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First things first, it is just a very cool match to see.
Not in the sense that it’s Murdoch going down on the ground or in a Fujiwara style match, because despite the rep, that’s never all that there’s been to Dickie, if you go back and look at some longer Mid-South work or the Inoki matches. Moreso in that, to me, Dick Murdoch is this total avatar for The Way Things Used To Be, a wrestler very much synonymous with old territories and old ways of wrestling, simple and direct, this personification of doing a lot with a little. It is very strange to see him in 1996, and it is just as gratifying to see him in a match that rocks this much.
For those familiar with Yoshiaki Fujiwara, this is yet another Fujiwara match with some very unique rhythms to it, a lot of peaks and valleys throughout the first two-thirds of the match, and Dick Murdoch fits in so well to that. Fujiwara has a wonderful other half in Dick Murdoch here, another older wrestler who always makes fascinating choices and gets so much out of small motions, similar to Fujiwara in all the ways that matter and different in all the ways that make a match better too.
The highest complement I can pay this match is that every single thing that happens in it is interesting.
Virtually every bit that Murdoch and Fujiwara get up to is a real joy. Some of those are actual bits, like some tremendous comedy with each man holding the ropes for the other, and notorious scoundrels that they are, neither man trusts the other and they constantly tease cheap shots that don’t come, embarrassing the other. Other times, and more frequently than the comedy, are the great little wrestling bits. Nasty cranks on holds, small counters that have a way of seeming desperate and violent through the force of selling and execution, great punches, tremendous little sells and looks thrown out there, it is all supremely interesting and at every possible moment, incredibly watchable.
Fujiwara opens Murdoch up for his namesake hold with a headbutt to win, but details like that almost don’t matter at all. This was an expert riff session between two old masters, with the only thing decided seeming to be that finish.
The joy of a match like this is everything before and around that one detail.
Dick Murdoch would, at least according to cagematch, have one more match in his life after this (vs. Rod Price on a spot show in Amarillo on June 6th, which probably also rocked, to be fair). He would be dead within a month of this match, on June 15th, 1996. Murdoch hadn’t done too much of great note for a few years before this (there is a WWC run that is probably fun, some SMW shots, but otherwise not a lot since the super great and brief 1991 Hardliners run in WCW), and so it is a really beautiful thing that he got to have a match like this just before the end. A match this wonderful and this weird feels not only like the kind of near-final match everyone would want an all-time great like Dickie to have, but in fact, like the kind of match that stands as a summary of everything that he was and stood for as a professional wrestler.
A professional last will and testament over the course of twenty five minutes from old Dickie. As such, it’s no great world beater, but an ultra charming little thing that I’m real happy exists in the world.
HANDWERK 