Pat Patterson Gives Sgt. Slaughter Everything He Deserves
Pat Patterson Gives Sgt. Slaughter Everything He Deserves
Quick Programming Note: Hope y’all had a happy holiday! It wound out being more complicated than planned in my neck of the woods for a couple of reasons, which is why you’re getting this essay on Monday night instead of Friday. Thanks for your patience! If you’re a paying subscriber, you’ll get the usual convo between Joseph and I tomorrow, and things will resume as normal with my essay on The Funks vs. Brody and Hansen on Wednesday. Cheers!
Pat Patterson was a genius. Creator of the Royal Rumble, agent of too many classic matches to list, mentor to generations of wrestlers – the phrase “a mind for the business” gets thrown around a lot, but insofar as professional wrestling in the United States is concerned, he is one of the architects of much of what makes professional wrestling so appealing to me. At the level of a WWE, WCW, or AEW, wrestling is a narrative of titanic, mythic struggle and sacrifice, of good men and women overcoming the impossible and transcending limitations to reach the pinnacle of human achievement, becoming something greater in the process.
These moments often require a baptism of blood. Here is one for the ages.
The first time I saw this match was as part of a Wrestling Observer Newsletter Match of the Year viewing project the wrestling forum I belonged to had put together. I don’t remember my first impressions of any of the other matches I watched for it, but this one popped – it was 2007, and the last man standing match between John Cena and Umaga from that year’s Royal Rumble was an obsession of mine, maybe my favorite WWE match since the WWF Championship street fight between Cactus Jack and Triple H from Royal Rumble 2000.
This match is the foundational text of my favorite kind of WWE story, where the everyman babyface and the indefatigable heel meet in the alien landscape of a match with no rules, where the only way to win is to survive. You put a dude in his jeans and a t-shirt against a UFC Champion or a Samoan monster or a Ric Flair clone or, here, a Marine drill instructor in his combat fatigues, and you’ve got the makings of a match as capable of living forever in the memories of those who’ve seen it as any of the most successful constructed epics, from Hogan/Warrior to your favorite Kenny Omega match.
It starts with the heel. It is crazy to think that, until he feuded with the Iron Sheik in 1984, Sgt. Slaughter was one of wrestling’s most hated heels, that the gimmick of “ex-Marine” was something the WWF, of all promotions, would push as something to be mocked and derided, but Slaughter was incredible in the role, the gravel in his voice and proud jut of his comic book villain jaw as much a part of pop culture’s perception of the bullying drill instructor as R. Lee Ermey’s later performance in Full Metal Jacket. You want to see men like them taken down a peg not because they’re patriots (which pop culture tells us is a fine thing to be) but because they’re power mad tyrants given license to abuse young men for the sake of their own ego.
Similarly odd, at least from a modern perspective, is that the babyface here is a French Canadian immigrant whose second language is English, but Pat Patterson is our hero here, in his officially licensed I Love New York shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, everything an uptight bully like Slaughter is designed to hate. I love the shirt, which is a bit of Dusty Rhodes-esque pandering, a totally unnecessary embellishment in the sense that it’s impossible to imagine a crowd being more behind a professional wrestler than Madison Square Garden is behind Patterson.
The match’s structure rewards the crowd immediately, as the Alley Fight’s lack of a referee is decidedly in Patterson’s favor, as there is nobody there to stop him from attacking Slaughter from jump; battering him with punches and kicks and his belt, all of which a ref would have protested even in your typical no disqualification affair. Slaughter isn’t hindered by the lack of a referee, either – he gains his advantages here and there by cheating, after all – but the story of this kind of match isn’t what a heel can do without rules (they already don’t care about them), it’s all about what the babyface does when there’s nobody holding him back.
In the Alley Fight, that means making Slaughter bleed, but by accident. Patterson, utilizing a fairly routine slingshot, shoots Slaughter into the corner, but Slaughter’s signature bump involved going over the turnbuckles and hitting his head on the ring post. He does that here and runs the razor over his forehead quick as a flash, opening up beautifully, if a bit obviously given that the blood curtains down his face in a straight line. Already on spaghetti legs because the blows he’s taken have been all closed-fist and cowboy boot, begins to flail while Patterson zeroes in on the head wound with more shots to the turnbuckle and the heel of his boot.
That’s enough for The Grand Wizard, who managed Patterson when he was the Intercontinental Champion, to the heights of a feud against WWF Champion Bob Backlund (where Patterson tried to use brass knuckles, something he largely foils when Slaughter attempts it here. It’s a nice reversal of fortune for Slaughter, the towel Wizard throws into the ring as humiliating, for the “Marine,” as the white flag of surrender.
There are interesting bits to consider here, like Slaughter looking to continue the fight despite the towel, but really what I love about this match is how it’s a study in the careful escalation of violence, the way you can deliver on everything a match promises and still find a way of turning things up a little at the end, all without straying too far from punches and kicks, the most basic attacks professional wrestling.
We are, I hope, sufficiently advanced enough as a fandom where a match “just” being punches and kicks isn’t seen as a bad thing – I’ve lived through eras of workrate fetishism and find it very tiresome. I go back to matches like this not as proof that it’s possible to do a lot with a little, but because I think that there is no such thing as “a little” in wrestling, that how well wrestlers are able to manipulate the emotions of an audience has nothing to do with what moves they use – which is perhaps most evident here in the fact that Slaughter’s Cobra Clutch, a key to his character and the angle that leads us here, is totally abandoned.
Instead, you have a simple matter of injustice. Pat Patterson witnessed it, called it out, pursued the matter through interviews and Cobra Clutch Challenges and matches where things like rules and referees got in the way, and the question posited by the Alley Fight could not be simpler: wouldn’t you like to see Pat get his hands on Slaughter without all of that in the way?
Yeah, man – I would. Every punch, every kick, every strike with a belt or the heel of a boot is a resounding “fuck yeah” to the very real, very visceral, and ultimately very rare spectacle that is watching a bad man get exactly what he deserves. On this night, it’d take a miracle for Pat Patterson to lose. The nice thing about wrestling is that bad men rarely receive miracles. Sgt. Slaughter is a bad man.
The argument of the Alley Fight and its descendants is that maybe the babyface is just a little badder. Maybe the heel is lucky that the rules are standing between him and what he really deserves. The phrase “Fuck around and find out” has only been in common usage for a couple of years, but it’s the lifeblood of issues like this one. Is there agony in watching the heel fuck around? Yes, of course. But listen to the crowd roar when Slaughter comes out of the turnbuckle bloody, when they know he’s beaten before he does. That’s the joy of watching the heel find out. It just works.