BRM Reviews A Rare WWF Show from the late 1970s!

[Big Red Machine]

WWF Torneio Para Unificação de Titulos (9/1/1979)- Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This show comes to us from the world-famous Estadio de Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The crowd looks pretty huge (I’d guess maybe 55,000), but it’s entirely possible that a huge chunk of the cheaper seats were comps. The reason for that is that is that this show was WWF’s first-ever show from Brazil, part of a little-known and quickly abandoned effort at the time to actually become a “World” Wrestling Federation.

Finding footage of this show was pretty much impossible. From what I’ve read several places, there are two things on this show (one a bit more than the other) which led to it never being released as a home release, or even in part on a best of. Not only was it never released, but there was actually an order from Vince Sr. that the footage be destroyed.
So how did I come across it, you ask?
Funnily enough, I ran into SE_Punk from the old OWW and WrestlingAddicts forums (remember him?) on a different forum and we got to talking and he mentioned that one of his grandfather’s friends who was a wrestling fan happened to work for the company that WWF hired out to do the camerawork for the show, and so when the order came in to destroy the tape, he just took it home with him instead (kind of like what happened to some of the once-missing but now found Dr. Who episodes). His grandfather’s friend was cleaning out the house and found the tape and mentioned it to the grandfather who mentioned it to SE_Punk, who got it converted to digital. He mentioned it to me and I thought it would be really interesting to see what late 70’s WWF was like when they were doing shows far away from anywhere they thought the footage (or even word of the show) might get back to the regular market (meaning guys like Andre wouldn’t be quite so protected). So I asked him to send it to me and when I did a bit more research into it, I found out that there was so much interesting stuff on this show I decided I absolutely had to review it for the website.
Obviously this couldn’t have been possible without SE_Punk, who not only sent me the footage, but even helped translate some of the commentary. Major props to him!

Your commentators for this show were Luiz Montoya and Aldo Figuereido. SE_Punk said neither of them seemed like they knew very much. He thinks it is entirely possible that they were only smartened up for the sake of doing the show, and that they probably put in a lot of time beforehand with a WWF representative and a translator to get some of the stuff down. If that’s true, I think it’s kind of cool that WWF was willing to put that much time into trying to make sure that this new market they were running would be able to get on TV with announcers who could actually call moves for what was clearly a dry run to see if it was a viable territory to run every few months and sell TV tapes to oversees like the British would do with BBC shows.

The way this show worked was that we had two champions going into the show, and they were placed on opposite brackets of this one-night, eight-man tournament which would have both champions defending their titles in each match of tournament, meaning that we were guaranteed that the final match would be Champion vs. Champion, but we didn’t know who those champions would be. The brackets were:
Bracket A:
The Stomper (South American champion)
Tito Santana
Johnny Rodz
Toru Tanaka

Bracket B:
Pat Patterson (North American Champion)
Dino Bravo
Seiji Sakaguchi
Tony Garea

Also, there was a really cool-sounding tag match that was “Superstar” Billy Graham & Ivan Putski vs. Chief Jay Strongbow & Andre The Giant

So… on to the show:
WWF SOUTH AMERICAN TITLE MATCH: “The Stomper” vs. Tito Santana- 6.5/10
I could be wrong, but I believe this was the only show the Stomper ever worked for the WWF. Tito was the babyface here. I guess they figured the Brazilian fans would have an easier time getting behind the guy with the Hispanic name. Tito was a great babyface and Stomper was a great heel. Stomper won with a move that SE_ Punk told me the announcers actually called the “Saskatchewan Spinning Nerve Hold.” Ah. So that’s where Jericho got the name. He probably saw Stomper use it when he was growing up.

JOHNNY RODZ vs. “PROFESSOR” TORU TANAKA- 5.5/10
Rodz won clean with the diving headbutt. The fans went nuts for that.

WWF NORTH AMERICAN TITLE MATCH: Pat Patterson(c) (w/the Grand Wizard) vs. Dino Bravo- 6.75/10
Dino working this show (and more importantly, doing this job while still the NWA Canadian Heavyweight Champion) is actually what led to him getting fired from Maple Leaf Wrestling and vacating the title shortly afterwards. I’m not sure why he went to work for Verne after this instead of going right to New York.
Pat was a pretty good cowardly heel, trying his best to get away from big, strong, powerful Dino Bravo. Pat managed to pick up the victory by sleeper hold.

SEIJI SAKAGUCHI vs. TONY GAREA- 4/10
Sakaguchi was representing WWF’s partner in Japan, which at this time was New Japan Pro Wrestling. This is the same Seiji Sakaguchi who still works for the company backstage to this day. Pretty boring match. Sakaguchi won with a roll-up.

IVAN PUTSKI & “SUPERSTAR” BILLY GRAHAM vs. CHIEF JAY STRONGBOW & ANDRE THE GIANT- 6/10
This was definitely more a spectacle than a wrestling match, but I bumped the whole match up from a 5 to a 6 because BILLY GRAHAM SLAMMED ANDRE! I did not expect to see that. It was SOOOO awesome and the crowd went totally nuts for it. Billy then dropped down to the mat and put Andre in the bear hug and Andre submitted. That was pretty shocking, considering how rarely Andre got slammed and how rarely he did jobs, but I guess they were just trying to get Graham over to the Brazilian fans and figured no one outside of Brazil would ever see or hear about Andre taking the loss.

2ND ROUND:
WWF SOUTH AMERICAN TITLE MATCH: The Stomper(c) vs. Johnny Rodz- 5/10
Stomper definitely did some stomping here, that’s for sure. Rodz was almost always a heel in the US, but the crowd loved that diving headbutt so much that they just made him the babyface here. Rodz won with the diving headbutt again. I’m not sure, but it seems possible that this was actually an audible they called after the reaction to the first headbutt was so great.

WWF NORTH AMERICAN TITLE MATCH: Pat Patterson(c) (w/the Grand Wizard) vs. Seiji Sakaguchi- 7.75/10
Now these f*ckers could work! Great technical match. It would have been an 8/10 if not for the terrible botching of the finish. The idea was that the Grand Wizard would distract the ref and Pat would hit Sakaguchi with a chairshot, except that the chair kind of slipped out of his hands a bit and it still made contact with Sakaguchi, but it looked really light. Unfortunately, while the contact looked light, it obviously wasn’t so light because according to a recap I read on the net of a shoot interview with Sakaguchi, he claimed that it legit knocked him out so they couldn’t redo the chairshot so Pat just had to bite the bullet and make the cover for the pin even though (and it’s possible he didn’t quite realize it at the time) the chairshot looked like complete and total crap and just killed the crowd dead. It was like watching people go from marks to realizing that everything is worked right before my eyes. It’s also REALLY ironic that the reason they couldn’t do redo the finish to make it look better, resulting in killing kayfabe (and business) in Brazil was because the botched chairshot legit knocked Sakaguchi out.
The reason for this finish was that they wanted to set up a rematch in Japan later in the year where Sakaguchi was going to win the North American Title from Pat, which did wind up happening on November 8th. New Japan was planning on using the footage of the chairshot finish to build up that match, saying that Sakaguchi would have won if not for Pat’s chairshot, but finish looked so bad to the point where New Japan officials decided that they couldn’t use it to build to that match because they were worried it would expose the business (and if you’re wondering whether or not New Japan was overreacting, consider that no pro wrestling company ran in this city for DECADES after this). Between this and the Andre job, Vince Sr. apparently decided that the footage should be destroyed because it wouldn’t be useful for anything and its existence was more of a risk than anything else, resulting in the sequence of events outlined above which in turn has led to me sharing this with all of you today. Kind of ironic when you think about it.

CHAMPION VS. CHAMPION TOURNAMENT FINALS: WWF South American Champion Johnny Rodz(c) vs. WWF North American Champion Pat Patterson(c)- 6.5/10
They really did their best and I certainly enjoyed the match, but the crowd was totally killed by the finish of the previous match. They didn’t even care when Rodz went for the diving headbutt. The finish was Rodz going to the top rope for the headbutt but the Grand Wizard distracted him for just long enough to buy Pat the time to recover so that when Rodz did finally jump for the headbutt, Pat rolled out of the way, then choked Rodz out with the sleeper hold.
After the match, they brought out a translator to translate a promo Pat cut in English, saying that he was going to unify the two titles and defend them as one championship.

It’s a shame that Vince Sr. wanted the footage of this show destroyed because between this being WWF’s debut in Rio (and actually in South America as a whole), Billy Graham slamming Andre and the historical finish to the main event, this show probably could have gone down in history as being something along the lines of the next year’s Showdown at Shea, with that feeling of it being of almost mythological proportions.

I hope you’ve all enjoyed this review. If you want me to send you the footage, send me a PM.