The Ultimate Warrior vs. The Honky Tonk Man 8/29/88 – WWF Intercontinental Title – SummerSlam '88

When it was announced that the Honky Tonk Man would be inducted into this year's WWE Hall of Fame class of 2019, my reaction was “hey, at least he won a title once, not like Hillbilly Jim.” But it also sent me down an unexpected nostalgia spiral for how much I absolutely detested him as a youngster. It was the angle involving his shoving Miss Elizabeth to the mat after a Saturday Night's Main Event Intercontinental title defense against “Macho Man” Randy Savage that got me hooked into pro wrestling for the first time, and for many reasons, he quickly cemented himself at the top of my Most Hated Wrestler rankings.

He was, by most fan-centric standards, a poor grappler. This is all relative, of course—he certainly could take a bump, and his ability to emote in the ring and hit storytelling beats was second to none. But he was never going to tear the roof off the joint with Ricky Steamboat or anything (hell, the match where he beat Steamboat for the belt was all of 4 minutes long). His finishing move was the “Shake, Rattle, & Roll,” a swinging neckbreaker that was a routine part of many wrestler's movesets, but it was Honky Tonk's finisher because...he shook his ass before delivering it, I guess. Or because it was the one wrestling move he knew, aside from “right handed punch,” “left handed punch,” “body slam,” and “kick.” (Just 999 moves to go and he'll match Chris Jericho!)

Thus, his constant claims to the title of “Greatest Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion of All Time” were particularly galling, as his opponents during his title reign were constantly portrayed as his clear superiors. Even during his feud with Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, who was essentially his equal in the ring (right handed punch, left handed punch, body slam, kick, sleeperhold), Honky Tonk was portrayed as the clearly inferior talent.

"I can't believe I'm jobbing to this fuckin' guy"

He won the Intercontinental Title in a fluke rollup where he reversed an inside cradle by “The Dragon”and grabbed the ropes for leverage. And he never—ever—won a title defense cleanly. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure he ever won a title defense. He'd get counted out; his manager, “Colonel” Jimmy Hart, would interfere with his trademark megaphone; or he'd take matters into his own hands and get himself disqualified with a guitar shot to his opponent's head or back. The result was always the same—the challenger would win but Honky Tonk would hold on to his title, since WWF titles can only change hands via pinfall or submission. (Not counting cage matches, or ladder matches, or...you know what, never mind.)

For all these reasons, as the Honky Tonk Man's Intercontinental Championship reign continued week after week, eventually becoming the longest IC title reign of all time, he became more and more hated with each passing episode of Superstars of Wrestling or Wrestling Challenge.

Strike Force vs. The Brain Busters 4/2/89 – WrestleMania V

I know what your initial thought is here. “What the hell – DJ starts off his blog with two epic classics, and for his first WWF/WWE entry, he picks a meaningless throwaway tag team match from a horrible WrestleMania? What gives?”

Look, it's easy and fun to write about classic matches. Flair/Steamboat, Omega/Tanahashi – the stories are right there, in plain sight. Deconstructing them is a blast, and hopefully someone who hasn't seen those matches is encouraged to check them out. In the same way, though, it's a fun challenge to look at the undercard and mine the gold that happens in matches that are immediately forgotten because of the overall focus of the show.

The beauty of pro wrestling is in the art of telling an athletic story inside the conventions of a match, and in a 20, 30, even 60-minute contest, there's plenty of time to let that story breathe and develop within three acts. But what if you're on the undercard and the bookers and producers tell you you have nine minutes to tell your tale?

Back in the 1980s peak of Hulkamania-era WWF, the 17-minute main event of WrestleMania V qualified as an “epic” (which is especially amusing when considering that the Flair/Steamboat best-of-three-falls match was on the same day). So working a televised match in the WWF in this era usually meant that you were going to get ten minutes or less to get your point across in the ring. Judging by the quality of the average WrestleMania match in this era, either this was extremely difficult to accomplish, or no one really tried very hard. So it stood out a few years ago, during a writing project where I was watching all the early 'Manias, that the teams of Strike Force (Tito Santana and Rick Martel) and the Brain Busters (Tully Blanchard and Arn Anderson) managed to tell a cool little tale with subtle story beats in the span of about nine minutes.

Ric Flair vs. Ricky Steamboat 4/2/89 – 2 out of 3 falls for the NWA World Heavyweight Title – Clash of the Champions VI: Ragin' Cajun

Like many Midwestern children of the 80s, my introduction to professional wrestling was courtesy of the mainstream rise of Hulk Hogan and the World Wrestling Federation. Sure, there were kids cooler than me with bitchin' parents that took them to see the local AWA shows when they were kids, but I was not among that elite sect that knew of the Hulkster or Bobby “The Brain” Heenan or “Mean” Gene Okerlund before they were swept up in Vince McMahon's quest for world domination. So for me, it was a babysitter that let me stay up late enough to see Hogan and Paul Orndorff escape a cage at the same time on Saturday Night's Main Event. That was exciting enough (and the boys in my 7th grade class debated feverishly the following Monday whose feet hit the floor first. “Hogan's legs were bent! Orndorff's were straight!” Man, Jesse Ventura really thought that made a difference, didn't he?), but it wasn't until later that year, when the Intercontinental Champion, The Honky Tonk Man, besmirched the virtue of former champ Randy Savage's manager, the lovely Elizabeth, that I got hooked.

The “Macho Man” took on Honky Tonk's stablemate, Bret “Hitman” Hart, on a November 1987 edition of SNME, and the ferocity displayed by Savage while defending his manager's honor was captivating, eventually leading me back several months to a VHS copy of WrestleMania III rented from the gas station down the street. And that's what led me to probably the best WWF match of the 1980s—Randy Savage vs. Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat for the Intercontinental Championship. And if Randy Savage was a crucial discovery, well, Savage vs. Steamboat was a revelation.

Until Savage vs. Steamboat, the wrestling I had seen (with the exception of Savage/Hart) was mostly cartoon characters punching each other, much like that Hogan/Orndorff cage match. But this—this was a pair of athletes trying to one-up each other, to prove who was the best...with a healthy dose of babyface revenge thrown in for good measure. Recovered from a vicious attack on his larynx months earlier, Steamboat came at Savage with passion and drive, seemingly trying for a pin every 10 seconds  (in fact, that match featured 22 near-falls in 14 ½ minutes of action) and pointedly lifting Savage up by his throat early in the contest. This was skill, storytelling, and wrestling that finally blew my brain open—and I needed more.