Truth or Consequences: Back in Time

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Well Armageddon has been and gone and, despite the prophecies laid out since the dawn of time, we all came through it relatively unscathed. Well, except for Jesus, of course, who looks like he might be out for some time, but hey – you’ve gotta laugh, right? I mean, they take Carlito out of the immediate U.S. title hunt due to injury and the guy they replace him with promptly slips a disc and pulls his groin. That said, give both men their due, they still wrestled with their injuries and Carlito still appears on SmackDown! to keeping the angle running nicely. His old man must be proud.

Traditionally, Armageddon is always one of the weaker PPV cards of the year and, on paper, 2004’s version seemed to follow suit. None of the matches shouted out “BUY ME!” to the casual fan, especially when you had the likes of Dawn Marie vs. Miss Jackie and the Dixie Dog Fight going on. In practice, however, the show wasn’t that bad at all – sure the diva match was crap, but we did get to see Charlie Haas’ brilliant heel turn at the end. The Big Show’s handicap match was fun to watch in a very Andre-esque kind of way; the main event was superb; the tag title match had its share of moments and Funaki is the new WWE Cruiserweight champion. In fact, the only real disappointments for me were the U.S. Title match as they had to work around Jesus’ injuries and the Dixie Dog Fight.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – shoot fighting has no place in the world of professional wrestling. Hell, I’ve got a whole column lined up for this particular topic but, for now, I’ll stick to the event in hand. Daniel Puder is an ex-UFC fighter and Mike Mizanin isn’t, which means that Puder should have absolutely creamed him. The fact that it was just boxing (which is boring as hell, anyway) didn’t help, but either Puder isn’t as much of a shooter as people would have you believe or Mizanin is hard as nails, but doesn’t have as good a PR agent as Puder. One final thing – if this was a shoot fight to see who really was “tough enough” then why the hell bring it down to an audience vote to decide the winner? It should end on KO or submission, surely?

Anyway, we’re not here to be despondant – this is Truth or Consequences, dammit! This is the part of the web where they is always a nugget of gold in the sludge of poor booking and botched spots; a world where Lou Thesz never died, Harley Race never left the ring and El Gigante never entered one.

This week’s column was inspired by an e-mail I received from a reader regarding a comment made in my last missive about the state of wrestling in the mid-nineties. My point was that wrestling was on a downward turn at the time, just as it is today, but that big things were about to happen.

Cyrus Krapf-Altomare sent me the following e-mail…

“Here, here for positivity. If you dig out the PPVs from ’96, you’ll find they were all damn good. Shawn-Bret. Shawn-Sid. Yoko-Austin at Summerslam was great, though on the preview show. Austin winning the KOTR. Of course Bret-Austin. People tend to mention the fake Diesel and Razor more then they do Owen and the Bulldog’s great tag team antics. I’m a fan of the mid-90’s WWF and one of my big favorites right now is HHH, so you can see how I’m usually frustrated about the stuff that pops up on the net. I’m gonna read your archives. Good luck with this one!”

Thanks for the feedback, Cyrus. You’re quite right in what you say – of all the PPVs in 1996 not one of them was an out-and-out DUD. Every single one had at least one excellent match on the card, thanks to the sterling efforts of the main-eventers and some (Survivor Series springs to mind) were just flat-out awesome cards from end to end. You’ve mentioned a few of the main ones, but I’d also like to add Bret Hart vs. The Undertaker from the Royal Rumble, Shawn Michaels vs. Owen Hart from IYH 6, Shawn vs. Diesel from IYH 7, Steve Austin vs. Savio Vega from IYH 8 (perhaps the finest strap match ever), Shawn vs. Mankind at IYH: Mind Games…I could go on.

Of course, for every ****+ match that took place there was a handful of DUDs on the undercard that dragged down the quality overall and you’re quite right when you say that this is what history remembers. Just as Halloween Havoc ’91 is associated with the Chamber of Horrors match and little else, despite the top-notch matches between Austin and Dustin Rhodes and between Richard Morton and Brian Pillman, so the WWF in 1996 is remembered as the age of Fake Diesel, Fake Razor Ramon, Isaac Yankem, the return of the Ultimate Warrior and Terry Gordy (as the Executioner) and crap matches between Sid and Vader.

Make no mistake, 1996 was a great time for wrestling, but the viewing audience was still turning away in droves. The PPV buyrates weren’t completely abysmal but they were consderably worse than this year’s and most of them were down from the year before. Consider that for a moment – more people saw Mabel’s coronation at 1995’s King of the Ring, than saw Austin’s crowning moment the following year. If that’s not an indication of poor performance then I don’t know what is.

TV ratings were even worse. Today, Raw is hovering around the high-threes, with a fair few shows edge up towards a four and yet people are bemoaning the fact that it’s not 1999 anymore with regular fives and sixes. Back in ’96 I’m sure Vince would have been overjoyed to get a 3.5, as ratings for Raw were regularly in the low twos and even dropped as low as 1.8 at one point in October.

This in itself proves little about the quality of wrestling and yet people across the IWC continue to state that low ratings are the death-knell of World Wrestling Entertainment. They contend that this is due to poor angles, sub-standard wrestling action and lazy booking when really it is nothing of the sort. It’s more to do with the average punter (I hate using the word ‘mark’) having more choice in what they choose to watch on TV than any huge drop in quality. People aren’t turning off Raw in protest, but simply because there’s something they’d rather be watching on the other side. Let’s face it, of the millions of wrestling fans out there, there are scarce few of them who are obsessed enough to watch every single episode without fail and even fewer who are prepared to write about it like the IWC columnists. I watch Raw as often as possible, but even I will turn the channel if, say, there was a rare Boris Karloff film on one of the movie channels or something.

Your average fan will likely watch Raw if there’s nothing better on the TV and this is where the real problem lies. If Raw wants consistently high ratings it needs to provide a product that casual fans will care about and this can cause a major problem for certain IWC writers who obsess with workrate over storyline. Most casual fans couldn’t care less about analysing the matches, they want a strong build-up and a satisfactory finish. Granted, that’s what we all want, but most of us will forgive a poor angle if the matches are red-hot and some will crucify a brilliant angle if the matches suck.

The whole Kane-Lita angle is a prime case in point. It is the classic old-school wrestling angle of the heel splitting up the face couple of Matt Hardy and Lita, with a sprinkling of new-school attitude in Lita’s rape, Gene Snitsky causing a miscarriage and Kane having his throat crushed (albeit, just to give him adequate time off for filming Eye Scream Man.). I have thoroughly enjoyed this angle and yet a large portion of the IWC has seen fit to deride it for reasons that DON’T AFFECT THE ANGLE. Things like Gene Snitsky being too green for such a prominent role, or Matt Hardy being too good for such a ludicrous angle. Who cares? As far as Snitsky is concerned, everyone has to start somewhere and the guy is at least as good as the majority of OVW big men who come into the company, having made something of a name for himself in Wild Samoan Afa’s WXW. Yes, he character is a baby-killing, throat crushing, Maven destroying heel but I’ll be damned if the guy isn’t funny as Hell, by sheer virtue of playing the role so over the top. As for Matt Hardy being too good for the part – yes, I know that and you know that but to the average fan (i.e. the WWE’s core audience) Jeff Hardy was always the talented one, because he was the one who liked to jump of high places. Before you start e-mailing me, let me state for the record that Matt Hardy is one of the most talented wrestlers on the WWE roster today, in that he is an all-round performer. He’s good in the ring, great on the mic and he can get a crowd behind him or against him as he sees fit, with or without his more popular sibling. You only have to look at early 2003 and his run for the Cruiserweight belt to see that. Since then he has been misused by WWE, having to job to Zach Gowen and scarcely getting any PPV or TV time. This Kane angle was great – it danced around kayfabe, as most people knew that Matt and Lita were going steady in real life, it gave him some great TV time and he looked like a hero when he crashed the wedding. It was thrilling TV, yet the IWC picked it apart for its ridiculousness. Erm – we’re talking about a sport where people pretend to beat each other up and where a guy like Rey Mysterio can get a win over the Big Show – reality doesn’t really come into it.

Anyway – back to 1996. The other thing that sometimes gets forgotten is how much the WWF was planning for its future. Granted, it might not have been intentional, but the midcard ranks at the time were the strongest they had been for a long time. The main event scene might have been dominated by Shawn, Bret, Austin, Owen, Undertaker and the Bulldog, but below them you had some real talent.

Marc Mero, Goldust, Savio Vega, Mankind and, of course, Hunter Hearst-Helmsley were all prominent members of the undercard at the time and they all had one thing going for them – consistency. It may have been a rare moment for them to pull off a 5-star classic (though Mero and Vega nearly managed it against Austin) but it was equally unlikely for them to produce DUDs. Generally they put on matches that were fun to watch, but had little to mark them out in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, Vega and Mero didn’t do anything with their spot, but the others did. Foley and Triple H in particularly climbed to the very top of the mountain and what was once a midcard feud became one of the hottest angles in wrestling history a few years later.

Again, this is were the WWE seems to need a little work today. There are a lot of great young guys out there, hungry for a push and some of them could be the next Triple H or Mick Foley. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to spend enough time learning their craft – and I’m not just talking about in the ring here. Wrestlers are entertainers – they are superstars. They need to have a certain charisma or a little bit of an edge to get over. Gimmicks can help, but they are really more of a marketing tool than anything else. Mankind was a stupid gimmick in the grand scheme of things, but Mick Foley got over through his only natural charisma, his selling and the fact that he’s just a mad bastard, bless ‘im. Look at Eugene – again a stupid gimmick, but the man is over and it’s got nothing to do with sympathy, it’s because Nick Dinsmore just has something about him that makes you want to watch his matches. Shelton Benjamin has some of that too, as do the likes of Paul London and, to a lesser extent, Orlando Jordan and Gene Snitsky. Maven should improve now that he’s a heel, though I fear he may never avoid the stigma of being a Tough Enough winner. These guys need to be given time to shine – never mind giving Triple H 20 minute interviews to open the show and a 15 minute heel beatdown to close it. Trim some of the fat and let the boys wrestle.

One final thing. Wrestling matches don’t have to mean anything in the long term in order to be enjoyable – we don’t need to only see a match if there is a history to it, nor do we only have to watch matches that became more important as the years went by. It’s great just to sit back sometimes and watch a match that meant f*ck-all back in the day and still means f*ck-all now.

One of my favourite matches from KOTR ’96 was the Free-For-All opener, between the Bodydonnas and the New Rockers. It was short, largely pointless and scarcely remembered by most, but it was just great fun to watch from end-to-end. I wish more matches could be like that…we don’t need endless run-ins, Dusty finishes and cheap DQ ‘victories’ just to protect someone’s heat. Just give a few curtain-jerkers six or seven minutes of ring-time and let them work some magic out there.

The WWE isn’t coming to an end any time soon, it just needs a bit of time to focus on it’s priorities. If you’re sick and tired of the main event scene, then there is plenty of other stuff out there. Try checking out Heat or Velocity once in a while for some great matches that, like it or not, will never make it to PPV. Alternatively, find your local tape trader and get him or her to send you some Christmas joy.

That’s it for this week, I’ll be back before Christmas Eve with a new column, but until then, let me know what you think of my musings so far.

Before I leave for the week it’s time to break out the plugs…

Check out SiMania and Hot Stuff International for the very best in wrestling tapes…and don’t forget to tell them who sent you.

Also – check out FuriousRage for some of the finest PPV and tape reviews you’ll find on the ‘Net.

Until the next time…farewell.