MissouriDragon
07-16-2010, 12:47 PM
*Summer 1989*
This may come as a bit of a surprise to some, but I, MissouriDragon, was once a young child. Long before I became the profane, over-educated hillbilly that you see before you today, I was but a mere whelp growing up in the mean street (yes, there was just the one) of Pleasant Hope, Missouri, population 548. Back then, my two best friends were a pair of identical twins named Jake and Josh. We did all the normal things that country boys did at that age, such as riding ATVs, honing our firearms skills at the expense of the local reptile population, and of course watching NWA Wrestling every Saturday morning. Now that I’m an Ethernet card-carrying member of the IWC, I’ve been made aware that the NWA in 1989 was one of the real high points of wrestling in the last 25 years, but back then it was just what was on after Ninja Turtles or whatever dreck passed for children’s entertainment at that time.
But fuck whatever was on before it though, because this shit was dope as hell. I mean, Sting! The Road Warriors! The Horsemen! Every week! I saw Barbarian and Warlord knock out Animal’s eye in the Bench Press Challenge as it happened. You should have seen the concern in our little mark eyes on that fateful Saturday, friends. We thought he was done forever, only for him to come back in a couple of months wearing a hockey mask with his face paint drawn on it whilst Paul Ellering (man I miss that dude) scowled menacingly at ringside. Thank God for that, if he hadn’t come back we might have been watching Jem or something, and I’d probably be a very different person had that happened.
Hell, I might have wound up like Oni.
It was a quality hour of entertainment. You’d get to see a promo where Flair would tell you ‘what’s causin’ all this’, “Mean” Mark Calloway would beat the ambition out of some jobber, there’d probably be a Koloff or two, perhaps a Gilbert. It was a classic wrestling show taped before a studio audience, and TNA would do well to catch a few full episodes so they could see how it should be done.
You know those PSAs that air during WWE shows nowadays talkin’ bout, “Don’t try this at home?” The NWA didn’t have the production budget nor the time for that shit, they had to air those Blue Star Ointment ads (‘…cures psoriasis, dander, athlete’s foot, and removes warts and calluses-Blue Star Ointment, the one that’s guaranteed-ASK FOR IT!”) so’s they could get that paper.
As you can probably guess, that meant I had to work a lot of handicap matches in the living room. Josh had a mean missile dropkick from the back of the couch, Jake would really lay in that Stinger Splash after Irish whipping you into his dad’s recliner, and both of them threw lariats (often at each other, it was a truly Russo-booked tag team) that were as Western as an 8 year old could muster. As for myself, I could, and still can, put your sorry ass in the figure-four with the QUICKNESS. However, there was this one guy who had a move that none of us were brave enough to try, even with mattresses and cushions aplenty.
Who the fuck would do a backflip off the top rope, and what was he doing with Gary Hart, that dickhead Buzz Sawyer and a guy who walked to the ring backwards?
http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac92/MissouriDragon/muta1.jpg
To this day, The Great Muta remains my favorite wrestler of all the times. What part of “mystical, silent Japanese devil” wouldn’t appeal to the sensibilities of an 8-year old? My eyes had never beheld such a thing before. Here was this guy coming to the ring in karate pajamas and a hood, with his face painted some strange color with kanji on both cheeks, doing a full on kung-fu psych-out to his opponent pre-match. And man, once he got started, his arsenal of moves was just insane. Here are a few things I saw for the first time in Muta matches:
· Spinning Heel Kick
· Roll-through to avoid a clothesline, later done to ruinous excess by one RVD
· Enziguri
· Flash elbow (the prototype for The Peoples Elbow and everything else like it)
· Handspring elbow (no, not you, Kelly Kelly)
· Dragon Screw legwhip
· No-hands plancha to the outside
· Cattle Mutilation (more than a decade pre-Danielson)
· THE MOTHERFUCKING MOONSAULT
The vast majority of this had never been seen before on American television, unless you lived in Texas and got some lucha on your TV. Can you imagine the internet reaction if a guy who didn’t talk, had a great heel manager and 10 moves you’ve never seen anywhere before debuted on Smackdown next week? Keyboards would be smokin’, that’s for sure. He spent the spring of the year in a winning streak gimmick, killing jobbers dead as fuck by backflipping ¾ of the way across the ring while good ol’ JR put over the amount of martial-arts training he had received in Japan on commentary. I realize now that this was just Jim Crockett doing an excellent job of building a heel challenger for Sting’s TV title, but at the time this guy seemed like he was going to rape and pillage his way to the World Championship in two or three weeks max, because nobody he wrestled could get two punches in a row in against the dude. Think ‘Goldberg streak’, but with the awesome Gary Hart as his mouthpiece.
11 years and two weeks ago (at the time of this writing), The Great Muta defeated Sting for the NWA TV title in a rematch of their double-disqualification classic at the Great American Bash. We knew this was coming eventually, as Muta was still undefeated at this time, and we were damn grateful to get to see it on a Saturday. Y’see, once upon a time before PPVs, title changes took place on regular TV shows with a fair amount of frequency, and this was one of them. As it would turn out, this would be the start of a feud that would span two continents and last more than a decade, but that’s another story for another day. At this point, some of the vulnerabilities would become evident, as Gary Hart, the Dragon Master (aka Kendo Nagasaki for the WoS fans out there, he once wrestled Finlay), or Muta himself would often have to cheat to get the duke against midcard opponents. And brother let me tell ya, nobody had a better foreign object than The Great Muta:
http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac92/MissouriDragon/mutamist.jpg
Oh yes. You want to blow some little kid’s minds, imply that an already supernaturally evil wrestler has POISON GLANDS IN HIS THROAT, AND CAN SPRAY SAID POISON AT HIS OPPONENT LIKE A SPITTING COBRA. Again, without knowing the carnyness behind this stunt, it was truly unbelievable. For example, whenever Eddie Gilbert or the Sheik threw a fireball at somebody, you could usually see them striking a lighter and holding it to something in their hand before unleashing the Hadouken on some poor babyface. Muta would just touch his fingers to his throat and unleash a green cloud. I will never forget reading an article in PWI back in the day that explained the toxins in his various mists, my favorite being the yellow paralysis mist which was made from the venom of Carribean sea snakes. Bring back kayfabe magazines.
With that kind of voodoo on his side, who could possibly stop him?
As it turns out, the only thing that could stop him was circumstance (and by that I mean booking). The scene is the very first Halloween Havoc, originating from the Philadelphia Civic Center on October 28, 1989. The main event was a Thunderdome Electrified Cage match between Muta and the Funker (if you think I’m writing a column and not mentioning Terry Funk, think again) and Ric Flair and Sting. Take my word for it; you’ve not lived until you’ve heard Tony Schiavone kayfabe explain the making of the Thunderdome. It aired on TBS, and I obtained the tape from an uncle with cable about a week after the fact. The only way to win or lose the Thunderdome match was for your second to throw in the towel, thus making it an ‘I Quit’ match of sorts. For the record, the seconds were Ole Anderson and Gary Hart, and the ref was no less than Bruno goddamn Sammartino. There was trouble right out of the gate, as one of the decorations at the top of the cage brushed against one of the electrified wires and caught fire. While stagehands raced down to ringside with fire extinguishers, Muta calmly scaled the cage and put the fire out with the poison mist to a huge pop.
Did I mention he was my fuckin’ hero, because he totally is.
Anyway, this match, which on rewatching years later was a total charlie-fox, ended with Hart throwing in the towel while Funk was in the figure-four. Muta became so enraged by this that he turned on Funk, beating him like Uncle Joe would beat a 5 dollar hooker. As it turned out, this would be the end of his dominance. Though he did not lose his TV title, Muta spent the rest of the year having shady DQ matches with the likes of Tommy Rich and/or Dynamic Dude Shane Douglas. Starrcade ’89, however, would see a true travesty befall the Pearl of the Orient. The centerpiece of this event was an Iron-Man tournament for the World Championship. The tourney was a round-robin affair between Flair, Muta, Sting, and Lex Luger (who was never good, not even for one match, in his whole career, and fuck him for killing Elizabeth). Muta lost all three tilts, including losing the one and only match between him and Flair in about two minutes flat. Seriously, they gave Muta/Flair in ’89 about two minutes at their biggest show of the year. WCW in its dying years rarely committed an atrocity such as that. Muta was set to return to the mystical Orient soon, and thus he dropped his TV title to Arn Anderson in a hell of a match in January of 1990.
As I’m sure you are aware, this is far from the end of the Muta story, but it’s the end of mine. Suffice it to say that Muta continued his career in other venues, occasionally squaring off against old rivals from his NWA days, and having a few decent matches here and there under a few different gimmicks. Now I’m not entirely certain about this…
http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac92/MissouriDragon/mutohbelts.jpg
…but I’ve heard that he’s done pretty well for himself since then.
A’ight then, y’all have youn’selves a good’n, y’hear?
This may come as a bit of a surprise to some, but I, MissouriDragon, was once a young child. Long before I became the profane, over-educated hillbilly that you see before you today, I was but a mere whelp growing up in the mean street (yes, there was just the one) of Pleasant Hope, Missouri, population 548. Back then, my two best friends were a pair of identical twins named Jake and Josh. We did all the normal things that country boys did at that age, such as riding ATVs, honing our firearms skills at the expense of the local reptile population, and of course watching NWA Wrestling every Saturday morning. Now that I’m an Ethernet card-carrying member of the IWC, I’ve been made aware that the NWA in 1989 was one of the real high points of wrestling in the last 25 years, but back then it was just what was on after Ninja Turtles or whatever dreck passed for children’s entertainment at that time.
But fuck whatever was on before it though, because this shit was dope as hell. I mean, Sting! The Road Warriors! The Horsemen! Every week! I saw Barbarian and Warlord knock out Animal’s eye in the Bench Press Challenge as it happened. You should have seen the concern in our little mark eyes on that fateful Saturday, friends. We thought he was done forever, only for him to come back in a couple of months wearing a hockey mask with his face paint drawn on it whilst Paul Ellering (man I miss that dude) scowled menacingly at ringside. Thank God for that, if he hadn’t come back we might have been watching Jem or something, and I’d probably be a very different person had that happened.
Hell, I might have wound up like Oni.
It was a quality hour of entertainment. You’d get to see a promo where Flair would tell you ‘what’s causin’ all this’, “Mean” Mark Calloway would beat the ambition out of some jobber, there’d probably be a Koloff or two, perhaps a Gilbert. It was a classic wrestling show taped before a studio audience, and TNA would do well to catch a few full episodes so they could see how it should be done.
You know those PSAs that air during WWE shows nowadays talkin’ bout, “Don’t try this at home?” The NWA didn’t have the production budget nor the time for that shit, they had to air those Blue Star Ointment ads (‘…cures psoriasis, dander, athlete’s foot, and removes warts and calluses-Blue Star Ointment, the one that’s guaranteed-ASK FOR IT!”) so’s they could get that paper.
As you can probably guess, that meant I had to work a lot of handicap matches in the living room. Josh had a mean missile dropkick from the back of the couch, Jake would really lay in that Stinger Splash after Irish whipping you into his dad’s recliner, and both of them threw lariats (often at each other, it was a truly Russo-booked tag team) that were as Western as an 8 year old could muster. As for myself, I could, and still can, put your sorry ass in the figure-four with the QUICKNESS. However, there was this one guy who had a move that none of us were brave enough to try, even with mattresses and cushions aplenty.
Who the fuck would do a backflip off the top rope, and what was he doing with Gary Hart, that dickhead Buzz Sawyer and a guy who walked to the ring backwards?
http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac92/MissouriDragon/muta1.jpg
To this day, The Great Muta remains my favorite wrestler of all the times. What part of “mystical, silent Japanese devil” wouldn’t appeal to the sensibilities of an 8-year old? My eyes had never beheld such a thing before. Here was this guy coming to the ring in karate pajamas and a hood, with his face painted some strange color with kanji on both cheeks, doing a full on kung-fu psych-out to his opponent pre-match. And man, once he got started, his arsenal of moves was just insane. Here are a few things I saw for the first time in Muta matches:
· Spinning Heel Kick
· Roll-through to avoid a clothesline, later done to ruinous excess by one RVD
· Enziguri
· Flash elbow (the prototype for The Peoples Elbow and everything else like it)
· Handspring elbow (no, not you, Kelly Kelly)
· Dragon Screw legwhip
· No-hands plancha to the outside
· Cattle Mutilation (more than a decade pre-Danielson)
· THE MOTHERFUCKING MOONSAULT
The vast majority of this had never been seen before on American television, unless you lived in Texas and got some lucha on your TV. Can you imagine the internet reaction if a guy who didn’t talk, had a great heel manager and 10 moves you’ve never seen anywhere before debuted on Smackdown next week? Keyboards would be smokin’, that’s for sure. He spent the spring of the year in a winning streak gimmick, killing jobbers dead as fuck by backflipping ¾ of the way across the ring while good ol’ JR put over the amount of martial-arts training he had received in Japan on commentary. I realize now that this was just Jim Crockett doing an excellent job of building a heel challenger for Sting’s TV title, but at the time this guy seemed like he was going to rape and pillage his way to the World Championship in two or three weeks max, because nobody he wrestled could get two punches in a row in against the dude. Think ‘Goldberg streak’, but with the awesome Gary Hart as his mouthpiece.
11 years and two weeks ago (at the time of this writing), The Great Muta defeated Sting for the NWA TV title in a rematch of their double-disqualification classic at the Great American Bash. We knew this was coming eventually, as Muta was still undefeated at this time, and we were damn grateful to get to see it on a Saturday. Y’see, once upon a time before PPVs, title changes took place on regular TV shows with a fair amount of frequency, and this was one of them. As it would turn out, this would be the start of a feud that would span two continents and last more than a decade, but that’s another story for another day. At this point, some of the vulnerabilities would become evident, as Gary Hart, the Dragon Master (aka Kendo Nagasaki for the WoS fans out there, he once wrestled Finlay), or Muta himself would often have to cheat to get the duke against midcard opponents. And brother let me tell ya, nobody had a better foreign object than The Great Muta:
http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac92/MissouriDragon/mutamist.jpg
Oh yes. You want to blow some little kid’s minds, imply that an already supernaturally evil wrestler has POISON GLANDS IN HIS THROAT, AND CAN SPRAY SAID POISON AT HIS OPPONENT LIKE A SPITTING COBRA. Again, without knowing the carnyness behind this stunt, it was truly unbelievable. For example, whenever Eddie Gilbert or the Sheik threw a fireball at somebody, you could usually see them striking a lighter and holding it to something in their hand before unleashing the Hadouken on some poor babyface. Muta would just touch his fingers to his throat and unleash a green cloud. I will never forget reading an article in PWI back in the day that explained the toxins in his various mists, my favorite being the yellow paralysis mist which was made from the venom of Carribean sea snakes. Bring back kayfabe magazines.
With that kind of voodoo on his side, who could possibly stop him?
As it turns out, the only thing that could stop him was circumstance (and by that I mean booking). The scene is the very first Halloween Havoc, originating from the Philadelphia Civic Center on October 28, 1989. The main event was a Thunderdome Electrified Cage match between Muta and the Funker (if you think I’m writing a column and not mentioning Terry Funk, think again) and Ric Flair and Sting. Take my word for it; you’ve not lived until you’ve heard Tony Schiavone kayfabe explain the making of the Thunderdome. It aired on TBS, and I obtained the tape from an uncle with cable about a week after the fact. The only way to win or lose the Thunderdome match was for your second to throw in the towel, thus making it an ‘I Quit’ match of sorts. For the record, the seconds were Ole Anderson and Gary Hart, and the ref was no less than Bruno goddamn Sammartino. There was trouble right out of the gate, as one of the decorations at the top of the cage brushed against one of the electrified wires and caught fire. While stagehands raced down to ringside with fire extinguishers, Muta calmly scaled the cage and put the fire out with the poison mist to a huge pop.
Did I mention he was my fuckin’ hero, because he totally is.
Anyway, this match, which on rewatching years later was a total charlie-fox, ended with Hart throwing in the towel while Funk was in the figure-four. Muta became so enraged by this that he turned on Funk, beating him like Uncle Joe would beat a 5 dollar hooker. As it turned out, this would be the end of his dominance. Though he did not lose his TV title, Muta spent the rest of the year having shady DQ matches with the likes of Tommy Rich and/or Dynamic Dude Shane Douglas. Starrcade ’89, however, would see a true travesty befall the Pearl of the Orient. The centerpiece of this event was an Iron-Man tournament for the World Championship. The tourney was a round-robin affair between Flair, Muta, Sting, and Lex Luger (who was never good, not even for one match, in his whole career, and fuck him for killing Elizabeth). Muta lost all three tilts, including losing the one and only match between him and Flair in about two minutes flat. Seriously, they gave Muta/Flair in ’89 about two minutes at their biggest show of the year. WCW in its dying years rarely committed an atrocity such as that. Muta was set to return to the mystical Orient soon, and thus he dropped his TV title to Arn Anderson in a hell of a match in January of 1990.
As I’m sure you are aware, this is far from the end of the Muta story, but it’s the end of mine. Suffice it to say that Muta continued his career in other venues, occasionally squaring off against old rivals from his NWA days, and having a few decent matches here and there under a few different gimmicks. Now I’m not entirely certain about this…
http://i889.photobucket.com/albums/ac92/MissouriDragon/mutohbelts.jpg
…but I’ve heard that he’s done pretty well for himself since then.
A’ight then, y’all have youn’selves a good’n, y’hear?