Wrestleroast 2002

[Guest TSMAdmin]

Well, Backlash last night was the most unimpressive WWE show since King of the Ring 2002 and RAW doesn't look to be any better tonight. Either we'll get a halfassed Nash-Trips lovefest or buildup for the inevitable Trips-Goldberg title match, neither of which are particularly interesting.

 

At least I've got episodes of Oz I can watch... While Oz, in season 4 which I'm watching now, has severe trouble introducing new characters who stick around for more than two episodes, the long-term plots are actually handled well. That's an improvement over the WWE who can't introduce new characters worth anything and only do long-term plots that no one cares about like Hogan-McMahon or The Clique's mass circlejerk about backstage stuff from 1995.

 

 

As always, you can feel free to Drop me an e-mail, read the archives, buy me stuff, or <!-- Begin Affiliate Code --> buy yourself stuff at Highspots.com.

 

 

WrestleRoast 2002 (Smart Marks video)

 

This is a legends event hosted by Jim Cornette and featuring many wrestlers of varying eras.

 

Due to its stand-up comedy nature, I’ll break each speaker off into his or her own part of the shoot.

 

Jim Cornette- Jim starts off by recognizing all the talent in the room and then declaring that they’re going to talk about Terry Taylor and Larry Zbyzko instead. He then jokes about how he and “Nature Boy” Buddy Landell are not old like everyone thinks but, rather, just turning 29 but have been in the business since age 6. Larry, however, is so old that waiting for him to retire “is like leaving a porchlight on for Jimmy Hoffa.” He goes nowhere for a while until he starts talking about Robert Gibson of the Rock and Roll Express, claiming that Robert missed his plane one night and that Ricky Morton had to find a new partner to face Cornette’s Midnight Express. They ended up taping a cutout of Robert’s face to the ringpost and no one noticed the difference.

 

Terry Taylor- “It took me an hour and a half to sign two autographs coming in here today… The first kid didn’t want one.” He starts talking about working for the office in WCW and starts talking about an angle involving Buff Bagwell and Buff’s masculinity, “insert joke here.” Eventually, he gets to the meat of the story which is that Sensational Sherri, the heel manager for Buff’s opponents, slaps him during the match, he rips her shirt off so she’s running around in her bra, she REALLY starts kicking his ass, and he gets into the fetal position as Sherri’s being dragged of. All the while this is going on, he can see the Disney people, who run the studios they’re taping in, waving goodbye to WCW. “It was one of the best memories I’ve ever had.” He starts talking about his last run as a wrestler in WCW with Curtis Hughes as his bodyguard when Sherri fakes a Chyna low blow from behind, turns him around, and kisses him.

 

Road Warrior Hawk- He gets the mic, off camera, and start cracking jokes. They’re mostly fart sounds at Terry Taylor’s expense as he’s trying to sit down. They then decide to take some time to remember Davey Boy Smith, Wahoo McDaniel, and Lou Thesz, all of whom died in the last year. “Four score and seven years ago… sorry, wrong speech.” They then do a Q and A session, with the first one being from Cornette, “How many potatoes could a Road Warriors throw if the Road Warriors could throw potatoes?” Terry Taylor: “All of them” Hawk then starts talking about how all wrestlers are freaks. “See that guy over there dressed as Randy Savage? He’s DEFINITELY a fuckin’ freak.” They then start picking on Buddy Landell by talking about how “Ric Flair thinks he’s better than you”.

 

Buddy Landell- He then starts talking about his penchant for running around naked and how Cornette once got a picture of him in the buff. “I’m a bit like Black Bart, who had a dick that looked like the push-start to a lawn mower. Bart swears that when he gets hard he’s as big around as a Coke can.” He then talks about how there are guys in the business “you just don’t want to shower with, like Terry Taylor, Robert Gibson… guys that God blessed. I remember the first time Flair saw me take a shower. He looked at me and said ‘You’re not the Nature Boy.’” He then starts talking about some road stories such as him hanging around with some unsavory people for several days on a run in Virginia, at the end of which they wanted him to pay up $1500, using several weapons as an incentive. At that moment, the Road Warriors, Paul Ellering, and Billy Jack Haynes all walked around the corner and asked if there was any trouble. The guys end up bolting to a truck, Hawk breaks the window, tells the guy “Open your mouth or I’ll rip your throat out”, and shoves a handful of gravel down his throat. He starts telling another story about being in Mid-South during 1984, riding around in Dennis Condrey’s van with Cornette and Bobby Eaton in the back. Buddy ended up throwing his newspaper out of the window, which ended up covering the windshield of a truck behind them. When the truck driver could see again, he pulled alongside the van, started cussing Buddy, and Buddy threw a bottle at him. The guy ended up throwing a box of roofing nails onto the road in front of them. After they wrestled that night and started heading to the next town, they’ve got a flat tire and no one will stop to help them, even though the guys suggested he go out there with his long blonde hair, pull his shirt down to show some chest, and start trying to flag down a truck. He eventually moves on to Larry Zbyzko and the story about him holding up Vince McMahon for $50,000 at the Shea Stadium show where his match vs. Bruno Sammartino was the main event and says that he had instant respect for him as a result. Buddy then brings up how, in 1995, his best friend, Jim Cornette, brought him into Smokey Mountain and that they made a lot of money and that Buddy was briefly in the WWF as a result (Buddy was fired this time due to injuries rather than drug use, which is the norm for him.) Finally, he moves onto the Rock and Roll Express and says that Robert Gibson should give Ricky Morton half his money and then demonstrates Robert’s interview, sign language in the background while Ricky talks.

 

Ricky Morton- “I stayed away between 1985 and 1995… didn’t go to sleep for 10 years.” He then goes off on being a member of the York Foundation with Terry Taylor… “We were over all right… like a fart in school.” One night in Phoenix, they were wrestling Todd Champion and Curtis Thompson (Firebreaker Chip) and “somehow while he was injured, he [Todd] gained 80 pounds” Both of the roided-up guys just whipped their ass so quick that they couldn’t see straight and, as a result, let themselves get rolled up for a quick three and just go to the locker room. He then goes on to describe the difference between him and Robert Gibson… “I’ll walk up and put it in while he’ll put it in and walk up.” He then says “For the main event, my partner, Robert Gibson, will speak for the first time in professional wrestling history.” Robert refuses, so Ricky starts going off on a Mid-South story about how the heels all had to stay in the locker room until the show was over since, with riots every night, they had to help the heels in each match fight their way back to the dressing room. One night, they were in Biloxi, Mississippi, when 30 people came after Jim Cornette hit Robert Gibson in the head with a shoe. Bobby Eaton had one 400-pound guy in a front facelock, except the guy kept trying to stand up straight and nearly took Bobby with him. All during this, Morton was pretending to be unconscious on the mat but was watching the whole thing.

 

Jim Cornette- Robert always had trouble standing. One night, Robert got a hot tag from Ricky and stretched out his legs to get into the ring… and promptly fell off the apron to the floor. Another time, there was a t-shaped stage for an entrance way and the Rock and Roll Express came out playing to the crowd. Ricky made it out fine but Robert wasn’t watching where he was walking and fell off the stage on the way to the ring. Another time, The Midnight Express was in Mid-South and on their way back to the locker room after the match, which was when a riot ALWAYS occurred because they had so much heat. Grizzly Smith and Buddy Landell ended up running out from the locker room to help them and Buddy sees a guy jumping off an archway to the floor. The guy jumps and Buddy punches him in the jaw while the guy was still in midair and both took flat-back bumps as a result (Buddy fell because he slipped on a spilled Coke when he punched the guy). “Back in those days, you didn’t pay to see the matches, you got the matches free when you paid to see the riots.” He moves onto Jim Crockett’s plane, which he said came from a halfassed used plane place, and he told Road Warrior Hawk, who always sat by him on it, that if the plane starts going down to hit him as hard as he could and knock him out.

 

Larry Zbyzko- He starts joking about how he can’t keep up with these guys because he never had truck drivers throw nails at him or anything like that but, every night, Terry Taylor would come into the locker room screaming at the top of his lungs how the fans were trying to kill him. He’d sit back and watch matches like Colonel DeBeers vs. Kerry Von Erich and, while DeBeers had Kerry in an ankle lock, he ended up taking Kerry’s boot off and there wasn’t a foot there, which freaked the hell out of him. (Kerry had lost it due to a motorcycle accident which, according to Jack Victory, was due to Kerry trying to run a police roadblock.) Kerry then took the book back, crawled under the ring, and came out a few minutes later with it back on and acted like nothing happened. He then talked about how Doug Somers was wearing light blue tights one night and then, after a slam during a match, there started to be a little brown dot on them. “About 5 minutes later, it was the size of a pancake.” Random voice from the crowd: “What a shitty match.” Another night, he was driving along when he got to a tollbooth. He paid his toll and was about to go on when another car full of wrestlers tried to drive past a separate toll booth. When the attendant complained, the trunk popped open and a naked midget paid the toll. He then talks about working the San Francisco Cow Palace once early in his career and went to take shower when he saw Pat Patterson in there all soaped up. “I wasn’t in there WITH him, he was in there.” This was when they were holding a wedding in the ring and everyone told Pat “You gotta see this!” He ended up going to take a look and got shoved out of the locker room bare-ass naked wearing only some soapsuds and ended up in front of the wedding procession.

 

Sensational Sherri- She tells a story about Cornette managing her early in both of their careers in Memphis, which doesn’t really go anywhere. She starts singling out people like Terry Taylor and Larry Zybzko and thanking them for various things they helped her with in her career. She starts talking about how she got hired in the AWA and how she and Larry had a mutual thing, “which didn’t have anything to do with how I bent over like this” (which she starts to demonstrate) and then goes off on a tangent to nowhere before talking about movies, which gets some jeers from the audience. She then goes off on how everyone thinks she means porno and how certain people in the audience have no room to make comments, such as Cornette. Cornette responds by saying “I’ve still got your copy of ‘Dumbo Does It Donkey Style.’” She gets back to Larry and how the favorite date for the two of them was to watch “Faces of Death.” Sherri then starts talking up certain people before getting to Cornette and saying that “I’d lay down and do a job for him every day”, which gets him to stand up and put on his coat, until she says “… IF the price is right.” Cornette’s reaction to this is great.

 

Road Warrior Hawk- Hawk starts talking about promoters for a few minutes but it goes nowhere. It turns into a big anti-McMahon rant. He says McMahon turned the business into a “pulpatious pile of penis pus.” The sound goes wonky here so I couldn’t describe what he’s saying even if it was good.

 

Cornette- He starts in on a Fabulous Ones story about how they went to the AWA where they promptly got their asses whipped by the Road Warriors. The Road Warriors weren’t happy with one of Verne Gagne’s decisions that week so they took it out on the Fabs telling them “We don’t like this finish, so do it our way and no one gets hurt.” They ended up beating the shit out of Stan Lane.

 

Terry Taylor- Terry tells a Road Warriors story from Mid-South about how he and Brad Armstrong ended up wrestling against the Road Warriors. He’d only seen them on TV and thought “That looked AWESOME” when he saw them kick the shit out of jobbers. They did their pre-match bit and then Iron Man hit over the PA, the Road Warriors ran out, and he and Brad looked at each other and said “Oh SHIT!” Terry asked Brad “What are we going to do?” Brad then asked him “What are YOU going to do?” During the pre-match instructions, they both started easing back towards the corner so they wouldn’t have to be in there with them. They were great to work with but were scary as Hell when they came running in with the spiked shoulder pads. “Brad was in there quite a while, it was over before we knew it, it was great.”

 

Ricky Morton- He and Robert had the same problem against them at a Superdome show that also involved the Freebirds (Terry Gordy and Michael PS Hayes at this time) and the Grapplers. Ricky wanted to get in there and take bumps from the Road Warriors to gain their respect “for takin’ an ass-whuppin’” but got nervous when he saw Hawk and Gordy whipping the shit out of each other like in a grudge match. Then Gordy walks over and tags him. The Road Warriors took a nice set of bumps for them, though, since the Rock and Roll Express were getting the big push at the time. He then goes back to talking about Buddy Landell. One night, Buddy passed out on the couch of a hotel lobby when they were hanging out. He ended up waking him up and bringing him to the bathroom and, while Buddy was on the can, going to get a beer. “That one beer turned to 37 and then, at 3:30 in the morning, I start to leave and think to myself ‘Where’s Buddy?’” He goes back to the bathroom and finds Buddy asleep on the can and he can’t get him out because the door is locked. He had to crawl under the stall to unlock the door and get him out of there.

 

Sherri Martel- She starts telling Terry Taylor stories. Cathy Gagne was working in the AWA office at the time and was in love with Larry Zbyzko. She ended up helping Cathy hook up with Larry and now they’re married.

 

Curtis Hughes- He remembers back when he would see all the guys in the room back in the 80s, which got him to enter the business. This doesn’t really go anywhere.

 

Ricky Morton- He starts telling stories about having to room with Curtis Hughes on the road. Hughes used to snore so loud that the guy in the next room called up and said “Excuse me, but I’ve gotta catch a plane at 7:00 the next morning so would one of you PLEASE roll the fuck over?!?” Cornette starts making narcolepsy jokes here about Hughes saying “Is narcolepsy when you fall asleep all the time? I thought it was when you had a certain fondness for dead people!”

 

The tape ends at this point with a pitch for the next night’s legends show.

 

Thoughts: Man, what a disappointing video. There are a few good stories here from Cornette, Landell, Morton, and Zbyzko but most of Sherri and Hughes’ stuff fell flat. Hawk was only good as a setup man for Cornette and Landell. This clocked in at less than two hours and had a lot of dull moments between each great story or joke. Buyer beware. Strong recommendation to avoid.