Of all things... a look at Tony Garea

 

2/3 Falls: Tony Garea & Steve Travis vs Johnny Rodz & Jose Estrada, WWF 9/18/1982

My foray into Tony Garea begins with this illustrious combination! And wow this is just a straight forward great match. Right at the bell they go into a criss cross running which I imagine is a hot workrate beginning in 1982 WWF. There is nearly nothing beyond the absolute most basic of wrestling moves here, but everything is executed so believable and with conviction. Everyone here throws good punches, and whenever the babyfaces one up the heels e.g. by kipping out of an armlock, they punctuate it with a punch to the face. Rodz takes an awesomely big back body drop, faces have great dropkick, and there’s lots of leapfrogging. Garea hits a really beautiful handstand kneedrop at one point. Heels stooge around the ring and beg off lots, selling punches like shotgun blasts, and they pretty much never get any offense except when they leap into eye rakes or distract the referee. US wrestling really lost a lot when they moved away from face punching and begging off. They do a pretty brief heat segment and then it’s back to the faces clowning and wasting the heels fast. I really appreciate the departure from a typical long heat segment and they really continue to deliver the action. Finish to the first fall is just a basic splash and it was followed up with some cool work to the mid section in the second fall. GREAT transition when a knocked unconscious Johnny Rodz is blind tagged as he knocked Garea down and fell to his corner, Jose Estrada then coming down off the top rope with an attack to the neck. Johnny Rodz also hit a pretty nice thrust kick at one point. By the end they just keep delivering with the heels putting heat on the babyfaces and being met constantly with great looking punch combos. The first hot tag is just Garea coming in and punching back and forth with Travis. They do seem to meander a bit in the 3^rd fall but I appreciate Johnny Rodz saving things with a little swaggering to give things a chance to get back on track. And get back on track they did as they really went all out. Even doing some quite hot nearfalls throughout all the falls. The announcer were talking about how this is an all action match and it really doesn’t feel like an exaggeration. I especially enjoyed the spot where Garea leaped over one heel, causing said heel to dive head first into the other. It’s such a fun simplistic creative approach to things in this era. To be fair, Garea and Travis were so competent but bland in this match they might as well have been interchangeable, but they still did a good job, and Rodz and Estrada were pretty great. I really appreciate how none of them were really big stars yet they went out and had a great match in the middle of the card here. That’s the spirit. This was pretty much everything that modern wrestling is not, and for that I enjoyed the heck out of this.

This was the only appearance of Tony Garea among the top ranked matches of the DVDVR 80s WWF set, so I guess the DVDVR folks did not like Garea very much.

Rick Martel & Tony Garea vs Masa Saito & Mr. Fuji, WWWF 10/13/1981

This was a great tag sprint. You would usually not associate early 80s WWF with sprints but this was pretty much just that. Martel is a house of fire right away. Saito and Fuji are just great in this, bumping all over the place and setting themselves up. Martel does a ridiculously high leapfrog where Mr. Fuji barely goes down. The heat segment was just masterful as Fuji and Saito were constantly in and out and dominated the action without things getting boring. Garea is very much just a guy in this doing everything right, though the crowd rallied behind him in a big way when he powered out of Fujis nerve hold, and the leapfrog spots are fun still. Martel hits a jumping headscissor in his hot tag and that is just delightfully old school highflying babyface stuff. Salt throw finish looked just amazing. I also really enjoyed young Masa Saito looking quite unfuckwithable as he always does. Super super enjoyable tag that could be shown as textbook example in wrestling schools.

Tony Garea vs Larry Sharpe, WWWF 12/31/1977

This was some workmanship. Garea really looks so bland with his everybodies darling look but just his prison tattoos make him interesting. Sharpe has the blonde bowlcut and a Buddy Rose esque figure. This starts as a scientific match. There’s actually some quiet swift work and Garea busts out a handstand into a wristlock takeover that we’d associate with the fancier European technicians. At one point Sharpe works the old hammerlock pin and Garea does some cool bridging and twisting, even bridging over to reverse the pin on Sharpe. Garea knocks Sharpe over with a shoulderblock and a woman in the audience goes “Woooo! Woo!” Interesting transition where Garea goes for another and Sharpe sidesteps and misdirects him into the turnbuckle where Garea hurts his shoulder. Mostly technical action, but the crowd quickly starts rallying behind Garea. Sharpe does a bit of cheating and a cool thing where he falls while holding onto the wrist of Garea to attack the arm. Garea gets out of the armlock with a nifty drop toe hold (basic but you never see anyone do that anymore). His hot comeback is mostly hammering away at Sharpe with headlock punches. They wind down a bit as Garea keeps hanging on to headlocks as they go to a somewhat lukewarm 10 minute draw. To my surprise, the referee awards the win to Garea, which causes Sharpe to flip out and beat on him further, but Garea comes back hitting some beautiful dropkicks that send Sharpe to the outside of the ring as the crowd absolutely erupts and old ladies jump out of their seat with joy. For a 70s WWF match this wasn’t boring at all and it was very much textbook stuff that just plain works as evidenced by the crowd reactions.

Tony Garea vs Adrian Adonis, WWF 4/24/1982

Another scientific match! Hugely enjoyable stuff, however, the problem here is that Adonis is clearly trying to draw heat with his swaggering persona, but then he ends up looking way better at wrestling than Garea. Nothing wrong with old Tony Garea here, but Adonis pretty much smokes him with a beautiful firemans carry, beautiful drop toe hold, even flipping out of an attempted monkey flip. That is hard flip to pull off and seeing a chunky man like Adonis making it look smooth as butter is magical. Adonis keeps running into Gareas armdrag takeovers though, and he takes these cool bumps for shoulder blocks where he is turned around on the spot by the force of Garea charging into him and flops to his belly. Eventually, Adonis grabs a handful of hair and hits this really cool knee lift. The crowd is way behind Garea though as he makes a cool escape from Adonis abdominal stretch. They spill to the outside, with some surprisingly hard moves on the floor being uncorked as they brawl to a draw. A pretty sweet TV match although Adonis stood out head and shoulders above Garea and it made me want to see what would go down further between them.

Tony Garea & Larry Zbyszko vs Baron Mikel Scicluna & Tony Russo, WWWF 1978/8/19

Boy Larry Z looks like the goofiest man you’ve ever seen here with his hair combed to the side and his whispy mustache. Talk about being born to be an obnoxious heel. 70S WWWF has a lot names that are lost to history, but whose solidness stands the test of time in a way. Garea definitely is one such guy, and the same goes for Scicluna and Russo. Sciclona works a forearm choke and some hair pulls and then they go pretty much right to heat with the heels being all over the faces constantly. Tony Russo, a man built like an angry apple (all body and no arms or legs), has this great kneedrop where he landed right on the mans throat. I think that was about the only fancy thing the heels did. They were all kicks and punches, but they were solid kicks and punches. There are actually multiple heat sections and multiple babyface comebacks, most of which are fun, until a double down signals to actually go to the finish. One notices that after getting a hot tag, Zbyszko and Garea would usually just go for another armlock so the heels could cheapshot again and go back to heat. Gareas hiptosses and dropkicks look as good as you need hiptosses and dropkicks to be. He does show some fire, and the double Sunset flip finish is fun. 70S WWF was faster paced wrestling than you might think.