Finally, they returned to the arenas for one last show down, and when you have two guys who have wrestled to DQs twice around the horn, they have to meet in a big final showdown. So they engage in a series of Boot Camp Matches! As Gorilla Monsoon said in their Madison Square Garden showdown aired on the USA cable network, “The rules of the Boot Camp match are, there are no rules! You can pin a guy inside the ring, outside the ring, you can even pin him at the hotdog stand.”

And they met in one hum-dinger of a series of matches. Blood shed from both men like water. They must have lost a pint a night. Slaughter usually used his army helmet as a weapon while the Sheik used his steel-toed pointed boots. In the end, Sheik usually took off his boot to use as a weapon, only to have it backfire on him, leading to his own pin. However, where I grew up in Erie, PA, they had a steel cage match! They each lost just as much blood, and even fought on top of the 15-foot high cage. In the end it was the usual cage ending, where Slaughter kicks Sheik away to fall out of the cage.

But as I’ve said many times before in this column, great feuds never die that easily. So one day, on national television, newcomer Nikoli Volkoff ran out during Slaughter’s match, and was quickly accompanied by Sheik and they both put a double teaming on him that he wouldn’t soon forget. So they now could go around in a series of tag team matches.

However, for his matches Slaughter needed someone a little tougher than Terry Daniels to handle both Sheik and Volkoff. Most of the time he employed another newcomer in the Junkyard Dog to tag with him. They had some great matches, but nothing compared to the classic Boot Camp Matches. Slaughter and Dog usually won with pinfalls. Soon after, Slaughter left the WWF over disagreements with management.

NEXT MONTH:

I’ll examine the entrance of a superstar who really shook things up in the late 80s: “Macho Man” Randy Savage.