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This was for Backlund’s WWWF Title.
It’s great. Bobby and Pat have a great little match.
The main utility of this though, I think, is to stand perfectly for what I think of as this kind of an old-school Great Title Match.
In terms of, like, what I would consider a great match, they get like eighty percent of it right.
This is a match with some great periods of focus, some outstanding physical activity, that is mechanically super super super interesting, and that also takes an interesting and really satisfying approach at the end.
Backlund’s work on the arm of Patterson in the first half is outstanding. Really great stuff. He not only does a lot of real nasty little things, but it stands out alongside some Ricky Steamboat stuff from five to ten years later as this sort of ideal babyface version of a segment like this. They move around faster than you might expect for the WWWF in 1979, to the extent that it feels like someone ported over a Mid Atlantic title match. Patterson going for big swings and eating shit, repeated arm drags, punishment to the arm when Pat tries to cheat or overreaches, all of the hits. Likewise, when Patterson goes to Backlund’s knee in the second half, Bob’s selling and Pat’s work on the knee are both outstanding. Bob has these lovely little sells, collapsing on a slam, trouble moving fast, things of that nature.
Outside of just what they do in a mechanical sense and how they do it, the match is also home to a really neat little finish as well. Unable to turn Backlund’s hurt leg into a victory as a result of Bobby himself still going to Pat’s arm here and there and being faster and better, Patterson takes brass knuckles out of his trunks and knocks Backlund out with them. The problem is that, Bob’s manager Arnold Skaaland gets on the apron to try and tell the ref, preventing Patterson from stealing the win and the title. As Patterson’s own manager, The Grand Wizard, tries to get the referee’s attention to go into a cover, Pat gets up to go and hit Arnold, only for the old man to hit him with the title belt in a real novel piece of comeuppance.
Neither man makes it up before ten, despite Bob Backlund making it to his knees and beginning to crawl, as the hero of the story has a little more of the tough stuff inside than the villain, resulting in a double knock out that doesn’t feel quite like a double knock out. Backlund still feels like something of a winner, not just for surviving the attempt at such blatant theft, but for being the first one up. And as always in professional wrestling, what feels true is often far more important than what is true.
The match is a lovely little thing, a familiar match done in a slightly less familiar way, and with the kind of a particular booking twist that stands out all these decades later.
It is just that other twenty percent that is frustrating, in which Patterson does the thing a lot of older wrestlers did, in which he completely forgets his supposedly hurt arm once it’s time to move to the next segment. It’s hard to really ding him for it, as he is so great in the first half and he is really good in general at attacking the leg of Backlund and of bumping and stooging in general, but it’s the one thing really off about this match. It’s the sort of behavior that has always sort of frustrated me in older wrestling (not that this was universal, just that you get a lot of it from around this time). It’s a show of intellectual laziness in a match that, otherwise, is the furthest thing from lazy in the world, as shown in Backlund’s performance without the same weakness.
Still, so much of this is so great that it hardly gets in the way of anything. An outstanding match, featuring one and a half great performances, and a stellar example of how not every non-clean finish in the world is bad. Again, sometimes bullshit can be really really great. After all, if bullshit sucked, we wouldn’t be watching pro wrestling to begin with.
Minor mechanical difficulties aside, wonderful little chunk of bullshit.
HANDWERK 