January, 1983: Two weeks ago, the Freebirds screwed Kerry Von Erich out of his chance to beat Ric Flair for the World Heavyweight Championship. This week, announcer Bill Mercer finally has a sit-down interview with Kerry in the fern-filled WCCW studio. Why didn't we hear from him last week? Was the pain still too near? Did he suffer a vocal chord injury from the vicious attack in Reunion Arena? Or is it because it takes more than a dozen days for Kerry to mentally compose a complete sentence?
As he tells Mercer about how disappointed his mom and dad are, and how he was planning to win the title on behalf of "the United States and the world" (a little presumptuous! I'm sure Ric Flair had plenty of fans!), I realized that I've never heard someone sound more like an idiot than Kerry Von Erich. He speaks like an intelligent caveman who's been brought to the future and has been studying English for 10 years—he understands most words and concepts of language, but his primitive mouth can't quite form all the words correctly.
Kerry also reveals that he hasn't even watched the tape of the match yet, and isn't really sure what happened. When they replay it for him, we get a picture-in-picture presentation of his reaction—pretty impressive production values for the time! Unfortunately, when he asks them to replay the cage door incident, they're unable, for some reason, to rewind the tape for several minutes. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
Finally, they're able to rewind and replay the moment when Terry Gordy slams the cage door on his head. Kerry's commentary on this moment: "BAM! Son of gun! Man I wish had him by throat right now." The more upset he gets, the more words he forgets to use in his sentences.
In his defense, though, Kerry is wearing a very luxurious-looking fur coat. Kind of takes away from his all-American image, but who knows, maybe he killed those animals himself on one of the patented Von Erich family hunting trips.
His final words of of the interview: "When we get you in the ring, baby, I ain't going out to hurt ya, I'm goin' out to cripple ya. And I guarantee ya that." That escalated quickly.
The in-ring action this week includes Gordy dominating Von Erich family friend Brian Adias (who's so bad the announcers can't be bothered not to call him "Brian Adidas" half the time), and, in the main event, King Kong Bundy squashing, as the ring announcer says, "From Samoa, the Samoan!" You know how you can tell when a wrestler is never going to win a match? When they don't have a name, just a nationality. More interesting is that in a pre-match interview, Bundy tells Mercer that he and "the man" won't let any of his matches be aired without written permission. Possibly the tamest threat I've ever heard!
Also, hilariously, it appears that Bundy was supposed to say something else during the interview, but forgot. Mercer keeps trying to prompt him ("I know you had something else to tell us!"), and Bundy tries to cover by claiming he has a lot of thoughts in his head, but doesn't always like to share them. I think we can all live with that.
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