This review was commissioned by Been Thrifty over on my Ko-fi account.
As with so much of this pre-70s wrestling footage, the value of its accessibility outweighs its value as an artistic product. It is a very important part of our collective fandom and culture that things like this can be preserved as documentation of where wrestling used to be, and helping create a more holistic picture of the industry at a different time. When working with footage like this, we typically only have the match itself to go by, as well as positioning it against the similarly rare footage we have from this time period.
With this match, for example, we’re given a perspective of its quality by comparing it to contemporary efforts in 50s French Catch, or more relevantly, the NWA Chicago footage from the same time. With these other works in mind, it’s fair to say that we have here isn’t a great match even for the time. Part of that is the wrestling that we’ll get into in just a bit, but another part of it is that the footage itself doesn’t seem to be presented in the ideal form either. I can’t tell if it’s a quirk of the preservation process or if this is just how it was broadcast in its time, but in the second half of the match, it certainly feels like some footage from earlier in the bout is re-edited in perhaps as a means of padding it out for a TV runtime or as a way to fill gaps in the footage that was found. Either way, it makes the back half slightly disjointed and occasionally incoherent for all of us watching on 2024 YouTube.
That said, the things we can parse from the footage we have is pretty strong. Terry Majors put in a real great, timeless sort of heel performance here. Just entirely spiritually correct, never earning a single thing, and cheating at every turn. We get a whole host of classic dastardly tactics here, from the hair pulling to the choking to (my personal favorite) the biting of the fingers. There’s also that sort of old timey manipulation of the referee’s line of sight, cheating in one place to draw the eye only as a misdirect to go in for the real attack. It’s brilliant stuff, the kind of performance that any present day heel could go back to and learn a thing or two from.
Ida Mae, for her part, spends most of the match on the sell, but when given the chance to make a comeback, she’s great. She throws these real great wind up uppercuts to really knock Terry down on her ass. I also enjoy how Ida Mae gives as good as she gets like when she bites Terry right on the arm as payback.
The match’s main problem is diminishing returns. Combined with the strange editing issues I mentioned earlier, this gets built around only a couple of key spots. There’s the toe hold down on the mat and a hammerlock, and they do interesting things working problem/solution sequences around these spots, but it does get repetitive the deeper into the match they go. The bag of tricks on display here isn’t nearly as diverse or developed as the NWA Title contenders of the time or the dazzling French Catch workers of the same era.
It’s rock solid though. They play the classics, and they’re classics for a reason.
Rating: ***1/4
