Thursday, December 12, 2013

Buddy Rose/Ed Wiskowski vs Stan Stasiak/George Wells - 4/21/79

The date confuses me since it's the same as the King Parsons match but that's what I have.

Stasiak is a guy I've only seen in Portland and a few years older at that. He and Wells start out with lots of wrenching armwork on Wiskowski. He has a certain presence to him which lets you buy him manhandling big Ed. Rose is great at getting distracted by the fans to miss the tag and then to pull Wiskowski back into the corner (While in a standing hold) by his foot. Stasiak's rising pumphandle arm wrench is pretty great and the fans respond. Stasiak has this weird greaser look. Heels take over with hair pulling and Rose goes for arm wrenching of his own (good character stuff) but Stasiak almost instantly tags and Wells makes Rose beg off (Better character stuff). And this is pretty engrossing shine work.

Great tease of the heart punch (which they were selling as the biggest thing in the world) and awesome underhanded heel tactics to really start the first fall's heat segment. Wells fights back before too long and Stasiak comes in like a madman. There are a couple of weird flubby heel misdirection spots here including Wells not chasing Buddy out of the ring like he was supposed to, but what they were going for was sound enough even if nothing special. During that aforementioned quasi-chase, Ed hits a diving headbutt for the first fall.

Second fall starts out with great southern stuff. Desperation heel tags to cut off comebacks. Leverage tricks. Fake tag chicanery. Angry babyface on the apron screwing his own team. Stasiak is good at being very focused in trying to make the tag. Buddy slaps on a chinlock at some point and winds Stasiak around so that he's facing away from his corner. Tiny thing but the sort you'd never even think of. This turns out to be a really great little heat segment. Stasiak fights back but always ends up in the wrong corner. They really delay the hot tag to the point where it's really hot when it happens, but Wells misses a corner tackle almost immediately. His movements are very weird in the ring. He does things like try to fight irish whips in a weird way. I love Wiskoski's body drop onto the shoulders. Wells gets beaten on a bit but makes a hot tag to Stasiak who immediately gets swarmed upon by non-legal man Buddy. Great heeling tactics in this match. We get the 1979 equivalent of the top rope counter RKO as Wiskowski goes for the headbutt again only to get heart punched on the way down for the second fall. 

And uh.... that's all I've got. Wells was really not so smooth here, but there was a great heat segment on Stasiak and Rose/Wiskowski were so good at callbacks and foreshadowing. I really liked the second fall.

No comments:

Post a Comment