I fell into something of a rabbit hole trying to divine the rough date of a Sailor Art Thomas vs. The Sheik match and found myself watching this, which is ripped, I think, from one of those of “before they were stars” or “when it was real” style VHS compilations that came out during either the 80s or 90s boom in an attempt to occupy the sliver of space in a video rental store’s wrestling section that wasn’t taken up by WCW or WWF tapes. It’s clipped-together 8mm footage with commentary and a crowd track added much, much later, to mostly charming effect. “The mat is soaked with blood,” the commentator says of the action he’s lost track of, “but what do you expect? This is caged madness!”
Not to dispute my new friend the relentless shill, but “madness” is playing a little loose with what you can see of the action until he notices how much Heenan is bleeding, which is, even by his awe-inspiring standards, quite a bit. At one point, the announcer confidently states that footage of something like this would be worthwhile at $100 a minute as over a rough edit from Heenan climbing the cage to Heenan down on the canvas taking the loss.
He’s not entirely wrong. If you’re like me, you probably have a general sense of Heenan as one of the true renaissance men of professional wrestling, unparalleled as a manager, a color commentator, and show host. His reputation as a wrestler is kind of taken for granted — you see a spread of bloody photos in a vintage issue of The Wrestler and a handful of WWF matches where he bumps his ass off to sell a weasel and assume, correctly, that he must have also been something of a genius at being a wrestler, too.
When you’re trying to fill the gap between belief and knowledge, scraps like this are a feast. The studio brawl segment that leads into the footage is particularly illuminating. Heenan alone, without the protection of The Assassins or The Blackjacks or Nick Bockwinkel, but he’s still a loudmouthed snot, a coward who lives for the embarrassment of his enemies. I don’t know what Pepper Gomez has done to get on Heenan’s bad side besides being a decent dude with a cast iron stomach, but cage matches are serious business, the promise of bloody retribution rendered in steel, and Heenan being in one alone with Gomez means that he has bought into his own shit and will suffer the consequences.
He has help, of course: he starts the match choking Gomez with a strap or piece of tape, and peppers Pepper with a secreted away set of brass knuckles throughout. The camera work is, like most 8mm wrestling footage, documentarian in nature, so you get a lot of neat shots of Heenan working these gimmicks, revealing and hiding his weapons at will, eventually busting Gomez open. The camera is in close on the two as Gomez tries to wrest the knuckles from Heenan, and when he does, the pretty boy immediately tries to bolt up and out of the cage. Heenan’s skill for ragdoll selling takes over from here, with each of Gomez’s punches feeling weightier and weightier as Bobby tries and ultimately fails to cling to the ropes.
Heenan has a hell of a punch, too, but you only see him unleash it after he’s cheated to regain the advantage by hitting Gomez in his groin, which is not as cast iron as his stomach. The detail of Gomez tearing the tape off of the brass knuckles to make them more effective, which Heenan puts over by selling the blow even harder, is what compelled me to recommend the match. It’s a small thing, and there’s no way of knowing how effective Gomez was in his end of the bargain, but it’s a great piece of business, effectively finding a second level to a cliche wrestling weapon. It’s an incomplete record, but it’s vital.