Battle of the Belts 1993: One Great Fight Trapped Inside a Bad Wrestling Show

Ray Odyssey and Chris Evans open the night with the kind of match that immediately tells you what level of show this is. Odyssey has enough spring to wake up the room, including a dive to the floor and a missile dropkick, while Evans keeps the heel work simple and understandable. The problem is that understandable is about as high as the ceiling gets. The finish arrives on a sunset flip, the crowd accepts it, and the whole thing disappears from memory almost as soon as the next introductions begin. For a regional opener, it functions. For an event called Battle of the Belts, it does not exactly make the belts feel mythical.

The Super Destroyers against the Lords of Darkness is more interesting as a promotion-versus-promotion idea than as a wrestling match. Tod Gordon and Dennis Coralluzzo add heat from ringside, Barry Hardy and Duane Gill take useful bumps, and the masked teams at least look like they belong in a title-versus-title attraction. Then the finish becomes a traffic accident: simultaneous pins, confusion over who is legal, and a referee decision awarding the WWA belts to the Super Destroyers. That kind of chaos can be fun when a match earns it. Here, it mostly feels like four people found the emergency exit at once.

Kerry Von Erich's surprise appearance should have been one of the evening's great jolts, and for a few seconds it probably was. Instead, the mystery-wrestler idea becomes accidental comedy when Kerry appears in a mask while wearing gear that all but announces who he is. Once the bell rings, the match never finds another gear. Bellomo and Von Erich brawl, trade simple offense, spill outside, and get counted out. The crowd still responds to Kerry because he is Kerry Von Erich, which gives the segment warmth that the wrestling itself cannot provide. The surprise itself is more memorable than anything the match produces after the reveal.

Johnny Hotbody and Tony Stetson have the right instinct and almost none of the execution. They know a bullrope match should feel ugly, physical and personal, so the rope, cowbell and punches all come into play quickly. The crowd wants blood and gets enough violence to stay interested. Then the finish arrives looking less like a dramatic conclusion than a clerical error, with Stetson appearing to get a shoulder up while the referee counts three anyway. A stipulation designed to eliminate ambiguity somehow produces the most ambiguous pinfall on the card. That botched certainty is what keeps the violence from feeling rewarding.

Davey Boy Smith versus the Masked Superstar lasts less than two minutes, which is both the problem and the mercy. Smith was a major name fresh from the WWF, while the Masked Superstar carried decades of credibility, so the matchup looks substantial on paper. In practice, it is barely a match. Superstar gets a little offense, Smith hits the running powerslam, and everyone moves on. There is nothing wrong with a squash when the purpose is obvious, but using two recognizable veterans for this little payoff feels like buying a billboard and printing a grocery list on it. The names create expectation; the bell-to-bell content never has time to meet it.

The Sandman and the Spider finally make the interpromotional premise feel alive. Neither man is delivering a technical masterpiece, but the crowd understands the stakes, the two promoters keep poking at the rivalry from ringside, and the match develops genuine tension as each side waits for the other promotion to blink. The double-disqualification finish is still a cop-out, but it is at least a cop-out with a point: Gordon and Coralluzzo collide, referees go down, both locker rooms spill toward the ring, and the ECW-versus-WWA argument becomes the attraction. For eleven minutes, the show finally understands its own title. As promotion-building chaos, though, the segment earns its place.

Then Terry Funk and Eddie Gilbert arrive and make the previous hour and a half look like somebody left the rehearsal footage running. They brawl immediately, bleed, bump hard, use the microphone to turn pain into dialogue, and treat the Radisson Hotel like a place that needs to remember them after checkout. Funk eventually traps Gilbert's leg in the ropes and attacks it with the wooden steps until Gilbert quits. The beauty is not smoothness; it is conviction. Funk and Gilbert look like two men who would rather damage each other than protect the furniture, and that energy points directly toward the ECW identity still waiting to be born.