The first five minutes of this episode consist of Hacksaw Jim Duggan stomping around the ring while starting tons of “USA” chants and shouting “HOOOOO!”. The audience absolutely eats all of this up, but I’ll tell you what, this is the most boring match in the most boring episode yet. I will say this though: it seems that Rob Bartlett may be out for good as this is the second episode in a row that he’s been replaced by Bobby “The Brain” Heenan. Anyway, Hacksaw wins the match by countout, which means that Shawn Michaels retains the Intercontinental Championship. That’s not good enough for Hacksaw though who contacts WWF President Jack Tunney and gets a rematch for next week. Only this time it’ll be a lumberjack match. That means there will be wrestlers lined up around the squared circle to make sure that anybody thrown out of the ring gets thrown back in. I imagine quite a lot of hijinks are in store for us on the next episode, but for now we’re left to our imaginations and this slog of an episode.
Americans love yelling and hitting stuff with 2x4s. The gimmick basically writes itself.
The only good match of the night is (of course) featuring Bob Backlund who dares you not to love his high energy and intensity. His opponent, Dwayne Gil, shows Backlund no respect, as is customary with most of his matches. How many weeks does Bob Backlund need to dominate before someone will shake the guy’s hand?!
"Who's got 2 thumbs and has ADHD?!"
The other matches of the night consist of the following:
- Doink the Clown VS Kamikaze Kid
This is still illegal in 12 states.
- The Headshrinkers VS Jay Sledge & Jim Bell
"I just bored this guy to death and you're next!"
- Kamala VS Rich Myers
Is this more or less racist?
None of that should sound appealing. Those matchups sound like Vince randomly selected 20 words from the dictionary, threw them together, and called it a day. How did the WWF get viewers if they only deliver 10 minutes of interesting wrestling? Maybe they really didn’t. I believe they were effectively the only game in town as far as consistently televised wrestling went. It wasn’t until the mid to late 90’s when WCW premiered "Monday Nitro" and the Monday Night Wars started in earnest. It would seem that competition is healthy and necessary for a good product, at least when it comes to wrestling.
I know buddy. Hit the showers. We'll try again next week.