Salutations to you and yours. This is The Rager, I’m Chris Sanders and I’m out of clever intros.
As my esteemed colleague, Joel Leonard mentioned in his latest edition of No Chance, we have switched spots for our columns. No real change for you all, just means I have to get into a new routine now that I work weekends. Trust me, though, everyone will get their weekly dose of Rage and then some.
Lets start with Roddy Piper kicking off Raw, this past Monday. First thing that hit my brain was how Piper has been trying to be John Cena’s moral compass the past couple of years. I’m sure plenty of you remember the segment more than a year ago between the two during Raw’s old school episode while John Cena was in over his head with Nexus. The heated segment was basically Piper urging John to do the right thing and call the Barrett/Orton match down the middle regardless of what might happen to John afterwards. What happened? John did exactly that. Now, who am I to say that John did that because he’s straight-laced and all that jazz but maybe what WWE wanted to say was that Piper caught the ear of Cena, who knows.
Flash forward to this past Monday, the show begins with yet another Piper’s Pit which really seemed to lack direction and an overall point. What I gathered from it was that Roddy REALLY hates shirts with buttons and that Piper believed John needed to shoot on the audience and basically turn heel in order to be successful at Wrestlemania. Honestly, I thought it was kind of a lame point until magic happened. Roddy slapped John with thunder and freedom and triumphantly demanding that John should “FEEL THE ENERGY!” If any of you joined in on Live Rager on twitter that night, then you would know that I desperately want this to becoming a thing (a la ‘Tebowing’) where guys slap each other and feel the energy. Rage Nation, I challenge all of you to take up this task and execute with the perfection only you all have the ability to reach.
I found this whole segment to be yet another Heel-Cena tease to all of us that brave the internet and fantasy book and play the what-if game. The promo was an attempt to build up our hopes and dreams only to become disappointed with yet another edition of aw-shucks-good-boy John Cena. Cena refused to feel anything and the promo promptly ended and that was that. Was a thought planted into the freshly-slapped mind of Cena? Will this just be completely written off as the rantings of a mad old man that’s been hit in the head one too many times? I guess time will tell.
Here is where I would probably move on to the next topic that most interested me and right now that would be Daniel Bryan. However, I spent most of my night out with the girlfriend. This means that I have yet to watch the live Smackdown broadcast and this column is already late enough as it is so I can’t really comment on the cage match between Bryan and Mark Henry. However, I can comment on the back-peddling Bryan we saw on Monday night on the mic with Michael Cole. It was an odd predicament because it felt like Bryan is setting up for a heel turn and yet he is still on Cole’s bad side and that seems counterintuitive to any heel looking for some sort of heat. But, as any loyal Ragean would know, the oddest part of all this is the downgrade of Bryan’s amazing beard. Its now more of a goatee-ish thing and because of it, I am disappoint. Maybe I believe he’s turning heel because of the goatee and because of that, he is now Evil Daniel Bryan. (Side note: how fantastic is Community?!)
In non-wrestling interests: speaking of Community, I’ve been listening to Childish Gambino’s (aka Donald Glover aka Troy from Community) album “Camp” a lot lately. I gotta admit, I haven’t really been into rap at all since a forgettable phase in high school (it wasn’t pretty…I’m still ashamed) but I’ve been digging it lately. Here’s a little peek and I highly recommend everyone to pick it up.
Well that just about does it for me this week, be sure to follow me on twitter so we can all live tweet, destroy feeds and make random enemies together on Monday nights. Yes? yes. Also, comment below to add your takes on both John Cena’s energy and Daniel Bryan’s beard.
Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do twice
Chris
The Answer: First person that finds me a youtube video of just Roddy slapping Cena and the “FEEL THE ENERGY” proclamation gets 1.5 million cool points from me…half a million if its a gif. 3, 2, 1 go!
