This review was commissioned by Ri Ri over on my Ko-fi account.
While perhaps most famous as something of a punchline with his short-lived NWA World Championship, Ron Garvin brought a really interesting dynamic to the battle against the Four Horsemen. Many of the babyfaces in JCP at the time outclass the Horsemen on pure athletic ability, your Windhams and your Steamboats, for example. Wrestlers that could control Flair and his cronies down on the mat, outwork them, and expose that the Horsemen can’t match up on an even playing field. He’s not as animated as a Dusty Rhodes, there’s very little shucking and jiving in this title match, for example. But what he can do is meet the Horsemen at their level with a grit that some of his other contemporary babyfaces don’t always do.
As he does in the famous Flair studio match, Garvin approaches Tully here with a very direct sort of aggression. There’s moments where the dirt under his fingernails can really shine through, sometimes literally so, like when he’s raking Tully right across the back. But it especially comes through with the way he’ll bite in desperate situations or even his willingness to use the ringposts and turnbuckles to really lay a beating on Blanchard. While very far from a perfect comparison, I can’t help but see a little of what Darby Allin brings to his feud with the Death Riders here–Garvin can get down to the Horsemen’s level and that’s a unique problem for the heels to try and solve.
Unlike the studio match though, Garvin’s coming into this National Title challenge busted up. “Hands of Stone” is missing one of his key weapons as his right hand is injured and it flummoxes him the whole time. This really is one of the most well-realized and real feeling examples of hand selling I’ve ever seen, especially from this particular time and place. Garvin’s hand isn’t exactly useless but the injury affects basically every aspect of his performance. He’s only able to pop off a few of those big punches he’s famous for, and every time he does, there’s a very tangible sense that he has to weigh the benefits of knocking Blanchard’s lights out with the consequences of the pain seizing up through his hand. He can’t get proper form on several smaller actions, like not using both hands to hold down Tully’s wrist on a cover, not getting a grip on a leg for additional leverage, or even having to rely on throwing elbows and forearms instead of straight up punching. Garvin doesn’t always make a show of this injury, but the consequences of it loom large over the whole match. He’s not throwing jabs, but he’s shoving his forearm into Tully’s face constantly, or throwing headbutts more than usual in his attempts to batter the champion.
There’s even something of a prototypical fighting spirit aspect to Garvin’s selling in this match. At multiple points, Tully will throw himself into a body blow on Garvin and crash to the mat, with Garvin only registering the effects of the blow a few seconds later. It’s less a matter of no selling and more of the idea that Garvin tries his best to absorb the shot only to crumple a few seconds later and open the advantage up for the champion.
Tully, for his part, turns in a magnificent performance. My goodness is he great, despite Garvin having way more substantial material to work off with the hand injury. It’s notable that Tully doesn’t go for the hand work here instantly or even much at all in any extended way. There’s a couple of ways this can be read. One would be Tully’s innate hubris, thinking he can just outwork an already injured man without resorting to a cheap targeting of an injury. Another is that Garvin’s extended babyface shine halts any sort of strategic attempts from Tully and puts him into more of a “fight or flight” mode, focusing on punches for cut offs and working over the body instead of a more cerebral attack. Notably, much deeper into the match, when it’s become clear how difficult Garvin has become as an opponent even with the injury, that’s when we finally see Tully go for the hand, and it’s as ruthless and nasty in the moment as we get from the Horsemen. Meanspirited, but also desperate, making it clear that Tully’s a wounded animal lashing out.
That sense of fighting from underneath while still being a heel is something that Tully creates beautifully here. He’s often diving into punches, and often missing wildly as Garvin controls the pace of the bout for long stretches here. After Garvin takes out his leg too, Tully limps through much of his control and seems far more comfortable trying to bring the match down to the ground to retain any sort of advantage. JJ Dillon is key to this as well, with his interference and cheating only really coming at key points of the match, when they can be best utilized to halt Garvin’s momentum–with things like a distraction to set up Garvin going into the ringpost, giving Tully a shoe to beat Garvin with, and in the finish handing Tully the roll of quarters he had used to defeat Dusty earlier in the year.
It’s unfortunate that a significant amount of this match gets lost to commercial breaks. The tape machines are rolling, but the footage is not sadly. What we primarily lose here is a view of the early transitions into Blanchard’s heat segments. Without fail, whenever the match goes to commercial, the control would have switched by the time we’re back on air. We mostly still see Garvin’s comebacks, but there would have been a thrill for me to see how Blanchard grew increasingly nasty in order to get the match on his side. Not much is lost as far as overall experience goes, but those key dramatic turning points could have created a much richer picture in the end.
Even with that, this is astonishing wrestling television. Watching this for the second time in order to do this review, I had completely forgotten both the winner and the finish. Seeing it again, I was convinced that even in spite of the bad hand, Garvin had Tully’s ass, so the pain of this Dusty finish (even more literal here with Rhodes being a direct cause of the eventual) came back fresh and strong all over again. The Horsemen steal another one because Dusty helped wrap up Garvin’s hand in illegal tape and Garvin’s big ole climactic punch draws a DQ.
About as thrilling a Horsemen title match as one can get, even up there with some of Flair’s best. The dynamic feels unique here, with both Tully and Garvin having a much more gritty vibe to them, rushing into their punches, barely standing while accumulating the physical toll of the fight. Another Horsemen highway robbery, and I’m left begging for Garvin to get their asses: about as pro wrestling as it gets.
IS IT BETTER THAN 6/3/94? Garvin and Tully take to a looser structure here than the King’s Road classic. Both move in and out of extended control segments, but Garvin and Tully feel so much more equipped to really milk all the moments between the major transitions. It’s a fault of the footage that we doesn’t have some of those transitions in the way we have the complete Triple Crown Title match, but Garvin and Tully more than make up for it with how rich every moment feels in relation to what came before and what’s yet to come. This match just feels more alive bell to bell than what Misawa and Kawada accomplish. Notch up a point for the southern rasslers.
Rating: ****½
