Thursday, December 12, 2013

Buddy Rose vs Steve Pardee - 9/15/79 - Hair match

Buddy insists, after all, that this will be on TV since no one thought he'd win. They ban Rip from ringside and the crowd pops. They shake to begin and weirdly that sort of makes this feel like a big deal. Shine stuff is great. Buddy hits one arm drag and Pardee hits three before Buddy takes a powder. Rip comes back out and keeps brushing the hair. Buddy kicks and goes for a turnbuckle shot but Pardee reverses and hits a bunch of stuff before Buddy begs off and gets out. Crowd is super hot for this. Buddy keeps getting a quick advantage but Pardee turns it around including some really good rope running. Pardee works over the arm and Buddy's selling and stooging is amazing. He takes the hugest bump off of an over the top rope drape and makes it (and Pardee) look like a thousand bucks. 

The transition is Pardee charging into the corner after Buddy and going shoulder first beginning Buddy's armwork. They keep mentioning Louie Pinzelli who's going to do the haircut and he's a former boxing second and local hair-cut guy and just name dropping him like that adds a lot to the local feel of this. Portland always had such a great warm community feel to it. Anyway Pardee punches out of it, making sure to sell the arm still during his comeback and hits some fairly good looking but simple offense including a legdrop to the gut before Buddy tosses him out in true Bockwinkel fashion, leading to one of the first real king of the mountain segments I've seen out of this era's Buddy. It makes total sense here given the stakes and how energetic young Pardee was. Good stuff and a switch up of structure. They keep things interesting while Pardee is out by having Buddy almost get in with it to Barr. Barr actually wants to DQ Buddy here but Pardee, gallant young lion, refuses to take it. He instead reverses a shot into the ring post. Presuming Buddy is going over here they're doing a lot to really make Pardee look good. He hits a revenge spot on Buddy keeping him out and then lets him back in before really laying it in with running turnbuckle shots. This whole thing was kind of neat since it was a real Portland twist. 

He finally misses a third dropkick as Buddy falls backwards for another transition. Pardee gets an immediate hope sunset flip making the crowd go nuts but Buddy starts in on the back and really begins to grind down. They tease another hope spot with Buddy putting his head down, but he hits the inside backbreaker immediately thereafter and picks up the win. I could have used a slightly hotter finish with Pardee getting a few more shots in before Buddy hit the backbreaker out of nowhere but in general this was really good. It had a good number of transitions but they all built to something and made sense. Buddy and Rip are awesome praying to the increasingly bald Pardee as if he was a monk and then saying that Kojak is in the ring. 

Good match that put over Pardee pretty well even in losing, that put over the gimmick match, that just made Rose look more formidable. And that just ratcheted up the heat on this stuff all the more for the Adonis loser leaves town match upcoming on Tuesday. 

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