Valentine’s Day

The ultimate baby-face tag team of the 1980’s was the Can-Am connection, with their matching dark wavy hair, cocky grins, tan muscular bodies, and white teeth, trunks, and boots. The promoters were just shameless back then about dishing out the sort of over-the-top, physically perfect, lawful good heroic types like this for the fans to cheer for. They were pure eye-candy and the fans back then had a sweet tooth. I guess people weren’t so worried about Type B Diabetes back then.

A nice contrast to these goody good, Dudley Do-Right pin-up boys was the great Greg “The Hammer” Valentine. This cruel bad boy had a reputation for snapping the legs of his opponents and getting a sadistic thrill out of doing it. Every good story needs a villain, someone to make life miserable for the protagonist, and Valentine was more than eager to fill that role.

To build heat around a Tag Team feud, promoters would sometimes separate the teams and have the individual members face off in singles matches. The Heels would usually dominate the handsome young good guys in these one-on-one competitions, causing the fans to think there’s no way the Baby Face team could ever score a victory. But once they’d joined forces again as partners, (often at the big Pay-Per-View,) the young upstarts would overcome all odds, pull out all the stops, and somehow defeat their clearly stronger opponents. Oh, the power of Teamwork! Here is a look at just such a singles match up between Valentine and Zenk.

It would be too simplistic if the evil wrestler gained the upper hand right from the bell. Instead, it’s better to build suspense by allowing the flashy high-flyer to show off some of his fancy moves, proving that in a fair fight, he’s got the skills to win.

Soon enough, some trickery or dirty cheating will allow the bad guy to gain the advantage.

This match is also available on YouTube: