Super Calo

Always interesting how Jericho, who looks like a normal-sized wrestler today, looks noticeably smaller than Mr. Perfect, whose WWF career was held back by his comparatively small size.

Welcome back to more Dream Matches! We start off with a double-whammy, as there’s a pair of Chris Jericho vs. Curt Hennig matches from late-90s WCW! Hennig’s past his prime and Jericho wasn’t “made” yet, but see what these two can get going. Then we go to mid-90s WWF, as “The Narcissist” Lex Luger and “El Matador” Tito Santana fill TV time as Lex’s WWF career starts off! Then the Steiner Brothers go on a tear in 1998 WCW as they take on the nWo bottom-tier squad of Konnan & Vincent!

Then it’s a very “1990s WCW TV” match, as Scott Norton faces jobber Jim Powers! And finally, a “Throwaway Saturday Night Trios Match” starring Juventud Guerrera, La Parka & Silver King vs. Super Calo, Hector Garza & Lizmark Jr.! Which is interesting mainly because it has a REALLY awkward bit thanks to a mid-match injury and some improv.

CURT HENNIG (w/ Ravishing Rick Rude) vs. CHRIS JERICHO:
(WCW Nitro, Dec. 29th 1997)
* The post-Starrcade doldrums of WCW are here! Hennig faces off against Cruiserweight star Jericho. Jericho at this point was still his Generic Peppy Babyface incarnation, but was far less manic than when he came down to that Mammoth song, using the “Evenflow” ripoff and coming down with… this odd kinda random grin on his face. Like he’s being sarcastic a bit? It’s really weird and hard to read. He’s in black with yellow lightning bolts, while Hennig’s in blue.

The Battle Royal: in an era of jobber vs. jobber matches making up almost all TV wrestling, this iwas the only way to get to see a TON of big stars in one place!

It’s another Dream Matches column! This time I find a Battle Royal from 1992 with a very unexpected victor! A 40-man battle royal with an incredible SEVENTEEN jobbers getting paydays, and extended runs by guys like Kato and a beyond-done Texas Tornado! Read on!

I also find some disparate stuff- Crush vs. Damian Demento from a 1992 WWF Mania, as I find an incredible smorgasbord of horrible low-grade matches on that program! Essa Rios vs. Jeff Hardy from 2000, as the Hardyz push REALLY starts to get in gear and “Team Extreme” is ready to form! WCW midcard glory as Glacier faces Lash Leroux! Then it’s a request, as we see a very young MIKE AWESOME in late ’80s WCW, as he faces the “Z-Man” Tom Zenk! And finally, some throwaway lucha stuff as Juventud Guerrera & Super Calo face Silver King & El Dandy in a match that ends in a REAL mess of miscommunication!

BATTLE ROYAL:
(Bret Hart, The British Bulldog, Sgt. Slaughter, Rick “The Model” Martel, “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, I.R.S., The Nasty Boys, “El Matador” Tito Santana, “Texas Tornado” Kerry Von Erich, Virgil, High Energy, Skinner, The Beverly Brothers, The Berzerker, Kato, Jim Powers, Barry Horowitz, Jumping Jim Brunzell, Duane Gill, Joe Milano, Rick Johnson, John/Tom Star, J.K. Goodman, Chico Martinez, Bob Bradley, Bruce Mitchell, Bob Knight, Terry Davis, Joe McMullen, Al Tucker, Barry Hardy, Nick Danger, Scott Palontonio?)
(WWF Prime Time, July 6th 1992)
* Okay, so while Scott Keith HATES Battle Royals, I LOVE them. I mean, in an era where your weekly main event was like Bam Bam Bigelow vs. Koko B. Ware, seeing THIRTY GUYS in one match? That was incredible! Plus it was fun to see guys go out almost in the exact order of importance. This one’s a real mish-mash of the most “1992” acts possible, including Kato as a singles act, the Beverlies, High Energy & Skinner. I don’t recognize most of the seventeen (!) jobbers, but there’s a pudgy short guy in a red singlet who is AMAZINGLY bad-looking, and Johnson is some huge, ripped dude. Bruce & Bob look like a tag team in matching black tights & white boots. LOL some asshole fan on the right is grabbing all the babyfaces by the arm and not letting go, resulting in a bunch of dudes (Virgil, Kerry) spinning around, probably giving him an earful.

The LOD vs. the RnRs! And not in FirePro! But don’t get too excited, because it’s short!

It’s time for another Dream Matches column! I was really surprised by how much of a reaction my 1995 KOTR one got, so I’ll have a 1996 version next week. This one features the one-time-only tag team match between the Road Warriors and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express… except it’s given 4 minutes on a WWF D-Show and the Express are heels! Life is weird.

Also up is a DOUBLE-SHOT of Ahmed Johnson vs. Al Snow, as Ahmed takes on Shinobi in an infamous squash match, and then the next year faces the New Rockers’ “Leif Cassidy”. Then we get the Bruiser Brody Memorial Show weirdo match of Abdullah the Butcher & Jimmy Snuka against Stan Hansen & Tom Zenk of all people. And we end it with a WCW Lucha Libre show match starring Psychosis, Felino & El Mosco vs. Blitzkrieg, Venum & Super Calo!

THE LEGION OF DOOM vs. THE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL EXPRESS (w/ Jim Cornette, Jeff Jarrett & Barry Windham):
(WWF Shotgun Saturday Night, Jan. 24th, 1998)
* Yes, this is apparently the one and only time the friggin’ Road Warriors & R’n’Rs EVER FOUGHT, despite the vast amount of years both teams had been around, often in the same company. This seems impossible given how today’s wrestling is, but back then, I guess they just never wanted to run it. On this very blog, someone suggested it and Scott pointed out the Roadies weren’t gonna lose and the Express was better off getting the rub for teams who could play ball with them: https://blogofdoom.com/index.php/2020/05/19/road-warriors-vs-rnr/. All there ever was was a 4-way match I guess. So instead we get a four-minute bullshit match on a WWF D-show, and this is the only time these two legendary squads ever faced each other in a tag match… with Jim Cornette backing up the HEEL RnRs, who are advertised as the NWA Tag Team Champions. Life is weird.

The Express are in red tights with white tassels (coming down to the ROCKERS’ theme music of all things) while the LOD are sorta in their “LOD 2000” gear, with grey shoulderpads- an unusual look for the WWF. The Express are 40 and 42, yet both look nearly fifty- they did NOT age well.

Welcome back to more Dream Matches! Now, if you’re anything like me, every once in a while you wake up and go “I really want to watch a dozen Roadblock matches”, but I wasn’t sure about doing a “Best of Roadblock” column or just spreading the joy throughout multiple columns. But watching him fight Tugboat in 1991 just needs some focus on its own, you know?

Also, this week we’ll see the TV debut of some tall guy named Dwayne Johnson as “Flex Kavana”, as he teams up with Brian Christopher against Jerry Lawler & Bill Dundee in the Memphis territory, while Dwayne prepares for his WWF callup in one of the few old territories left. Also, it’s a Berzerker frenzy, as John Nord squashes both Shawn Michaels and Jim Powers in different decades! Who knows if either of those pretty boys will recover their careers?

Also, come watch Blitzkrieg fight Super Calo! With NO BOTCHING! Swear to God! Except once. Where Blitzkrieg nearly dies. But other than that it was clean!

USWA TAG TEAM TITLES:
FLEX KAVANA & “TOO SEXY” BRIAN CHRISTOPHER vs. “THE KING” JERRY LAWLER & BILL DUNDEE:
(USWA, mid-1996)
* So yes, this is the first EVER televised match for one Dwayne Johnson, as he appears in his USWA incarnation, with barely any training under his belt (he graduated college only the year before), as “Flex Kavana” (a nickname 411/Inside Pulse’s Eric S would always use to make fun of him). And he’s teaming with “Too Sexy” against the old men of the territory, Jerry & Bill, at a combined age of 970, with Bill in yellow tights and Jerry in his blue one-strap. Flex is in black trunks, Brian in white tiger-striped tights. Flex, with the same heelish tint in his voice that the Rock would later use, declares his team “Naughty by nature and violent by design”. There’s barely anyone at all in this embarrassingly-tiny red TV studio as the USWA promotion dies and dies. Lawler is actually a heel at this point.

Welcome to another Dream Matches column! Kind of! I mean, didn’t you ever want to know how Zangief would do in a REAL pro wrestling ring?

Okay, so let’s get this out of the way- YES, probably, Victor here is the basis for Zangief from Street Fighter II. He is a hairy-chested, mustached Russian named “Zangiev”, often wearing red, with legitimate wrestling skill, and he trained and wrestled with New Japan in 1989 for a tour or so- this makes the timing match up pretty well for SFII, which came out a short time later in Japan. He even wrestled for WCW in their weird “Pat O’Connor International Tag Team Tournament” in 1990. That was it for four years, until he randomly did a tour for UWF-I. The short version of that promotion is that they were the biggest deal in the world for a hot minute- being a Fake Shootfighting promotion that pretended to be real, making grandstand challenges at all the “fake” wrestlers… at least until a combination of killing all their Ace’s challengers and the revelation that they were fake as hell (hard to pretend your stuff is real when UFC becomes a thing and people realize you can’t just “make the ropes” out of a fully-applied cross-armbreaker) completely destroyed them and the promotion folded right after they were huge.