Buddy Rose/Rip Rogers vs Ron Starr/Adrian Adonis - 7/7/79 - 2/3 Falls

Buddy and Rip are sporting bandana headbands. For those who care, Rip is clean shaven which looks weird but sort of highlights the physical resemblance between he and Buddy. Pretty sure this for the held up belts. Rose stooges all over for Starr doing a pretty good job flailing about and selling. He eats one killer dropkick after they break up a Rose attempt to interfere. It wasn't so high but he leaned into it. Nice little spot with a begging off Rogers getting pushed from behind by Adonis right into a headlock takeover. Buddy takes a huge looking bump off the screen in a heel miscommunication spot. Faces take out Rose, trying to come back in with charging billy goat headbutts and then Adonis wins fall#1 on Rogers with the spinning toehold. Buddy didn't get in at all. Fun shine.

Rip is pretty good at starting falls by selling. In Portland, btw, the person who loses the fall has to start the match and can't tag until there is physical contact. Rip gets pulled right back into the faces' corner. We get some comedy stooging Heel In Peril as Rogers tries to make the tag until Bully runs in and hits. It was pretty entertaining, flailing stuff but this is a fairly big match in context and I think it went on a bit long in general. I really like Adonis FIPs from this era. Rose's stuff looks really good against him and Adonis is great at making desperate comebacks only to get cut off at the last second. It took me a while to really start to buy him as a babyface wrestler but he's really dynamic in these tags. Anyway, Rip cuts him off with a long chinlock/sleeper, which doesn't look great except for the fact that they keep moving with it. I do like the Rip/Rose pairing. It brings out a different dynamic than Rose/Wiskowski (which I of course liked). More energy, some more stooging, a little more desperation, a little less methodological. Here they keep cutting off hope spots by putting on a desperate hold. Starr finally has enough on the outside and comes in. Barr stops him and the heels hit first a double clothesline which Starr manages to break up and then a head-held second rope flying knee strike which looked pretty brutal for the second fall.

Third fall has Adonis fighting out of the corner. I really love the structural shortcuts in these 2/3 fall matches. You can get the hot tag at the start of the third fall, which is what we get here. Starr gets in and starts unloading on Buddy but buddy hits a quick cheap shot and they trade blocked atomic drops. Roddy comes out and Buddy collides into him on the apron letting the faces roll him up for the win and the titles. This was a pretty abrupt third fall but felt totally in character for Piper as his sort of punch drunk way of interfering cost the heels the belts and moves us right back to Rose vs Piper which is what the crowd really wanted anyway. Good functional stuff.