[1994-11-19-NWA-World Title Tournament] Eddie Gilbert vs Tracy Smothers

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Kevin Ridge]

Eddie attacks Smothers before the match starts. They go into the crowd and I can’t see a thing. In the ring for a few minutes but they go back outside again and I can’t see anything once more. There is another ref involved and they do a both men’s shoulders down pinfall. This was bad.

[Loss]

Not the easiest match to follow at first because of all of the crowd brawling, with the handheld camera not really catching it. You get the idea of what they're doing, throwing chairs and tables and fighting in the crowd, but you don't get to see much of it. Gilbert nails Smothers with a hammer from the timekeeper's table and starts finding stuff around the ringside area to choke him. Mark Curtis is the perfect guy to referee a match like this. I'm not sure how all of this weapon use flew in a tournament setting without a DQ.

 

Once the match gets into the ring, it gets really good, and the brawling continues. Gilbert tries to suffocate Smothers with a garbage bag! Eddie has let himself go a little bit even from earlier in the year, and while he gives an inspired performance here, you can tell he's on a personal decline. It just shows in his face (when we get to see his face).

 

I think this was an awesome match. What I could see of it I loved. It was probably tremendous live. Only about 10 minutes, but they crammed quite a bit of stuff into this.

[Kevin Ridge]

Loss, I want to give you ***3/4 for your imagination. Mine was lacking as I was just seeing the back of people's heads standing in front of the camera.

[Exposer]

Fun brawl. Eddie and Tracy fight all over the place and threw the crowd. Eddie rams Tracy into wooden (?) steps and puts a garbage bag over his head. Mark Curtis takes a ref bump then there's a double pin controversy with Tracy coming out as the winner in the end. This was a blast and a very good match.

[soup23]

Tough match to rate due to camera work. MOst of what we saw looked fun but I feel like we can't get a true accurate vibe on how good the match really was.

[PeteF3]

There may have been a decent match buried in here somewhere, but most of the focus was on the backs of various audience member's heads. Actually to be honest I thought a lot of what we saw was pretty damn crappy, with Gilbert working sub-Tiger-Jeet-Singh-level bullshit in plain view of the referee, a pointless ref bump (oh, I see, it's so GIlbert can play hide-the-object...AFTER USING PLASTIC BAGS, STAIRS, AND TABLES THE WHOLE MATCH??), and a shitty double-pin finish. Not to get all PURE SANCTITY OF THE CHAMPIONSHIP or anything or to discount the three-ring-circus approach to booking but an NWA title tournament should be above a lot of the crap we saw here involving plastic bags and stairs used in the middle of a match with no explanation. Gilbert throws about the most tepid, perfunctory heel tantrum ever after the decision. Not to gloat or relish over a man's obviously failing health but Hot Stuff is so completely beyond cooked at this point it's sad to watch.

 

I wanted to avoid bringing this up, but one weakness of the Snow/Candido match was neither guy was really willing to engage the crowd in any way. Until Candido begged off toward the end, good luck identifying who the heel and babyface were. I've come to expect that out of indy Snow but from Candido, that was disappointing. But I didn't talk about it because I thought maybe they were working a Pure Sportz Build-type tournament. Well, with this match that all went out the window, so this had the bonus effect of being actively detrimental to completely unrelated matches, which is difficult to pull off. The more I think about this match the less I like it.