Admit it. Everyone who watched Raw last week felt surprise and anticipation during the Edge-Lita wedding when Matt Hardy’s ring entrance music and video exploded throughout the America West Arena in Phoenix, Arizona. The question is, was it a swerve, or a harbinger of things to come?
TODAY’S ISSUE: Is Matt Hardy coming back to WWE?
To me, the question is really this: is Vince not only dumb enough that he fails to realize the potential money-making storyline he’s throwing away by NOT bringing Matt back, but also arrogant enough to swerve his paying customers by teasing a wrestler he has no intention of delivering?
Trust me, Vince is certainly capable of pissing off his fans just to make a personal point to somebody. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was just thumbing his nose at Matt by teasing his appearance last week. Vince is one of the most self-centered, shortsighted promoters in the history of the business, and that covers quite a lot of ground.
However, even a blind man could see the wave of support for Matt Hardy by fans all over the world. Vince would be simply making a bad business decision to ignore the desires of his paying customers, although, this wouldn’t be the first time Vince made a bad business decision. The list of McMahon’s grand failures and stupid ideas is lengthy indeed: WBF, XFL, No Holds Barred (and the ensuing Zeus-Hogan feud on WWF programming), the InVasion angle, et cetera. For a millionaire or billionaire, depending upon the current value of Vince’s stock holdings, the man certainly doesn’t seem to display many good business practices.
But think about this: Vince, or at least some of smart people that work for him, must be aware of how the IWC works. Perhaps they’ve scripted the first true internet angle! Maybe he NEVER fired Matt Hardy. Maybe this entire scenario has been a work. Maybe Vince has been playing us all like violins from the beginning, and Matt has just been following corporate instructions every step of the way by posting all his rants online. Maybe this was all done for the benefit of internet fans! Yeah, and maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt. I suppose anything is possible, but I can’t see WWE being that clever. We’re talking about the same company that buries their up-and-comers to appease the egos of veterans who have outlived their usefulness as main-eventers. WWE also spends thousands of dollars to create and hype new gimmicks like Mordecai, and then when those gimmicks fail weeks later, they toss the character and the wrestler on the scrap heap. Brilliant, no?
They protect Chris Masters, who admittedly looks phenomenal, from having to wrestle on television because he can’t wrestle. I know they changed the “F” to an “E”, but the second “W” still stands for wrestling, doesn’t it?
I don’t know. A few of my colleagues here on the Pulse thought the Matt tease HAD to foreshadow a Hardy appearance at Vengeance Sunday night. I certainly wanted to see that. Matt has the tools to perform on the big stage, and the storyline havoc he could create right now would make things really hot around WWE television for a while. I never thought he deserved to be punished just for telling his side of the story in public. It’s not like Vince was all that concerned that the news of Amy and Adam’s affair would hit the streets; he’s certainly not covering it up now. Lita and Edge are together in a storyline of treachery and deceit, however, the key player in their affair has been replaced by a really tall, muscular guy. After all, Kane is far larger than Matt, so he must be better suited to play the jilted lover, right?
Speaking of the Lita-Edge-Kane angle, I have a few storyline questions. Am I supposed to feel sorry for the psycho-freak who forced himself on Lita and married her against her will? Am I supposed to hate Snitsky, the man who accidentally destroyed Kane and Lita’s would-be demon spawn still in her womb, when all Snitsky tried to do was protect himself from Kane’s insane rampage? Am I supposed to consider Lita a Jezebel for not wanting to be with the psycho-freak anymore? Hell, she should have filed for divorce or annulment the morning after their wedding on Raw anyway! I’m glad she finally did, and I’m releaved she’s not going to carry Kane’s Little Red Machine to term. The world does not need another junior psycho-freak on the loose.
Am I supposed to hate Edge for hooking up with Lita while she was basically enslaved to Kane? I think any red-blooded, heterosexual, American man would have wanted to swoop in and rescue Lita from her sweaty, disgusting, nasty, demented, evil psycho-freak husband.
Keep in mind, Kane is the same man who set fire to Jim Ross, and who hit a defenseless Linda McMahon with a tombstone piledriver on the metal ramp. He has terrorized innocent people in front of our eyes for years. He’s an abhorrent, pitiful excuse for a human being, and I feel like he’s finally getting what’s coming to him. Whoever thought turning Kane face was a good idea has a very strange sense of what goes on here on planet Earth. Maybe he should talk to George Lucas about a job writing science fiction.
Well, Vengeance delivered some bad news for us MFers. It seems Matt Hardy was nowhere to be found in Vegas Sunday night. That makes teasing his appearance last Monday that much harder to understand. For the marks, the wedding wasn’t even about Matt-Edge-Lita. It was about Kane-Edge-Lita. What does a typical mark think about Edge and Lita teasing a V1 appearance last week? There’s no storyline reason for it. Matt’s been off TV for months now, and Lita and Kane were married. The only reason to tease Matt was to bring him back to Raw. Now, it makes no sense at all.
There is another opportunity to make the V1 tease mean something on Monday night. I guess I’ll hold off on submitting this week’s column until after the June 27th episode of Raw. I normally complete my column and place it into the queue on Monday morning for my regular Tuesday post, but I’ll wait this week.
Here we go – I’m writing this paragraph just moments after Raw went off the air. Once again, there was no mention of Matt Hardy, so now I officially don’t understand what the hell is going on at WWE creative. Sure this disappoints me and all, but hey, we got to see Hulk Hogan again! WOOHOO!!! Hogan even scored the victory on behalf of his two partners, current WWE Champion John Cena, and the He’s Balding Kid.
Well, it’s a good thing they gave Hogan the duke, he certainly needed it three months after his induction in the WWE Hall of Fame. God forbid the young champ Cena be made to look strong while partnering with two legends. I may sound bitter, but at least the two aging legends gave Cena the rub after the match. Wait a minute, the final scene was the Egomaniacs posing in the ring while the young champion slipped quietly up the ramp. I guess he didn’t want to steal Hogan and Michaels’ spotlight. After all, why should the reigning champ stand tall at the end of the show? That would only be logical, and logic may be the dirtiest five-letter word your could utter at Titan Towers!
Also, Batista practically advertised that he was physically and emotionally vulnerable after his Hell in a Cell battle with HHH last night, so why didn’t Edge use his Money in the Bank title shot tonight? Is it because he’s a heel, and heels aren’t allowed to be cunning or clever (except the almighty HHH, of course)?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
p.s. – Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
