WWF WrestleMania XI, Hartford, CT
A request! I watched this match again a couple years ago when I was going through the entire 1995 year in the televised wrestling, which is fun and I should get back to that sometime, having left off in early ’96. But we’ll see.
Anyway this is a famous match where Bam Bam Bigelow and Lawrence Taylor got into a little scrap at the Royal Rumble and eventually it led to LT signing up to face Bigelow at WrestleMania
(Requests open and tips always appreciated!)
Bigelow’s got the Million Dollar Corporation in his corner, and we get the likes of King Kong Bundy and Nikolai Volkoff jogging down to the ring, as well as Tatanka and Kama and IRS, guys who might have jogged at some point in the last decade otherwise, plus Ted DiBiase having to jog in his tuxedo. Why are they all here? So that LT can have a bunch of football players with him, so that there is More Stuff Going On.
LT’s All-Pro sidekicks are Ken Norton Jr, Chris Spielman, Rickey Jackson, Carl Banks, Steve “Mongo” McMichael, and Reggie White, the latter two of whom would go on to wrestle in WCW, Mongo pretty extensively, of course, and White just the once, against Mongo. As a Lions fan, Spielman was a personal favorite as a kid, and before Mongo hit the wrestling scene, I read some wild stuff about him in Jim McMahon’s autobiography McMahon!, which I have now just ordered a copy of from thriftbooks because that book got lost in whatever shuffle probably 25 years ago. Or at least I think it was McMahon’s book, it might have been Mike Ditka’s. I was not and am not a Bears fan, but these were books my uncle had, so they were easy for me to acquire off of his bookshelf. He was also not a Bears fan, but he read a lot of sports bios back then.
Before the combatants makes their entrances, we get Mongo and Kama renewing hostilities from a recent episode of Raw, with Mongo nailing him with a forearm. When Tatanka gets on the apron, Spielman recklessly takes him out, and then Reggie White drops Bundy easily. Mongo does his very good job of acting like he thinks wrestlers act, which he would continue through his entire wrestling career, to charming results.
And now here comes Bigelow, who wears a leather jacket and intimidates Salt, Pepa, and Spinderella. Salt has to be held back once he’s out of the way, then he puts his cool jacket back on. Bigelow hits the ring and does a cartwheel. He’s leaving nothing on the table here.
And here is Lawrence Taylor in his special track outfit, flanked by his dork agent in a matching get-up. That guy did a good job of getting himself some spotlight in this whole thing. The good news for LT is that Diesel has helped train him.
Pat Patterson is the referee to help keep things together in there. They do a good stare down, Vince pointing out all the flash bulbs going off, and there are lots. A little shove from Bam Bam, and then another stare down as Pat explains more rules. Then Taylor slaps Bigelow in the face and Patterson immediately has the bell rung, which seems a bit biased to me.
Bigelow turns around into a hard forearm shiver from Taylor, then a kneelift, a little sort of throw, and a clothesline that sends Bigelow out to the floor. All of it looks technically bad, you’d get yelled at for it in wrestling school probably, but it doesn’t matter, it’s done Correctly Enough, and the crowd are excited.
Patterson gives Taylor a talking-to and LT still dodges a Bigelow charge, then hits a bulldog that, again, doesn’t matter that it doesn’t Look Right. Now to be totally fair here, his forearms rule, perhaps because he’s just pretty much cracking Bam Bam, but listen, that’s one way to do it. He’s not landing straight up full-force or anything, but there’s some stank getting in there. Hey, Terry Funk threw a great punch because he just kinda hit people. If it’s good enough for Terry Funk, it’s good enough for Lawrence Taylor.
Bigelow retreats to the floor and the MDC, but Taylor just hops over to confront the group. The All-Pros run over, and then back in the ring, Bigelow gets his first advantage. Taylor does sell OK for his experience level, which is “zero,” and the way he sells makes this feel much more like a proper fistfight than a normal wrestling match, which is good, because this cannot be a normal wrestling match. It has to be two big dudes fighting with vigor, and that’s what it is.
You also do see in real professional combat sports guys whose unorthodox style makes it difficult for their more polished opponents. Bigelow is not exactly a technician, but he’s a true pro wrestler, you would reason that he has trained and competed knowing the normal rhythms of various opponents, from Bret Hart to Diesel, from the 1-2-3 Kid to Barry Windham. And as much as those guys all have different styles, they have the normal rhythms of a fellow pro wrestler, and furthermore, things he could scout, if we’re looking at this through the competitive lens of ~Storytelling~.
Taylor does not have these rhythms, and thus you can imagine Bigelow being thrown off. Vernon Forrest was a drastically superior boxer in comparison to Ricardo Mayorga, but Mayorga beat him twice. Similar things have happened in UFC and everything else. “Styles make fights” isn’t a saying that has lasted the ages for nothing, it’s extremely true. They’re working with that sort of energy here. Bigelow wants to bring this more into the standard pattern and flow of pro wrestling, but Taylor is doing these weird lunges, throws odd shots from odd angles and at odd times, he’s not where he’s “supposed to be” doing things technically right, and Bigelow has to work with that unless he can get hold of him and totally dominate.
And when he gets chances, that’s exactly what Bigelow tries to do. He grabs a body part, say a foot, gets Taylor on the mat, and tries to slow this down and keep Taylor from all the weird, herky-jerky, explosive type of stuff he wants to do with his limited training. Grabbing a hold is not exactly Bigelow’s specialty, but he knows a hell of a lot more about it than Taylor does. If there’s an area where you have to assume Taylor has a massive deficiency, it’s defending himself on the mat.
Once back up, Taylor throws a weird shot, Bigelow grabs a headlock, and Taylor picks him up and drives him down with a back suplex. But Taylor’s winded, too; great athlete, but this is a different sort of cardio ask of him, and Bigelow is back up first and able to keep control of the pace.
Bam Bam goes up top and hits his wonky moonsault, but has to roll away after a one-count because he cracked his own knee. You can find criticism of this match where people insist Taylor was “made to look so much stronger” than Bigelow, which of course is a terrible mistake if you listen to people who booked wrestling in 1977 or 1985 and never managed to adapt with the times at all. This is a ridiculous thing to do, and there’s a reason those dudes all fell by the wayside by or in the 90s with TV wrestling changing the way it did after Vince Jr went national, but even more than that, the little knee injury does a lot of work for what happens after. Bigelow may well have had the match won clean right there, but it’s high-risk for a reason. Through nothing Taylor did, Bigelow winds up hobbled.
Bigelow then makes a mistake, the CARDINAL mistake, and Taylor hits a jackknife of sorts for a long two-count. Bam Bam’s knee is still bothering him, and he makes it worse hitting an enzuigiri that knocks Taylor loopy, but not down on his back. Bigelow drops a couple headbutts, then decides to go back up top, but the All-Pros are kind of in his way until Patterson comes over to lay down some law. A falling headbutt hits and Taylor kicks out this time.
Bigelow, hurting and tired and in disbelief a bit, wastes time worrying about that not getting the win instead of following up. This gives Taylor a chance to hit a couple forearm shots, then a couple big, lunging forearm shivers, and he heads up to the second rope himself, hitting a flying forearm and covering for the win.
This match was the only way WrestleMania in 1995 was going to get any level whatsoever of mainstream attention, as the WWF was ice cold and pro wrestling as a whole wasn’t much better in the U.S. at the time. But it worked. They got a massive amount of publicity for this. It was a short-lived boost for both the WWF and Bigelow, whose peak in stardom was also short-lived. A so-so face turn followed, as did a gradual move down the card. He was gone from the WWF just seven months after this, and never returned, though he found a groove for himself as a big fish in a small pond with ECW and then had that late-period WCW run.
In a lot of ways I think you can say Bigelow’s career never quite reached the heights a guy like him might have seemed capable of when he burst onto the scene in the 80s. He wasn’t just a random big guy or another Hogan clone or whatever, Bam Bam was unique in many ways, from look to athleticism to natural physical presence.
He main evented WrestleMania, though. Only so many people in the last nearly 40 years can say that, and even fewer can say it without the match having been for a top title. And in the job he was assigned, which was of critical importance to the company that night, he was phenomenal. He manages to make Taylor’s goofy stuff look bewilderingly effective, while also not letting himself look too weak. And for once, the WWF followed up at first with some good ideas on how to address something, helping to gloss over the fact he lost to a one-off football legend in a pro wrestling match, the idea of which just didn’t matter that much by 1995 compared to the eras before anyway, but all the same they had the idea of how to deal with it, and I thought they did a pretty good job. The execution after was iffy.
The match is not technically strong, no. But it’s got its own sort of life force to it, and if you look at it on its terms, I think you can see something pretty special. Watching it in some sort of “critical” context this time, I liked it more than I ever have, and I always have thought they both did a really good job. But there is a subtlety to the work they do, in all its very basic and very simple form, that I found truly compelling this time around, and a lot more intriguing to watch unfold when giving it that sort of eye than I really expected it to be.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 