I get things from people, and am not the anal labelling librarian type. I will most likely watch this and either throw it in a pile of other things that eventually get stepped on and broke, then thrown away, or I will mail it to someone who mails me something. With wrestling DVDs, I do not aim to recreate the material clutter of VHS tapes, and I know it is easy to think, "But they're smaller and you can put everything down into a smaller amount of stuff space-wise," but I think fuck that. New technologies are meant to simplify our lives, so why carry around all the burdens of my past but on a new-fangled format?
This is from right after Ricky Morton got his face rubbed in the concrete, because he's wearing that Richard Hamilton facemask thing. The commentary is in Japanese, but the screams are American, and Morton is on Flair right away, backing him begging into a corner, with no ringside area to escape to.
You know, the whole full disclosure but through the filter of whatever you disclose through thing that post-kayfabe wrestling does - I find it sad. I read that stupid Ric Flair "autobiography" written by Vince McMahon's writers last year, and it was sad to see this womanizing, overly confident, gold belt wearer come off as a pathetic old man with no self-confidence. I mean, how can you be Ric fuckin' Flair and not have self-confidence? I guess the wrestling industry for men is akin to the porn industry for women and you are always fighting to maintain your spot on the payroll, and the higher your spot, the harder you have to fight (or do morally compromising things, or demand that you'd never do morally compromising things because it's beneath you, or something). And I guess people loving to read little tidbits about other people's lives kinda creeps me out, too, just like housewives actually buying those celebrity gossip mags at supermarket check-outs kinda creep me out. I hope my life never sucks so much I need to know that much about famous faces, whether wrassler or media slut. I don't find it creepy at all that while that book was coming out, Ricky Morton was in jail for failure to pay child support. That I can understand. I always assumed the Polaroids he sold to benefit "The Children's Miracle Network" was just his way of saying "buying a pack of cigarettes and sending some money back to this bitch I had a kid with" anyways.
Morton rubs Flair's eyes along the top rope, referencing his own injury, and then Flair looks to go out the door, but it is locked, showing the entrapment of grudge. Little shit, that gets lost in the real-time watching, but adds up to things that elevate shitty fake fighting to THE MOTHERFUCKIN' BEAUTY OF PROFASSIONAL WRASSLIN'! Morton keeps going towards mangling Flair's face, and Morton was always the pretty boy, so his face-rubbing angle has highlights of man jealousy. Flair goes to punch Morton, but hits the mask, Morton no-sells and Flair hops around shaking his hand and he has created this dilemma for himself. He is a man who has created an ugly monster, and now is trapped to face the ugly monster he has created. But then on top of this, the thing most precious to him, his title belt, is on the line as well, beyond the normal prideful evil vs. soulful good storyline. Will that belt cause evil to find some soulful good inside himself to stay on top? Or will the evil that has been unleashed in Ricky Morton stand with upraised arms at the end of the match? Motherfucker, you know Ricky Morton never held no damned NWA World titles. But yeah, all that was there for the live audience to wonder about.
Tommy Young is ref, and I remember reading somewhere how his career-ending injury left him with a hole in his back. What the fuck do you do as a ref to end up with a hole in your back? I mean, modern medicine and surgery and all is crazy. They can clone pigs for human hearts and make a rhesus monkey glow like a jellyfish. Do people actually still have to go around with holes in their back because of back injuries? It makes me envision Tommy Young as homeless, walking somewhere within ten blocks of either the Charlotte bus station or the UNC-Charlotte campus wearing old corduroys and a white Chicago Bulls World Champions t-shirt from the Salvation Army with a big ol' oozing blood stain on his back, asking liberal-looking white dudes for change.
Flair is being pummelled and finally goes to climb over the top, leading to Morton pulling Flair's trunks down to show his ass like he loves to do. I'm comfortable enough in my repressed homosexuality to say that Flair has a pretty nice ass for a guy. Morton even puts on the figure-four and Flair writhes in the added pain the tarheel blue-and-white checkered bandanna causes him when pressed into his calf muscle. Ends with Tommy Young ref bump as Morton does the sunset flip, but Young comes to, gets to two before Flair rolls it over one more time and yanks on the trunks for the win. Not a great match in the sense it has amazing things you never ever did saw before, but a great enough match in that it highlights all the important bullet points of their intertwined story at the time. Seems to me a lot of times, matches tend to assume you already know all that shit and don't need it subliminally reinforced. People, no matter how smart they get by reading things like Ric Flair's autobiography, are still stupider than fuck, and the little subliminal things are still important.
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