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WRESTLER OF THE DAY: SID


RIPPA

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He's a mad genius and someday I hope that we develop the skill to come to understand him and the cornucopia of work that he left us.

So, Sid is the Jerry Lewis of wrestling? A genius that will only be recognized and fully appreciated once he's dead? I'm willing to embrace this concept.

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SID

 

The man who rules the world.

 

Look, you get someone like the Honky Tonk Man who took one bad bump off of a backdrop in 1978 and decided he was never going to go up for anyone ever again. You get someone like Nash who has a bum knee from the get go and isn't going to push it without a damn good reason. You get someone like Disco Inferno who actually loves a lot of different styles of wrestling but realizes that he looks like a moron when he tries to utilize them. 

 

And then you get SID. Sid is someone who is from an alternate reality where wrestling is just slightly different. It's just slightly skewed. At no point in his entire career did Sid think he was doing the wrong thing in the ring. He didn't second guess himself. He didn't have doubts. So much as he didn't have to sell too much for a little guy, everything was perfect. He went out there. He did his thing. He thought that the match was great and he left. Earnest, honest, and it shows in his movements. I don't know if he's from a world where the gravity was a little different, or maybe a world where the rings were made out of stay puft marshmallow, or a word where EVERY match was against a bear. On Sid's world, though? Five Star Matches every time out. He's not one of those guys who you don't believe in the ring. He's not pretending to be a pro wrestler. He is the most unnatural natural person in the history of wrestling. 

 

For our hobby, he is a fucking national treasure. It's hard to get bored watching a Sid match. Bewildered. Confused. Horrified. But not bored.

 

He's a mad genius and someday I hope that we develop the skill to come to understand him and the cornucopia of work that he left us.

 

This post reminds me of the last time I watched the clip of the ill-fated Shockmaster debut.

 

In it, Sid is a consumate professional.  Everyone is in danger of losing it (I think Davey Boy even audibly moans "he fell on his arse!") and the segment is about to bomb even more completely than it already has as nobody really knows how to play this off and proceed.

 

But Sid does not miss a beat.

 

Sid stays on script and just cuts the promo he was supposed to cut anyway.   Like nothing is amiss.  Treats the Shockmaster as seriously as he would any other adversary in a face-to-face war of words, and averts further disaster.

 

Ah, here it is:

 

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I don't think it'll be easy to find, but there's a Superstars appearance, I think it's the 1/25/92 show, which was taped before the Rumble, and Graham's site says he's up against Mike Casey. And he gets one of the biggest babyface reactions I've ever seen on a Superstars.

 

You can get a bit of the taste of here, but only a taste.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVnr28BmXII

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Sid matches I legitimately enjoy

 

vs Sting (The kip-up still wows me)

vs Michaels (When MSG turns on HBK and Sid just looks like the world's most awesome guy)

vs MIchaels II (The RR rematch)

vs Hart in a Steel Cage (On Raw, still has one of my most favourite storylines ever as Hart gets his World Title match one week before Wrestlemania.  Steve Austin, his hated foe and soon-to-be opponent at Wrestlemania ends up coming out to help Hart because if Hart wins than his match with Hart is for the World Title, so he's helping the man he's battled with for months.  Undertaker has to come out to help Sid, in order to prevent losing out on his long sought-after World Title match, so you get two guys helping guys they don't like.  The match is solid, if unspectacular.  But, THEN you get the amazing post-match angle where Hart shoves McMahon on his ass (And Vince looks like he's ready to cry), whines and swears (With repeated hilarious "We apologize ladies and gentlemen" remarks from JR) about getting screwed, to which Austin comes on the Tron and mocks him for not even being able to win with Austin's help to which Hart says his nickname is 'Stone Cold' because his "stones are so cold he won't come out and face him man to man" then Hart says everyone knows he's the real champion and Sid comes out and very audibly says "I don't know shit!" then Undertaker comes out then Austin and finally HBK comes out and mills around while Vince sounds like he's close to tears on commentary "Don't do it Shawn!"  People talk about Austin 3:16 and DX creating the 'Attitude Era' but I think this was the real genesis of it: bad language, shades of grey characters, chaotic action and stuff that straddles the line of kayfabe.  Tremendous fun)

 

I mean, there are more but that's just off the top of my head.

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I couldn't find the whole War Games match in order to show the closeups of Sid's "punches" and spot-calling, but here is him almost crippling Brian Pillman from it anyway. 

 

 

EDIT: I was looking for the Nightstalker match because I thought Ramsey might have typed in "Nightmaster" by mistake, like above. It's not there, but I got four or so good closeup screenshots of the leg break. Thanx, Youtube! Now that's gonna haunt me even more than the hospital photo of my friend's arm after he fell off a pool slide earlier this week.

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I'll admit I wasn't a huge Sid fan his first several years.  I didn't dislike him, but to me he was another random big guy who would lose the big match and then flame out.  He had the look, but I just couldn't bother investing my time in him.

 

That changed after he attacked Shawn Michaels on the Raw after WM11.  Anyone who could leave 1995-era HBK a crumpled heap in the ring was all right in my book.  By the time he won the WWF title at Survivor Series 1996, I was firmly on board.  Just seeing the genuine excitement and thrill Sid had when he won the belt, in Madison Square Garden, fist-bumping and celebrating with the ringside fans, that still makes me giddy.  And that goes back to what Matt D wrote: everything Sid did, no matter how unreal, was still completely genuine.

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I love Sid. I make no apologies for it. One of the most underrated big men in the industry. He could MOVE like few others; he bumped like a dude half his size. And yeah, sometimes his punches looked like shit; but I think that's a case of Mark Henry Syndrome, where he physically COULDN'T lay it in, because he'd fucking kill people if he'd swung any harder and didn't have that Bobby Eaton-level precision where he could stop his fist 0.1 inches away from his target's face. And he didn't mind selling or jobbing when asked to (unlike Nash or some other similar-sized guys we could mention), no matter who it was he was asked to do it for. He came in, did everything he was told, and left again. That's a professional, regardless of all the softball/scissors/squeegee jokes we can make.

 

and whoever posts the leg breaking video gets banned

THANK YOU. I fucking HATED how WCW just kept, kept, KEPT showing that video every fucking week. When I attended Superbrawl 2001 live, I managed to talk my rather squeamish then-girlfriend into attending with me; and I had to super-quickly tell her to close her fucking eyes when they inevitably played that goddamn vomit-inducing clip for the millionth fucking time.

 

vs MIchaels II (The RR rematch)

That match is absolutely fascinating, and worthy of consideration for Sid being a much better worker than we gave him credit for at the time. Michaels supposedly had the flu, or that's at least what the announcers claimed; maybe he just showed up in ye dreaded No Condition To Perform, who the hell knows. Whatever the case, he was clearly off his game, moving at half speed and not bumping much and generally looking nothing like Shawn F'n Michaels generally looks in a big main event title match. However, SID~! stepped up and saved the day: watch this sucker, and you'll see Sycho Goddamn Sid carry Shawn F'n Michaels to a perfectly watchable match. It was like Perfect vs. Luger at Mania 9, with Sid running rings around his opponent and creating the illusion of action even when nothing was really happening. Sid was GOOD, dammit, no matter how many terrible mismatches he had in various promotions on various bad nights.

Also: does anyone know what the story was on the "I have half the brain you do!" promo in WCW? I always got the feeling that it was something that Nash or Hall probably got Russo to write into the script as their own private joke, and Sid probably recognized the rib but he went out there anyway and delivered the line as well as he could.

EDIT: maybe I'm biased, because I did get to call a Sid match once. It was for some flash-in-the-pan indy run by some moneymark who promoted a few Nashville Fairgrounds shows back around 2005. It's sadly not online; but maybe not sadly, because the match itself was admittedly stinky. The full story is related in the Bobby Eaton thread somewhere in this folder. It's also notable for one of my friends being one of the indy dudes that Sid beat up, and described the simple act of Sid slapping him across the face as briefly suspecting that his jaw had been dislocated.

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Also: does anyone know what the story was on the "I have half the brain you do!" promo in WCW? I always got the feeling that it was something that Nash or Hall probably got Russo to write into the script as their own private joke, and Sid probably recognized the rib but he went out there anyway and delivered the line as well as he could.

 

I always suspected the line was either "You have have the half the mind that I do!" or "I have twice the mind that you do!" but he got it mixed up.  I doubt Hall and Nash got into written in as a private joke because of Hall's reaction of surprise and the way he leans in and tells Nash, then you can see Nash starts laughing, too, once he's been told what's been said.

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Sid could have been a big time babyface on a near Hogan level if he were more reliable and if the promotions kept him as a face.

 

So anyways.. from Japan:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7dGsz5DtGs

 

I haven't seen Fujinami/Lawler in awhile, but IIRC, people think Fujinami's match with Sid is better than Fujinami's match with Lawler.

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Oh lord these last two so belong in the Misc. Matches thread. "VICIOUS WOYAHHHHH!"

 

In all seriousness the Sid match might be better. I watched the Lawler match not too long ago and it bored the piss out of me, at least they kept this short and had some basic psychology and got the crowd behind it. Fujinami seriously cranked on that Scorpion to make it a proper finish, too.

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