[1991-04-13-USWA-Memphis-TV] Jerry Lawler vs Eric Embry (Cage)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Comparing the action level of this to the Sportatorium cage match tells me that we need to have the Mid South Coliseum footage available in full to really see these guys go all out. They bleed here, and the heat is much stronger too. I'm guessing that the issue was that they needed to keep Sportatorium wrestling very ESPN-friendly, so when a feud called for violence, they were a little limited. I didn't like the full length cage match, but this one is awesome!

[PeteF3]

This might be one of the great double-shot main events in Memphis arena history. This is about as intense as it gets, with a real star-making performance from Embry: his transition from begging off to assaulting Lawler in the corner with punches and headbutts is a great one, on the level of an Onita comeback. Plus he throws some pretty great clotheslines. Even shit that tends to annoy me like Lawler going all Masato Tanaka on the chairshots to the head made sense here in context. Frank Morrell takes TWO separate ref bumps and then eats a piledriver and it doesn't really feel excessive. Lawler gets choked from the outside of the cage by Tom Prichard's belt while Embry levels him with chairshots. I liked the Sportatorium cage a good deal but this blew it out of the water.

[Kevin Ridge]

Lawler grinding Embry’s face in cage. Embry was showing his own firely comeback. Looks like there were a couple ref bumps in this one. Again, it’s a cage match so I don’t see why necessary. Embry and Lawler looked great though. Lawler getting choked up against the cage was awesome. His facials were so great making you believe he really was grasping for air.

[soup23]

Man this looked like a war. I don't know what camera the USWA used to make this so weird but the action was insanely heated and Embry just waylayed Lawler with 10 chair shots while Tom had the belt wrapped around his throat. This would be the match I would want to see in full of all the USWA arena clips I have seen from 1990, 1991, and 1994.

[garretta]

The action we saw here was about as brutal as any I've ever seen in a cage, but there were two significant drawbacks. First, the video cut out far too often. I understand that that might have been the only copy Loss and Will might have had access to, but that doesn't change the fact that it was almost impossible to watch in certain places.

 

Second, we have the same old problem regarding heel beatdowns. I lost track of how many chairshots Lawler took from Embry, but however many it was, it was too many. Did Lawler have a steel plate in his head? Was Embry wrestling a concrete statue of Lawler instead of the real man? If the answer to both of the above is no, the lengths to which the beating went were totally beyond reason. We saw Keirn come in just before the video cut out, but he was about five chairshots too late. Maybe Jarrett figured that this was a good way to make sure everyone knew that Lawler was taking medical leave, but it was so badly overdone it was cartoonish. (I just checked, and there were a total of ten chairshots in the segment. Most wrestlers go to the hospital after taking one or two, especially in the head.) Maybe we'll get a slightly saner match between these two when Lawler returns.

[JKWebb]

The Jerry Lawler punches in this match were just on another level. This looked spectacular. After seeing the highlights of the Jarrett/Prichard footage, I would love to get my hands on the full versions of these two matches. This looked it could really be another one of Lawler's classic main events. This was really cool to see.

[dawho5]

This here looked like an incredible cage match. Both guys throwing awesome, violent strikes, Embry bleeding, those chairshots looked brutal. I am with soup, this would be the one MSC match I would want in full that I've seen so far.