In 1986, Jim Crockett Promotions had one of the great years in pro wrestling. That’s always been the hot scoop, but really seeing it play out week after week is tremendous fun for a wrestling fan. You have the Four Horsemen at their peak, Dusty Rhodes doing his thing, the rise of the Road Warriors and Magnum T.A., as well as The Rock & Roll Express, The Midnight Express (including Jim Cornette and the debut of Ray Traylor as Big Bubba Rogers), and those god damned Russians.
You’ve also got fun midcard feuds involving Paul Jones Army, as well as random brutal Ron Garvin squashes. Later in the year “Gorgeous” Jimmy Garvin and Precious show up, and Garvin is a revelation, with great promos and fun squashes. Sam Houston isn’t around a ton, but when he is it’s great – he’s your perfect midcard babyface, with smooth offense and great comebacks. For historical purposes and an example of really tight, logical TV wrestling and use of a roster, this is a must-watch year in a professional wrestling company.
Right now on the WWE Network, you only have the shows that aired on TBS at 6:05pm. The show was then known as World Championship Wrestling before that became the company’s official name. Outside of a few special clip shows, you only get shows taped at the WTBS studio, and studio wrestling is a wonderful thing. The crowd makes everything special, as it’s a small group of people who are super close to the ring. Everybody can hear each other, and you get people reacting big to subtle stuff and breaking any silence by calling things out, usually centered around telling one fella to break another fellla’s arm. The WCW TV crew loved cutting to shots of unsuspecting women in the crowd watching Flair promos as well. Everything is so intimate, and a lot of times you’ll get people yelling audible things out during promos, and it adds to the organic feel of the program. Rather than feeling like a big glitzy arena event, this feels like someone set a ring up and all these cowboys wanna fight.
As you see with current WWE, weekly TV is a hard thing to do, but at this point JCP had a great formula down. It’s mostly squashes, which can be testing (especially since 90% of the shows run an hour-and-a-half without commercials), but the promos are great, everything is logical and builds to the next thing, they’re hyping house shows and tours like crazy, and they introduce just enough new guys at the right times to keep things fresh. This along with World Class is my favorite Vault stuff on the Network.
There’s a ton of squashes, but they’re effective squashes. The Andersons, Tully Blanchard, the Midnight Express, the Road Warriors, and the aforementioned Ron Garvin all do consistently fun beatdowns.
Having repeated squash matches burned into your brain, as a viewer, makes everybody seem like a star. You really do believe that anybody can beat anybody, because week-after-week, you saw everybody at their most dominant. At the same time, the week-to-week show isn’t something I can really recommended to anybody who’s not a hardcore fan. The individual angles and matches that stand out I absolutely can – some of the best stuff ever. But no matter the peverse enjoyment I get from the long Midnight Express or Ron Garvin squashes, I don’t imagine it works for everybody
What I also like is how everything is kind of connected. The roster isn’t huge, and it isn’t uncommon for one guys’ promo to address like five different opponents. Wrestlers aren’t afraid to mention guys they aren’t directly feuding with.
1986 TV has a ton of amazing promos from all the greats – Flair, Tully, the Andersons, Dusty Rhodes, Cornette and the Road Warriors, as well as guys you don’t hear talked about as some of the greats – Ricky Morton, Paul Jones and Jimmy Valiant.
Flair doesn’t wrestle a ton on these shows, but when he does it feels special, and it’s almost always top shelf.
Road Warrior promos and squashes are just wild too. 30-seconds of destruction.
What they do show of outside the studio are what seem like very heated arena shows. A few of those matches are highlighted below. JCP had so many great characters who the crowd was way into. They run a bunch of ‘serious’ angles that the crowd shrieks for and is totally into too.
Tony Schiavone and David Crockett are on commentary for the whole run, outside of a few Jim Cornette co-hosting gigs. Schiavone is tremendous, especially for a guy with only a few years in the wrestling biz. He’s a total pro and brings credibility to all the action. Crockett is prone to getting over-excited and isn’t super polished – and looks like a total dork mixing it up with wrestlers during promos – but there is something about his general awkwardness that just adds to the charm of every show. Plus him screaming “DOUBLE DROPKICK!” for the Rock & Roll Express finish is always great. Towards the end of ’86 he does start to get grating – could’ve really used Vince in his ear.
JCP used a rotating cast of jobbers for these squashes, and while not many stand out it’s fun to see these schlubs trotted out week after week to get beat up. Some of the highlights of this cast of supporting characters are certainly the Mulkey Brothers, who aren’t afraid to try and break their tailbones taking bumps to the outside, and eventually start to grow some kind of a cult following, where you’ll get like 2 people chanting for them during a match.
Mike Jackson is also straight fucking incredible and seems like a guy the locker room respected, as he’s always given a bunch of offense. He’s just some balding guy in a singlet but is all fired up and the crowd buys it. Bill Tabb also stands out, not as a guy who did a ton of impressive stuff, but he’s a big bastard and there’s instant credibility when a guy squashes him. Before he’s repackaged as Big Bubba Rogers (and eventually, in the WWF, the Big Bossman), you also get big fat Ray Traylor getting squashed and, in one instance, taking an amazing slingshot suplex. These squashes also gave them ability to do fun simple stuff too – at one point Dennis Condrey wins a tag match with a punch.
The rise of the Four Horsemen sure is something. Ric Flair is on another level as a promo and wrestler, while Tully, the Andersons and JJ Dillon bring such credibility to everything they do. A bunch of fun matches and just a treasure trove of promo material can be found here. All these guys were great in their squashes – Tully’s duck-and-diving routine and the Andersons’ beatdown routine are amazing.
Dusty Rhodes promos, man. The best. Interestingly, he doesn’t wrestle in the studio once.
The bad is definitely there. The Baby Doll saga is just strange, starting with the fact that her name is fucking Baby Doll. She’s all over these shows and while it’s an okay plot device to move things along – over the year she goes from Dusty’s girl to Cornette’s arch rival to The Warlord’s manager to Flair’s girl to the Midnights’ manager, it usually never works. Wahoo McDaniel squash matches are the things of nightmares. They bring in Joe “Nighthawk” Coltrane briefly who I think was a sports guy who they trained to wrestle – either way, the promos are bad and the wrestling is bad and he’s gone quickly.
Also, some of the squashes go really long – they have two-hours of programming to fill and don’t always choose the most compelling wrestling matches to do that with. Sound familiar? But even the weak stuff, like Baron von Raschke or Jimmy Valiant squashes, at least have that dopey nostalgic charm to them.
The Network also has to overdub a lot of themes, and not having Midnight Express and Road Warrior theme songs definitely takes some mystique away. They also cut some weird stuff. But you’re mostly getting the full run of TV here on-demand and that’s tremendous.
There’s fun too in seeing how a lot of it ties into the wider history of pro wrestling. This is prime Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair in the mid-80s folks. Tons of guys who are a part of the fabric of wrestling are in their prime here – Flair, Dusty, Arn Anderson, Ricky Morton, Jim Cornette, in addition to early Road Warriors.
There’s also the rise-and-fall of Magnum T.A., one of the great what-ifs of pro wrestling. Magnum is pushed huge as Dusty’s friend and is a good-looking dude with tons of badass charisma. Almost all his squashes go like 10-seconds and are beautiful in how efficient they are. He has big feuds with Tully Blanchard and Nikita Koloff that cement him as a superstar. He was probably set to headline Starrcade vs. Flair for the World Title. And then a car accident puts an end to it all.
At the end of the year there’s a referee named Scrappy McGowan and it makes you yearn for days’ past. That’s where a lot of the fun is in this – the nostalgia factor, from a time when you could surround a studio TV station with a bunch of flags from other countries and it wasn’t seen as some kind of statement. When studio wrestling was something that could still get over, damnit.
And then I watch the Cruiserweight Classic and NXT and say – god, the dream is still alive.
Check the WCW page for matchlists and match/promo recommendations (denoted, for now, by a #).
Below you’ll find some notable matches and brief reviews.
Ron Garvin vs. Mac Jeffers (1/4/86) – An underrated gem of mid-80s JCP is Ron Garvin squashes, where he’s basically an old dad teaching some young punks a lesson. He stretches, slaps, and just straight hurts guys. This is the ultimate of these matches, as he just tortures poor Mac Jeffers.
Tully Blanchard w/ JJ Dillon vs. Mike Jackson (2/22/86) – Incredible squash, Mike Jackson is fired up and is the perfect foil for Tully’s douchebag shtick.
Ricky Morton vs. Ric Flair (4/12/86) – Just an amazing TV match, two of the best in the 80s who have just perfect chemistry. Morton keeps on Flair with no wasted movements, and Flair just flops around like a madman while the crowd goes nuts for the whole thing. Totally fan-friendly finish, so much fun.
NWA World TV Title: Arn Anderson [c] vs. Manny Fernandez (4/19/86) – Classic example of Arn tearing apart an arm as well as Arn selling a limb himself, with a great good guy as a foil. Great structure and flow for a 15 minute match, felt like it lasted half that.
Sashka Whatley & Baron Von Raschke w/ Paul Jones vs. Bill Tabb & Lee Peek (4/26/86) – This is a crazy match, as it’s basically a great Southern tag in the confinements of JCP WTBS formula. The hot tag is barely caught due to commercial and the good guys really get no offense at all; regardless, it’s freakin’ great. Shaska and Baron keep on their opponents well, but the real star is Peek who makes everything look vicious.
The Midnight Express w/ Jim Cornette vs. Randy Mulkey & Bill Mulkey (5/10/86) – Great example of the weekly Midnight Express squash – though it lacks a high-five – plus some insane flat back bumps on concrete by Randy Mulkey.
Ric Flair & Arn Anderson vs. Italian Stallion & Rocky Kernodle (5/24/86) – An Anderson tag match with Flair instead of Ole. Both Flair and Arn make these nobodies look like a million bucks, all the while maintaining credibility. Amazing example of a TV squash match that makes everybody look good.
The Midnight Express vs. Sam Houston & George South (6/28/86) – Fun squash match, with the Express giving Houston and South a ton of offense.
NWA National Heavyweight Title: Tully Blanchard [c] w/ JJ Dillon vs. Chief Wahoo McDaniel (7/12/86) – This isn’t a studio match, as at this point the show was showing highlights of the Great American Bash tour. Thos is just an awesome example of getting something out of nothing. Wahoo’s TV shtick is terrible, but here he just does holds and chops and Tully works a dramatic match around it.
The Road Warriors w/ Precious Paul Ellering vs. The Midnight Express w/ Jim Cornette and Big Bubba Rogers (7/12/86) – Another match from the Bash tour. Such simple, awesome stuff. All the spots are built to super well, with the Warriors constantly overpowering the Midnights. Not much happens, but they milk the fuck out of everything and it’s beautiful.
NWA National Heavyweight Title: Tully Blanchard [c] w/ JJ Dillon vs. Sam Houston (7/19/86) – Another Bash match. Crowd is fired up, Houston is a GREAT babyface, and Tully is great at bringing the crowd down at all the right moments. Some insane sequences here. Just classic stuff – Houston’s fired up babyface spots are beautiful, made all the better by Tully whiffing punches and selling everything like a total goof.
The Rock & Roll Express vs. The Minnesota Wrecking Crew (7/19/86) – Another Bash match… they have to drag this one out as it goes to a 30-minute draw, but what a master performance, with great beatdowns and comeback spots, and a crowd going apeshit the entire time.
Ric Flair vs. Mike Jackson (8/30/86) – This is basically all Mike Jackson, against all odds they make you believe he might just win. Ric is fantastic begging off, selling a figure-four, and getting the crowd going nuts as he just eats shit for Jackson. Jackson takes some nasty bumps too.
Brad and Bob Armstrong vs. Jimmy Garvin & Sam Dundee (11/29/86) – They cut the angle that sets this up on the Network but Bob Armstrong wrestles in blue jeans and is all fired up and it’s tremendous. Brad takes a beating, Garvin cheats by spraying some shit in Brad and Bob’s face, and the studio crowd is appreciative to see an actually complete wrestling match, even despite a double DQ finish. Garvin and Dundee are game bumpers for Bob as well.
NWA World Tag Team Title: The Rock & Roll Express [c] vs. “Ravishing” Rick Rude vs. “Ragin’ Bull” Manny Fernandez w/ Paul Jones (12/6/86) – This thing goes over a half-an-hour, hence the image. But man is it fun and just impressive how solid it is the whole time. Tons of great sequences early on based around rope-running and armbars. Manny is all over this match, especially early on, bumping around and selling huge for the Rock & Roll’s. Looooong segments of Rude and Manny working Robert’s leg and Ricky’s arm, and Rock & Roll selling makes it pretty compelling. The studio crowd is amped up for a big tag title match, and David Crockett is at his peak dorkiness on commentary marking out for this.
Arn Anderson vs. Alan Martin (12/6/86) and Ole Anderson & Arn Anderson vs. Randy Mulkey & Mike Simani (12/13/86) – These are the follow-up TV matches to the Andersons losing their cage match with the Rock & Roll Express at Starrcade ’86. They are both squashes, but stand out as Andersons are pissed off after losing and just maul their opponents. The first Arn solo match just has him efficiently beat his opponent with a few impactful moves, while Ole and Arn take their time abusing their opponents with crossfaces, chokes and armbars while the studio crowd chants for Dusty. Includes Ole just straight putting all his weight on the bridge of Mulkey’s nose, as well as an attempt at an “Ole is a Wimp” chant. Just such straightforward solid TV wrasslin.
