WCW SuperBrawl, St. Petersburg, FL
The first SuperBrawl is one of my favorite “comfort shows,” so I’m watching it. No reason, I just haven’t in a while. This is for the vacant U.S. tag team championship, and is roughly the 714th match between the Freebirds and Young Pistols/Southern Boys.
Instead of heroic Confederate army cosplayers, the former “Southern Boys” are now cowboys from Wyoming. They are called just “Steve!” and “Tracy!” It is like a bumpkin Dynamic Dudes. Big Daddy Dink interferes once (well, twice, once successfully) early, so Brad Armstrong runs in to be at the Pistols’ side, because “Steve!” is his little brother from Wyoming. Anyway Brad and the Dinker are both tossed.
To be entirely fair to the bad early 90s Freebirds, the Young Pistols did manage to squeeze the last drops of “best” out of the both of them. Tracy Smothers in career-long fashion (except when he was a heel, except also sometimes when he was a heel) asks people to clap about every 10 seconds he’s in the ring and not selling.
As basically all matches between these teams were, at least when given time to develop, the matchup is about the speed, teamwork, and exuberance of the Pistols against the veteran experience and shortcuts of the Freebirds. Hayes busts out his trademark left hand a couple times on Tracy, but Smothers hits a Karate Kick, and they both make tags. Hayes barely gets over on a backdrop from Steve Armstrong, and Steve is rollin’.
Freebirds eat a double noggin knocker. The Pistols both miss missile dropkicks, but right after Smothers hits a flying double clothesline and Armstrong nails the Birds with a crossbody from the top to the floor. The Pistols hit their finisher — a Doomsday Device with a flying back elbow from Smothers — on Hayes, then hit a Doomsday Device with an Armstrong missile dropkick on Garvin.
But Garvin and Smothers fly into the referee, so he’s out. And then some masked idiot dropping a bunch of feathers runs in, hits two DDTs, and runs away. “His shirt said FANTASIA on it!” Jim Ross shouts. That didn’t last for very obvious reasons, and he would be called “Badstreet.” (It was Brad Armstrong.) The Freebirds steal the win and the U.S. tag belts.
There is definitely a level to the Freebirds knowing how lame they were by this point. When they kicked off this run in ’89, they were really trying to be tough guys. Didn’t work. Then they overlay played to the worse instincts of Southern wrestling crowds. Didn’t really work. So they kinda just went full dorky. It’s not really GOOD, but I think it’s aged well in a campy B-movie sort of way.
This is far from the best match these teams had, never gels into something cohesive as a story and is really more a series of “events,” not even a series of spots or whatever. They have to get Dink thrown out, which involves Brad, so that they can get to the Fantasia run-in. The wrestling between these things is really simple and kind of lazy at times, just filling time.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 
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