#166 – Greg Valentine vs Tito Santana, July 6, 1985
Dre and the Black Cat are back for an extra episode this holiday season! Yes, THREE episodes this month! This week they review a classic 1985 matchup between Greg Valentine and Tito Santana for the Intercontinental championship in a steel cage. Please support the show and pick up our new SEASON 4 BOX SET including two unreleased episodes of reviews for the 1987 Jim Crockett Sr. Memorial Cup Tag Team tournament and the documentary “Heroes of World Class Wrestling” available on DVD or for direct download. Please support the Old School Wrestling Podcast by visiting oldschoolwrestlingpodcast.com where you can find links to all of our great products. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you…..at the matches!
I started to watch wrestling pretty late – in my early twenties
(we did’nt have it on TV before).
Greg “The Hammer” Valentine was the first one, where I understood the concept of a cool heel: Here was that cranky, ugly bastard that would beat up Jobbers merciless – and it was fun!
And one more about the rules: Saving the tag Team Partner “more than once” (if I heard that right) seems to be point.
Admittedly I was an NWA fan andLooked at the WWF as a second-class outfit. I really liked Santana when he was in Atlanta in the early 80’s but felt like he was pretty bland after he went to the WWF.
Didn’t Dusty Rhodes do a Bolo style wind-up punch as part of his flurry of punches? He would deliver a few blows and then he would encircle his hands around themselves at break neck speed eventually unleashing the built up momentum upon his already dazed foe. I seem to remember mimicking this as a child. Should he not have been disqualified?
Whenever I hear the announcers discuss “the hot and steamy night in Rio” when Patterson won the belt, I’m always happy there is no footage of it.
Thanks for the bonus episode!
This matched was shown, in clipped form, on one the WWF’s syndicated shows a few weeks later. I remember staying up really late one Saturday night to catch a later airing of Superstars as I had missed the Saturday morning broadcast on my local station. My friend had watched and told me I had to watch it. It was the first steel cage match I had seen. Great match! Still holds up well today.
Growing up, I had no clue what word “Intercontinental” meant and didn’t even consider the root word “continent.” Given that the IC title was secondary to the World Title, if figured “Intercontinental” meant “good, but not the best.” So when my Mom would ask me how my day at school was, I’d respond with “It was Intercontinental.”
Valentine and Santana are two excellent examples of wrestlers I had felt were caught in limbo when Vince Jr’s ‘rock n’ wrestling’ took off. Neither were great on the mic, but both were good workers and from what I remember, entertaining at house shows.
By 1987, you could see there were certain wrestlers that had trouble adjusting to Vince Jr’s vision of ‘sports entertainment’. Valentine and Santana’s style seemed to be stuck 5 years in the past. Whether because of loyalty, their work ethic on the road, or simply not wanting the competition to have them, these two hung on in the Fed, getting blander and blander by the year as the Ultimate Warrior, Big Bossman, and the Honky Tonk Man rocket past them in popularity. Eventually both got saddled with ridiculous gimmicks and both eventually disappeared from WWF.
This match reminds me how much clout these two had at one time, and how much of a crazy transition period the time around Wrestlemania 1 was.