Casey eventually defeated Goodish with a sunset flip to take the belt. Goodish cut a classic promo complaining about the loss. "Scott Casey had me by the seat of my pants!" he bellowed. To illustrate his point, he thrust his backside at the camera and grabbed a fistful of his own sweat pants.

Though he was tremendously over, Goodish was suddenly repackaged. He appeared on TV one week with his hair done up in many braids. It looked as if a tarantula had attacked his head. Instead of "the Hammer," he was suddenly "the King of the American Hippies." Nick Roberts, who was filling in as commentator that day, remarked that Goodish was sporting "an Afro-American look." Perhaps the hippie gimmick was meant to stop the cheers Goodish was beginning to get and firm up his status as a heel. To a substantial number of Amarillo fans, a hippie was not a good thing.

In the course of his feud with Casey, Goodish teamed with Super Destroyer. Both were killer heels, but their team became a slapstick routine. They miscommunicated, collided with each other repeatedly, and ended up losing the match. Destroyer philosophically remarked that it was always a mistake to trust a partner. He said he would not be teaming with anyone henceforth unless money was involved. Once again, Destroyer had undercut Goodish, making him look like a fool.

The obvious follow-up feud between Destroyer and Goodish didn't take place. They did meet in a bearhug-versus-bearhug match in Lubbock, which Destroyer won.

Goodish was gone from the territory not long afterward. He rarely appeared in Amarillo after that. When he did, he was billed as Bruiser Brody, a name he had picked up in the WWWF. In one memorable 1978 appearance, he tried to collect the $5000 Adrian Adonis offered to any man who could defeat him in under ten minutes. Brody pummeled Adonis with a chair and tossed him around the ring, but Adonis managed to hold on for a time-limit draw. A few years later, when Amarillo hosted the talent from Fritz von Erich's Dallas office, Brody occasionally appeared here as a babyface.

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NEXT MONTH: 

The Great Malenko.