The moss covered, three-handled family gredunza is the third of Chris Jericho’s 1004 moves, preceeded by an armdrag and armbar, and to be followed by an armbar and the Saskatchewan spinning nerve hold. It is a reference to the Cat in the Hat’s TV special.
Links
Grut interviews Portia Perez, a dynamite-sounding indie wrestler with a knack for Owen Hart’s colours and Elliot Reed’s catchphrase. I am incredibly sold.
Allen gives us a short retrospective on the late Bryan Adams. I personally really enjoyed Adams’ work, as he was capable of redefining himself nine fairly unique and different ways. Few wrestlers have that sort of palette.
And then there’s Kurt Angle in an excellently done short film depicting himself in a bar in Connecticut. The subtleties are the reasons to check it out, including Kurt’s favorite drink (an untouched comedic spot since joining TNA), and the pointed remarks about the WWE. Why don’t they do more of these?
Angle vs Joe was awesome for all the right reasons
Over the last month, TNA has hyped Samoa Joe vs Kurt Angle as a guaranteed match of the year. The premise seemed to dictate thisâ€â€through several fortunate and strange circumstances, every single title in TNA (and one from Japan) was be on the line in a singles match. This is fairly unprecedented. It is also ridiculous. To even involve one’s psyche in the idea, one has to completely forget everything one has ever learned about organized competition. Kurt Angle held the world heavyweight title and the IWGP title (from a company he didn’t work for). Samoa Joe held the X Division championship and the tag team championships (with no partner). They were going to face one another in a fight to determine who gets to hold all the big shiny belts. This was an excellent idea.
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This could not happen in any other realm of sports or entertainment. It’s the kind of thing that they could only get away with once. It was one of the few heavyweight main event headlines that hadn’t been used before (likely because of the insane logic). It was something new, something intriguing, and something that completely failed to deliver. Due to outside interference and a foreign object, Kurt Angle holds five titles, three of which he isn’t even qualified to hold. The entire story arc had surprises, twists, turns, atrocious acting, poor booking, and a prevalent sense of injustice. This apparently has everyone in an uproar, but I don’t see what everyone is complaining about. This is professional wrestling at its finest.
I want to take this opportunity to point out something that should be exceptionally obvious to all: Professional wrestling doesn’t make any sense. Good guys should win in the end, but they often don’t. Bad guys should have clearly defined objectives, but often they’re motives are only marginally different than the wrestlers who are cheered. The acting shouldn’t be as terrible as it is. Sometimes a chair to the head results in a two count, and sometimes it results in winning every championship in a company. The world championship on Smackdown isn’t supposed to injure everyone that touches it, but it does. The world championship in TNA isn’t supposed to turn everyone evil, but there isn’t a single wrestler to hold the NWA/TNA belt for more than a month who’s a good guy anymore. Your favorite X-Division guy should be on TV more, but he isn’t. Finally, wrestling isn’t supposed to be real, but far too many people a) want it to be, and b) take it seriously.
That’s not to say it isn’t ripe for discussion and analysis. As I’ve stated before, wrestling is a deep, complicated and near impenetrable art form. But it is an art form drenched deep into the sea of the absurd. There are lots of opinions out there that say that TNA just did the dumbest thing in the world by having Angle beat Joe. They say that TNA has shot down any chance Joe has of ever being a “superstar,†and that people should stop watching the product. They say this is not a single mistake; TNA has been making short-sighted and predictable mistakes for years, and the faith of the audience has been destroyed. These kinds of arguments are awash in fact, and many of their arguments are undeniable, so long as you look at wrestling as a company that plays by the same rules as a sport. Under that philosophy, wrestling is just like a sport, except that it’s scripted. Therefore, it should be really easy to entertain people, because people like sports, but they also like it when their favorite team (or wrestler) wins. In wrestling, the good guy could win whenever they want him to. That should make it easy to please a crowd. So long as wrestling is booked as a sport and takes itself seriously, everything will be fine. There is a major flaw to this argument that everyone seems to forget.
Wrestling isn’t a sport. Wrestling was never a sport. Think of wrestling as a scripted sport, and you will constantly be disappointed. That is, unless they watch Ring of Honor. But Ring of Honor isn’t professional wrestling. It’s a fake sport.
While the WWE’s macro storyline has always been a little vague, it’s always been fairly easy to map TNA, and that is because TNA has one storyline. This single story has revolved three times now. At Bound for Glory, the good guy will win the big match. Almost immediately following, a bad guy will beat him handily. The title will bounce back and forth in a directionless haze until Slammiversary, when a bad guy will win the King of the Mountain match. This will lead to the build of toward Bound for Glory, where the good guy will ruminate about justice and victory. This has been repeated with only slight modifications ever since TNA began running monthly ppvs. Basically, the bad guy holds the belt for most of the year, to finally be defeated by the powers of good, only to have the process repeat itself ad infinitum. No sport follows this kind of plan. You’d never convince the union to go along with it.
Theatre is the only place where evil reigns with a 90/10 ratio in comparison the hero. Especially in modern theatre, the very idea of good vs evil is vague and regarded as a relic. The same goes for the ideas of justice, tradition, and the very notion of giving the audience what it wants. Pro wrestling is a very unique form of theatre, but it is theatre all the same. It went through it’s good vs evil stage (the 80s), through its adolescent anti-hero stage (the mid-late 90s), it’s do-what-used-to-work phase (the early 2000s), and now, wrestling is in a new place. You can see it on every single wrestling program. The air that surrounds the WWE and TNA right now is that of a misplaced identity. Who is there to cheer or boo, anyway? Consider Raw’s main tandem of the past year: John Cena and Edge. Why cheer one and not the other? What of our positive emotions does Cena evoke? And what negatives ones are touched by Edge? Were they fighting for a cause that we believed to be against our own beliefs, or for them? Were they fighting for a cause? Consider TNA’s tandem. What cause is Samoa Joe or Kurt Angle fighting for? What drives fans to cheer Joe, even though his motives are identical to Angles’? Will Joe turn into a villain the second he gains the TNA title? And what will fans think of him then? Finally, consider Smackdown’s current main feud: Batista and Khali. I’ve done my best, but I can’t see one reason to cheer Batista over Khali. Neither of them possesses the simple idea of virtue. At the same time, neither really hold tether to any antagonistic weapons, either. What is left but to place our own meaning upon relatively blank canvasses?
Vince McMahon said in 1997 that there are no heroes and villains anymore, only shades of grey. What he really meant was that the typical hero and villain of the 80s was finally dead. It appears that in 2007, his words have finally come true. But this is a good thing, because it shows that wrestling is growing as a theatrical production. It’s evolving into a more complicated creature, and it is doing so seemingly organically. There doesn’t seem to be a conscious decision on anyone’s parts to inhabit this grey area. It’s just what happens when you produce wrestling in 2007.
This is why Joe vs Angle last week was fantastic. Not because it was a great wrestling match (which doesn’t matter anymore), not because it made the fans happy (it clearly didn’t), and not because it made either of them more or less famous (because, to a point, main event wrestlers move laterally at best), but because it highlighted everything that is right and good about the art of pro wrestling. Held at an event called Hard Justice (a reference to violence, but also to pornography), it featured two individual in character but identical in motive wrestlers fighting for prizes that only pro wrestling could offer. The match included a knocked out referee, a steel chair, and a subplot involving Kurt Angle’s wife and her new boyfriend that resulted in a Russervian swerve that everyone saw coming. For fans of professional wrestling (not fake sports, not real sports, and not fans of real-life logic) this was a feast and a testament to where the art is today.
