#64 – Snuka vs Muraco, Madison Square Garden, October 17, 1983
Dre and the Black Cat review a classic WWF moment, go over feedback from the War Games show, Scott Hall has a survey for the Hardcore Badass, and we have a very special visit from the American Dream.
I am well pleased to announce that I just put podcast 64 into the 64th place in a playlist on my iTunes and will update my iPod once I plug it into my computer.
Thank you fine gentlemen for another awesome show!
As a ten year old, before Hogan won the title, Superfly Snuka and Andre The Giant were the only two wrestlers I knew. When my friends and I were watching TV, if it was not one of them wrestling we just change the channel. If either of those two were on, you could not get us away from the TV.
I hated the NWO from the start. I could not stand Hall and Nash and I never rooted for the NWO.
About the NWO Office staff – Big Daddy Cool Nash would drive the Trucks
Scott Hall would be the writer for the President.
Hollywood Hogan would be the President.
Eric Bischoff would be the Vice President.
–Staff for the nWo.
About the nWo staff (idk if my other comment went thru about this):
Scott Hall – Writer for the President
Hollywood Hogan – President
Eric Bischoff – Vice President
Ted Turner – Backer of the cabinet
Dusty Rhodes – Color Annalist for the cabinet
Macho Man Randy Savage – Secretary of War
Giant – Secretary of Defense
“You know who I am, but you don’t know why I’m here. (Mello) Yello Belly Cat and Dirty Dawg Dre, you guy can get all your OSWP ‘Nitro Men’ and face me, my big mang partner, and our mystery partner, at OSWP-Mania, mang! You can get the American Dream as the special guest ref and get Tony “Wanna-Be-JR” Mang as the play-by-play mang, and we’re set!”
This promo was going throw my head at work while listening to this podcast. Who knows, there could be a hostile take over of this podcast, by Hardcore Bad***, Disco Stu, and me?
What a Feud! probably the only WWF Fued that surpassed this one was Piper/Snuka. Muraco was nasty on the mic, nobody at the time could cut a promo like the Magnificent one! but we all pulled for poor Jimmy, first he was swindled by his manager Capt. Lou Albano, then Ambushed by the Capt., Classy Freddy Blassie and Ray “the crippler” Stevens, who administered not one, but two!! Piledrivers to Snuka ON THE CONCRETE FLOOR! of course in 1982 the piledriver was the be all end all of finishing moves, so many of us young marks worried that the superfly was done!
but no Jimmy came back strong with the original nature boy, Buddy Rogers as his manager!
the biggest dissapointment of my (Wrestling) life however was when i went to see Snuka Face muraco, not at Madison Square Garden , but at the Ridgewood Grove Arena. it was one of the tiny stops on the WWF circuit back when they were still doing high school gymnasiums and such. they ran monthly shows at the old area in in Queens NY. My dad used to take me to the monthly matches which were usually more of a B card. WWF Champion Bob Backlund was NEVER there. but we would get to see Tito Santana, Rocky Johnson and legendary Jobbers like Pete Sanchez, Jose Luis Rivera and Rudy Diamond.the occasional Muraco Squash match would be top class for Ridgewood, but when they announced that at the next card Snuka would face muraco i made my dad get the tickets on the spot.
the next month was torture waiting for the match to come. every saturday i’d watch the WWF tv show and pray that nobody Peal Harbored Snuka (which seemed to happed a lot back then)and put him out of commission!
but luckly jimmy stayed healthy and the time had come for Snuka and Muraco at the Ridgewood Grover Arena!!!!
unfortunatly as soon as we arrived the buzz was around the arena that the match was not happening. rumor was that muraco’s wife was in attendance and told some people that the two had fought somewhere else the night before and it was such a brutal bout that neither man wold be able to appear that night.
this was complete horseshit! i wasnt buying it so I demanded to know where Mrs. Muraco was and was pointed towards a young pretty blonde woman. i got up the nerve to ask her about what i had heard and she Confirmed it!!!!!
i have no clue if this was muraco’s wife or not, but when the ring announcer came out the first thing he said was exactly what Mrs. Muraco told me. and he also said whomever wanted to get a refund could do so. of course we stayed but i was very dissapointed and to this day i still am.
Whew! Glad to see I’m not the only person in the universe who hated the nWo from the beginning.
You guys mentioned the blue backstage area and the extremely dim crowd lights of Madison Square Garden, which are two iconic things about MSG that always stood out to me, as well. However, there was another thing that always struck me that I don’t think you mentioned (I don’t remember if it was even seen in this match or not): the large “MSG” microphone that would lower from the ceiling, as seen here: http://www.wrestling101.com/101/imageview.php?image=345
Nothin’ says Madison Square Garden like Howard Finkel waiting for that microphone to drop to the ring.
This match was on a “Best of Steel Cage Wrestling” VHS tape my brother and I had when we were kids. The tape had this match, Hogan versus Bundy from WM2, and Randy Savage and Adrian Adonis versus Tito Santana and Bruno Sammartino. The tag-team match, as I recall, was a nasty, gory affair, as well, and my favorite match on the tape.
I’m with Dre that Gorilla is my favorite commentator of all time.
I was told Superfly wears flip flops into the building, but then immediately takes them off when he gets in the locker room.
I gotta wonder if main events at Madison Square Garden consistently went short to avoid running past curfew.
Dre, I would like to know details on what your wife has to say about that 2006 ROH show you dragged her to. I’d also like to know what you were thinking bringing her along. One time I won tickets to a Raw house show and my wife went with me since I had no one else to go with. Thankfully the show was only 2 hours long so she remembers it as not being that bad. I’m guessing a ROH show in 2006 ran a bit longer than 2 hours.
Straight up, I was behind WCW. I, like Dre, loved DDP during this era. Also, while I usually didn’t care for Lugar, I loved it when he beat Hogan for the title on Nitro before unfortunately losing it right back at the PPV. I believe that was August ’97 so that would’ve been a Road Wild or Hog Wild PPV. While I thought the NWO was cool, and at times hilarious, I always rooted against them. There was an episode of Nitro when half the WCW roster was in Japan, leaving Savage by himself to take multiple beatings throughout the evening. I wanted someone to come out and make the save, but at the same time it was pretty comical.
I can’t believe Dusty doesn’t eat chicken!
I think the clip of Tony Schiavone saying “never before in the history of our sport has there been a night like this one” needs to be incorporated into every OWSP episode.
The ROH show I took my wife to was almost 4 hours long. Most of the fans around us smelled like dead feet. There was a teenager who sat behind my wife screaming “I love you Punk”. And try to imagine hearing the clap-clap-clapclapclap chant all night long. My wife almost divorced me.
I’ve about had it with the clap-clap-clapclapclap cadence of chants. Also, chanting for every little thing’s gotta go. I once heard a “nice-arm-drag, nice-arm-drag” chant.
A big reason why Vince didn’t want to put a title on Snuka even though he was really the top face in the company at this point.
4 or 5 months before this match, Snuka’s girlfriend died of head injuries she sustained..Snuka had called 911 to the hotel room and she died later..Foul play was suspected and the case was left open..I think a judgement was passed against Snuka in 85 or 86…civil suit..Reads and sounds like the OJ case..Everyone knows who did it except the law.
Nevermind, I should learn not to leave comments until I am finished listening to the whole thing..
But that’s OK, because that I can bring up the 2nd reason why Vince didn’t want to put a belt on Snuka.
Vince hated Snuka’s mic work..And this is a time were it began to be more important..Flair in the NWA, Bockwinkel/Heenan in the AWA,guys who could talk…
I wish at some point Snuka could have teamed with the Ultimate Warrios…That promo would have been bedazzling.
I love old WWF MSG shows…
What I liked about them was the fact that the arena was pitch black dark, except for the spotlight on the ring. It used to make the Garden look so much bigger back then. Now, with the Titan Tron, ramp, huge entranceway, it looks A LOT smaller.
I also used to love watching the wrestlers walk through the backstage area, with the red, white, and blue concrete block wall. And I loved how the aisle was like 10 feet long. They came out from behind a ratty ass curtain.
Gotta love old MSG tapes/.
Well, you know what they say about the cost of real estate in New York.
You guys mentioned the length of the match..I just watched and old MSG with Rene Goulet and Tony Garea going 13 minutes, which seemed like 60 minutes watching those 2, and the main event going 5 minutes..Wonder if the curfew had anything to do with it if it was still in place.
Thanks, this is the second time someone mentioned this “curfew”, I don’t know what this is, can someone explain it?
I can have all of this wrong..but I don’t care.
Almost all the help of a MSG event is union workers..Ushers, security,etc..The curfew was set so that if you went past 11pm,you had to pay union overtime and it was going to cost a lot. I believe it’s still in effect.
You see some of the old shows having the last match cut off at 4 or 5 minutes and called a curfew draw.Or they were told to send it home quickly.A lot of the time, the actual main event was held earlier in the card so that people wouldn’t feel like they were cheated out of their money..
You guys should review Team Demolition vs Team Powers of Pain from Survivor Series. Oh the humanity!
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=0XllxVk-zzM
WCW was horrible from the time Flair left as the champion until it closed. here is a match that sums it all up … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb34HzbvElA
The purpose of the NWO seemed to be to make every fan and every wrestler from WCW look like an idiot while “the stars” killed everyone. Next time you listen to OSWPC and the boys are reviewing a Flair match think back to how awesome those days were and you will find it hard to imagine Flair losing to his own kid or Uncle Eric or Russo or Bagwell.
Why wasn’t Patera at Wrestlemania 1? Was he in jail already? Also , like to note that Snuka returned at Mania 5 , jobbed to Rude at Mania 6,wrestled at Survivor Series 1996. Even had a Survivor Series match where he was on Pipers Team in 89.
When I was a kid, Muraco was one of those guys who scared the living hell outta me, because he seemed to lack any sort moral compass. He had a lackadaisical attitude and sense of humor about his brutality. Other heels of the day were either crazy, bad-tempered or cunningly calculating, but Muraco just didn’t seem to give a damn. His type of heel character has become quite common in the post-Kayfabe era, but at the time, such sociopathic behavior was jarring to a young fan.
After your podcast I searched youtube for the incident where the Magnificent One and Mr. Fuji hanged Ricky Steamboat over the ring ropes, as it legitimately terrified me at the time. It holds up as a classically executed spot and still comes across as incredibly violent. (A conflicted Vince McMahon then reminded the viewing audience they have an opportunity to vote for Fuji in a mail-in contest for “Manager of the Year” at the outset of this beating, in a bit of unintentional humor.)
From there, I sought out and watched some other classic Muraco matches/promos and encourage your listeners to do the same. He was one of the greats, no doubt.
it was the number 4 omg moment in the top 50 omg wwe dvd list