam footage released where they were revealed to NOT be successful rock n’ roll stars, and then dressed up as “hired actors” who had pretended to be the Freebirds? Honestly, if I’d remembered any of this, it sounds like it would be some of my favorite shit ever.
The Southern Boys are your, uh, heroic Confederate soldier cosplayers. It was bad by 1990, yes, but nobody said shit. I mean we’ve had guys sporting Confederate flags on their gear as babyfaces into the 2000s.
Michael looks into the camera pre-match and goes, “Wait ’til they get a load of ME! Ha-ha!” and Lance Russell goes, “Oh, Michael. You are OUT-rageous, Freebirds!” It’s extremely subtle work from both.
Jimmy Garvin really struggled to pull a lot of this stuff off in this period. It was JUST outside his wheelhouse. He did all-timer wrestling character work at his best. But they really had him trying to be Michael Hayes II with this run, and he just wasn’t. We are still a year and a half away from the final nail in the Freebirds’ coffin, though, when they just absolutely shit the bed at the Topeka Clash on the “I’m a Freebird, What’s Your Excuse?” song/”performance.”
One idea — and it’s a valid one, I think, Hayes is/was a lot of things but he’s not dumb about wrestling — is that Hayes decided to stop fighting the fact that the Freebirds were running on fumes at this point, and so they just went as embarrassing/dated/sad as possible to get heat instead. This after they really failed to be badasses in ’89, mind you. Which was always doomed once Gordy dipped again.
Anyway, this is a pretty basic match as it has to be because the Freebirds don’t really have a worker. But the Southern Boys work hard. Smothers takes a hellacious flight into the guardrail from the apron off of a Garvin knee. Southern Boys come back and win it clean with the DIXIE DEMOLITION, which was a cool move:
It’s a decent match, nothing special. The Southern Boys usually got the better of the Freebirds in matches in their pretty long feud, and they do it here. It works mostly because while these Freebirds aren’t very good, again, they know how to work a match, and more importantly keep the crowd interested so that the atmosphere doesn’t dip to levels where it becomes a chore to watch. Crowd always involved, making some noise. And Smothers and Armstrong were a very, very good team.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 
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