The Final Conflict Is, Among Other Things, Good Soup When You're Ill

The other things, though...

So here’s my situation: I’m in New York City for a music festival, but I’m sick, missing day two. I’ve been here since Tuesday, which means I got to breathe in the apocalypse, then the dust of the festival, so I’ll be fine, but y’all, when I tell you I felt sick, I mean I felt sick. And what do people reach for when they’re sick?

That’s right, matzo ball soup.

Only I can’t eat matzo on account of celiac disease, so I watched this, as the National Wrestling Alliance of the 1980s is the sort of calm, soothing presence that takes one’s mind off of the pain, blues, and agony of being ill.

As a bowl of soup, this match rules. It’s long, Bob Caudle’s distinctive drone soundtracks it, and when something important happens, the fans go “boom! boom! boom!” Can’t recommend this (or any old episode of NWA programming) highly enough in that respect.

That said, I was pretty meh on The Final Conflict. I’ve seen it before, of course, and even told Joseph that I was excited for him to check it out, but something I’ve noticed in my NWA viewing, starting with the WWE Network’s discovery of The Last Battle of Atlanta, is that big NWA cage matches often let me down. They stuff too many ideas into the thing – post-match stipulations, special referees, weird finishes – and get by on story, presence, and how cool wrestlers look when they bleed.

That is unfortunately the case here, as it’s a tag team cage match with a special guest referee enforcing tag rules despite it being “anything goes.” There are justifiable reasons for doing it this way, tag team wrestling has worked the way it does for decades because its pacing and tropes are easy to buy into, but there are titles and partnerships at stake, blood on the canvas, and the finish involves the referee holding Slaughter back while Steamboat and Youngblood win in a way that wouldn’t make their mothers proud, switching the pin behind the referee’s back.

The referee is Sandy Scott, here in his capacity as a wrestling legend, which is a nice way of saying that he works in the office, like the judges of a Pure Rules match in AEW. He’s known primarily for tag team wrestling, teaming with his brother George as The Flying Scotts in Stampede and Jim Crockett Promotions, then fairly extensively as a singles wrestler after he and his brother became estranged. Looking at his fairly comprehensive Cagematch profile, he and his brother mostly won regional titles, but they did have a 42-day reign as the NWA World Tag Team Champions, and that ain’t nothing.

Now that I have given the man his due, I’ll say this for him: in what is possibly the most famous match he’s involved in, he fuckin’ stinks. He’s a bum, y’all, a washed-up jawn in a dingy shirt who is always out of position, terminally slow on the count, and nowhere near relevant enough to offset these flaws. Dude is just in the background, pulling up his pants because he figured he wouldn’t need a belt while in constant motion.

Even without him, I think the match’s reputation is outsized for its quality. Tag team cage matches are a tough, thankless kind of encounter – until AEW said “fuck it” and turned the spectacle slider up to 11, mainstream ones were trapped between either following traditional tag team rules or using escape rules to sustain drama, neither of which work. Both teams have moments where the potential is there – Steamboat places his body between the cage and Jay Youngblood on an early Irish whip, and, later, Kernodle tackles Slaughter to move him out of the way of a Steamboat dive, sending Steamer into the cage.

Otherwise, I don’t know. There are small moments, but anybody who’d complain of the Bret/Owen cage match focusing too much on technical wrestling would hate the first 20 or so minutes of The Final Conflict, which really loves the headlock. I’m fine with it, but I mean “fine” as in “I accept that this is happening.” The most interesting aspect of the first half of the match is that Steamboat and Youngblood are largely in control, cutting off the ring and isolating Kernodle to the point that Slaughter teasing an entrance gets a pop because the crowd wants to see him get beaten up, too.

Given how good Sgt. Slaughter was at getting beaten up, I can’t blame them. I make fun of the guy for refusing to admit that he wasn’t really a Marine, but he is one of the great bump maniacs of the 1980s, my favorite guy to watch bounce around like a rubber ball with the exception of Bobby Heenan. The timeline wouldn’t have worked out, as Sgt. Slaughter became a super babyface after feuding with The Iron Sheik after Sheik lost the title to Hogan, shortly leaving thereafter, but there are flashes here and there during the embarrassing Hogan/Slaughter feud that make me wonder what a match between the two of them would have looked like in the 1980s.

Probably pretty good, if Slaughter’s prior life as a heel is any indication. He’s playing Marine-as-coward-bully and goes full throttle for it – when he finally enters the match, he immediately eats the cage. His blade job is one of the most obvious in world history, but I am a person writing wrestling criticism on the internet, not someone looking to be fooled by sleight of hand magic, so the blood is appreciated. 

I can’t say as much for Don Kernodle or Jay Youngblood as I can for their partners. With Youngblood, that’s likely due to his early death – two years after this, he dies of pancreatitis. He debuted in 1975 and teamed with Steamboat from 1979 on. They were a great team, and Youngblood died at 30, which is when many wrestlers really start hitting their stride, but the effect of all of this is that you have the rest of Ricky Steamboat’s career, one of the great legends of the sport, to consider, so your eye is drawn to him. Don Kernodle was a good journeyman wrestler – I’m never displeased when he pops up, and his understated workmanship was a really good foil for Slaughter’s more over-the-top presentation. He was also a member of one of the federal agencies that became the Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, though how big of a bastard he was is lost in the mists of wrestling journalism being the kind of thing where nobody thinks to see if ICE existed in 1986. Something you can say for his career in law enforcement is that, unlike Slaughter, he was an actual sergeant. 

Dave Meltzer calls this match the most important in the history of the Carolinas, its legend being that thousands of people were turned away, a feat that birthed Starrcade later in the year, debuting wrestling on closed circuit television a whole year and a half before Vince McMahon invented the idea. It is that, and it was obviously a good time for everybody in the Greensboro Coliseum. A question I often ask myself about wrestling goes like this: it’s important, but is it good? I am going to say yes, in this instance – the little details and big spots and the charm of the Carolina wrestling crowd are all great, the story leading to the match is great, and it’s nice when a payoff in the NWA results in a clean title change. It is not, however, the match I held so highly in esteem when I saw it, unlike Slaughter/Patterson or Slaughter/Sheik. It’s too constrained, if that makes sense. I wish it had been a bootcamp match. I wish Tommy Young was the referee. It’s too bad, because otherwise everything’s here to achieve greatness, but a match doesn’t have to be great in order to be legendary, and you can’t discount the match’s importance because Sandy Scott keeps pulling up his drawers.