WWF SummerSlam, Philadelphia, PA
This is two out of three falls for the Demolition’s WWF tag team championship at the SummerSlam. At this point, the Demolition are three members — Ax, Smash, and the Cousin Oliver ass, Seven Bundy ass Crush. The Hart Foundation are fully back together after a start-and-stop Bret singles run that lasted from about the start of ’89 into March of ’90, with him still teaming with Neidhart here and there. Mostly worked a lot of house shows with Curt Hennig, Honky Tonk Man, Dino Bravo, and Bad News Brown, never took off despite some promises. Bret would have to wait until ’91 to finally get the real green light as a singles.
Smash and Crush are the Demolition reps here. Bret comes out with a ponytail for some reason or other, but removes it along with his “sunglasses.” You can tell Demolition are in their dying days, not only with the wack Crush addition and not only because the Road Warriors had finally made the move to the WWF, but their face paint had gotten fairly lazy, too. Pretty soon Ax stops even bothering to slick his hair back.
Hart makes Crush look good early here, which was not always a very easy thing to do. Crush at this point is green, but he was always kind of stiff (not in the Stan Hansen way) and clunky, and had a tendency to look a lot weaker than a big powerhouse guy should, didn’t wrestle with conviction all the time. He had his good nights, but it was almost always someone else bumping around hard to make his weak shit look better. But I can recall some times he really laid it in more and he had something. He was at times better than, say, Warlord. He was at times just about as good as Warlord, who had all the same problems but never really got better about it.
Anvil weirdly waits around on the outside for quite a long time, either him going out there too early or the other lads taking too long to get to his bit, which is him getting thrown into the guardrail by Crush. With Neidhart down outside, Demolition hit their finish on Hart and win the first fall; at this point, Smash is in the Ax role, and Crush in the old Smash role, dropping the elbow from the second rope.
The second fall has Bret in some real peril, but Neidhart is back on the apron so he is at least available to be tagged. Smash does his best to keep the hot tag from coming, but Bret crawls through Smash trying to hold onto his leg, and Anvil is a house afire. Neidhart hits a great powerslam on Smash for two, and Piper starts screaming about it being “bad officiating!” Vince has to disagree with him. The two have decided to focus a lot on officiating for some reason tonight.
Hart Attack connects, crowd going wild, but it only gets two because of this:
That earns a pretty fucking weak DQ for the second fall, but it doesn’t matter much because the crowd are mad for it, they are wildly behind the Hart Foundation here.
Bret gets knocked out of the ring before the third fall can fully start, and Demolition double distract the referee while Ax sneaks down and goes underneath the ring. He has to go under because the rule is only two members of Demolition are allowed out at the ring at a time, so the third man cannot serve as a “manager” or whatever, because it makes it too easy for them to cheat, which obviously they would and plan to here.
This is a weird match, it’s kind of spacey or something, the timing pretty constantly seems just a little bit off. But it’s not bad; it rides a razor’s edge between working fine and falling apart and being very fun.
One of the great frustrating bits for kids watching at home was the WWF commentators pretending it was ever, even once, hard to tell the members of Demolition apart. You’d be little as hell screaming at the TV like THAT’S FUCKING AX YOU DUMBASS, and they bust out an all timer when Ax, visibly older and with SHORTER HAIR THAN THE OTHER TWO BY A LOT, climbs into the ring to replace Smash here. The old switcheroo.
Bret takes a hard bump on Ax just sticking his arm out as a clothesline. Crush and Neidhart have the ref (it’s a Hebner) distracted while Ax and Smash beat up on Bret, and this time Smash comes back into the ring. And now the Legion of Doom are out, pulling Ax from under the ring. Hawk nails Crush, Smash chases after the LOD, and the Harts hit a clumsy finish on Crush for the win. Crowd loves it.
The crowd being so behind the Harts makes this as good as it is, and some good moments sprinkled in. It otherwise, again, rides a razor’s edge between falling apart and staying enjoyable, and they navigate it and stay up the whole way, even if just barely at times. It’s a very entertaining, unusual sort of match for the time in the WWF.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 
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