The Lost Classic Between Jay Youngblood/Ricky Steamboat and Sergeant Slaughter/Don Kernodle
The entire idea was formulated on a single road trip, just a pair wrestlers shooting the shit on a four hour drive down I-95 between two of the South’s premiere tourist destinations. Don Kernodle and Sergeant Slaughter left Myrtle Beach with an empty page. Kernodle was at the wheel with Slaughter jotting down thoughts in a convenience store notebook. As they pulled into their next pit stop in the never-ending grind that is pro wrestling, they’d devised a scheme that would totally capture the hearts and minds of Carolinians.
“We wrote it all in one trip, riding from Myrtle Beach to Savannah,” Kernodle told me in a 2012 interview. “We had a composition book full from the start to the cage match that was supposed to end it all. By the time we got to Savannah, we had the whole angle.”
Kernodle, an established opening act babyface who was trained by the Anderson Brothers after an amateur career at Elon College, was taken under the wing of the brilliantly nasty Sergeant Slaughter. Along with Jim Nelson, he became perhaps pro wrestling’s first Private, with Slaughter as his Drill Instructor. The Sarge taught Kernodle how to be a real man and, soon enough, he was a force to be reckoned with.
Fans, many of whom had slapped him five on the way to the ring, watched him grow into a villain week-by-week, eventually teaming with Slaughter as the world champs. They seemed unbeatable. Unfortunately for the Marine Corps, Ricky Steamboat and Jay Youngblood just happened to be in the same promotion at the same time, two ruggedly handsome, uber-talented babyfaces with their own destiny to fulfill.
The battle between the two teams had been devised perfectly, including a match the month before that had devolved into chaos. This wasn’t a cage match for the hell of it. This was a bout that needed a cage to bring order to madness, a fight that needed a confined space and limited ruleset to finally be settled. Youngblood and Steamboat, desperate to win the titles, put their very existence as a tag team up against the straps in an apuesta bout of sorts, meaning the match had very high stakes for all involved.
The feud between the four has become a thing of legend, in part because it was just so elegantly built and in part because the blowoff match in Greensboro had seemingly been lost to history. The show had become an urban legend in the wrestling business, with old-timers claiming thousands of people had been turned away from the building, that traffic was so bad that wrestlers had to park their cars and walk to the Coliseum, that the tag match in the main event had been one for the ages.
“Steamboat and Youngblood were a great team and we gelled together in the ring. They were tightly worked matches, realistic. We really went for it and we went at each other hard,” Kernodle said. “Of course I got over working with them. If you couldn’t get over wrestling Steamboat and Youngblood, with Sergeant Slaughter as your partner, then, buddy, you just couldn’t get over.
“Twenty thousand people were turned away. That’s what the police told us. It was a madhouse. They were on the radio telling people not to come because the matches were sold out. By far the biggest thing I’d ever been a part of. Ric Flair wrestled Greg Valentine for the world title, but that night we were the main event. We were 20 miles away from my hometown and that’s where I went to wrestling as a kid. I get goosebumps just thinking about it”
The extravaganza was called “Final Conflict” and it turned out to be proof-of-concept for the Crockett family, leading to an even bigger super show the next year called Starrcade. You may have heard of it.
For years Final Conflict was little more than lore, just another tape hidden like the lost ark in WWE’s cavernous archives—until it wasn’t. It turned out Jim Nelson had requested a copy of the tape and had kept it for years, as it was a favorite of wrestlers in the Alabama territory.
“Arn Anderson and I shared an apartment, and I had shown the Greensboro tape to him early on. He loved it,” Nelson told the Mid-Atlantic Gateway. “He loved watching it over and over. He was so amazed by that whole deal and the huge crowd it had popped. Arn was constantly having the boys over to our apartment to show them this tape. Everyone working there at one time or another was at our apartment to see that tape. The Armstrongs loved it, too. We watched it all the time.”
Then, one day, disaster struck. Nelson, then working on a new character who had betrayed his country to side with Russia, attempted to record a news program for background information. Anderson, aghast, tried to stop him. It wasn’t, it turns out, a blank tape in the VCR. Nelson had inadvertently taped over a few seconds of Arn’s favorite match instead. That’s why the tape that initially circulated when Nelson released it to the public was missing the finish. Had Anderson not been in the room at the time, it could have been much worse.
Thanks to Nelson, more than 20 years after the fact, hardcore fans finally got the chance to see the bout that caused all the fuss. As it turns out, the match is everything it was promised to be. Steamboat and Youngblood, after initially controlling the overmatched Kernodle, are given the beating of a lifetime. The sixth man in the match is the cage itself, rendered ominous by the way the wrestlers initially try desperately to avoid it and then the way they smashed each other into it ruthlessly, drawing both blood and “ooohs” from the capacity crowd.
The first part of the match was all about the cage. It hung ominously over everything as they did all they could to avoid it. Eventually all four men tasted the bitter tang of steel anyway as the blood poured. The highlights here are numerous—the way Steamboat and Youngblood made headlock takeovers look like circus routines, Slaughter saving his own partner from a Steamboat splash against the cage, then leaping off the top of the cage like a balding Jimmy Snuka, Kernodle attempting to bleed all his own blood. But the finish, derided by some, was something I enjoyed, Steamboat turning sneaky and hoisting the heels on their own petards.
Though it was called “Final Conflict”, the two teams continued to feud for months, running back the cage match around the horn, this time with the heels on the chase until the temporarily jumped ship to the WWF. Nomenclature aside, this is one of the very best tag matches of the 1980s, a testament to the power of story-telling—both in the ring and out.
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work. Follow along with the televised history of pro wrestling at:
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