In conversation the other day, it came up that Rusty had never seen a Bruiser Brody match. By coincidence, it is the 25th anniversary of his untimely death. I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on Brody, I've only seen about a dozen of his matches myself. There is one match of his, however, that I've watched over and over. It's an unusual match in that Brody's the babyface, I guess because the crowd wanted Rick Rude to get his ass kicked so bad. Brody did have a long-time reputation for being stiff in the ring, but considering how much time he spent in the south and in Japan, that should come as no surprise. Along with his notorious toughness and roughness, Brody may be best remembered as one of the great "monsters" of wrestling. Of course, we're used to seeing 6'8", 300 pound dudes like it's no big deal, but what makes Bruiser Brody special is the aura around him. He's got an incredible presence, which to me almost seems to bust out of the screen, making him one of my favorite wrestlers to watch.
This match was filmed May 4th, 1986, from the WCCW event Parade of Champions 3. Part of why I like the match so much is the way it looks and sounds, with the natural light, bright colors and washed-out colors, old-school sports announcing, and a freakin' awesome behemoth wild man puttin' the hurt onto the Ravenous One, who deserves his own post someday. The title he's defending in this match is the WCWA World Heavyweight Championship, which was basically the NWA's top belt for Texas, except that WCCW had cut ties with the NWA and rebranded the belt in their own image. In it's previous incarnation, it was known as the NWA American Heavyweight Championship (defended exclusively in Texas,) a title which Brody held 4 times between 1977 and 1979.
What's that you say? No, I didn't use Wikipedia to write this! I know this stuff COLD. Well, I might have done a little fact checking...
By the way Poncho, I tagged all your major posts with "Poncho Madness" so that we can search through some of the content on the site more easily (see bottom of sidebar.) If you want to use a different tag (it could be anything) I'd be happy to relabel the posts, no problem. You guys have always been real nice about letting me do whatever with the content of the site, but feel free to let me know if you have other ideas or suggestions for improvements.
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