No Chance – At This Rate, Does Super Cena Even Need The Rock’s Help?

Columns, Top Story

We’ve all known that the Rock was going to team with John Cena at Survivor Series for a while now. We heard about it on the internet, it was teased by the Rock in a viral video, and we saw the poster advertising the matchup months ago, So last week when Cena announced his desired tag-team partner for Survivor Series, the intended “Oh my stars! This is the matchup of dreams! In all my life I had never dared to dream for such a day!” feeling that WWE was hoping for, was for the most part replaced by a “bout time they finally start this storyline on the show. Geez, Survivor Series is in less than a month” reaction.

Don’t misunderstand me; I am excited to see the Rock at Survivor Series. From the limited stuff that we saw earlier this year, it looks like the Rock still has a good amount of in ring ability and we know he still has the mic presence. And Rock also seems to bring out the best of Cena (before you can say it; there is no best of Cena, yea yea yea, all of that, moving on) on mic as well. It’s a good idea to see him get some ring time before next WrestleMania, to try and show audiences that, yes, this is the Rock that you remember, and here he is back in a WWE ring. It a good idea to have the Rock get some air time so that audiences emotions at WrestleMania don’t have to rely solely on a couple of great promos that will be over a year old by that point. So I am glad that the Rock is going to be at Survivor Series. I am glad that he’s going to be teaming up with John Cena. What I’m not so excited about is this less than stellar storyline that they’ve used to get the Rock and Cena together.

The way that the story is unfolding, its really looking like the tag team was decided first with the story written around that. Yes, I realize that is in fact how it happened, but good storytelling should be able to hide that fact. And that’s what’s missing here, good storytelling. It was rumored earlier that Cena and the Rock would be teaming up as part of a bigger group of faces (one that included Triple H) in order to take on a large faction of heel wresters, which would include Kevin Nash leading. No that that idea has clearly been scrapped, Cena and the Rock still need to team up as promised. And to do that they need a tag team of heels to fight.

In the past few months, not one but two heel tag-teams have started to form. The Awesome Truth, and “Hey look at us! We’re American!” with Jack Swagger and Dolph Ziggler. Because Vickie’s pair are still pretty much in the sketch comedy territory (Just this past week they beat up a Muppet before losing to the two comic relief wrestlers) Miz and R-Truth were really the only choice. The only problem is, that they don’t seem to pose much of a threat either.

It’s a recurring problem in the company that heels are never really treated like legitimate threats to star wresters. At there worst they are usually little more than annoyances that have through some nefarious means, temporarily cheated the hero out of his title. It’s a problem that has affected The Awesome Truth. Sure they’ve caused some havoc in the WWE, interrupting matches and whatnot, but when it comes to actual in ring skills, they haven’t exactly been posing a threat. Sure they were good enough to hold off Punk and Triple H at Vengeance, but they needed interference from Nash to actually get a pin. And now they’re going against two of the most unbeatable champions in the WWE.

When the match was set up last week, WWE had four weeks to make Awesome Truth look like a credible threat, a threat that could only be stopped by the teaming of Rock and Cena, a threat that might actually be so great that it could even best these two top tier superstars. Four weeks to do all of that. And what did they do this week to help legitimize Awesome Truth as a credible threat? They had Cena lay them both flat in the ring.

If Cena can beat Miz, and then lay R-Truth out with a single Attitude Adjustment right after his match, then does he even need the Rock’s help? I know he was in a handicap match last week, against the two of them but it’s not like Awesome Truth was defeating Cena with any great ease then either? If you are going to advertize that you have one of the greatest tag teams forming at Survivor Series for the first and only time, shouldn’t you give that tag team something worthy of their supposed greatness?” Not a pair of guys that one half of your tag team can beat while the other twiddles his thumbs in the corner.

This whole situation reminds me of Nexus’s SummerSlam match last year when Cena decided to challenge them with the seven of the biggest names in the company. It wasn’t Cena with plucky mid-card faces under his wing; no it was Cena along side Edge, and Chris Jericho. And they were going against seven rookies, three months into the business. Yes the match ended up being a good one, but there was never a great concern that the biggest names in the business wouldn’t be able to beat seven guys who had all been on Raw for less than three months. And this was when Nexus had been portrayed as an unstoppable force week after week. But after the SummerSlam loss, the whole Nexus story started to go downhill.

And that’s probably my biggest concern for Survivor Series. That it could derail any future potential for Awesome Truth. Because right now, that tag team is one of the best parts of Raw. Truth’s heel turn helped him break out of his forever a mid-card status, and gave him a chance to really shine on mic. Miz, who had been floundering a bit since losing the title, (remember when his biggest moment on the show was a bit with Jarred the Subway Guy?) came back into prominence when he jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon. R-Truth and Miz are some of the better things that WWE has right now and it would be a shame if getting squashed by Cena and the Rock killed their momentum.

Unrelated Thought:So WWE is really all about twitter now aren’t they? (By the way a great time to plug my own twitter here) What with flashing up wrestler’s twitter handles when they walk out to the ring and telling everybody to use #Raw and #WWE when tweeting about the show. They’ve even got Michael Cole reading out whenever something WWE related makes it into the trending topics. Well, I’ve been to twitter during Raw. I’ve searched the WWE related hash tags and clicked on the trending topics to see what others are saying, and I would think that if WWE actually realized what sort of comments people were saying when using #Raw and #WWE they would be trying to make sure nobody else read all the negative things that fans had to say.

Joel Leonard reviews the latest movies each week for Inside Pulse. You can follow him @joelgleo on Twitter though he's not promising to ever tweet anything from there. Joel also co-hosts the Classy Ring Attire podcast and writes the No Chance column on Inside Pulse as well.