When you’re watching territorial wrestling footage from nearly five decades ago, located in a relative distant outpost for the business, you’ve got to take what source material you can get. Given that the vast majority of the surviving footage from Portland wrestling in the late 1970s came from the actual tape collection of Buddy Rose, that means that there’s a hearty helping of Rose on these episodes.
That’s not a bad thing. I feel like I’ve waxed poetic on the greatness of Rose, who I consider among the best wrestlers of all time, and maybe the most underrated.
The bulk of the footage available from the April 14, 1979 episode of Portland TV, sees Rose take on a young Hector Guerrero. It’s an undercard match, so it’s one fall to a finish unlike the usual two out of three fall format for main events on the Portland program.
This is also the final match for Hector in Portland, period, for reasons that are made quite clear after the match. He still looks like a kid thanks to that haircut (pictured below) but he’s actually about six years into his career.
This might be the Portland exit for Guerrero, but Rose seems determined to send him out looking strong, because the Playboy spends the vast majority of the match selling and feeding. For all the fat jokes about Rose, to the point he goes into some deep schtick about it later in his career when he is substantially heavier, he’s in great ring shape. He runs the ropes and feeds into arm drags more effectively than hundreds of wrestlers I can think of who look more athletic.
Hector works the left arm of Rose relentlessly, with everything from an arm wringer to an arm scissors to, briefly, the setup for a modern-day mixed martial arts armbar. On one of the few occasions where Rose gains the upper hand and flings Guerrero for a backdrop, Hector nimbly lands on his feet to oohs and ahhs from the Portland crowd, in a spot that had to feel spectacular by the standards of 1979 and was still pretty nifty by the standards of 2026. Nothing Rose does seems to keep Hector down for long… until he catches a flying cross body and drops Guerrero across an outstretched knee for a backbreaker. An inside backbreaker follows, and Rose scores a decisive pin. After the bell, Rose and his running buddy Ed Wiskowski double team Guerrero and hit the same knee drop from a backbreaker setup that put Killer Brooks on the shelf the previous week. The referee disqualifies Rose, who doesn’t seem bothered. He grabs the house mic from Don Owen and proclaims, with no small amount of glee, “I heard his neck snap!” as Guerrero is carried out of the arena, never to be seen again in Portland.
There are entertaining nuggets in this, and several things young wrestlers can borrow (the word we use instead of “steal” in any creative or performative endeavor), but the structure is too disjointed to call it a good match.
Up next, we get a Roddy Piper interview from the Crow’s Nest, and Piper is beside himself after seeing Rose and Wiskowski take out someone else with the same tactic they used to injure Brooks, or, as Piper calls him, “my Brooksie.” Adorable. Piper is borderline manic here. He’s talking way too fast but you already see the presence that goes on to make him one of the major stars in wrestling during the pop culture boom of the mid 1980s, and arguably the first major crossover star in American wrestling. It’s in the eye contact, and the conviction of his words. Even here, years before his peak fame, Piper stares into the camera, using it as a vessel to connect to the viewer, doing everything but reaching through the screen, grabbing you by the shoulders, and throttling you until you believe.
Piper also spends some of this time running down the women’s wrestlers passing through the territory and Vicki Williams in particular. There’s an interesting level of nuance here, a shade of grey usually absent from the black or white, hero or villain booking of traditional wrestling. While Piper continues to position himself as the next nemesis to Rose, he simultaneously with his words on Williams embodies unfiltered, ugly misogyny with a microphone — and taking that stance to a much higher level in our next installment.
A couple of other interviews from the Crow’s Nest wrap the footage from this episode.
First up, current tag champs and fan favorites du jour Adrian Adonis and Ron Starr. I appreciated the continuity here — they find Brooks’ injury last week unfortunate, but it’s from the company he chose to keep — and Starr in particular had a good delivery, but the other material is so cringe-worthy I won’t even summarize it.
Finally, Rose and Wiskowski return to the Crow’s Nest with Wiskowski selling the heart punch from Stan Stasiak, a former WWWF (the predecessor to WWF or WWE) world champion who’s been appearing sporadically in Portland since the mid 1960s. Rose has Stasiak one on one next week. After seeing several Stasiak matches from earlier this decade when he was younger and presumably more spry, the prospect of a Stasiak singles match here doesn’t excite me, even if it is against Rose. We do get a tag match featuring Stasiak and Rose on opposite sides, and that’s the centerpiece of our next review.
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