Old School Wrestling Rewatch

RAW Recap: 1/13/1997 The show starts with Intercontinental Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Jerry 'The King' Lawler in the ring. 'Wildman' Marc Mero comes out (with Sable!) and then Golddust sprints to the ring, he's incensed with HHH for his attacks on Marlena. Vince McMahon and The Honky Tonk Man are the announcers. Fun match, love the physical comedy and work of Lawler here, great heel mentality. The whole point is to build the Helmsley/Golddust match in 6 days at the Royal Rumble. HHH avoiding Golddust at every turn, including refusing to tag in when Lawler was begging for it. Finally after wearing down Mero, the hot tag is made to Golddust who takes it to HHH. HHH's arms get caught in the ropes Golddust relentlessly is choking him. The ref rings the bell for the DQ since Golddust refuses to stop choking HHH. Mero even tries to pull him off and they exchange punched. Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Nice build for Royal Rumble, Golddust is a man just obsessed with ...

Starting out 1997 with Monday Nitro 1/6/1997. Tony Schiavone and Larry Zbysko are on commentary. --Glacier comes out to an elaborate entrance. Bobby Eaton is already waiting for him in the ring. Eaton looks in poor shape and barely has any vertical when he goes to leap Glacier, causing a botch. Glacier wins a quick match with a kick. Rating: 0.5 out of 5. Not much here, just a quick setup match to keep the relative newcomer Glacier building. Crowd didn't really seem to care about the match or Glacier at all though. * --Video highlight of the nWo and "Big Bubba" (aka Big Bossman) and Konan. Schiavone seems to get mixed up or the video gets screwy otherwise he's summing up past events out of sequence. Chaotic. Anyways a goateed and somewhat longer haired Big Bubba comes out in a nWo shirt on. He kind of looks like Ted Dibaise at this point. Next out is Konan, already wearing a "Mexican strap" around his neck. Jimmy Hart is with him, for some reason (...

The journey begins with watching Monday Night Raw's offering on January 6, 1997, from Albany New York. Seems very typical WWF town of this day and age to be in. Commentary team is Vince McMahon doing play-by-play and the always amusing Jerry 'The King' Lawler adding in his heel perspective for color. Great intro package to catch us up on the issues of the day between Stone Cold Steve Austin, Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Sid and Vader. The entrance video is very old school, there's no Raw is War or dynamic beginning. --Opening match is Owen Hart vs. Mankind . Very odd match, no story behind it. And I think both are heels, or at least heelish. It's a pretty good match, as you would expect from two of the best workers at this time. Foley takes a brutal looking bump getting suplexed gut-first onto the railing. For basically no reason and no pop. That's not a DQ, nor does the ref even leave the ring. He just watches as Owen hits Mankind with the tag team title....

With the advent of WWE Network, the available library of wrestling is limited only to the amount of time you can spend with it. After listening to podcasts like Something to Wrestle, 83 Weeks, What Happened When, it's very en vogue to talk about Old School Wrestling. As a person who lived through the Attitude Era/Monday Night Wars age as a young person, it's interesting to circle back and see what happened. And of course knowing in hindsight how the story will end, we can see the triumphs and tragedies still to come. So my idea is to start with 1997, a very fun year in wrestling. And one of major changes, the landscape will look very different as WWF ratchets up the Attitude. I didn't watch much WCW as a kid, so a lot of that will be fresh. But it's worth exploring to see how the companies matched up back then. Pull up a chair and join in on the journey. Glad you found the spot and hope you enjoy the trip down memory lane.