Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Ted DiBiase Throw in the Kitchen Sink

Not literally, of course, but this classic Mid-South confrontation takes order and makes chaos.

On paper, this is pretty daunting. You have your known quantities, Ted DiBiase and Hacksaw Jim Duggan, but they’re wearing tuxedos. You have a cage. You have a pole, and at the top of that pole is a coal miner’s glove, this large, brown gauntlet that doesn’t look too impressive on its own, but, when combined with the lethal force of a closed-fist punch in the 1980s, is basically a headshot. You’re probably watching a VHS rip of this, film degraded just so, to the point that when DiBiase and Duggan get bloody, their ripped tuxedoes look like garments from an early slasher film. Oh, and the loser won’t be wrestling in the territory for awhile.

What in the hell is going on here?

Context helps, but it isn’t necessary. Take a 10,000 foot view of this match, and it’s the conclusion of a long, complex angle between Duggan and DiBiase, beginning with DiBiase’s betrayal of Duggan. The issue began in April 1983. This match takes place in March 1985. One long, sustained feud where you see things that will become burned in the brain of WWF fans in the short-term future, with Duggan “walking tall,” to quote Jim Ross, referencing a cult 1973 film about a wrestler-turned-lawman-turned-vigilante whose primary weapon is a wooden club. Ol’ Hacksaw preferred the two-by-four and his heavily taped fists. You will come to know DiBiase almost exclusively as the tuxedo-clad “Million Dollar Man,” at least until his kayfabe avarice manifests itself in the real world and he becomes a legitimate grifter and thief.

This match is meat-and-potatoes, which is why you don’t need the context. It’s a feud blow-off in front of a hot crowd, and both men have the volume turned up to eleven. They are, like every great pair of rivals at the end of their story, playing for eternity, to brand themselves upon the brain of everybody in the building that night. This kind of professional wrestling is simple, but in the best possible way. It is comfort food to the core, heated and bloody and beautifully executed.

The hero wins, duh, but the way Duggan gets there is as suspenseful as territory-era wrestling gets, if you are able to forget the match’s reputation. It’s as intricate as the stipulations suggest it will be, as cathartic as the finish to a classic WarGames match. The normal routine in ______ on a pole matches is to have the babyface grab the weapon and use it righteously. Duggan climbs the pole and grabs the coal miner’s glove, signaling the end of the match, but DiBiase throws powder (which the referee missed when checking him before the bell) into his eyes and rips the glove from Duggan’s hand.

At this point in the match, both men are winded, so Duggan is able to avoid DiBiase’s killshot in the corner because the time he spent loading it (I’m assuming — these things are always loaded) allowed Duggan to get his vision back. DiBiase misses again, takes an atomic drop, hits the ropes, and collides with Duggan, again teasing that the momentum is going full-tilt in Duggan’s favor but stopping just short.

When DiBiase misses a signature fist drop, however, that’s it. Duggan, fired up, smashes DiBiase’s fist into the turnbuckle and yanks it off of his hand. This is my favorite spot in the match, the hero having to reassert himself to maintain the advantage he’d won just minutes prior, something he does not need to win, but wishes to use in an act of poetic justice. The Big Cheese sees it coming, but he can’t escape. The universe calls for his defeat, and Hacksaw delivers, throwing one of the sweetest exaggerated punches in the history of professional wrestling.

It is beautiful, it is ugly, it is the kind of professional wrestling that is frequently cited as wildly influential, but whose influence is kind of invisible because we’re so far removed from the eras in which that was true.

Here’s it’s the way the gimmicks weave themselves into the match, each one purpose-built to correspond to some aspect of a two year long feud. What looks like a mess on paper is quite elegant when it is laid out.

You see this play out in odd ways. WWE’s first televised ladder match literally held up the disputed Intercontinental Championship that Razor Ramon had won without beating the previous champion, Shawn Michaels, who had been stripped of the belt. Hell in a Cell, which credits The Last Battle of Atlanta as official inspiration, put a roof on a cage to prevent Shawn Michaels escaping The Undertaker, and D-Generation X interfering to help him.

Where you really see this match’s influence is in something like the Steve Austin/Dude Love WWF Title match where every member of Vince McMahon’s entourage had a role, or the Tables, Ladders, and Chairs match, the first two in particular. Three tag teams with three distinct weapons, all of which got tangled up in various permutations of matches and title changes over a long stretch of time. By the time TLC I happened, you had table and ladder matches in the past, and segments involving Edge and Christian’s use of chairs. TLC II at WrestleMania X7 involved each team’s second — Lita, Spike Dudley, and Rhyno — whose role in the match was to expound upon their parts in the drama.

Of course, these matches are perfunctory now, required by the calendar. It is what it is, but the reason you used to be able to put roman numerals after “TLC” is because, like this cage match, the build to it assembled not only the players, but what they’d be playing with that evening, and how all of those elements worked. It was the grand finale to a fireworks show that would have been pretty satisfying without throwing everything at the wall, bombarding the viewer with so much spectacle that it’d feel fresh every time, were such things documented.

Luckily, wrestling is documented, and we have this match, and others like it, that surprise and delight decades after they ran. A gory package with a perfectly tied bow.

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Thank you for reading! I would be remiss in not taking this opportunity to plug my dumb, ancient Bullet Club/AJ Styles parody t-shirt. It costs $20. The pre-order period ends on Monday. I’ve seen this thing pop up at NJPW and AEW shows, and in photo ops with the likes of Kenny Omega and Tetsuya Naito. I will not stop until AJ Styles sees it.