Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Heenan and Bockwinkel: Wrestling's Greatest Tag Team

Heenan and Bockwinkel, a verbal duo none could match
Screen Grab via TJR Wrestling
I talked yesterday about how putting Bobby Heenan with established talkers feels like a violation of conventional wisdom, but that in reality, it's adding strength to strength. Heenan was paired with some of the best promo men in history, Rick Rude and Ric Flair in WWE most notably. However, while his work in Vince McMahon's house of cartoon wrestling will be remembered the most warmly because of who came out the as the survivor of all those promotions from the '70s and '80s, Heenan's peak may have come as Nick Bockwinkel's manager in the American Wrestling Association.

Bockwinkel and Heenan both are considered among the greatest gabbers in the history of the art, but what made them work so well together was probably the fact that they complemented each other so well. While Bockwinkel was cool and eloquent, Heenan was acerbic, witty, almost litigious. I posted a video from the AWA where he went apeshit on Stanley Blackburn, the AWA, Jumbo Tsuruta, and the nation of Japan, but that was only half of what made him and Bockwinkel the greatest verbal tag team in history. It was missing the well-coiffed, even-better-vocabularied AWA ace. Below are a selection of promos featuring Heenan and Bockwinkel. The first shows them crowing after picking up a disqualification victory over Hulk Hogan to retain Bockwinkel's AWA World Heavyweight Championship:



While Heenan had always had the rep of being an ace at building a match, he and Bockwinkel both showed here that they were excellent when getting the chance to crow and brag after gaining a victory in battle, regardless of how cheap it was. Of course, Heenan's run of luck against Hogan would not survive when both would make the jump to WWE, but that goes to show how differently McMahon valued the dynamic of hero and villain than Verne Gagne did. The next video shows the duo hyping up a match with Mad Dog Vachon on an AWA Christmas Day show:



Those who only remember Heenan from WWE know that he was all talk and barely any action. He did wrestle for McMahon, but it was mostly in bloodlust-fulfilling wrestler vs. manager matches. Heenan however was a highly-regarded wrestler, so while it might be strange to newer school fans (and by newer school, I mean anyone who picked up wrestling in like 1985 and after) to hear Heenan physically threatening any active wrestler, let alone Crusher Blackwell, it actually fell in line with his skillset. The next video is a tutorial about the sleeperhold:



This promo actually shows Bockwinkel and Heenan working in concert to show up Verne Gagne and his son Greg on how they did the sleeper as opposed to how Bockwinkel applied it. They even brought up real life controversy with the Los Angeles Police Department and urged children and "old ladies" not to try this at home. The best heel work in wrestling always comes under the guise of righteousness. Not knowing anything else about the feud or the angle, I would venture to guess that it was Bockwinkel who was putting the choke on opponents, not Gagne, but spinning it as a double standard and showing receipts as to how much they "cared" about the kids at home? Yeah, that was classic weasel-wording hidden under self-righteousness. Next up:



Ah, classism and penis shaming. No one said that, regardless of their trappings, Heenan and his charges, even the highfallutin', dime-store word employing Bockwinkel, were gentlemen. Genteel, maybe, but the reason why they got so much heat was because of promos like that, ripping on pickup trucks and implying the redneck opponent had a small dick. But TH, you might ask, the AWA was a northern/Midwestern promotion, but I guarantee you that the rural culture that people assign to the South is prominent anywhere you go here in the States. Hell, take a trip from Philadelphia southeast to the Jersey Shore. Once you get a few miles outside of Millville, it's nothing but farmland and pickup trucks until you get to Route 9. Next:



Up front, the "pull your rickshaw" line was pretty, uh, problematic. I'll cover this later, but more than a few of Heenan's one-liners may not have flown today for good reason. But if you listened to Bockwinkel, he uttered the phrase "cretinous humanoids." It was one of his favorite burns to the fans and his opponents, and I'd like to think that Heenan kept using it as a tribute to his old friend when he got to WWE, at least the "humanoids" part. But this promo was great for two reasons. One, Bockwinkel set up a situation that made Tsuruta look like a coward for not defending the AWA World Championship as frequently as he had, which sounded like a great plea until you realized that Tsuruta rarely was able to come over to the States thanks to his responsibilities as the ace of All-Japan Pro Wrestling. The second reason was that Heenan was just so good at painting a picture with words. It's one thing to say that you're mad that another wrestler put his hands on you, but the way Heenan described Blackjack Mulligan's dirty hands, the drunkard ham 'n eggers he'd fight down in Texas, it painted a vivid picture in the mind.

The above sampling is just a taste of what kind of work that Heenan and Bockwinkel would do together in the AWA. Longtime fans of Gagne's stalwart promotion could tell you stories about how those two would run amok and then crow about their exploits afterwards, and they might be underselling the impact. Everyone loves Ric Flair with few exceptions, and while he may be the best micman of all-time, he didn't have the same rapport or chemistry with Heenan that Bockwinkel did, even if the Flair/Heenan teaming was glorious in its own right. That's how legendary Heenan and Bockwinkel were together.