The Night Mr. Perfect Jobbed to a Human Potato in Fishnet Tights

You ever think your boss hates you? Well, they probably do. It’s in the nature of being a boss, after all. But if we’re being totally honest, I don’t think it would be possible for your boss to hate you as much as Vince McMahon hated Curt Hennig. Well, maybe he didn’t hate Hennig so much as love Hulk Hogan, whose best friend was Ed Leslie, best known for his Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake gimmick, in which he played your garden variety stripper-barber. As one does, of course.

So Mr. Perfect had, ahem, a perfect record going into his match against Brutus Beefcake at WrestleMania VI on April 1st, 1990. Well, sort of. He’d been defeated at house shows, but not on television. And, of course, back then, and to a large extent now, if it didn’t happen on TV, it didn’t happen at all, or at least it happened in some crazy alternative house show universe where nothing really mattered.

By the time his match with ol’ Beefcake came along, Mr. Perfect had been undefeated for nearly two years. And, oh yeah, before that he’d been the AWA world champion for nearly a year and had one-hour classic with Nick Bockwinkel. To be fair to Beefcake, though, he played a stripper who cut hair on the side. Or was it the other way around? Plus, he could strut around the ring like an idiot while making air scissor motions with his fingers. So there’s that. And besides, what if your nickname was “Beefer”? He might not have been talented, but at least he had to suffer through a silly gimmick, which might be penance enough.

Goddamn, this match was bad. Not even Perfect, who could make just about anyone look good, could save the thing. Beefcake just looked stiff. And his punches looked stupid. Even for a wrestler. If your match is going to consist of mostly kicks and punches, maybe you should work on making your two moves look decent, eh? Probably the worst part of the match was the end, when Perfect lost the match via a goddamn slingshot into the turnbuckle. To be completely fair to Perfect, though, no one has ever launched themselves into an object with as much grace and beauty. Plus, he had the Genius by his side. Good ol’ Lanny Poffo, one of the best over-the-top personalities in all of wrestling.

Just terrible. But in a way it fit the tone of WrestleMania VI, which had fifteen matches, many of which only lasted a handful of minutes. And the less said about Roddy Piper in half-blackface, the better.

Perfect would go on to win the Intercontinental title after the Ultimate Warrior vacated it when he took the heavyweight strap off of Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania. Perfect was supposed to drop the strap to Beefcake at Summerslam later that year. Wow. Were people clamoring for a re-match? Well, Beefcake actually ended up having that terrible parasailing accident, and Perfect instead dropped the title to the “Texas Tornado” Kerry Von Erich. The match against Von Erich wasn’t great, but at least it was fun. Perfect could usually make babyfaces look great, but nobody could make Brutus Beefcake look good in the ring. Except maybe those fishnet tights of his. Now they looked good, especially in hot pink.