Okay, first of all, let’s start off with the personal stuff. As I suspected would happen, they fired me last week (that wasn’t the reason for the absence of columns; I’ll get into that in the next graph, thank you). It was the last week they could do it, both bosses were out of town so they wouldn’t have to face me while doing it, etc. Well, thank God for that. I couldn’t stand to spend another second in that festering cesspit. It saved me the effort of having to quit, and I prefer it this way because I can collect unemployment. So if unemployment can pay my bills and rent, I can hold out for a while. Besides, I’ve already received a few calls from recruiters, so something may be in the offing. So I’m not broken up about this at all. In fact, as I left the building for the last time, I was smiling and laughing. I’m sure people didn’t know what to make of that, especially since I never smiled and laughed in front of them before. I feel damn good right now. So I’ve set the wheels in motion to get out of this piece of shit town, and let’s hope it happens quickly.
Now, as to the lack of columns last week. Thanks to a bad IDE cable, both of my drives were corrupted. One of them still is, but I’m holding off on doing final repairs on it until such time as I get other stuff done. When I got the other drive working, I needed to do a fresh install of Windows, and I went back to 32-bit due to the fact that there were just too many incompatibilities and problems to be had with 64-bit. It’s just too new, and the fact that 64-bit was based on Windows Server 2003 doesn’t mean there’s the massive already-installed base that greeted Windows XP on its release. Nobody bothered to do things like drivers and such for WinServ2k3. It took me all of last week to correct the problems, get the hard drive properly formatted as to its size, and get Windows reinstalled and up and running. In fact, it was literally all of last week. I started getting stuff fixed up on Sunday and finished on Saturday night. I did it carefully enough that all I lost were my bookmarks. Big f*cking deal. It allowed me to do a wholesale cleaning on those and get rid of all the bookmarks to sites I haven’t visited in years and will never visit again. So I had to get my system actually up and running to do this thing, which it wasn’t capable of last week. So now it is, and now I’m back. Come on, you know I never miss Tuesdays unless I absolutely can’t do it. The other two, meh, but Tuesdays? No. That’s a sacred bond.
Good weekend, actually. Between a massive Dalek invasion force hovering near Earth and an ECW PPV, I’m a happy camper (and I have to admit that Doctor Who is ramping up to one helluva season closer next week). I’ve finished downloading One-Night Stand so I can watch it and comment on the activity therein. And I have enough free time to give this column the care and devotion that it deserves (hey, Fleabag says I’m on a roll, and I plan to continue on one). So let’s get into it…
THE PIMP SECTION
Lucard goes into more detail about the mystic and such. And he name-checks Madame Blavatsky this week.
Gloomchen gets on an angry roll this week, and all the better for it.
Misha really has nothing on tap for this week’s releases. Sucks having nothing to work with. Trust me, I know.
Hevia has better pictures than I do, but I do actual screen caps, not pub shots. So there.
Hatton needs to turn his AC on, and get rid of his friends on occasion.
Stevens has DC up and running again.
Price finally does what most sane Americans did a long time ago: tells NASCAR to f*ck off.
Goldberg thinks everything sucks. Well, except the vodka, but that’s cool.
THE PROBABLE FINAL WORD ON ONE-NIGHT STAND
Well, there was no reference to it on Raw except for the replay pimp, so that brings it down to me to bring it out to a close.
I have to admit that I was never really into ECW per se during its heyday. Wrong place, wrong time, really. ECW didn’t really get big in Chicago until after I left for Ohio, and by the time I got to Ohio, the fandom there was already starting to die down. So I don’t possess this mystical reverence for ECW that a lot of people have. I’m thinking back to the way Sean Shannon treated it back in the day, and it’s almost embarassing right now. I mean, he called Sabu the best wrestler in the world, for Christ’s sake. No, really, he did. The bond is there, it’s just not very pronounced.
But it was still an object of massive curiosity for me as to whether they could actually do something like this. Bring back the spirit and the feel and all that. They did a pretty good job of pimping it on Raw and Smackdown over the past few weeks, and the atmosphere was certainly set with Byte This (which Fleabag said I HAD to hear and which I downloaded after I hung up the phone with him). But the proof is in the pudding, as the kids say. So did they do it?
Before we get to that, let’s deal with the Joey Styles issue. When it was confirmed that he’d be announcing the PPV, the knives came out. Everyone started attacking him as a hypocrite for his “I won’t work for WWE” stance. Suddenly, they need him and he comes, like the faithful dog to Heyman that he is. His leash may be held by Ryder now, but that dog knows his old master’s voice. Apparently Heyman did a serious sell job on him convincing him that 1) this wasn’t going to be watered down and 2) it wouldn’t be ECW without him. I presume it was a serious sell job, because Styles does have a little integrity. Not much (he hangs around with Ryder, for God’s sake), but some. But I appreciate the effort it took to get him in there. I also hope they took the time to demonstrate to him the inner workings of WWE and how it’d be a pretty good place for him to work. With Styles in their clutches for a short time, it was the perfect opportunity to ditch Ross and kick him upstairs to concentrate on his Talent Relations position. And with the draft going on, it’d be simplicity itself. Michael Cole gets drafted to Raw, they do a three-man for a few weeks until Ross can be conveniently ditched away courtesy of an injury angle, Long “hires” Styles to replace Cole. This gives us two strong booths on the shows. Cole’s learned enough to control Lawler’s flights of fancy, and Styles/Tazz gives Smackdown an edge and an ECW-esque vibe that it definitely needs right now (it’s become by far the blander of the two shows). In fact, don’t be surprised if this actually happens, folks. They’ve been wanting to get Styles on board. If he drank the Kool-Aid ™ while he was doing One-Night Stand…
Oh, yeah, he drank the Kool-Aid ™
…well, that’s just speculation. On to the more concrete stuff.
Well, it’s natural then that my first quibble has to be about Styles. Chris Jericho was trying to bring back the Lionheart for the night. Styles exclaimed during his entrance that “this wasn’t Y2J, this was before Y2J”. Then what was that entrance music I heard them play for him? Oh, yeah, it’s his WWE theme. Kinda just undercuts everything, doesn’t it?
Of course, we should talk about the Jericho/Storm match itself. It’s hard to divest emotion from this one and look analytically upon it. It’s Lance’s last match, and the IWC loves the guy to death. For good reason. He’s a great technical wrestler and a great guy. So he and Jericho, who faced off against each other in their mutual first match, went out and put on a school. We didn’t expect anything less from them, after all. It was just nice pure wrestling and showcased each guy to their best extent. Nothing magnificent, nothing spectacular, just solid, solid, wrestling, more of a tribute to the ethics that were instilled in them in the Dungeon than a tribute to Storm individually. After all, that’s what Storm is doing right now, he wants to carry the Dungeon to a new generation of guys. I’m not even going to complain about the ending. It’s only right and proper that the Impact Players, all four of them, be reunited in the ring one final time. Say what you want about P. J., but he and Lance carried the ECW tag division for a long time. All in all, an appropriate match and an appropriate tone to start the evening. Thank you, Lance, and thank you for all of your testicle ecstacy.
Sometimes a picture just says it all
There was something else that did annoy me about that match, though. I know it was the whole nostalgia trip, and it wouldn’t be the “old days” without it, but was it really appropriate to call a visibly-pregnant Dawn Marie a crack whore? It just seemed so out of place, for some reason. Oh, yeah, the bun in the oven and all that. Come on, here’s a woman in the full glow of expectant motherhood. Don’t ruin the beauty for everyone. Of course, Sytch wasn’t going to be there, so the crack whore chant had to be used sometime.
The memorial spot has been absolutely lambasted for ignoring certain people (especially Brian Pillman), but if there was a full list of guys who contributed to ECW that had to be paid tribute to, that would have eaten up the rest of the goddamn PPV. It’s a dangerous business, and nothing is more dangerous than seeking thrills. It’s too easy to go extreme that way, and when you go extreme, you crash. Hard.
Weird thing, the Three-Way Dance. It seemed to be going too damn slow. Dunno if it was me or what, but I expected something a lot faster. Of course, with everyone but Super Crazy having to have an entourage that’d be excessive even by J-Ho’s standard (but it was great to see Jim Miller back in the house; please, get WWE to hire you, because we need more male managers in the biz), maybe it was just the entrances that killed it, and if the entrances didn’t, the damn clusterf*ck leading up to the first fall did. But something good has got to come out of this, namely WWE picking up Super Crazy for Smackdown. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, they don’t know what to do with the cruisers they have. However, Rey-Rey has shown there’s a market for a WWE-ized lucha, and they should tap into it a little bit more than they have. Well, shit, I’ve always loved Super Crazy anyway, so I’m not an unbiased observer or anything like that. However, I did like the fact that he went over. Essentially, this was a triple-“promotional” (or better yet, triple-brand) match: Little Guido from Smackdown, Tajiri from Raw, and Super Crazy being pure ECW. WWE allowed its higher-visibility guys to get jobbed to someone that I don’t think anyone in “creative” even knows about. So let’s hope that this does bode well for Super Crazy. Maybe if he were on Smackdown every week, I’d make the effort to actually do the goddamn Short Form.
Get him his f*cking green card, now
And speaking of green cards…yeah, Psicosis brings some baggage to the table. He’s had his troubles in the past, and he seems to be slightly over-the-hill (unlike Rey-Rey, who seems to just be hitting his stride, amazing how long considering he’s been around). But he might be worth a look as a mid-carder or perhaps as an IC challenger if things go right. The point is that WWE can do something with these guys, and provide a refresh for their product at the same time. This PPV is a goldmine in terms of an audition reel for the wrestlers involved. I think it’s actually better for Psicosis’ case that he and Rey-Rey didn’t wrestle in a pure lucha style. The match showed Psicosis’ ability to wrestle WWE-style if necessary (and this was a very, very WWE-style match). He could be yet another fit. Of course, if ECW gets revived full-time, he’s in.
Another entry from the Mexican Kama Sutra
It was during this PPV that I finally realized that the Brand Split was successful. Yeah, it took me this long, despite Hyatte’s (quasi-) weekly notices. Every time I thought I’d accepted it, some reservations would always crop up. But those were eliminated once and for all the moment the crowd started up the “Fuck You, Smackdown” chants. Here are ECW fans. Well, at least they behaved like an ECW crowd close enough to be regarded as something out of the Bingo Hall. ECW fans have always been the smartest of smarks. They know that’s what is now being presented to them is a three-headed hydra. Yet these people chose to cement the identity that WWE has been trying to establish since the Brand Split. They’d normally be the last people who’d do that; the only such group they’d give that level of identity to would be, well, ECW itself. Yet it wasn’t “Fuck You, Angle” or “Fuck You, Bradshaw”, it was “Fuck You, Smackdown”. The identity has become ingrained. The Brand Split worked. They actually got something right. It took a long time, but they got it right. Now, let’s do something substantial with that.
“The bearer of this ticket gets one free ass-kicking of Blue Meanie”, huh?
So, Rob Van Dam can still cut a promo? That was interesting to find out. Yeah, he’s right. He used to be a pretty good mic guy in ECW, and that’s gone to waste in WWE in their eternal quest of making him out to be the quintessential slacker/toker. He’s got a right to be pissed. Unfortunately for him, he still can’t string two coherent thoughts together. Screaming in a throaty yet high upper register while attempting in a futile manner to string those thoughts together isn’t the best way to get your point across. Either he needs more practice, or he needs to keep doing what he has been. That seems a little contradictory on my part, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just memory playing tricks on me. Or maybe it’s that f*cking whistle. No matter how many years go by, I still want to shove it up Fonzie’s ass.
And speaking of things I want to shove up people’s asses, let me flash back to Sean Shannon’s incredibly misguided (to say the least) opinion about Sabu’s talents. The guy’s
not only overrated as a wrestler, but as a maniac as well. Or maybe it’s just that we’re jaded seeing all this “extreme” bullshit over the years, and Sabu was more of a, well, pioneer in that regard. But I still can’t watch seeing a Sabu match (the recent matches with Raven in TNA are actually an exception because those two work so well together in covering up Sabu’s weaknesses). Add to the fact that Rhyno is in there…you know, I shouldn’t bitch about Rhyno. It isn’t his fault that he ended up holding the ECW belt when the promotion folded. It isn’t his fault how he was misused by WWE so extensively that they decided to cut him. But he’s a symptom of something being wrong inside the body wrestling. Only a promotion at the end of its rope would drape the belts on him. Only a promotion with no clear creative direction would turn a guy into a monster one week and a jobber the next, lather, rinse, repeat. It may just be a coincidence that he was there, but from an epidemiological standpoint, his presence indicates disease. That’s why I can’t get into the guy. I’m sick enough to begin with.
Attention: train wreck in progress
Weird Irony stuck during the Benoit/Eddy match. “Fuck You, Bischoff” chants started up. Now, if memory again serves me correctly, isn’t Eric Bischoff the first person in the US to give us Benoit/Eddy? They’d wrestled in Japan against each other before coming back here, but, as was made clear by Styles, they’d never wrestled against each other in ECW. It took WCW to bring them into the same ring against each other. So that’s gratitude for you.
Now, as to the match…well, I’m going to do something I rarely do: echo Milord. Seeing me agree with Scherer is an almost unique experience, so savor it while it lasts. He said that he expected an MotY candidate match out of them given the circumstances. Well, so did I. I expect the entire world when these two guys get it on. I mean, you start grading at four snowflakes and take it from there when it comes to them. But this one just didn’t live up to expectations. It was very good from a technical standpoint, and it wasn’t an embarassment or anything, but, well, I blame Eddy for this one. He got so wrapped up in playing the heel. He was almost telegraphing the fact that he and Benoit are going to be programmed against each other on Smackdown, and didn’t want to spoil anything. He didn’t want to tip his hand too much or leave a standard that the rest of the program would have to live up to. Benoit was more willing to let things go. It’s actually a sort of good sign from Eddy, because he’s concerned about the program as a whole and not about the circumstance that they happen to be fighting on this unconnected card. However, when wrestlers start to become Method actors, there’s a bad sign.
Our Lord and Savior versus Latino Jesus in an ECW ring: Nerdvana
Gertner’s depressed because Bisch wouldn’t let him recite a poem
Another match that didn’t turn out to my taste was Awesome/Tanaka. I would have preferred more of a showcase for Tanaka and a little less emphasis on tables. It was a good ECW-style match, though. More wood than a Catholic boys’ field trip to a whorehouse. That must count for something. But what I really wanted was for Tanaka to be given a chance to shine a bit. Out of all the people I wanted to see come out of this PPV with a WWE contract, it was Tanaka. That’s not going to happen, but it looks like if someone has a little stroke with Ross and Vince, Awesome might be getting a second chance. Put him on Raw, let him f*ck with Kane and/or Snitsky. Vince Loves Big Guys.
Are we done showing off for Vince, Mister Awesome?
Tanaka suddenly realizes that Snitsky has a WWE contract and he doesn’t
And now that brings us to the most “controversial” aspect of the show, Heyman’s shoot promo. I’m not going to buy into it whole. The part about Bisch, yeah, I’ll accept it as complete shoot, especially after the commentary on Byte This. Magnify this with the Mike Awesome comments made by Styles during the show itself. The Awesome situation is almost certainly still a bitter one (Styles was shooting, by the way). In retrospect, Mike Awesome’s defection was what put ECW into its final creative death spiral. It was the most egregious talent raid that Bisch had performed on ECW, and it came at the worst possible time. But back to what I was talking about. So the stuff about Bisch, yeah, definite shoot. However, as Paul E. is wont to do, reality shifted slightly. The attack on Edge, other than the mention of Matt Hardy, was a work. It was done definitely to assist in Edge’s push, so classify this as more of a pimp than a work, really. It meshed completely into the set-up on Raw with Kane and Lita the next night. As for High-Quality Speaker Boy, that was a work as well, answering the promos from the last few Smackdowns. All in all, it was classic Paul E., meshing fantasy and reality in a way that only he knows how to do in Sports Entertainment. Essentially, his promo was a microcosm of ECW itself, and if things don’t go well, its eulogy as well. Good job.
Genius comes in all guises. Not necessarily this one.
Okay, you fifteen-year-olds of all ages can crop this and use it as the avatar on those whiteboards you go to
The main event was an appropriate choice, really. Except for Raven and Tazz, there’s no people who better represent ECW than Tommy Dreamer, Sandman, and the Dudleys. It’s only fitting that they get the main. You know, I couldn’t believe how much I missed the five-minute Sandman Entrance until I saw it again. So the PPV succeeded in obtaining a little nostalgia value for me in that regard. And the pre-match shenanigans…well, it was fun to see everyone again, you know. And I think that Kid Kash was angling for a job with that springboard moonsault into the crowd of wrestlers. Of course, he’s an ego run rampant, so they’re not going to take a chance on him, which is sorta too bad, really. When his mouth isn’t running, he’s damn good in the ring.
As for the match, it seemed to try for that perfect distillation of ECW and almost succeeded. The weapons, the mayhem, the run-ins…as I said, it came close. The only problem was that the format forced them into shoving all this stuff into one match. Albeit they gave a lot of time to it (well, not too much, since the show ran short), so it worked out. It was close enough to the real thing for proper credit to be given. And, hell, the guys were really enjoying themselves out there. In general, it was very well-calculated and well-booked; hell, they even got the right two women for the catfight. Bottom line is, it was damn fun to watch. It also makes me skeptical of continuing ECW on a regular basis (as the majority of people in Da Meltz’s poll wanted; 51% said to take over Heat’s timeslot). Something like this is refreshing once in a while, but a full diet of it? I dunno.
Well, we haven’t seen this in a long time
I hope I don’t have to do something like this to get my next job
Francine hasn’t aged too ba…oh, who am I kidding?
But Beulah has aged well
Who cares if it was contrived? It’s Beulah and Francine cat-fighting!
Tommy Dreamer through a flaming table. This is truly ECW.
It wasn’t a phenomenal PPV by any stretch of the imagination. It did come as close as possible to the full ECW experience. But it’s definitely a success d’estime. It deserves another shot sometime, and let’s hope that the viewing figures and DVD sales of this are good enough to put it on WWE’s calendar again.
MOUNTAIN, MOLEHILL, ETC.
Thanks to a total lack of actual real news out there, everything’s still dominated by the fallout from the High-Quality Speaker Boy/Blue Meanie shoot at One-Night Stand. It’s enough to drive a good columnist crazy, and a crazy columnist desperate for some material driven to comment about it, and Big Johnson proved that when he hit the slush e-mail pile and started putting up stuff at 1bullshit Junior about what some guy in the crowd at the Hammerstein saw after High-Quality Speaker Boy was done turning Meanie into a meat puppet.
I won’t quote, but basically what the unpaid stringer said was that apparently Tracy Smothers had picked up on the fact High-Quality Speaker Boy was shooting on Meanie and started to get his licks in. Then, the fact penetrated the brains of Balls Mahoney, Mikey Whipwreck, and Sandman…hold it, Sandman had a fact penetrate his brain?…and they started shooting as well. It was then that Buh Buh Ray saw what was going on and pulled High-Quality Speaker Boy away from them. Apparently this was the save, as Buh Buh Ray got a punch in and sent him back to the WWE guys. The unpaid stringer wasn’t sure whether or not that punch was a shoot; if he knew anything about Buh Buh Ray, he’d know that it was a worked punch to get High-Quality Speaker Boy to safety; Buh Buh Ray is a very, very smart guy and very aware of the fact that this was a dangerous situation from a job perspective, what with four guys not under contract whaling away on an upper-card heel and him able to make the save. You think that Vince would ever forgive him if he didn’t?. Besides, Buh Buh Ray is one of those truly good guys in the business that you occasionally hear about. He’d want to protect his ECW friends, some of whom might have been in line for a pick-up if permanent ECW plans were being made, and he’d want to protect High-Quality Speaker Boy as well, because Buh Buh Ray knows far better than he does what happens to ECW guys who get a bit of adrenaline going. And that, apparently, was the end of it.
I just went through that portion of the PPV. The camera wasn’t focused on High-Quality Speaker Boy and Blue Meanie, but we got a great view of the rest of the stuff, and it was true that Smothers, Whipwreck, Mahoney, and Sandman were all beating the crap out of High-Quality Speaker Boy. Buh Buh Ray did pull him out and gave him a rather perfunctory punch. There was a camera right on the two at the time, and Buh Buh Ray was definitely covering ass by making the rescue look like part of the brawl. So who was shooting and who wasn’t? Who knows? It was total mayhem going on in there. But Meanie was busted wide open from his wounds from Hardcore Homecoming opening back up.
What seems to have escaped everyone’s notice is this little fact: we’re talking about High-Quality Speaker Boy and the Blue Meanie. Why the hell are we wasting so much typing motion on those two? Meanie blabs off on his website about how deficient High-Quality Speaker Boy is as a champion and wrestler; like he wasn’t saying the same things that most of us were. He was deficient in every aspect except on the mic, and it took him time to get into that groove (about a month and a half or so after he got the strap, if memory serves). But getting away from that, Meanie was just commenting as an “expert” in the wrestling business, and as a neutral party, was providing what he felt was constructive criticism. Well, I think so. Actually, I’m not the best person to judge that because of my well-known feeling that the only opinion that matters in wrestling is mine. But High-Quality Speaker Boy took it badly, mostly because it was a fellow wrestler talking about him that way. I mean, Scooter’s said things a billion times worse than Meanie about High-Quality Speaker Boy, and you don’t see him flying out to central Canada tracking him down, do you?
That being said, though, you have to remember that we’re talking about High-Quality Speaker Boy, whose judgment has been shown to be quite questionable on occasion. Does everyone remember the Germany Situation? High-Quality Speaker Boy goes into a ring in Germany and starts cutting a promo accusing the audience of being unreconstructed Nazis, among other things? Almost causes him to get himself indicted in Germany because he’s violated German law? Does that spark anything in anyone’s neurons? And he got away with it corporate-speaking because he was getting a Blowjob Push, when literally everyone (and I mean everyone; me, Meltz, Milord, people who wouldn’t have anything to agree on in any other circumstance) was saying that he should have been disciplined in some public fashion like a suspension? This is also the same guy whose idea of a hazing ritual was going one step away from gay rape. He also cut an anti-Meanie shoot at a Smackdown taping which got cut from broadcast. So is it really out of anyone’s imagination, especially the guys backstage, that he’d flake and go after Meanie when the opportunity presented itself, especially when this was an ECW PPV where he could get away with doing so with pretty much a free pass? Let’s face it, we’re dealing with a person here who’s a few gallons short of a barrel, and whose reckless behavior would have no consequences given his position.
So shit happened between them and everyone was surprised. We in the IWC possess a near-infinite capacity for vacating our minds when the time is convenient. It makes suspending disbelief easier, and that’s difficult enough the more smarky you get about this business. Shit, we can suspend disbelief so well that we can believe that Michael Jackson really was innocent. So it shocks, shocks, us, I say, that High-Quality Speaker Boy would initiate a fight with an overweight guy who once f*cked a porn star. And then we have to write about it. In copious volumes, turning every single angle over like an anteater looking for its dinner under rocks, debating every single second of it like it’s the Zapruder Film. All the while, we’re deluded into believing that this is not only surprising, it’s important. It’s High-Quality Speaker Boy and Blue Meanie! Two completely useless individuals who don’t have the most sterling of track records to begin with (Meanie’s being better in that department, of course; after all, he did f*ck Jasmine St. Clair, but, hey, who hasn’t?). And we waste our time typing this stuff out and thinking about it.
How useless. But, Eric, you say, you just typed out a whole bunch of stuff about this. Doesn’t this undercut your point? No, not at all. Unlike everyone else, I’m admitting this to you: I’m doing this as filler. At the time I typed this, I hadn’t finished downloading One-Night Stand yet and I needed something to start putting into this column for fear of it being shorter than Trip’s dick after the ‘roids. It gives me the chance to get a catharthic jeremiad in print about the stupid behavior of two human beings in front of a live PPV audience and about the stupid behavior of the chroniclers of their actions. So it serves my purposes. Only I’m cynical enough to admit it and not trying to disguise it as being part of the “complete record”.
And let’s hope they’re not disguising Raw like they usually are…
THE SHORT FORM
Match Results:
Mohammed Hassan over Shelton Benjamin, Intercontinental Title Match (DQ, Wife-Beater-ference): Thanks to repeated viewings of this particular match (and all its variations on a theme) over the weeks, WWE seems to have stumbled onto a good fit between these two. Benjy’s matured during his reign enough to set the pace of a match, and Hassan is just good enough to keep up with Benjy and fill in the blank spaces. Thus, together, they create a good, solid wrestling match where nothing’s really spectacular per se (although Benjy does try, I’ll give him that), but there are no real flaws or gaps. You’re not going to get another Steamboat/Flair these days, but I’ll accept something like this. As for Wife-Beater, well, he was there to burnish Hassan’s heel cred in order to make a title reign more viable, and until the end, he remained relatively innocuous (if still unctuous and noxious), so I won’t take down the match on that basis.
Chris Jericho and John Cena over Christian and Tyson Tomko (Pinfall, Cena pins Tomko, F-U): The match was nothing special. I expected it to be a Transition Showcase for Cena, and it was, thus sending me scurrying to the confines of a good book (weird to think that Smackdown, the supposed “purer” wrestling show, was utterly dependent on the dynamic of two inferior wrestlers for so long prior to last week). Of course, they pulled the trigger on the Jericho turn afterward and laid Jericho as a contender for the WWE title. The Triple Threat will help disguise Cena’s deficiencies (and it’s not a vote of confidence in either Jericho or Christian that “creative” believes that they can individually carry Cena to a good match, but, really, that’s too much for anyone to handle), and it should set up a good one-on-one feud between the two for afterward. The matches will suck, but the promos will be platinum.
Viscera over Maven (Pinfall, sit-out powerbomb): And to cement Viscera’s newly-won mid-card facehood, he gets the tradition treatment: has Maven fed to him. Boy, that book got a lot of use during this match.
Kane versus Sylvain Grenier (Pinfall, chokeslam): And since we didn’t get fed enough in the last match, they decided to do a little more. Of course, this was all a set-up to the whole Edge/Lita marriage next week, which gets their almost-contractual-like obligation for a wedding a year out of the way (and they’ve involved Lita in the last two now). Of course, if they use this as an excuse to rehire Matt Hardy and have him do the run-in (hey, just like the last one), then the whole IWC will spooge their jeans and not realize how incredibly cynical that kind of move is. In which case, I get to beat on both Hardy and the IWC. This is, of course, good for me, and that’s all that matters.
Angle Developments:
As If Last Night Wasn’t Bad Enough: The moment the glass broke for the opening extravaganza, I was so thrilled that I came back into my home office to type out more of the High-Quality Speaker Boy/Blue Meanie stuff. Just shows you how far I think that Wife-Beater is on the lifeform scale these days. It’s bad enough that he showed up at One-Night Stand, but to have him on Raw really torques me off. Vince is getting him back in through the back door, and that’s where I feel this particular broomstick is being shoved up on me.
Existential Quandaries 101: So who is the more humiliated: Sergeant Slaughter for having to deal with Chris Masters, or Chris Masters for having to deal with Sergeant Slaughter? Sounds to me like it’s a lose-lose situation.
A Logistical Question: Okay, so the WWE champion ended up on Raw. But the WWE championship itself is a property of Smackdown. Just because the titleholder is in one place doesn’t necessarily mean that the championship is there with him. It’s not personal property. Wouldn’t it be more fun to use this particular skein of logic to have Teddy Long counter Bisch’s booking of WWE championship matches and have Long book the matches for his brand’s title? That would tick off Bisch to no end and provide a nice continuation for his “flustered GM” act that he did so well with the ECW situation. Of course, I can think of this in three seconds, but “creative” can’t.
4-F: Before I start, kudos to Trip for using the term “gimmick infringement” in a promo. That may be a first. Okay, now let’s dissect Angle switching shows. Raw needed someone to replace Benoit in the upper-card at the highest of talent levels. They got that. Angle needed to escape from that rapidly-descending feud with Booker he was involved in. I understand perfectly well. He’s got an insta-feud with Michaels. He can be immediately plugged into the upper card without anyone breaking sweat or losing credibility (unlike Cena, if you think about it; who’s Cena f*cking around with compared to Angle?). But I do have to be a little cynical about his positioning as a tweener. Yeah, Trip’s got to remain top heel. We all know why, so it’s no use entering into more futile discourse on this. Angle can’t go full face while Batista’s holding the belt (and he’ll drop it at Vengeance, allowing enough time for Trip to get drafted to Smackdown). Angle does have the promo talent to pull the balancing act off. But I still have to question why him in particular. Right now, there’s no room for him in his natural position (at the upper card) on Raw. All of the ecological niches are being filled. They’re having to shoehorn him in in order to prop him up instead of just sliding him in courtesy of a feud with Michaels. It seems like they’re trying to do too much with Angle immediately rather than just having nature take its course. It would have been smart to let Angle just come in, handle the business with Michaels (as a full heel), then let him segue in to the title picture. It’s not like Angle has to be pushed immediately or die; he’s proved his worth time and time again. This is one of those situations that just has me shaking my head. And don’t be surprised if the match changes from Angle/Batista to Angle/Trip versus Michaels/Batista in a PPV Tag Pimp next week.
I think I’ll close this puppy off for now. Since I have no distractions, I should get something in tomorrow. Until then, have a good one.
