This was a commissioned review from CheapPop1099. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out.
This was a Best Two of Three Falls match, as many Portland matches apparently tended to be.
I say “apparently” because more than just about anything else that I’ve described as a blind spot — from mid 90s through 2010 lucha, 2000s joshi, AWA stuff, some older stuff from the 70s and further back — Portland is my ultimate blind spot. Prior to watching this match, I had genuinely seen none of it, not a single second. I knew it was great, of course. I’ve been on message boards since the 2000s, I spend time talking to people with a lot of reverence for this stuff, I’ve planned to watch it for years and years, but I just never have.
Nobody is ever going to watch all of the wrestling ever, despite what you might think if you’re like seventeen and despite what I myself tried to do for a while as younger man, and if you do, there are going to be things absent from your life that are probably not worth giving up. It is what it is, I am largely at peace with it. If anyone wants suggestions for future commissions, this is the sort of stuff I want to see in the inbox.
I say that because this was a BLAST.
Perfect for what it is.
Rose is your consummate goon yet again (not watching Portland doesn’t mean I haven’t seen Buddy before, it just means it’s limited, I know the deal, fuck off), stalling, falling on his ass, getting run around, and it is to the match’s immense credit that like ninety percent of it is just him eating shit. Sometimes that’s him being almost immediately rolled up to end the first fall in ninety seconds once he’s finally done stalling, and going into histrionics. More often than not, it’s Eagles outdoing him on the ground and standing up when exchanging holds, and being owned in ways that are both really fun in a technical sense, and also just instinctively deeply satisfying.
This idea — and the strength of this match — is best expressed here, in a little headscissors exchange, showing both a more novel slant on a routine counter idea, and a real viscerally pleasing shutdown of everything Rose tries to counter with.
This match is also full of these great moments where Rose gets real overconfident about his own abilities and tries to do the same things as Eagles, only to completely fail and be even more embarrassed. It’s seen with a full nelson early on in the second fall, but also when he tries the same headscissors escape, only for Johnny to jab him from underneath in it, rather than from above as seen before. It’s a beautiful exhibition of goonery and stooging and how to eat shit in small little ways, yet another old thing that really ought to be studied more.
Most impressively of all though is the way that, despite getting maybe ten percent tops of the match’s offense, Buddy Rose is still able to come off as a genuinely rotten person and a great wrestler, dangerous in his own way. He cheats in small little ways every time he has control, the aforementioned headscissors seeing him hide hair pulls, claiming cheating every time he gets humiliated, all things of that nature. It’s something of a lost art, but at every moment that Buddy Rose has the chance to do something in this match, he is able to do something uniquely unlikeable.
The booking of the thing is also very helpful in this regard, making the best possible use of Rose’s gifts to create fall finishes that accomplish every goal that this match has, showcasing the star in a way that takes very little away from Eagles, and furthers the ideas that he is both a coward and a wrestler to be respected.
Rose sneaks in an illegal (?) karate chop off a slight ref bump to win the second fall, and when Eagles gets mad to start the third fall when he blocks a second try at it, his anger leads to him making the mistakes he didn’t throughout the first two falls. Rose catches him with a slingshot backbreaker, before hitting the old style back suplex lift backbreaker to win the third fall, and the match itself.
It’s a lovely thing this match has to say about wrestling. Cheating might have won Buddy Rose the middle fall, but the first and the third falls are both lost as a result of someone taking their eye off of the prize. Winners keep their heads in the game, and there’s nothing more upsetting than a villain deserving to win.
Following his victory, Rose gets run out of the ring by ex-partner “Killer” Tim Brooks with a chain, immediately moving seamlessly to the next thing. Every show is somebody’s first show, and even forty plus years later, I’m the example here. Rose is established as a real shitheel, both a coward and someone just dangerous enough to be even more contemptible, only to be met immediately with a tease of just maybe getting the beating he might deserve. It’s the ultimate compliment to this match that, despite it only being fifteen minutes tops and not having seen a whole lot, it instinctively feels like this is a beating Rose has been dodging for years, and earning for even longer.
Less a great match than it is an exemplary piece of Wrestling TV, but that is no less impressive, and real arguably, is even more impressive than just a great match.
HANDWERK 