When it comes to icons, wrestling has certainly had its fair share, defining performers and personalities, but two of them are so large that they overcame incredible odds to achieve lasting success. One was an Immortal who transformed the business to accommodate his outsize physique and persona. There other was a Phenom who ignored all the rules of plausibility and grew into a role where his incredible endurance itself overcame his character.
XI. Hulk Hogan
He became so big that his reputation was something he could never actually live up to. Vince McMahon effectively began the modern era of professional wrestling by reshaping WWE around Hulk Hogan, spending years, and the formative development of WrestleMania cultivating a dominant star who only five years earlier wouldn’t have lasted more than a year with the strap (see: Superstar Billy Graham), and whose reign as champion even as it was didn’t really compare to that of Bruno Sammartino. Yet Hogan eclipsed both Graham and Sammartino (a bitterness the Italian Stallion still harbors) in short order, perfecting a match type that would prove durable through all the phases of his career, both when he was beloved, and actively reviled.
Everyone knows Hogan thrived best in his original run with WWE. The steroid scandal of the early nineties cost him heavily, took him out of the championship rotation, and led to a brief exile, only for a comeback with WCW, where he was immediately pushed back to the top. Times were different, though, and without a clear mandate, something he’d always enjoyed in WWE, Hogan began to feel like a pariah. Then he famously turned heel, and the act worked so well even industry professionals forgot that he had long ago made himself into the consummate wrestling attraction, the entity everyone had to talk about, or react against.
It’s a little weird to think, just in terms of parallels, the kinds of double standards that always seem to work against Hogan. In 1996, during the first act of the New World Order angle, he’d was celebrating only his thirteenth year as a wrestling attraction. In contrast, Sammartino, while no longer champion (the company was looking for a new face after ten years, and went through Graham, Pedro Morales, and Bob Backlund, a sort of prototypical Kurt Angle at that point in his career, before settling on Hogan), was still beloved, and still doing exactly the same routine. Thirteen years after first winning world championship gold, the Undertaker also attempted to reinvent himself, in reverse, actually, returning to the “Deadman” role after a few years as an “American Badass.” Do you even want to consider Ric Flair in this equation? Thirteen years into his championship career, the “Nature Boy” was, you guessed it, battling Hogan, much as he had Harley Race, Sting, even Ricky Steamboat.
When you think about the harassment he got for the Starrcade match against Roddy Piper, what do you honestly think about the “legends” matches Undertaker has been having not thirteen years but two decades into the peak of his career?
Hogan’s talent for reinvention, knowing what worked for him, and how it worked for the fans, was often unappreciated both by bookers and the fans themselves. The nWo for him ground to a halt sometime in 1998, and disaster really began to strike in 1999, when WCW lost all confidence in him, eve though he’d had extremely valuable programs with at least Sting and Goldberg during that run. He was seen as a past-his-prime liability. Yet somehow, just when he was at his lowest, 2002 rolls around, Vince comes calling again, and Hulkamania ends up running wild all over again, thanks to another blockbuster match, against The Rock. The thing nobody ever seemed to learn during all of this? Hulk Hogan creates seminal moments in wrestling history. He can do it in the ring (okay, not anymore, obviously), and if handled right (read: TNA, why are you hassling him with Eric Bischoff ?) with his reputation alone. By itself, a leg drop at the end of a match is not really all that exciting, especially when this is something he’d done for years. But a leg drop at the end of a match no one knew he was participating in, a moment that completely redefined his relationship with the wrestling business (something WWE has endlessly recreated, most often at the end of a WrestleMania main event, and never quite to the same effect), that’s news.
I wish more people had cared when Jeff Hardy did the same thing last year. That was TNA’s money shot. Who did he have to thank for it? Hulk Hogan.
Did he sometimes act out of paranoid egotism, effectively bury the momentum of those who might have succeeded him? No doubt. Was he better for this business than anyone else from his generation? You bet. Was he the best thing that ever happened to it? Not a chance. But you don’t need everything to have a career like that. Sometimes he was accused of putting himself before the business, but I think the real truth was, and remains, that the people who do business with him are often at a loss as what to do with him. The power of Hulkamania will always be that Hogan himself is capable of rising above a less than ideal situation.
XII. Undertaker
“The Streak” is a manufactured event for every WrestleMania we’re privileged to see this man perform in. Most of the 19-0 wins come against foes and matches that are well beneath the mystique. This doesn’t really matter. That’s not what it’s about. Undertaker is WWE’s new Hulk Hogan, which even Hogan couldn’t do anything about, which even WWE’s own early mishandling of the “Deadman” couldn’t do anything about. Where Hogan was most often defined as a champion, Undertaker has steadily represented himself as the most legitimate wrestler to ever put his name in with a bad gimmick. He used to do this by no-selling, but eventually built a repertoire that put even the most gifted technical competitors to shame, the ones everyone wished had more success, but never had the mind for the game that he assembled after a long career that in its origins almost mocks the wrestler we know and celebrate today.
Undertaker became a more serious force in WWE the moment the company realized that the only way Bret Hart or Lex Luger could be the man to topple Yokozuna was to get him out of the way. A funny thing happened. Once he came back, he became undeniable. A silly program was crafted, a fake Undertaker introduced, and the real one proved himself in more ways than was strictly necessary at this particular Summer Slam, in the transition days of 1994. The deconstruction began in earnest soon after. The treasured urn manager Paul Bearer always kept with him at ringside became the target of a restless campaign from his enemies. Bearer himself betrayed him. Mankind appeared, more bizarre and suicidal than Undertaker, who had always handled himself with dignity, could ever have been. When the company needed a savior in 1997, a year of constant turmoil, that man turned out to be the “Deadman.” It was at this point, when he was treated more like Ric Flair than Hulk Hogan, that perhaps everyone began to see just how versatile, and valuable, he really was.
Hogan never managed to craft a disciple quite like Kane, a man who blatantly copied much of the same template that had made Undertaker a cornerstone of WWE for almost a decade by that point. By making a sort of Mankind version of the “Deadman,” the company suddenly found itself with a challenge that would definitely place Undertaker at the next level, something that proved more of a challenge than it first appeared. He became more demonic, in this attempt at a place in the driving storylines of WWE. He went so far in this direction that he had to abandon the otherworldly gimmick entirely, in fact, and become a “big dog,” as close to a straight brawler as he ever came. That’s probably the only way Brock Lesnar would have ever wrestled him, the only way it would have made sense.
Then, I guess, he realized there was no future, nothing he could use to extend his career for as long as he liked. So the “Deadman” returned in 2004. It wasn’t for a few more years that he cultivated the refined tactician he remains to this day. It wasn’t for a few more years that he became a default champion, a Ric Flair AND Hulk Hogan for the Smackdown brand. Why put the belt on him? Well, why not? Who better for legitimacy? That’s what it was like for a while, and it certainly worked, but as it always seemed to, that phase ran out of steam, before anyone really seemed to appreciate it. (I’m not just saying this because I figure it would have been better for CM Punk to win that feud.)
Three straight WrestleMania career matches, two against Shawn Michaels, one (actually, a second) against Triple H, and a feud he soundly lost to Kane, and it seems clear that Undertaker, who has regularly taken sabbaticals for most of his WWE career, is almost ready to finally call it quits. You probably won’t see a lot of him in 2011. The Mayan calendar comes to an end in 2012, and so does this career. The legacy, however, is just beginning. No one creates more drama in the ring than the Undertaker. Just imagine what his final match will look like.
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Thursday, June 9, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Jabroni Companion #6
The wrestlers I talked about last time were either all big stars or those still building toward legendary careers, even John Morrison, who at this point, even without the world championships, has built a considerable legacy and mystique that will be cherished and analyzed for generations. There are others, though, who will never reach even that level, sometimes through no fault of their own, because sometimes, that’s just how this business works. These are my favorite underdogs, these are the ones lost to:
X. Wasted Potential
Inasmuch as wrestling itself is a subjective sport, where winners are based entirely on the needs of the moment and where that moment might lead, and fans have a huge part in that when they decide to respond, it’s hard to sometimes step back and objectively report on the stars who could’ve meant so much more than they ultimately did. Most of them can be identified by tentative, even perennial pushes they received in their promotions, which for those they connect with, can become agonizing after a long period rooting for them, with very little to show for it. These are the wrestlers who end up looking, and not to put this too harshly, like jokes, and seem like they can easily be forgotten, even dismissed. “They had their chance,” you’ll hear, “and they blew it.”
I don’t ken to that sort of logic. Sometimes it really is a matter of too many stars, too little time. Shawn Michaels waited years to become a world champion. So did Steve Austin. Imagine if HBK had never accomplished his goal. Can you say “Marty Jannetty”? His former Rockers partner kept resurfacing, and it wasn’t as if anyone ever said anything bad about his work in the ring. It was just, Shawn got all the attention, all the chances, and was kept on the roster until the moment finally came. It was the same for Bret Hart, even. By the time he was called on to wear the big strap, it seemed as if every other possibility had already been exhausted, and even then, the company spent a year keeping it away from him with a wrestler who was his polar opposite. John Cena first competed for a world title in 2003, and yet didn’t capture one until 2005. I could go on and on with examples just of those who eventually “fulfilled their potential,” but what about those who didn’t?
Andrew Martin, who competed for most of his career as Test, may be one of the biggest examples I can think of. He was set up to be something of the second coming of Kevin Nash, and yet, like a lot of that breed, nothing ever really came of it. He had his closest brush with success during the McMahon-Helmsley Era in 1999-2000, when he was Stephanie’s intended groom, which led into a mini feud with Triple H, who was otherwise occupied with a dozen other challengers, which happened to include Mr. McMahon himself, and not to mention The Rock, just as the “Great One” was entering the period of his greatest popularity. A lot of things can be said about what held Test back, with the biggest of them being that he was never that charismatic a personality, and that perhaps he never quite solidified a style for his matches. Still, WWE saw enough potential in him that he stuck around and was a featured player for years, in a variety of roles, many of which might have pushed him to the next level, if only a window had been there. He was a classic victim of circumstances. When he was with the company, there wasn’t a need for a Kevin Nash. Even Kevin Nash found that out. Even during a brief comeback during the early ECW brand era, when Test finally brought his physical talents to a peak, his reputation spoiled his potential. Sadly, of course, he died young, and all that potential became a moot point. That doesn’t mean that his career as a professional wrestler should be viewed as a failure.
The next man I’ll address has been known by many names, and never reached near the level of even Test. He also, if you’ll mind a little rhyming, liked to compete in a dress. His name, during this period, was Vito, and he’s easily one of the biggest victims of fans not appreciating what’s right in front of them imaginable. They treated him like he was Rico, the gay stylist who actively sought jeers as part of his gimmick, when what Vito should have elicited was cheers. “The toughest man to ever wear a dress,” is how he used to be described, and that should have been it, because his wrestling skills were phenomenal. He knew how to work a match, how to make it dynamic, how to work a submission hold (which very few wrestlers ever bother with), and how, even if it did not ultimately work in his favor, to motivate the audience. There’s no reason why Vito shouldn’t have become one of the most popular wrestlers WWE had during his brief tenure with the Smackdown brand. He had more natural charisma than John Cena, and this is coming from someone who willfully suffered through Cena’s horrid rap gimmick and considered him a breakout star in the early months of 2004, when he was becoming the secret MVP of Smackdown, a role Vito might have assumed, given the chance.
Speaking of MVP, there’s also MVP himself, a wrestler who very quickly and easily established himself as a franchise player, so easily and naturally that it was held against him, and the role he inhabited was already too good to replace. There was literally nothing he could do, unless he was finally given the nod for greater things, for world championship gold. He was never given that chance, and never even experienced a slight flirtation with that level. He’s one of the many victims of the brand era. For every John Cena, there is an MVP.
Tatanka was one of my early favorites. In hindsight he’s very much an Ultimate Warrior substitute, a wrestler with a mystical drive and energy, who can command the ring and the attention of the audience, and there was only ever one thing holding him back: lack of any charisma on the mic. You could easily argue that this was one thing he never needed, but obviously WWE thought differently, and so even a lengthy undefeated streak ultimately meant nothing, came to a dramatic defeat, repackaging, a heel turn he could do nothing with, and then obscurity, and the few odd meaningless comebacks. He could have been so much more, given the chance.
Crush was another star WWE gave an untold number of chances to, and he adapted many times and successfully fulfilled what was required of him, but what he lacked was the chance to be the spotlight heel, and he was always in the wrong era. He would have done better with just a decade’s shift, might have been that foe who forced Hulk Hogan to face a worthy challenge, and not just a manufactured one. That wasn’t something the company ever needed when Crush was actually wrestling. Yokozuna was such a massive obstacle that in his best moment Crush was still forced to play second-fiddle.
Anyway, one of my unabashed favorite was Paul Birchall, and he seems to embody everything that ever went wrong for wrestlers of this type. He had all the gifts he needed in the ring. He had the look, he had a persona, and he had the opportunity. And then Vince McMahon allowed Paul to be transformed into a pirate, and then Vince determined that this pirate gimmick had no future (this despite the movie character Jack Sparrow only just becoming a craze). I loved “Pirate” Paul Birchall. I want to make that clear. Even though it wasn’t necessarily necessary to put Paul over, it was still something he was inexplicably able to make work. Even his breathtaking C-4 somersault slam, rechristened “Walking the Plank,” fit. Except even without Vince’s kiss of death, it never went anywhere. He was made into fodder for Bobby Lashley. Paul Birchall, who could have revamped the whole face of Smackdown with the personality of a brawler who could gracefully soar through the air, was deemed to be inconsequential. Paul and the pirate were soon tossed back into the sea. He resurfaced a few years later, and actually spent more time with WWE than his previous tenure, but his spirit seemed to be broken. The price of the contract this time seemed to be that he was stripped of everything that made him special. By the end, he was busy arguing that “The Hurricane” had to be Gregory Helms. Well…Is that really what the “Ripper” was best for?
Even mentioning the name Orlando Jordan now conjures bizarre images, thanks to Orlando himself, who has updated the homophobic gimmick for the 21st century but attempting to make it cleanly bisexual. Mr. Jordan, that is a distinction that makes no difference at all. Here’s a guy who could have become something of a replacement Rock, having trained with that clan, and adopted many of the same stylings, and yet eventually found himself dismissed as the new Virgil, the “Chief of Staff” for JBL, and the guy who kept tapping out in record time to Chris Benoit’s Crippler Crossface. It didn’t seem to matter that Jordan began evolving as a performer, that he grew more comfortable on the mic, and even put on brave and innovative struggles against the Crossface, something normally reserved for talent far above his level. Once deemed a joke, always a joke, and the worst of it is that Jordan himself eventually came to embrace it. Not in a good way, sir. One of the sorriest stories possible.
Petey Williams, if TNA could ever have found itself capable of supporting an X division star not named “A.J. Styles,” could easily have become one of the biggest names in wrestling, but instead became something of an undersized joke himself. Imagine if this had happened to Rey Mysterio. Just a damn shame that everyone seems perfectly happy to have let this happen.
Same, too, with Sonjay Dutt, who couldn’t have tried harder to work the charisma he had, and the skills he possessed, all to nothing much at all. Dutt and Williams were like the Dean Malenko of TNA, the workers who didn’t seem to have to work at all. It’s no longer, sadly, a Dean Malenko world.
It never belonged to the likes of Sylvester Terkay. Whereas someone like Ken Anderson, who will always have a brash personality to fall back on, can work against having a wrestling style that defies expectations, this was never to be for Terkay, who could have been another Smackdown star to transform perceptions, but was quickly abandoned. At least Elijah Burke still has the chance to salvage some of his legacy.
Jimmy Yang, who became the most improbable redneck in wrestling history in an effort to bridge an impossible gap, is like WWE’s version of Dutt and Williams, someone with phenomenal talent, but no way to make it work effectively in the context available to him.
Jamie Noble had a number of chances available to him, but became another victim of an unfortunate gimmick. Seems wrestling fans aren’t too keen on supporting trailer trash. Sucks, too, because Noble had the ability to surpass the remarkable stature of, yes, Dean Malenko.
Marc Mero, who once competed as a wrestling version of Little Richard, and was eventually eclipsed by Rena “Sable” Lesnar, had incredible potential, but circumstances just kept getting in his way. Could have been the new “Superfly.” Could have been the first MMA-style wrestler. Could have been great. Never got the chance.
Then, of course, there’s Carlito. Grew incredibly frustrated with WWE, and there’s a damn good reason, because he was never allowed to do anything but what he had, like MVP, done from the start, which was, like Scott Hall as Razor Ramon, become an instant star. WWE, and its fans, really don’t like that sort of thing, apparently. You have to earn it. And sometimes, even when you do, it’s either not enough, or too late.
That’s just the way it goes, sometimes.
X. Wasted Potential
Inasmuch as wrestling itself is a subjective sport, where winners are based entirely on the needs of the moment and where that moment might lead, and fans have a huge part in that when they decide to respond, it’s hard to sometimes step back and objectively report on the stars who could’ve meant so much more than they ultimately did. Most of them can be identified by tentative, even perennial pushes they received in their promotions, which for those they connect with, can become agonizing after a long period rooting for them, with very little to show for it. These are the wrestlers who end up looking, and not to put this too harshly, like jokes, and seem like they can easily be forgotten, even dismissed. “They had their chance,” you’ll hear, “and they blew it.”
I don’t ken to that sort of logic. Sometimes it really is a matter of too many stars, too little time. Shawn Michaels waited years to become a world champion. So did Steve Austin. Imagine if HBK had never accomplished his goal. Can you say “Marty Jannetty”? His former Rockers partner kept resurfacing, and it wasn’t as if anyone ever said anything bad about his work in the ring. It was just, Shawn got all the attention, all the chances, and was kept on the roster until the moment finally came. It was the same for Bret Hart, even. By the time he was called on to wear the big strap, it seemed as if every other possibility had already been exhausted, and even then, the company spent a year keeping it away from him with a wrestler who was his polar opposite. John Cena first competed for a world title in 2003, and yet didn’t capture one until 2005. I could go on and on with examples just of those who eventually “fulfilled their potential,” but what about those who didn’t?
Andrew Martin, who competed for most of his career as Test, may be one of the biggest examples I can think of. He was set up to be something of the second coming of Kevin Nash, and yet, like a lot of that breed, nothing ever really came of it. He had his closest brush with success during the McMahon-Helmsley Era in 1999-2000, when he was Stephanie’s intended groom, which led into a mini feud with Triple H, who was otherwise occupied with a dozen other challengers, which happened to include Mr. McMahon himself, and not to mention The Rock, just as the “Great One” was entering the period of his greatest popularity. A lot of things can be said about what held Test back, with the biggest of them being that he was never that charismatic a personality, and that perhaps he never quite solidified a style for his matches. Still, WWE saw enough potential in him that he stuck around and was a featured player for years, in a variety of roles, many of which might have pushed him to the next level, if only a window had been there. He was a classic victim of circumstances. When he was with the company, there wasn’t a need for a Kevin Nash. Even Kevin Nash found that out. Even during a brief comeback during the early ECW brand era, when Test finally brought his physical talents to a peak, his reputation spoiled his potential. Sadly, of course, he died young, and all that potential became a moot point. That doesn’t mean that his career as a professional wrestler should be viewed as a failure.
The next man I’ll address has been known by many names, and never reached near the level of even Test. He also, if you’ll mind a little rhyming, liked to compete in a dress. His name, during this period, was Vito, and he’s easily one of the biggest victims of fans not appreciating what’s right in front of them imaginable. They treated him like he was Rico, the gay stylist who actively sought jeers as part of his gimmick, when what Vito should have elicited was cheers. “The toughest man to ever wear a dress,” is how he used to be described, and that should have been it, because his wrestling skills were phenomenal. He knew how to work a match, how to make it dynamic, how to work a submission hold (which very few wrestlers ever bother with), and how, even if it did not ultimately work in his favor, to motivate the audience. There’s no reason why Vito shouldn’t have become one of the most popular wrestlers WWE had during his brief tenure with the Smackdown brand. He had more natural charisma than John Cena, and this is coming from someone who willfully suffered through Cena’s horrid rap gimmick and considered him a breakout star in the early months of 2004, when he was becoming the secret MVP of Smackdown, a role Vito might have assumed, given the chance.
Speaking of MVP, there’s also MVP himself, a wrestler who very quickly and easily established himself as a franchise player, so easily and naturally that it was held against him, and the role he inhabited was already too good to replace. There was literally nothing he could do, unless he was finally given the nod for greater things, for world championship gold. He was never given that chance, and never even experienced a slight flirtation with that level. He’s one of the many victims of the brand era. For every John Cena, there is an MVP.
Tatanka was one of my early favorites. In hindsight he’s very much an Ultimate Warrior substitute, a wrestler with a mystical drive and energy, who can command the ring and the attention of the audience, and there was only ever one thing holding him back: lack of any charisma on the mic. You could easily argue that this was one thing he never needed, but obviously WWE thought differently, and so even a lengthy undefeated streak ultimately meant nothing, came to a dramatic defeat, repackaging, a heel turn he could do nothing with, and then obscurity, and the few odd meaningless comebacks. He could have been so much more, given the chance.
Crush was another star WWE gave an untold number of chances to, and he adapted many times and successfully fulfilled what was required of him, but what he lacked was the chance to be the spotlight heel, and he was always in the wrong era. He would have done better with just a decade’s shift, might have been that foe who forced Hulk Hogan to face a worthy challenge, and not just a manufactured one. That wasn’t something the company ever needed when Crush was actually wrestling. Yokozuna was such a massive obstacle that in his best moment Crush was still forced to play second-fiddle.
Anyway, one of my unabashed favorite was Paul Birchall, and he seems to embody everything that ever went wrong for wrestlers of this type. He had all the gifts he needed in the ring. He had the look, he had a persona, and he had the opportunity. And then Vince McMahon allowed Paul to be transformed into a pirate, and then Vince determined that this pirate gimmick had no future (this despite the movie character Jack Sparrow only just becoming a craze). I loved “Pirate” Paul Birchall. I want to make that clear. Even though it wasn’t necessarily necessary to put Paul over, it was still something he was inexplicably able to make work. Even his breathtaking C-4 somersault slam, rechristened “Walking the Plank,” fit. Except even without Vince’s kiss of death, it never went anywhere. He was made into fodder for Bobby Lashley. Paul Birchall, who could have revamped the whole face of Smackdown with the personality of a brawler who could gracefully soar through the air, was deemed to be inconsequential. Paul and the pirate were soon tossed back into the sea. He resurfaced a few years later, and actually spent more time with WWE than his previous tenure, but his spirit seemed to be broken. The price of the contract this time seemed to be that he was stripped of everything that made him special. By the end, he was busy arguing that “The Hurricane” had to be Gregory Helms. Well…Is that really what the “Ripper” was best for?
Even mentioning the name Orlando Jordan now conjures bizarre images, thanks to Orlando himself, who has updated the homophobic gimmick for the 21st century but attempting to make it cleanly bisexual. Mr. Jordan, that is a distinction that makes no difference at all. Here’s a guy who could have become something of a replacement Rock, having trained with that clan, and adopted many of the same stylings, and yet eventually found himself dismissed as the new Virgil, the “Chief of Staff” for JBL, and the guy who kept tapping out in record time to Chris Benoit’s Crippler Crossface. It didn’t seem to matter that Jordan began evolving as a performer, that he grew more comfortable on the mic, and even put on brave and innovative struggles against the Crossface, something normally reserved for talent far above his level. Once deemed a joke, always a joke, and the worst of it is that Jordan himself eventually came to embrace it. Not in a good way, sir. One of the sorriest stories possible.
Petey Williams, if TNA could ever have found itself capable of supporting an X division star not named “A.J. Styles,” could easily have become one of the biggest names in wrestling, but instead became something of an undersized joke himself. Imagine if this had happened to Rey Mysterio. Just a damn shame that everyone seems perfectly happy to have let this happen.
Same, too, with Sonjay Dutt, who couldn’t have tried harder to work the charisma he had, and the skills he possessed, all to nothing much at all. Dutt and Williams were like the Dean Malenko of TNA, the workers who didn’t seem to have to work at all. It’s no longer, sadly, a Dean Malenko world.
It never belonged to the likes of Sylvester Terkay. Whereas someone like Ken Anderson, who will always have a brash personality to fall back on, can work against having a wrestling style that defies expectations, this was never to be for Terkay, who could have been another Smackdown star to transform perceptions, but was quickly abandoned. At least Elijah Burke still has the chance to salvage some of his legacy.
Jimmy Yang, who became the most improbable redneck in wrestling history in an effort to bridge an impossible gap, is like WWE’s version of Dutt and Williams, someone with phenomenal talent, but no way to make it work effectively in the context available to him.
Jamie Noble had a number of chances available to him, but became another victim of an unfortunate gimmick. Seems wrestling fans aren’t too keen on supporting trailer trash. Sucks, too, because Noble had the ability to surpass the remarkable stature of, yes, Dean Malenko.
Marc Mero, who once competed as a wrestling version of Little Richard, and was eventually eclipsed by Rena “Sable” Lesnar, had incredible potential, but circumstances just kept getting in his way. Could have been the new “Superfly.” Could have been the first MMA-style wrestler. Could have been great. Never got the chance.
Then, of course, there’s Carlito. Grew incredibly frustrated with WWE, and there’s a damn good reason, because he was never allowed to do anything but what he had, like MVP, done from the start, which was, like Scott Hall as Razor Ramon, become an instant star. WWE, and its fans, really don’t like that sort of thing, apparently. You have to earn it. And sometimes, even when you do, it’s either not enough, or too late.
That’s just the way it goes, sometimes.
Friday, May 27, 2011
For Fans of the Film Fan...
Part of the Fan Companion cycle (and possibly the most popular to date) was the Fan Companion, which was infamous for covering a large amount of movies with very few words. Anyone interested in reading some further movies thoughts from your Scouring Monk might read reviews for current movies over at Examiner. Apparently the only available slot for Colorado Springs movie examiners was for action movies, so I'm mostly going to be writing about that particular genre. Not that I've had a problem so far...
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Jabroni Companion #5
Now that we’ve established my absolute favorite wrestler (Eddie Guerrero, remember?) and thoughts on several historic angles, not to mention touching on WrestleMania, I thought it would be fun to dive into the nitty gritty of a fan’s regular appreciation of wrestling, some more of my favorite superstars. Let’s start with someone who hasn’t always been easy to appreciate. Let’s start with
V. Mr. Anderson
Anderson. (Sorry, had to do that.) Here’s a guy who came to prominence in 2005 (no, really!), and ironically had his first significant match against Eddie (which was, in fact, Eddie’s final televised match). The encounter was plenty indicative of the way WWE chose to push Anderson. He had struggled for years on the independent circuit, but once someone realized that he had the gift of gab (and probably when he started introducing himself, the routine everyone knows), he shot onto the track of superstardom. In fact, when he debuted in WWE, on the seldom-seen B-show Velocity, he really was Mr. Anderson, but by the time he arrived on Smackdown had been rechristened Mr. Kennedy (which you might recall happens to be Vince McMahon’s middle name…another suggestion that a certain angle was supposed to reveal our hero as the boss’s bastard son). At the time Smackdown certainly liked to give humongous pushes to newcomers (think Carlito and MVP), but Kennedy/Anderson was almost a different case entirely. He famously defeated a series of former world champions, which, of course, became regularly referenced by the ringside commentators during his matches. What the company obviously expected was that this guy was going to become an overnight member of the main event scene.
Maybe Vince forgot about a dude named Rocky Maivia. Okay, you don’t exactly forget about The Rock, but what I mean is that maybe Vince forgot that you can’t engineer crowd favorites. It’s something Hollywood does time and time again, find an actor it really likes, and then push that actor in countless projects. It seldom works. Those actors either catch on, or they become the next “where are they now” trivia answers. That’s what happened to Kennedy/Anderson.
You’ll constantly hear the argument that what did him in is his wrestling ability, and that’s partially true. He’s unorthodox in the ring. He’s the rare wrestler who will relish the chance to sell his opponents, not cartoonishly, like a Ric Flair or Shawn Michaels, but enough so that maybe it’s a little too easy to believe that he’s allowed the match to get out of hand. It’s probably a holdover from his former jobber status (and probably what helped him get out of it, too, because anyone who can make beatdowns truly look good can probably do other things, too), and so rare most fans will never even think of a good wrestler competing that way. When it comes to offense, he prefers striking, but also has some striking, as it were, sentons, which is another baffling element of his repertoire, because it’s also not routine for most wrestlers to depend on sentons, whether delivered from a standing position or from the turnbuckle. When you’ve got a distinctive style, it either means that you’re playing directly to the crowd, performing time-tested and anticipated maneuvers, or simply getting it done in the match. Kennedy/Anderson never really draws himself out of matches. His style has drawn comparison to Steve Austin because of that. That and his brash personality.
The other thing you’ll hear about him is that injuries and controversies undid his WWE career. I would argue that WWE screwed him, as it were, by failing to understand that they had a far more literal next Rock on their hands than they ever seemed to realize. They couldn’t push him successfully the way they wanted. He needed feuds with competitors at his experience level, not at the status he deserved. Instead of Undertaker and Shawn Michaels, he should have had more matches with Bobby Lashley, MVP. Hell, imagine if he had ever had a program with Chris Jericho. During their mutual time in the company, Jericho hadn’t definitively established his world champion credentials (other than that run as undisputed champion, which both he and WWE had determined to be something of a failure).
Anyway, instead of establishing a list of defeats against former world champions, Kennedy/Anderson might’ve simply ingratiated himself to the fans, what every wrestler is supposed to do. Randy Orton became a “Legend Killer” so that he could better represent his arrogance, not put himself at a specific level (though his was another career that WWE had to constantly play catch-up with, until things finally leveled out, which reminds me, that the Legacy stable was delayed for something like a year because both Orton and Batista kept getting themselves injured during their early runs with the company, something Orton seems plenty eager to ignore when considering Anderson’s prospects).
When he debuted with TNA, a company with a reputation for making all the wrong decisions, a funny thing happened. Mr. Anderson was finally handled correctly. Sure, the highlight of his first year was a feud with Kurt Angle, but at that point, and because it was both prominent and calculated, and treated Anderson nearly as an equal instead of an arrogant pretender, that one worked. Instead of constantly working pseudo main events, Anderson was allowed to be himself, develop himself. He had worked sporadic programs with Jeff Hardy in WWE, but TNA took that to another level, which is something perhaps many fans still don’t realize, how important that particular relationship has been. Never mind that Hardy had been battling personal demons, as it were, recently. In a single year, TNA did everything right with Anderson, and successfully crowned him a first-time world champion, a status he has maintained since, and a title he will reclaim, though there’s no big rush this time, either. Now everyone knows that he can make it work, and that he’s only just began to tap into his potential…
VI. John Morrison
Other than The Miz, Morrison is the most famous and accomplished veteran of the Tough Enough system WWE ever discovered. Unlike Miz, however, Morrison has had to scratch and claw his way toward recognition every step of the way. It’s somewhat ironic that Miz succeeded where Anderson failed, in almost single-handedly rising to main event and world champion status based on personality alone (but don’t worry, I’ll return to Miz directly later on in the Jabroni Companion, so if you’re not down with that description, you’ve got a few more words coming). Morrison, on the other hand, is still working on it.
And not for lack of trying. He rose to prominence within the company as Eric Bischoff’s lackey, Johnny Nitro, establishing a pattern of looking cool, before forming M-N-M with Joey Mercury and Melina (another Tough Enough alum) on Smackdown, where he had a chance to develop and present a distinctly athletic style, using the ropes for propulsion as few other wrestlers tend to, and then returning to Raw as a singles star, feuding with Jeff Hardy (there’s that name again) over the Intercontinental championship (presenting himself as proficient in ladder matches for the first time).
He caught his big break, however, when he was picked to replace Chris Benoit in 2007 as the new face of ECW, a brand WWE could never find respect for (both when it championed the company itself and when it tried to revive said company under its own auspices; this is one relationship that was never quite what fans tended to believe, but I’ll get back to that, too). I say “big break,” but Morrison (as he was soon rechristened during this period) might have just as easily considered it a curse. This was a period when fans were finally allowed to fully embrace CM Punk, which they had been clamoring to for months, but they inexplicably chose not to. Morrison and Punk engaged in a lengthy feud, which is standard procedure in wrestling (the legendary Flair-Steamboat rivalry grew throughout an entire decade; imagine if the fans who booed the ECW headliners in 2007 had been watching those guys!). The ECW brand itself was supposed to be a place to groom new talent, which it routinely did, but fans (who can’t even seem to realize what the point of a show like Superstars is, because most of them can’t seem to appreciate actual wrestling; no, I absolutely cannot explain it) only liked to comment on how little they respected WWE’s version of ECW. Might anyone point out that Paul Heyman routinely employed wrestlers no one else was able to showcase properly, that he built a cult following based on unique talent, many of whom became far bigger stars (Steve Austin, Eddie Guerrero, the Dudley Boyz; the list goes on and on; suffice to say, is not actually limited just to the hardcore wrestlers who nonetheless became synonymous with the company) for having the exposure he was able to craft.
But aside from ECW, this period developed Morrison as a personality. He adopted such nicknames as the Guru of Greatness, the Shaman of Sexy. He took residence at the Palace of Wisdom. Despite all these awesome phrases, fans didn’t really glom onto him. He developed Starship Pain in ECW, but quickly realized what maybe AJ Styles did over at TNA. Unless Morrison became a typical wrestler, instead of merely an outstanding one, it would be very hard to gain the level of respect he truly deserved. Although he now had the look, the entrance, the moves, even notoriety along with The Miz, Morrison still needed one thing: the respect of the fans.
He found himself on Smackdown, and in matches against the likes of Chris Jericho, CM Punk, and Jeff Hardy, Morrison put on some of the best TV matches anyone was likely to see, all with the express purpose of putting him over. It never worked. Because he couldn’t or didn’t conform to the demands of a typical main event personality, who regularly bark into the mic rather than simply exude natural charisma (someone tell Gorgeous George that he couldn’t have begun the modern era in the actual modern era!), Morrison developed the reputation of failed potential.
And now, of course, he’s on the injured list. He’s got all the talent required, more than anyone else could possibly handle (the only comparable performer, AJ Styles, long ago stopped wrestling this way). The fans demand a concrete reason to cheer and admire talent like this. What Morrison needs to do is put his cocky confidence to a whole different level. He needs to be like Russell Crowe in GLADIATOR. He needs to demand, “Are you not entertained?” Because he can do anything. His style could easily be presented as impossibly dominant, in an entirely unique way. If WWE, and its fans, could grow comfortable with this, John Morrison could become a legend.
VII. Shawn Michaels
The wrestler most people compare Morrison to is Shawn Michaels, the only other performer who has been able to so completely perfect his craft that he has literally been able to do anything he wanted in the ring. It’s how he became known as Mr. WrestleMania. He could make anything look like he was the innovator. Even though he popularized the ladder match against an opponent, Scott Hall, who had a completely different style, it was HBK who came to dominate the legacy of that original encounter, because where Hall kept wrestling much the way a good and competent wrestler does (and I’ll get back to Hall, too), Shawn just kept pushing his game to whatever level was necessary, in whatever situation he found himself.
That’s how he became an icon. He was in the wrestling business, and WWE, for years before this talent was appreciated. That ladder match at WrestleMania X came about because Vince McMahon was finally forced to recognize that Shawn could no longer be denied. 1993 had been something of a hassle for all parties, and if things had continued the way they were then, the entire sport of professional wrestling would be different today. It was a transition year, when Yokozuna was pushed as champion simply because he was naturally what the company could no longer do artificially, which was be larger than life. While WWE tried to push Bret Hart and Lex Luger as the new faces of the company, Shawn Michaels was finally putting his Rockers tag team past completely behind himself. He was not supposed to steal the show at 1994’s WrestleMania, but steal the show he did.
He brought in Kevin Nash during this period, and Nash, thanks to Shawn’s prescience, was quickly recognized as a considerable talent, and became a featured performer on the main event and world title scene. 1995 belonged to “Big Daddy Cool,” but that year’s WrestleMania was also the first time Shawn was allowed to legitimately compete for the world title. Everyone finally seemed to realize that he belonged at that level, but on his own terms, and so he was put into a program with a competitor who might truly be able to keep up with him, and with that, Bret Hart finally met his match, and WrestleMania XII happened.
The only problem was, 1996 eventually went in the direction Shawn himself had realized a few years earlier, when he singled out Kevin Nash. The return of the era that had held wrestlers like HBK back couldn’t have come at a worse time. Shawn seemed to return to the mentality that had almost undone him in 1993, and things kind of got out of control for a while, and then he took all that energy and put it in a more useful direction, and made the momentum swing in his favor. He truly blossomed, finally, as figurehead of DX, just as his career seemed to be winding down. 1998 eventually became 2002, though, (yes, I’m horribly compressing), and Shawn found himself to be a WWE elder statesman (years before Undertaker would truly embrace a similar role).
Long story short, Shawn Michaels became the most improbable beloved figure in sports entertainment. Plenty has been said about his career, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about this one.
VIII. Triple H
Someone who has struggled to win the respect of the fans throughout his career not named Ken Anderson would be Paul Levesque, better known as Hunter Hurst-Helmsley, better known as Triple H. Few wrestlers have as dramatically altered their original images as this man, who went from the “Blue Blood” to “The Game” during an arduous transformation process. Unlike Shawn Michaels, his career didn’t really benefit from DX shenanigans. He didn’t become a world champion until several angles after his original DX run. It was the infamous McMahon-Helmsley era that truly put him on the map, that came to define his career, as someone who got ahead by literally sleeping with the boss’s daughter. If he hadn’t made that late 1999, early 2000 run so entertaining, maybe I’d agree that it was an unholy alliance that made his career. Never even mind that his development was delayed for years after Hunter pissed off Vince McMahon back in 1996 by breaking character. Apparently something like that is easy to overlook when you really want to hate someone.
What Triple H did better than anyone else was embody the potential of the heel. He did it so well he actually did it too well. Unlike his mentor Ric Flair, Hunter was a braggart in a coward’s body. He didn’t win by accident or cheating, but by any means necessary. That’s what the program with Mick Foley was meant to convey. That’s why he adopted the trusty sledgehammer. All due respect to The Miz, but Triple H was no fluke champion. He wore the title because he’d truly earned it, and had waited long enough. Only Triple H could prevent The Rock, during The Rock’s most popular period, from being world champion.
Years ago, the story would have been different. Roddy Piper, by this reasoning, would have been world champion at WrestleMania I. What Hunter’s original reigns as champion represented was Vince McMahon’s evolving appreciation of the art of professional wrestling, things he might have learned from Ric Flair, you might say, or even Steve Austin. You put the title on the wrestler with the most heat, and you’re guaranteed hot programs. It’s another overlooked aspect of Hunter’s career that his original reign as champion ended somewhat abruptly, extended though it was. By the summer of 2000, The Rock was champion, and then Kurt Angle was champion, and Hunter never even sniffed the title again. He became embroiled in other feuds. Maybe that card with Austin should have been saved for 2001’s WrestleMania, not 2000’s Survivor Series. It didn’t matter, maybe, because Hunter went out with an injury, and missed a whole year, missed the whole Invasion, missed WCW, ECW, and the crowning of the first-ever undisputed champion.
Of course, that meant that when he did return, he would be given what most wrestlers only dream of, and that’s the spot at WrestleMania, the featured spot, not one that steals the show, but the one that marks a significant moment in a wrestler’s career. Several years after attaining world champion status, Hunter was given that spot. His detractors might note that even this did not immediately return Triple H to dominance.
Brock Lesnar became pushed as the “Next Big Thing,” and suddenly Hunter was tapped as the face of continuity within WWE. In the summer of 2002, Triple H was awarded the world title, and was almost immediately placed in a hot program with the returning Shawn Michaels. When Lesnar’s push cooled , Hunter found himself in the position to try and reclaim the kind of role he’d had in the McMahon-Helmsley era, and responded by forming Evolution. The development of this stable was delayed by so many injuries between Randy Orton and Batista that fans thought they could be forgiven for confusing it with keeping Triple H champion for the sake of Triple H being champion. In fact, by 2004, Orton was finally coming into his own, and by 2005, Batista was putting his potential into the stratosphere.
With the departures of major stars like Austin and The Rock, Hunter had become an undisputed cornerstone of the company, and at the dawn of the brand era, asked to carry one of two promotions within WWE, competing against what was hoped to be the new Hulk Hogan. Triple H didn’t sweat it. By this time he knew what to do. It was the fans who were confused. They would probably have been more confused if they’d looked at an NWA or WCW scorecard, and tried explaining why Ric Flair amassed all those championship reigns, and why guys like Sting and Vader entered the main event scene without ever replacing him. His own company grew tired of relying on the “Nature Boy.” Hunter, like I said, made it look easy. He did what he had to, and for fewer years than “Naitch.”
Triple H became a more conventional company player after this, and managed a dominant as well as quiet period as world champion on Smackdown. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so easy to explain, but “The Game” was a favorite from the start, and his many, ah, evolutions just made it all the easier to enjoy following his career.
IX. The Rock
In contrast, even WWE didn’t see The Rock coming, when it tried to make an instant sensation of Rocky Maivia in 1996. The fans famously sparked a backlash against this initial push, which forced The Rock to transform from a babyface to a heel, begin to talk in the third person, and start laying the smackdown as a member of the Nation of Domination, the only time he would ever be seen as a performer by the color of his skin (aside from Owen Hart, the Nation was more or less a gang of black wrestlers). How exactly he attained world champion status was less a matter of the fans demanding it and more Vince McMahon attempting his old tactics (the 1998 Survivor Series was the first chance Vince had to offer a true alternative to the wildly popular “Stone Cold” phenomenon, and, truth be told, The Rock was not actually there yet, and so that’s why the epic rivalry and/or relationship with Mick Foley happened).
But The Rock became a huge fan favorite all the same, and his charisma was noticed beyond wrestling thanks to a 2000 appearance hosting Saturday Night Live, and Dwayne Johnson emerged as a legitimate Hollywood star. I could go into all the performances I like best (THE RUNDOWN, BE COOL, SOUTHLAND TALES, RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, FAST FIVE), but this isn’t the Film Fan, this is the Jabroni Companion. Know your role and shut your damn mouth.
The Rock made an improbable WWE comeback in 2011, and so there’s more yet of his wrestling career to speak of, which is exactly what sports entertainment needs right now. For a man who last wrestled in 2004, and even that was an exception, it speaks to how unique a personality he has become, how big a phenomenon he really is, that he doesn’t look out of place in this context, and that he can still manage two separate careers. Much can be said about how that transition was originally made, but for now, let’s just revel in the millions…and millions of the Rock’s fans. Because they’re still here.
If any one personality can truly encompass the complicated relationship between professional wrestling and the rest of the world, that would be The Rock.
V. Mr. Anderson
Anderson. (Sorry, had to do that.) Here’s a guy who came to prominence in 2005 (no, really!), and ironically had his first significant match against Eddie (which was, in fact, Eddie’s final televised match). The encounter was plenty indicative of the way WWE chose to push Anderson. He had struggled for years on the independent circuit, but once someone realized that he had the gift of gab (and probably when he started introducing himself, the routine everyone knows), he shot onto the track of superstardom. In fact, when he debuted in WWE, on the seldom-seen B-show Velocity, he really was Mr. Anderson, but by the time he arrived on Smackdown had been rechristened Mr. Kennedy (which you might recall happens to be Vince McMahon’s middle name…another suggestion that a certain angle was supposed to reveal our hero as the boss’s bastard son). At the time Smackdown certainly liked to give humongous pushes to newcomers (think Carlito and MVP), but Kennedy/Anderson was almost a different case entirely. He famously defeated a series of former world champions, which, of course, became regularly referenced by the ringside commentators during his matches. What the company obviously expected was that this guy was going to become an overnight member of the main event scene.
Maybe Vince forgot about a dude named Rocky Maivia. Okay, you don’t exactly forget about The Rock, but what I mean is that maybe Vince forgot that you can’t engineer crowd favorites. It’s something Hollywood does time and time again, find an actor it really likes, and then push that actor in countless projects. It seldom works. Those actors either catch on, or they become the next “where are they now” trivia answers. That’s what happened to Kennedy/Anderson.
You’ll constantly hear the argument that what did him in is his wrestling ability, and that’s partially true. He’s unorthodox in the ring. He’s the rare wrestler who will relish the chance to sell his opponents, not cartoonishly, like a Ric Flair or Shawn Michaels, but enough so that maybe it’s a little too easy to believe that he’s allowed the match to get out of hand. It’s probably a holdover from his former jobber status (and probably what helped him get out of it, too, because anyone who can make beatdowns truly look good can probably do other things, too), and so rare most fans will never even think of a good wrestler competing that way. When it comes to offense, he prefers striking, but also has some striking, as it were, sentons, which is another baffling element of his repertoire, because it’s also not routine for most wrestlers to depend on sentons, whether delivered from a standing position or from the turnbuckle. When you’ve got a distinctive style, it either means that you’re playing directly to the crowd, performing time-tested and anticipated maneuvers, or simply getting it done in the match. Kennedy/Anderson never really draws himself out of matches. His style has drawn comparison to Steve Austin because of that. That and his brash personality.
The other thing you’ll hear about him is that injuries and controversies undid his WWE career. I would argue that WWE screwed him, as it were, by failing to understand that they had a far more literal next Rock on their hands than they ever seemed to realize. They couldn’t push him successfully the way they wanted. He needed feuds with competitors at his experience level, not at the status he deserved. Instead of Undertaker and Shawn Michaels, he should have had more matches with Bobby Lashley, MVP. Hell, imagine if he had ever had a program with Chris Jericho. During their mutual time in the company, Jericho hadn’t definitively established his world champion credentials (other than that run as undisputed champion, which both he and WWE had determined to be something of a failure).
Anyway, instead of establishing a list of defeats against former world champions, Kennedy/Anderson might’ve simply ingratiated himself to the fans, what every wrestler is supposed to do. Randy Orton became a “Legend Killer” so that he could better represent his arrogance, not put himself at a specific level (though his was another career that WWE had to constantly play catch-up with, until things finally leveled out, which reminds me, that the Legacy stable was delayed for something like a year because both Orton and Batista kept getting themselves injured during their early runs with the company, something Orton seems plenty eager to ignore when considering Anderson’s prospects).
When he debuted with TNA, a company with a reputation for making all the wrong decisions, a funny thing happened. Mr. Anderson was finally handled correctly. Sure, the highlight of his first year was a feud with Kurt Angle, but at that point, and because it was both prominent and calculated, and treated Anderson nearly as an equal instead of an arrogant pretender, that one worked. Instead of constantly working pseudo main events, Anderson was allowed to be himself, develop himself. He had worked sporadic programs with Jeff Hardy in WWE, but TNA took that to another level, which is something perhaps many fans still don’t realize, how important that particular relationship has been. Never mind that Hardy had been battling personal demons, as it were, recently. In a single year, TNA did everything right with Anderson, and successfully crowned him a first-time world champion, a status he has maintained since, and a title he will reclaim, though there’s no big rush this time, either. Now everyone knows that he can make it work, and that he’s only just began to tap into his potential…
VI. John Morrison
Other than The Miz, Morrison is the most famous and accomplished veteran of the Tough Enough system WWE ever discovered. Unlike Miz, however, Morrison has had to scratch and claw his way toward recognition every step of the way. It’s somewhat ironic that Miz succeeded where Anderson failed, in almost single-handedly rising to main event and world champion status based on personality alone (but don’t worry, I’ll return to Miz directly later on in the Jabroni Companion, so if you’re not down with that description, you’ve got a few more words coming). Morrison, on the other hand, is still working on it.
And not for lack of trying. He rose to prominence within the company as Eric Bischoff’s lackey, Johnny Nitro, establishing a pattern of looking cool, before forming M-N-M with Joey Mercury and Melina (another Tough Enough alum) on Smackdown, where he had a chance to develop and present a distinctly athletic style, using the ropes for propulsion as few other wrestlers tend to, and then returning to Raw as a singles star, feuding with Jeff Hardy (there’s that name again) over the Intercontinental championship (presenting himself as proficient in ladder matches for the first time).
He caught his big break, however, when he was picked to replace Chris Benoit in 2007 as the new face of ECW, a brand WWE could never find respect for (both when it championed the company itself and when it tried to revive said company under its own auspices; this is one relationship that was never quite what fans tended to believe, but I’ll get back to that, too). I say “big break,” but Morrison (as he was soon rechristened during this period) might have just as easily considered it a curse. This was a period when fans were finally allowed to fully embrace CM Punk, which they had been clamoring to for months, but they inexplicably chose not to. Morrison and Punk engaged in a lengthy feud, which is standard procedure in wrestling (the legendary Flair-Steamboat rivalry grew throughout an entire decade; imagine if the fans who booed the ECW headliners in 2007 had been watching those guys!). The ECW brand itself was supposed to be a place to groom new talent, which it routinely did, but fans (who can’t even seem to realize what the point of a show like Superstars is, because most of them can’t seem to appreciate actual wrestling; no, I absolutely cannot explain it) only liked to comment on how little they respected WWE’s version of ECW. Might anyone point out that Paul Heyman routinely employed wrestlers no one else was able to showcase properly, that he built a cult following based on unique talent, many of whom became far bigger stars (Steve Austin, Eddie Guerrero, the Dudley Boyz; the list goes on and on; suffice to say, is not actually limited just to the hardcore wrestlers who nonetheless became synonymous with the company) for having the exposure he was able to craft.
But aside from ECW, this period developed Morrison as a personality. He adopted such nicknames as the Guru of Greatness, the Shaman of Sexy. He took residence at the Palace of Wisdom. Despite all these awesome phrases, fans didn’t really glom onto him. He developed Starship Pain in ECW, but quickly realized what maybe AJ Styles did over at TNA. Unless Morrison became a typical wrestler, instead of merely an outstanding one, it would be very hard to gain the level of respect he truly deserved. Although he now had the look, the entrance, the moves, even notoriety along with The Miz, Morrison still needed one thing: the respect of the fans.
He found himself on Smackdown, and in matches against the likes of Chris Jericho, CM Punk, and Jeff Hardy, Morrison put on some of the best TV matches anyone was likely to see, all with the express purpose of putting him over. It never worked. Because he couldn’t or didn’t conform to the demands of a typical main event personality, who regularly bark into the mic rather than simply exude natural charisma (someone tell Gorgeous George that he couldn’t have begun the modern era in the actual modern era!), Morrison developed the reputation of failed potential.
And now, of course, he’s on the injured list. He’s got all the talent required, more than anyone else could possibly handle (the only comparable performer, AJ Styles, long ago stopped wrestling this way). The fans demand a concrete reason to cheer and admire talent like this. What Morrison needs to do is put his cocky confidence to a whole different level. He needs to be like Russell Crowe in GLADIATOR. He needs to demand, “Are you not entertained?” Because he can do anything. His style could easily be presented as impossibly dominant, in an entirely unique way. If WWE, and its fans, could grow comfortable with this, John Morrison could become a legend.
VII. Shawn Michaels
The wrestler most people compare Morrison to is Shawn Michaels, the only other performer who has been able to so completely perfect his craft that he has literally been able to do anything he wanted in the ring. It’s how he became known as Mr. WrestleMania. He could make anything look like he was the innovator. Even though he popularized the ladder match against an opponent, Scott Hall, who had a completely different style, it was HBK who came to dominate the legacy of that original encounter, because where Hall kept wrestling much the way a good and competent wrestler does (and I’ll get back to Hall, too), Shawn just kept pushing his game to whatever level was necessary, in whatever situation he found himself.
That’s how he became an icon. He was in the wrestling business, and WWE, for years before this talent was appreciated. That ladder match at WrestleMania X came about because Vince McMahon was finally forced to recognize that Shawn could no longer be denied. 1993 had been something of a hassle for all parties, and if things had continued the way they were then, the entire sport of professional wrestling would be different today. It was a transition year, when Yokozuna was pushed as champion simply because he was naturally what the company could no longer do artificially, which was be larger than life. While WWE tried to push Bret Hart and Lex Luger as the new faces of the company, Shawn Michaels was finally putting his Rockers tag team past completely behind himself. He was not supposed to steal the show at 1994’s WrestleMania, but steal the show he did.
He brought in Kevin Nash during this period, and Nash, thanks to Shawn’s prescience, was quickly recognized as a considerable talent, and became a featured performer on the main event and world title scene. 1995 belonged to “Big Daddy Cool,” but that year’s WrestleMania was also the first time Shawn was allowed to legitimately compete for the world title. Everyone finally seemed to realize that he belonged at that level, but on his own terms, and so he was put into a program with a competitor who might truly be able to keep up with him, and with that, Bret Hart finally met his match, and WrestleMania XII happened.
The only problem was, 1996 eventually went in the direction Shawn himself had realized a few years earlier, when he singled out Kevin Nash. The return of the era that had held wrestlers like HBK back couldn’t have come at a worse time. Shawn seemed to return to the mentality that had almost undone him in 1993, and things kind of got out of control for a while, and then he took all that energy and put it in a more useful direction, and made the momentum swing in his favor. He truly blossomed, finally, as figurehead of DX, just as his career seemed to be winding down. 1998 eventually became 2002, though, (yes, I’m horribly compressing), and Shawn found himself to be a WWE elder statesman (years before Undertaker would truly embrace a similar role).
Long story short, Shawn Michaels became the most improbable beloved figure in sports entertainment. Plenty has been said about his career, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about this one.
VIII. Triple H
Someone who has struggled to win the respect of the fans throughout his career not named Ken Anderson would be Paul Levesque, better known as Hunter Hurst-Helmsley, better known as Triple H. Few wrestlers have as dramatically altered their original images as this man, who went from the “Blue Blood” to “The Game” during an arduous transformation process. Unlike Shawn Michaels, his career didn’t really benefit from DX shenanigans. He didn’t become a world champion until several angles after his original DX run. It was the infamous McMahon-Helmsley era that truly put him on the map, that came to define his career, as someone who got ahead by literally sleeping with the boss’s daughter. If he hadn’t made that late 1999, early 2000 run so entertaining, maybe I’d agree that it was an unholy alliance that made his career. Never even mind that his development was delayed for years after Hunter pissed off Vince McMahon back in 1996 by breaking character. Apparently something like that is easy to overlook when you really want to hate someone.
What Triple H did better than anyone else was embody the potential of the heel. He did it so well he actually did it too well. Unlike his mentor Ric Flair, Hunter was a braggart in a coward’s body. He didn’t win by accident or cheating, but by any means necessary. That’s what the program with Mick Foley was meant to convey. That’s why he adopted the trusty sledgehammer. All due respect to The Miz, but Triple H was no fluke champion. He wore the title because he’d truly earned it, and had waited long enough. Only Triple H could prevent The Rock, during The Rock’s most popular period, from being world champion.
Years ago, the story would have been different. Roddy Piper, by this reasoning, would have been world champion at WrestleMania I. What Hunter’s original reigns as champion represented was Vince McMahon’s evolving appreciation of the art of professional wrestling, things he might have learned from Ric Flair, you might say, or even Steve Austin. You put the title on the wrestler with the most heat, and you’re guaranteed hot programs. It’s another overlooked aspect of Hunter’s career that his original reign as champion ended somewhat abruptly, extended though it was. By the summer of 2000, The Rock was champion, and then Kurt Angle was champion, and Hunter never even sniffed the title again. He became embroiled in other feuds. Maybe that card with Austin should have been saved for 2001’s WrestleMania, not 2000’s Survivor Series. It didn’t matter, maybe, because Hunter went out with an injury, and missed a whole year, missed the whole Invasion, missed WCW, ECW, and the crowning of the first-ever undisputed champion.
Of course, that meant that when he did return, he would be given what most wrestlers only dream of, and that’s the spot at WrestleMania, the featured spot, not one that steals the show, but the one that marks a significant moment in a wrestler’s career. Several years after attaining world champion status, Hunter was given that spot. His detractors might note that even this did not immediately return Triple H to dominance.
Brock Lesnar became pushed as the “Next Big Thing,” and suddenly Hunter was tapped as the face of continuity within WWE. In the summer of 2002, Triple H was awarded the world title, and was almost immediately placed in a hot program with the returning Shawn Michaels. When Lesnar’s push cooled , Hunter found himself in the position to try and reclaim the kind of role he’d had in the McMahon-Helmsley era, and responded by forming Evolution. The development of this stable was delayed by so many injuries between Randy Orton and Batista that fans thought they could be forgiven for confusing it with keeping Triple H champion for the sake of Triple H being champion. In fact, by 2004, Orton was finally coming into his own, and by 2005, Batista was putting his potential into the stratosphere.
With the departures of major stars like Austin and The Rock, Hunter had become an undisputed cornerstone of the company, and at the dawn of the brand era, asked to carry one of two promotions within WWE, competing against what was hoped to be the new Hulk Hogan. Triple H didn’t sweat it. By this time he knew what to do. It was the fans who were confused. They would probably have been more confused if they’d looked at an NWA or WCW scorecard, and tried explaining why Ric Flair amassed all those championship reigns, and why guys like Sting and Vader entered the main event scene without ever replacing him. His own company grew tired of relying on the “Nature Boy.” Hunter, like I said, made it look easy. He did what he had to, and for fewer years than “Naitch.”
Triple H became a more conventional company player after this, and managed a dominant as well as quiet period as world champion on Smackdown. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so easy to explain, but “The Game” was a favorite from the start, and his many, ah, evolutions just made it all the easier to enjoy following his career.
IX. The Rock
In contrast, even WWE didn’t see The Rock coming, when it tried to make an instant sensation of Rocky Maivia in 1996. The fans famously sparked a backlash against this initial push, which forced The Rock to transform from a babyface to a heel, begin to talk in the third person, and start laying the smackdown as a member of the Nation of Domination, the only time he would ever be seen as a performer by the color of his skin (aside from Owen Hart, the Nation was more or less a gang of black wrestlers). How exactly he attained world champion status was less a matter of the fans demanding it and more Vince McMahon attempting his old tactics (the 1998 Survivor Series was the first chance Vince had to offer a true alternative to the wildly popular “Stone Cold” phenomenon, and, truth be told, The Rock was not actually there yet, and so that’s why the epic rivalry and/or relationship with Mick Foley happened).
But The Rock became a huge fan favorite all the same, and his charisma was noticed beyond wrestling thanks to a 2000 appearance hosting Saturday Night Live, and Dwayne Johnson emerged as a legitimate Hollywood star. I could go into all the performances I like best (THE RUNDOWN, BE COOL, SOUTHLAND TALES, RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, FAST FIVE), but this isn’t the Film Fan, this is the Jabroni Companion. Know your role and shut your damn mouth.
The Rock made an improbable WWE comeback in 2011, and so there’s more yet of his wrestling career to speak of, which is exactly what sports entertainment needs right now. For a man who last wrestled in 2004, and even that was an exception, it speaks to how unique a personality he has become, how big a phenomenon he really is, that he doesn’t look out of place in this context, and that he can still manage two separate careers. Much can be said about how that transition was originally made, but for now, let’s just revel in the millions…and millions of the Rock’s fans. Because they’re still here.
If any one personality can truly encompass the complicated relationship between professional wrestling and the rest of the world, that would be The Rock.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Jabroni Companion: WrestleMania XXVII
Having finally had a chance to check out this year's WrestleMania for myself, I've got a few thoughts:
The "Snookie match" was probably intended more as Michelle McCool's dream match, against Trish Stratus. You can kinda tell because, well, she retired soon after and most of the match take place between them. Also, to say all John Morrison did was perform Starship Pain is kinda like saying all Tazz did was suplex. He performed Starship Pain off the frickin' top turnbuckle. Onto the floor. I don't know if the commentators I read are aware of this, but that's not the way he usually does it. For the record. I'll have more Morrison on Thursday.
As a whole, the card felt like a huge throwback to how WrestleMania was in the beginning, with a huge emphasis on celebrity (which happened to come from WWE's own, for the most part, in the form of Dwayne Johnson), and not a lot of concern for important matches. Don't get me wrong, because for most of the wrestlers on the card, they were actually involved in personally significant matches, but I'm not sure the company was looking for any technically excellent exhibitions. They ahd Undertaker in yet another climactic encounter, and as long as they've got that, I think they'll allow the rest of the card to rest a little easy, which is pretty interesting.
I'll watch it again at some point, but on the whole, apart from the vastly different tone, I would not call it a failure, as most others seem to be saying. There were so many emotionally charged moments in previous months, because of the whole Nexus angle, that they had to go in a different direction, and Cena-Rock had appropriately already been announced for next year.
To steal a line from The Miz, that one will be awesome.
The "Snookie match" was probably intended more as Michelle McCool's dream match, against Trish Stratus. You can kinda tell because, well, she retired soon after and most of the match take place between them. Also, to say all John Morrison did was perform Starship Pain is kinda like saying all Tazz did was suplex. He performed Starship Pain off the frickin' top turnbuckle. Onto the floor. I don't know if the commentators I read are aware of this, but that's not the way he usually does it. For the record. I'll have more Morrison on Thursday.
As a whole, the card felt like a huge throwback to how WrestleMania was in the beginning, with a huge emphasis on celebrity (which happened to come from WWE's own, for the most part, in the form of Dwayne Johnson), and not a lot of concern for important matches. Don't get me wrong, because for most of the wrestlers on the card, they were actually involved in personally significant matches, but I'm not sure the company was looking for any technically excellent exhibitions. They ahd Undertaker in yet another climactic encounter, and as long as they've got that, I think they'll allow the rest of the card to rest a little easy, which is pretty interesting.
I'll watch it again at some point, but on the whole, apart from the vastly different tone, I would not call it a failure, as most others seem to be saying. There were so many emotionally charged moments in previous months, because of the whole Nexus angle, that they had to go in a different direction, and Cena-Rock had appropriately already been announced for next year.
To steal a line from The Miz, that one will be awesome.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Jabroni Companion #3
Okay, so now that we’ve looked at my favorite wrestler and the most famous card in professional wrestling, how about one of the most hotly disputed angles to ever develop? I’m talking
III. The Invasion
Incredibly, 2011 marks the ten-year anniversary of Vince McMahon buying WCW, thereby effectively ending one of the greatest rivalries wrestling has ever seen, WWE vs. WCW, headlined by the Monday Night War that gave us the nWo, the Attitude Era, and an endless series of wildly inappropriate Mae Young appearances.
There’s been plenty said about how WCW sabotaged itself during its last year of existence, from increasingly erratic booking to the dwindling impact of a formula that had, since its hottest days in 1996, lost the interest of the fans. The company attempted a number of ways to repackage existing stars, reposition them, and keep business going more or less as usual, but WWE, behind the cultural phenomenon of Steve Austin, had finally managed to completely eclipse its competition, and there was just no way WCW could maintain, much less regain, the kind of momentum it had enjoyed previously. For financial reasons, the prospect of new ownership made everything that much more unstable, and that allowed Vince to slip his way in, and bring WCW to a close, and in dramatic fashion, with a simulcast announcement occurring between Raw and the final edition of Nitro. The new boss couldn’t wait to rebrand his acquisition, quickly establishing the seeds to a whole new era, and the beginnings of the Invasion angle, by representing his son Shane as a usurper of this historic moment.
It was a slow build from there, and part of the reason was that WWE had an opportunity to rebuild itself around Austin, who had recently returned from career-threatening surgery, and that year’s WrestleMania kicked off a different angle entirely, the unexpected alliance between the “Texas Rattlesnake” and his former archrival, Vince McMahon. The story only became more complicated when Triple H, who only months earlier had been confirmed to be the culprit of the storyline that had explained Austin’s absence, and therefore the recipient of a violent blood feud with him upon his return, joined up, and together, this “Two-Man Power Trip” ran roughshod over the company. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), meanwhile, was just getting started in his movie career, and so the biggest competition for this duo was the late Chris Jericho and the late Chris Benoit. Things hit a patch when “The Game” himself went out to injury.
And things only became further complicated from there. WCW stars, and then ECW stars, began the invasion in earnest. It probably bears noting how complicated the wrestling scene had been for the preceding year. ECW, a cult promotion known for its devoted fans (strong enough for WWE to later revive the idea for an entire brand, and then TNA to bring back its most visible stars once again), began suffering a major setback (as Ring of Honor in recent years can probably relate) when WWE and WCW raided its best talent to stock up their own rosters. WWE had names like the Dudley Boys and Tazz under contract by 2000, while WCW literally stole Mike Awesome during his ECW heavyweight championship run. About the only name that remained loyal was Rob Van Dam, but he had never been a world champion with the promotion, and the momentum ECW constantly strove to build never really came. The company was out of business by the time WCW was bought out.
By 2001, then, it wasn’t uncommon to find wrestlers who had been known as ECW competitors to be featured regularly on a WWE card, and that included Rhyno, who had become something of the ECW equivalent of WCW’s Goldberg, a monster of a wrestler who mauled opponents with the Gore, a version of the tackle that Goldberg and WWE’s Edge had made one of the modern era’s most feared maneuvers.
By the time of the invasion, fans were salivating at the prospects. WWE had the ECW and WCW rosters to pick from, which promised a war of epic proportions, a clash between all the biggest stars of the days, now free to mingle in the same ring. What seemed like a perfect dream, however, was apparently not what Vince McMahon himself had in mind. These are names that never factored into the invasion: Scott Steiner, Tommy Dreamer, the Sandman, Sting, Ric Flair, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Hulk Hogan, Sabu, Rey Mysterio, Goldberg, Jeff Jarrett. It’s not as if none of these men would ever be seen in a wrestling ring again. Many of them are still, in some way, ten years later, still very relevant to wrestling fans. Yet none of them graced a WWE ring in 2001, ever appeared with the WCW/ECW Alliance, even though they were and are undisputedly the biggest names from either promotion.
Fans who caught on to that fact were a little put off, to say the least. WWE used all the least relevant stars, in some ways. Sure, you had Booker T and RVD, both of whom became far bigger stars than they had been before as a result. But what was the point of this angle if Austin didn’t finally have that match with Goldberg, for instance, or any number of other blockbuster combinations?
Almost exactly from the start, WWE was using its existing stars to augment the ranks of the Alliance, those who had famously competed in those organizations, and even some surprises, such as Steve Austin’s turn at the Invasion PPV itself, when he turned his back on WWE. It was almost business as usual in some respects. What was the point?
Chris Jericho, in his recent book Undisputed offers one possible explanation, when he talks about his own rough transition from the style he had become used to wrestling to what Vince expected from him in WWE, and this is just one exceptionally gifted star. Imagine what kind of nightmare it would have been to try and develop two whole additional rosters of stars, when WWE itself already had a roster of talented individuals who shouldn’t be expected to give up their spots to relatively unproven talent. This I’m saying purely in the sense that there were now dozens of wrestlers WWE fans and the WWE system itself would now have to incorporate into a cohesive vision. When most fans think about wrestling, it’s easy in theory to juggle different promotions, and that was a lot of what sustained the Monday Night War, and what allowed ECW to stand out, with a style that stood out in stark contrast, until it was adopted and adapted to suit both WCW and WWE.
But that was when fans could pick and choose, when there were options, when there were different channels, and the ability to clearly delineate support between promotions. Vince quickly determined that he would have to very carefully calculate and modulate the conflicting affections his fans would now have to juggle all at once, and that it would best serve him, his stars, and yes, the fans, if he did so in a very deliberate manner. He put his own company first, and it was a damn smart move. I will actually be writing another column about who benefited the most from this decision, so I may seem to be skipping over some rather significant developments in this one, but suffice it to say, I intend to finally dispel the myth that the Invasion angle was a missed opportunity.
The Invasion, which quickly segued into the Alliance, was an angle that officially lasted from the Invasion PPV in July of 2001 until that November’s Survivor Series. As we all know, another huge story occurred at roughly the midpoint of all this, 9/11, one that was far bigger than any wrestling event, and something that is rarely referenced when fans talk about the failure of the angle, because it ended up being far shorter than most people seemed to hope.
That’s being all the more naïve, though, especially when you consider how many things happened after Survivor Series, when the Alliance appeared to have been completely neutralized. Ric Flair made his return to WWE soon after, and initiated an epic feud with Vince, and that in itself led to the comeback of the New World Order, with its original members Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Hulk Hogan, which itself led to perhaps the biggest match in WrestleMania history, Hogan vs. The Rock. This was quickly followed by the beginning of the brand era, when WWE split into Raw and Smackdown as separate promotions, thanks to the increased roster that was the direct result of the acquisition of WCW and ECW. Word had it that originally Vince hoped to split WCW off into its own brand within WWE (but then, WCW had the same hopes with the nWo), and while that very dream would one day be realized with ECW, this was a different era. Vince McMahon had won the professional wrestling war. He had no reason to immediately capitulate and grant his vanquished foes their own platform in his own company. His sole job was the satisfactory welfare of WWE, and the stars he himself had nurtured. I would venture to say that doing anything at all with a flood of WCW and ECW talent was more generous than anything. He gave the lesser-known talent an unbelievable opportunity (which fans might better appreciate today in the post-Nexus era), and then moved on to bigger and better things.
As I said, Booker T was a huge beneficiary of the Alliance angle. He had been WCW champion several times in its final year, but was one of the stars that failed to properly motivate fans to truly care (Jeff Jarrett and Scott Steiner were the others), and was even positioned as the final champion on the last Nitro, and so became the face of the promotion at the onset of the Invasion. Since he had developed several moves that resembled ones The Rock had made famous, it was only natural that he and The Rock would enter a program at some point, and that alone elevated Booker’s profile. That this feud helped Chris Jericho become a world champion for the first time is another huge development that the Invasion helped make possible. When the Alliance was defeated at Survivor Series, Booker was one of many stars who were supposed to disappear, but he never did, and in fact became a WWE staple, and by 2003, a scant year later, was competing in a WrestleMania main event.
RVD, meanwhile, became such a fan favorite that it became difficult to understand how he himself wasn’t immediately pushed into world champion status, even though his own ECW promotion had never done so. He was the true breakout star of the Invasion, and this would never have bee possible if all those other big names had been around. He would have been an afterthought. Instead, he eventually became the cornerstone, and champion of, the ECW revival in 2006, which in turn would give him the legitimacy to headline TNA years later.
This is to say nothing of how Steve Austin and Kurt Angle, for example, benefited, and that’s another hugely overlooked development of the Alliance angle, and one that will figure prominently in the follow-up column, to be sure.
The Invasion and the Alliance, however, were only one small element of Vince’s strategy. Where others sawed only a series of missed opportunities, he envisioned a series of prospects that only increased in time. He had two world champions during the whole angle, and these titles were routinely defended, separately. That opened the door to the unprecedented unification tournament at that December’s Vengeance, when the first-ever undisputed heavyweight champion would be crowned. Since Steve Austin and The Rock were both involved, it seemed natural that one of them would claim the honor, but Vince gave fans another huge swerve when he tapped Jericho instead, thereby paving the way for the return of Triple H in time for the 2002 WrestleMania.
He had the chance to launch the WWE careers of many famous WCW stars at his leisure as well. Rey Mysterio didn’t debut until the summer of 2002, a good year after the initial invasion. Imagine if Rey had been just another WCW star trying to make his mark. Vince instead had the vision to make him something special from the start, and reaped the benefits for years, finding an unlikely (WCW itself had never been able to make Mysterio quite so popular) fan favorite, and an even more unlikely world champion. Scott Steiner, who had closed his WCW career as a heel with one of the most hotly greeted fan reactions of the modern era, made his WWE return in the fall as a free agent greatly desired by both brands (and therefore accentuating not only his own presence by the still-novel concept of rival brands within WWE). No matter the controversies that would surround his matches with Triple H, or his increasingly undistinguished year back. “Big Poppa Pump” had already proven Vince’s point.
WWE gained new developmental talent, too, wrestlers WCW had been working on, such as Jimmy Yang, Nathan Jones, Oleg Prudius, which it was free to nurture at a different pace. Yang went through several incarnations before becoming something of an attraction as an unlikely redneck. Jones, who has since become a Hollywood favorite, but was first discovered by WCW, had a few opportunities to prove himself inside of a WWE ring, even at one point being slated to compete as the Undertaker’s partner at WrestleMania, which is far more than he ever got with the organization that found him. Prudius, meanwhile, was a Russian sensation whose general ungainliness for mass conception eventually gave WWE and Santino Marella the easy-going Vladimir Koslov.
Through all of this, WWE kept the spotlight on its own stars, and 2001 served as a significant transition year for not only Austin, Angle, Jericho, but also for Edge, Jeff Hardy, and William Regal, who finally found the perfect WWE role for himself, a persnickety authority figure whose personality fans could really get behind. 2002 was a significant year for developing new stars as well, from John Cena and Randy Orton to Brock Lesnar, who came about at a time when the company could use a fresh new face to dominate the main event scene, something fans hadn’t even thought about a year earlier. And after the return of Triple H, the comeback of Eddie Guerrero was probably the best feel-good development of the year, at least in terms of WWE stars. Did I mention that Hulk Hogan, after several years of lukewarm WCW reception, energized arenas for the first time since turning heel, by becoming a bona fide fan favorite again? It would never have been possible if he had simply been brought back as part of the invasion angle.
Looking back, Vince McMahon undertook perhaps his second greatest accomplishment, after the birth of WrestleMania, when he bought WCW, and executed the results the way he did. I’m not here to argue that everything went off without a hitch. Nothing is perfect, but the Invasion/Alliance angle was as near perfection as you can get in professional wrestling, satisfying every long-term goal Vince might have envisioned. The four months the Alliance actually existed did a lot more than fans realized or appreciated at the time, and during a difficult period of world history. I guess what I’m trying to say is, revisit this particular era for yourself. Surprise yourself. Try to remember what it was like, rather than what you might have been feeling. If you’re new to wrestling, 2001 is the year you have to thank for everything you enjoy today, so reward yourself with a look at what things were actually like ten years ago. Things were very different. But then, maybe they really weren’t.
III. The Invasion
Incredibly, 2011 marks the ten-year anniversary of Vince McMahon buying WCW, thereby effectively ending one of the greatest rivalries wrestling has ever seen, WWE vs. WCW, headlined by the Monday Night War that gave us the nWo, the Attitude Era, and an endless series of wildly inappropriate Mae Young appearances.
There’s been plenty said about how WCW sabotaged itself during its last year of existence, from increasingly erratic booking to the dwindling impact of a formula that had, since its hottest days in 1996, lost the interest of the fans. The company attempted a number of ways to repackage existing stars, reposition them, and keep business going more or less as usual, but WWE, behind the cultural phenomenon of Steve Austin, had finally managed to completely eclipse its competition, and there was just no way WCW could maintain, much less regain, the kind of momentum it had enjoyed previously. For financial reasons, the prospect of new ownership made everything that much more unstable, and that allowed Vince to slip his way in, and bring WCW to a close, and in dramatic fashion, with a simulcast announcement occurring between Raw and the final edition of Nitro. The new boss couldn’t wait to rebrand his acquisition, quickly establishing the seeds to a whole new era, and the beginnings of the Invasion angle, by representing his son Shane as a usurper of this historic moment.
It was a slow build from there, and part of the reason was that WWE had an opportunity to rebuild itself around Austin, who had recently returned from career-threatening surgery, and that year’s WrestleMania kicked off a different angle entirely, the unexpected alliance between the “Texas Rattlesnake” and his former archrival, Vince McMahon. The story only became more complicated when Triple H, who only months earlier had been confirmed to be the culprit of the storyline that had explained Austin’s absence, and therefore the recipient of a violent blood feud with him upon his return, joined up, and together, this “Two-Man Power Trip” ran roughshod over the company. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), meanwhile, was just getting started in his movie career, and so the biggest competition for this duo was the late Chris Jericho and the late Chris Benoit. Things hit a patch when “The Game” himself went out to injury.
And things only became further complicated from there. WCW stars, and then ECW stars, began the invasion in earnest. It probably bears noting how complicated the wrestling scene had been for the preceding year. ECW, a cult promotion known for its devoted fans (strong enough for WWE to later revive the idea for an entire brand, and then TNA to bring back its most visible stars once again), began suffering a major setback (as Ring of Honor in recent years can probably relate) when WWE and WCW raided its best talent to stock up their own rosters. WWE had names like the Dudley Boys and Tazz under contract by 2000, while WCW literally stole Mike Awesome during his ECW heavyweight championship run. About the only name that remained loyal was Rob Van Dam, but he had never been a world champion with the promotion, and the momentum ECW constantly strove to build never really came. The company was out of business by the time WCW was bought out.
By 2001, then, it wasn’t uncommon to find wrestlers who had been known as ECW competitors to be featured regularly on a WWE card, and that included Rhyno, who had become something of the ECW equivalent of WCW’s Goldberg, a monster of a wrestler who mauled opponents with the Gore, a version of the tackle that Goldberg and WWE’s Edge had made one of the modern era’s most feared maneuvers.
By the time of the invasion, fans were salivating at the prospects. WWE had the ECW and WCW rosters to pick from, which promised a war of epic proportions, a clash between all the biggest stars of the days, now free to mingle in the same ring. What seemed like a perfect dream, however, was apparently not what Vince McMahon himself had in mind. These are names that never factored into the invasion: Scott Steiner, Tommy Dreamer, the Sandman, Sting, Ric Flair, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Hulk Hogan, Sabu, Rey Mysterio, Goldberg, Jeff Jarrett. It’s not as if none of these men would ever be seen in a wrestling ring again. Many of them are still, in some way, ten years later, still very relevant to wrestling fans. Yet none of them graced a WWE ring in 2001, ever appeared with the WCW/ECW Alliance, even though they were and are undisputedly the biggest names from either promotion.
Fans who caught on to that fact were a little put off, to say the least. WWE used all the least relevant stars, in some ways. Sure, you had Booker T and RVD, both of whom became far bigger stars than they had been before as a result. But what was the point of this angle if Austin didn’t finally have that match with Goldberg, for instance, or any number of other blockbuster combinations?
Almost exactly from the start, WWE was using its existing stars to augment the ranks of the Alliance, those who had famously competed in those organizations, and even some surprises, such as Steve Austin’s turn at the Invasion PPV itself, when he turned his back on WWE. It was almost business as usual in some respects. What was the point?
Chris Jericho, in his recent book Undisputed offers one possible explanation, when he talks about his own rough transition from the style he had become used to wrestling to what Vince expected from him in WWE, and this is just one exceptionally gifted star. Imagine what kind of nightmare it would have been to try and develop two whole additional rosters of stars, when WWE itself already had a roster of talented individuals who shouldn’t be expected to give up their spots to relatively unproven talent. This I’m saying purely in the sense that there were now dozens of wrestlers WWE fans and the WWE system itself would now have to incorporate into a cohesive vision. When most fans think about wrestling, it’s easy in theory to juggle different promotions, and that was a lot of what sustained the Monday Night War, and what allowed ECW to stand out, with a style that stood out in stark contrast, until it was adopted and adapted to suit both WCW and WWE.
But that was when fans could pick and choose, when there were options, when there were different channels, and the ability to clearly delineate support between promotions. Vince quickly determined that he would have to very carefully calculate and modulate the conflicting affections his fans would now have to juggle all at once, and that it would best serve him, his stars, and yes, the fans, if he did so in a very deliberate manner. He put his own company first, and it was a damn smart move. I will actually be writing another column about who benefited the most from this decision, so I may seem to be skipping over some rather significant developments in this one, but suffice it to say, I intend to finally dispel the myth that the Invasion angle was a missed opportunity.
The Invasion, which quickly segued into the Alliance, was an angle that officially lasted from the Invasion PPV in July of 2001 until that November’s Survivor Series. As we all know, another huge story occurred at roughly the midpoint of all this, 9/11, one that was far bigger than any wrestling event, and something that is rarely referenced when fans talk about the failure of the angle, because it ended up being far shorter than most people seemed to hope.
That’s being all the more naïve, though, especially when you consider how many things happened after Survivor Series, when the Alliance appeared to have been completely neutralized. Ric Flair made his return to WWE soon after, and initiated an epic feud with Vince, and that in itself led to the comeback of the New World Order, with its original members Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Hulk Hogan, which itself led to perhaps the biggest match in WrestleMania history, Hogan vs. The Rock. This was quickly followed by the beginning of the brand era, when WWE split into Raw and Smackdown as separate promotions, thanks to the increased roster that was the direct result of the acquisition of WCW and ECW. Word had it that originally Vince hoped to split WCW off into its own brand within WWE (but then, WCW had the same hopes with the nWo), and while that very dream would one day be realized with ECW, this was a different era. Vince McMahon had won the professional wrestling war. He had no reason to immediately capitulate and grant his vanquished foes their own platform in his own company. His sole job was the satisfactory welfare of WWE, and the stars he himself had nurtured. I would venture to say that doing anything at all with a flood of WCW and ECW talent was more generous than anything. He gave the lesser-known talent an unbelievable opportunity (which fans might better appreciate today in the post-Nexus era), and then moved on to bigger and better things.
As I said, Booker T was a huge beneficiary of the Alliance angle. He had been WCW champion several times in its final year, but was one of the stars that failed to properly motivate fans to truly care (Jeff Jarrett and Scott Steiner were the others), and was even positioned as the final champion on the last Nitro, and so became the face of the promotion at the onset of the Invasion. Since he had developed several moves that resembled ones The Rock had made famous, it was only natural that he and The Rock would enter a program at some point, and that alone elevated Booker’s profile. That this feud helped Chris Jericho become a world champion for the first time is another huge development that the Invasion helped make possible. When the Alliance was defeated at Survivor Series, Booker was one of many stars who were supposed to disappear, but he never did, and in fact became a WWE staple, and by 2003, a scant year later, was competing in a WrestleMania main event.
RVD, meanwhile, became such a fan favorite that it became difficult to understand how he himself wasn’t immediately pushed into world champion status, even though his own ECW promotion had never done so. He was the true breakout star of the Invasion, and this would never have bee possible if all those other big names had been around. He would have been an afterthought. Instead, he eventually became the cornerstone, and champion of, the ECW revival in 2006, which in turn would give him the legitimacy to headline TNA years later.
This is to say nothing of how Steve Austin and Kurt Angle, for example, benefited, and that’s another hugely overlooked development of the Alliance angle, and one that will figure prominently in the follow-up column, to be sure.
The Invasion and the Alliance, however, were only one small element of Vince’s strategy. Where others sawed only a series of missed opportunities, he envisioned a series of prospects that only increased in time. He had two world champions during the whole angle, and these titles were routinely defended, separately. That opened the door to the unprecedented unification tournament at that December’s Vengeance, when the first-ever undisputed heavyweight champion would be crowned. Since Steve Austin and The Rock were both involved, it seemed natural that one of them would claim the honor, but Vince gave fans another huge swerve when he tapped Jericho instead, thereby paving the way for the return of Triple H in time for the 2002 WrestleMania.
He had the chance to launch the WWE careers of many famous WCW stars at his leisure as well. Rey Mysterio didn’t debut until the summer of 2002, a good year after the initial invasion. Imagine if Rey had been just another WCW star trying to make his mark. Vince instead had the vision to make him something special from the start, and reaped the benefits for years, finding an unlikely (WCW itself had never been able to make Mysterio quite so popular) fan favorite, and an even more unlikely world champion. Scott Steiner, who had closed his WCW career as a heel with one of the most hotly greeted fan reactions of the modern era, made his WWE return in the fall as a free agent greatly desired by both brands (and therefore accentuating not only his own presence by the still-novel concept of rival brands within WWE). No matter the controversies that would surround his matches with Triple H, or his increasingly undistinguished year back. “Big Poppa Pump” had already proven Vince’s point.
WWE gained new developmental talent, too, wrestlers WCW had been working on, such as Jimmy Yang, Nathan Jones, Oleg Prudius, which it was free to nurture at a different pace. Yang went through several incarnations before becoming something of an attraction as an unlikely redneck. Jones, who has since become a Hollywood favorite, but was first discovered by WCW, had a few opportunities to prove himself inside of a WWE ring, even at one point being slated to compete as the Undertaker’s partner at WrestleMania, which is far more than he ever got with the organization that found him. Prudius, meanwhile, was a Russian sensation whose general ungainliness for mass conception eventually gave WWE and Santino Marella the easy-going Vladimir Koslov.
Through all of this, WWE kept the spotlight on its own stars, and 2001 served as a significant transition year for not only Austin, Angle, Jericho, but also for Edge, Jeff Hardy, and William Regal, who finally found the perfect WWE role for himself, a persnickety authority figure whose personality fans could really get behind. 2002 was a significant year for developing new stars as well, from John Cena and Randy Orton to Brock Lesnar, who came about at a time when the company could use a fresh new face to dominate the main event scene, something fans hadn’t even thought about a year earlier. And after the return of Triple H, the comeback of Eddie Guerrero was probably the best feel-good development of the year, at least in terms of WWE stars. Did I mention that Hulk Hogan, after several years of lukewarm WCW reception, energized arenas for the first time since turning heel, by becoming a bona fide fan favorite again? It would never have been possible if he had simply been brought back as part of the invasion angle.
Looking back, Vince McMahon undertook perhaps his second greatest accomplishment, after the birth of WrestleMania, when he bought WCW, and executed the results the way he did. I’m not here to argue that everything went off without a hitch. Nothing is perfect, but the Invasion/Alliance angle was as near perfection as you can get in professional wrestling, satisfying every long-term goal Vince might have envisioned. The four months the Alliance actually existed did a lot more than fans realized or appreciated at the time, and during a difficult period of world history. I guess what I’m trying to say is, revisit this particular era for yourself. Surprise yourself. Try to remember what it was like, rather than what you might have been feeling. If you’re new to wrestling, 2001 is the year you have to thank for everything you enjoy today, so reward yourself with a look at what things were actually like ten years ago. Things were very different. But then, maybe they really weren’t.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Jabroni Companion #2
If that’s not enough for you, then maybe WWE’s greatest legacy, WrestleMania might satisfy you. This year’s card was a few weeks ago, and so maybe the rush of it is still flowing in your veins, and you’re still energized. Rather than attempting to analyze all of it, I’m going to limit myself a little, with a nifty little exercise that looks at what is ostensibly the most important part of the show.
II. Ranking the WrestleMania Main Events
Oftentimes, when fans look back at WrestleMania, they remember the matches that stole the show, and they aren’t always the main event. In fact, although the hype traditionally rests at the top of the card, it’s perhaps just as traditional for superstars other than those who perform last to leave the lasting memories. You may know those better, actually, so rather than preamble further, let’s jump into the list, and revisit the intended attractions.
1. XII (1996) Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels
This is the famous Iron Man match, which in itself is perhaps special in the annals of WWE lore, but as many purists will tell you, broadways have often been used to test, and on a regular and frequent basis, the best wrestlers in a given promotion. That WWE actually headlined a WrestleMania in such fashion, however, required a ton of hype, and two very particular competitors. Hart had been champion off an on since 1992, and that’s the year he and Michaels first clashed for the title, at Survivor Series. Nicknamed the “Heartbreak Kid,” Shawn had for years pushed himself to be one of the best wrestlers in the world, but had long been denied headliner status because of his comparatively small stature. WWE had attempted to fill the vacancy of Hulk Hogan in many ways, and seemed as happy as it was reluctant to do it with the “Hitman” for the past several years. His most notable opponent over the past four years was Yokozuna, who was not exactly best attuned to fight the kind of match Hart was best suited for. Neither was Ric Flair, or Randy Savage, or maybe the company simply believed Bret deserved someone of his own generation. That would turn out to be HBK. By the time this match took place, Hart’s time as champion was effectively over. He’d have another run in 1997, and another Survivor Series title match with Shawn, but the perfect confluence was here, when all points came together, and the best pure wrestling match WWE had seen was finally allowed to happen.
2. XIV (1998) Shawn Michaels vs. Steve Austin
It’s ironic, since 1996 also saw Steve Austin’s transformation from gifted but generic wrestler to a bona fide star, when he preached the “Stone Cold” gospel at King of the Ring, and he still had to wait, like HBK, several years before he was granted what he had earned. So despite a lot of pain, Shawn helped make the transition official, took the next four years off, and allowed the Austin era to begin. It might be said that the only stars WrestleMania itself was ever allowed to make were HBK and “Stone Cold,” and so that’s reason enough to place those main events at the top of this list. Hulk Hogan had a succession of these things to make his legacy, but it only took once to make it stick for the main event to make the appropriate statement and moment for these two.
3. XXVI (2010) Undertaker vs. Shawn Michaels
The other great legacy of WrestleMania is “the Streak.” The Undertaker, since WrestleMania VII in 1991, has overcome each and every one of his opponents, a total record as of 2011 of 19-0. A couple of stars (Kane, Triple H), he’s defeated twice, and this match marked another one, but there was even more significance. There have been a few deliberate rematches in WrestleMania history, but none moreso, when HBK chose to end his career in much the same way he’d helped Ric Flair two years earlier. I had something of a problem with this match initially for that very reason. It seemed too obvious, and didn’t seem to honor Shawn in the right way. The match itself, as it first seemed to me, seemed nothing more than a methodical rehash of the original encounter, a classic version of “epic encounter” where the point really seems to be to slip almost immediately into desperation mode, into one giant climax. Then I watched it again. And then again. The final moments of the match are what really make it, when Shawn finally brings his own unique stamp to the occasion. He briefly flares up into the defiant imp he’d become in his original DX days, when everyone started to legitimately hate him, when they thought the selfishness and destructive impulses he himself would admit to truly had permeated his professional career. All that in a flash, a show of defiance in the face of what Undertaker, and everyone watching already knew, from that other match, that Shawn couldn’t win. Suddenly the booking made sense. All of it made sense. If Shawn wasn’t ready for this moment a year earlier, he helped make it better by making everyone stew on it for a little while longer. A WrestleMania main event where a world title isn’t defended is pretty rare. This was the best of them.
4. 21 (2005) Triple H vs. Batista
Triple H is kind of a funny case. He has appeared in six of the twenty-seven WrestleMania main events to date, more than Hulk Hogan, more than Shawn Michaels, more than any other WWE superstar. About the only year of the modern era when he was healthy that Hunter skipped that honor, ironically, was 2003, the year everyone agreed he’d reached the apex of insufferability. Part of what skewers his legacy, despite a sustained and inspired career, is the fact that, unlike HBK and Steve Austin, he didn’t have his championship breakthrough at WrestleMania. “Stone Cold” had to pass the torch in the summer of 1999 so he could go off and have career-salvaging surgery, and that’s how Triple H finally won the gold. We’ll get to his first WrestleMania main event with it a little later, but there’s a sense that his momentum was a tad sabotaged before it was even begun (something of the story of his career). But Hunter still did wrestling good. He built a whole stable, along with one of his primary inspirations, Ric Flair, around Randy Orton and Batista, both of whom would go on to have arguably even more successful careers. What makes this particular main event so fascinating is that it was exactly the opposite of what everyone expected. Orton was supposed to be “The Man,” and 2004 was all about making that happen, but “The Game” instead tapped the relatively unproven Batista for the WrestleMania honors. It turned out to be the right move. “The Animal” proved to be WWE’s revision of Ultimate Warrior and Goldberg, a reliable and consummate champion with his own brand of unusual charisma, and this match had the whole story. Batista might not be Shawn Michaels, or even Triple H, but he’s as close to the next Hulk Hogan that the company has ever found.
5. 25th Anniversary (2009) Triple H vs. Randy Orton
But getting back to Orton, he’s perhaps still more fascinating. As I said, he was, by all signs, intended to be the main beneficiary of the Evolution stable (even in the early days, when it seemed like just a bunch of goons to keep the gold around Hunter’s waist). The “Legend Killer” came into WWE in the same year as John Cena, 2002, but was fast-tracked to world champion status almost a year sooner than “The Champ.” Turns out, however, it was a little premature. Orton spent three years waiting for his next run with a heavyweight title, during which Cena spent the majority of that time with just such a title firmly around his (neck?), and Triple H not so far away with another. He spent that time developing a calculating persona even more coiled than his mentor’s, becoming “The Viper,” and turning his attacks on and relationship with the McMahon clan even more personal than Triple H’s from the McMahon-Helmsley Era. Much of it was a new version of what had made Steve Austin a star, but what made this match so special was that it inverted just about every bit of conventional wisdom, from the fact that Hunter would finally draw inspiration from his real marriage with Stephanie McMahon to having a grudge match that was constrained to conventional rules. Even an Orton-Hunter match, which had been seen many times, felt special. Most WrestleMania matches should be exceptions because they’re uncommon encounters. This one really was the reverse of everything fans had grown to know.
6. 2000 (2000) Triple H vs. The Rock vs. Big Show vs. Mick Foley
I don’t know how many other fans have a special place in their hearts for WrestleMania 2000 (fun trivia that never gets old: this is the only card in WrestleMania history to not feature a single one-on-one match), but it’s the only one I’ve seen on PPV, so there’s that at least, and beyond that, it’s almost the one most like the first WrestleMania, at least in terms of the main event, that WWE has done since. This match should have been Triple H and The Rock. Everyone knows that, or at least should. The two had engaged in feuds long before either one was a world champion, and this particular feud continued for several months afterward. Mick Foley, one of the most unlikely world champions ever (whether you consider his titles in WWE or TNA), won his way to the main event thanks to sentiment (and, no doubt, literary prowess, having become the most successful wrestling memoirist ever at that point). Big Show had his only WrestleMania main event, probably to round out the match, make it even less predictable. Hunter had done his best to enrage Vince McMahon, as only Steve Austin had managed to accomplish previously, by stealing power, and the boss’s daughter, and there was a McMahon in every corner for this match (watch out for Linda!). The finish is still a classic for me, even though the exact same thing was done the next year, with Vince screwing over The Rock to give Hunter the win. It was a win Triple H needed to be a legitimate champion, even though I still kinda wish Rock would have been successful (his anemic wins later in the feud did nothing to make him look better, but it’s not as if his legacy needed a strong run as champion).
7. 23 (2007) John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels
The constant knock on John Cena is that he isn’t much of a wrestler, and this match was clearly designed to counteract that argument (well, beyond the fact that HBK was subbing for an injured Triple H). For an improvised feud, it worked surprisingly well, and it really didn’t hurt that it was probably Shawn’s last great card (the two would but on an even better match several weeks later on Raw), the better for its spontaneity (not to knock the ones with Chris Jericho or Undertaker, but you can still hear the same desperation from them that Edge wrung from HBK not long before this match). Not surprising, then, that Shawn’s next three WrestleMania matches basically summed up his career. He really had nothing left to prove.
8. III (1987) Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant
It seems a little perverse to list this one so low, but that has nothing to do with the momentous nature of seeing these two titans clash so much as the actual quality of the match. Andre was a living legend, the Undertaker of his day, with a mystique that had seen him, to this point, remain undefeated, and he was basically retired by the time he agreed to it. He enjoyed a career resurgence, and in turn gave Hogan the legitimacy two previous WrestleManias couldn’t. Still, maybe there’s a reason why everyone still argues that the best match from this card was Savage-Steamboat, the first time in WrestleMania history, in the first one that lived up to the hype, where a match other than the main event stole the show. That has got to say something. But it’s still weird to say that this match shouldn’t, by definition, be at the top of the list. That’s the evolution of wrestling, folks.
9. XV (1999) The Rock vs. Steve Austin
In a perfect world, the first time Austin and The Rock clashed should have been something like Hogan-Andre, but the truth is, Rock hadn’t hit his stride yet (that was the thing that was basically squandered at WrestleMania 2000, even though it turned out to be a good thing), so as good as The Rock was at this point, he was basically cannon fodder for “Stone Cold,” even more blatantly than Andre. That’s what makes a blockbuster encounter like this rank so low. The Rock’s greatest WrestleMania match was against Hogan. Everyone knows it. That’s where the magic is. It’s not here.
10. XXVII (2011) John Cena vs. The Miz
This year’s WrestleMania is still pretty fresh, and in point of fact, I haven’t even seen it yet, but I am still willing to rank it, in terms of importance, because of what was quickly announced in its aftermath. If it really happens, it’ll be the biggest thing to happen to WrestleMania since Hogan-Andre. I’m talking Cena-Rock. WrestleMania III ignited an arc that continued at least through WrestleMania V, an uninterrupted story that saw Hogan’s quest to regain the title after his war with Andre evolve with the emergence of Randy Savage as an unexpected threat. So this is not to say that The Miz is akin to Andre the Giant, much less Hulk Hogan. But John Cena is on that level, and The Rock, even though he has not actively participated in a wrestling match since 2004, is beyond even that. To have The Rock push around the company’s top star is comparable to Vince McMahon helping Triple H win at WrestleMania 2000, and to have the promise of Cena-Rock finally happening (a dream match Cena has actively pursued for years) is like having the biggest blockbuster imaginable, and between two stars who will actually be able to perform at more or less the same level. So cheer up Miz, that’s what you’ve accomplished so far!
11. V (1989) Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage
If Hogan were at the same level as the “Macho Man,” this match would serve as a precursor to the kind of action we might expect next year. But while Savage was at his best (though reports have it otherwise, much like Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania XIV), bouncing and leaping all over the place, Hogan does his usual, almost making a mockery of the occasion. I’ve never really gotten around to actively loathing the “Hulkster,” but I can see how he came to actively support his own career at the detriment of others. Charisma is not the only thing that makes a career, but Hogan came as close as anyone to creating that illusion.
12. VI (1990) Hulk Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior
What Savage couldn’t do, Jim Hellwig did his best to achieve, which was to meet Hogan at his own level, and this was an epic clash that had all the kids in the schoolyard buzzing, which is something I remember vividly to this day. If anyone ever came close to truly subverting Hulkamania, it was the Ultimate Warrior, who offered an equally overblown and one-dimensional hero for fans to believe in, and a limited ring presence worked to its most efficient capacity. Warrior had a better match with Savage, not surprisingly, one year later (and just imagine if that had been a WrestleMania main event; you’ll hear about that one again later in the Jabroni Companion), and Hogan subsequently did everything he could to get the attention back on himself. More on that later.
13. XIX (2003) Kurt Angle vs. Brock Lesnar
This was a dream match between amateur wrestling stars, and a clash of styles, and all you really needed to know was that “The Next Big Thing” was supposed to receive his crown as the new Hulk Hogan that night. Well, one botched shooting star press later, and even Lesnar seemed to have second thoughts. Gone from the company a year later. Still, those of us who experienced Lesnar know that Batista still owes him big-time. A monster who could do whatever he wanted (except, it seemed, when “the lights are on bright,” as JBL liked to say), Lesnar gave Angle his only WrestleMania main event (something that TNA clearly feels was a huge oversight, and this journalist agrees with). Another match that could be ranked higher, without a lot of argument necessary.
14. IV (1988) Randy Savage vs. Ted DiBiase
I have nothing particular against “The Million Dollar Man,” but a tournament that deliberated eliminated Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant was the only way he was ever going to find himself in a WrestleMania main event, whereas for Savage, it was exactly the scenario that would best differentiate himself from either star. He was everything they weren’t (including DiBiase), and while this was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time, more often than not, that’s exactly the opposite of what the career of the “Macho Man” came to symbolize.
15. X (1994) Yokozuna vs. Bret Hart
I loved the idea of an unstoppable monster being champion of WWE, and Yokozuna was far more capable of filling that role than just about any other big man the company has seen before or since. He was predictable and unpredictable. He could do anything that was required of him. The only problem here is that the truth could not be said of Bret Hart. I love Bret Hart, but he never had any business competing against Yokozuna. That much was proved the first time around (more on that later), and only because Vince was annoyed that Lex Luger told somebody what would have been obvious to anyone, he was given the chance to do it against, this time even more lamely. Still, on Yokozuna’s end, this particular main event was still pretty awesome, at least the build-up.
16. X-SEVEN (2001) The Rock vs. Steve Austin
Much like HBK-Undertaker II, very little was done to make this sequel very sensical other than that, for practical reasons, it simply had to happen. The Rock was in better form, but the company was more interested in rebuilding “Stone Cold,” but that didn’t really happen until the WCW/ECW invasion (more on that later), so this just seemed lazy. But good lazy!
17. I (1985) Hulk Hogan & Mr. T vs. Roddy Piper & Paul Orndorff
I realize that in order to make it a spectacle, to make it feel like something special, something out of the ordinary had to be featured in the main event, but the first WrestleMania could have fulfilled that imperative without bloating the match. It should have been, simply, Hogan-Piper, and that match would have been, to this day, one of the greatest encounters in wrestling history. But instead, and no disrespect to “Mr. Wonderful,” we get Mr. T and Orndorff plugged in, plus a half dozen others, and nothing much at all. But at least there have been twenty-six other WrestleManias since!
18. XI (1995) Lawrence Taylor vs. Bam Bam Bigelow
Like the above, though it was good for business it’s still baffling historically. And while it’s also good that Bigelow, the “Beast from the East,” did get into a WrestleMania main event, well…
19. XXIV (2008) Edge vs. Undertaker
I’ve been one of Edge’s biggest admirers from the moment he first appeared in WWE, but I would never describe his wrestling style as anything but “controlled awkwardness.” Some argue this to be one of the best matches they’ve ever seen. It’s a good match, but I would never be able to say that. Sorry, Edge.
20. VII (1991) Hulk Hogan vs. Sgt. Slaughter
The only time Slaughter was relevant as a WWE competitor was when Hogan needed someone to make him seem like the greatest symbol of patriotic valor imaginable. So naturally the company turned to the only other guy who had literally built his career around that model. Yes, it makes sense. No, it is not actually compelling to watch as a match, at least not on this level. But Hogan had done worse in this regard.
21. XX (2004) Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels vs. Chris Benoit
Let me just start out by saying I’m not ranking this so low because my opinion of Benoit dropped like a stone in 2007. Quite the opposite, really. I remained a supporter of Benoit’s legacy through the most vicious reactions that year. 2004, however, belonged to Eddie Guerrero, if it belonged to any former WCW cruiserweights matriculated as Radicalz in WWE. As much as I loved to watch the “Rabid Wolverine” compete, it was always a bit like seeing, well, a rabid version of Bret Hart throwing himself around the ring, with less charisma, and to make that man world champion was like endorsing “Hitman” as champion, and I was never able to do that, either, except during the summer of 1997, when Hart really seemed to get into his character for the first time (ironically, as it turned out). Triple H and HBK are there to round out this match, in the same way Big Show was at WrestleMania 2000. How is it that two out of three competitors are there to round out a match? Exactly.
22. 22 (2006) John Cena vs. Triple H
The year after John Cena became a heavyweight champion he was still fighting to form the definitive statement for what it meant for him to have that title. He didn’t have that statement in this match, and neither did Triple H.
23. X8 (2002) Chris Jericho vs. Triple H
It’s a damn shame that “Y2J” competes in the WrestleMania main event, and becomes completely invisible, not because Triple H hogs all the glory, or Rock-Hogan had already stolen the show, but that Jericho himself is completely uninspired. If you’ve read either of his memoirs, you’re probably wishing he’d gotten a second chance. That would have been froot!
24. 13 (1997) Sycho Sid vs. Undertaker
I like Sid, and I’m a big fan of the Undertaker, but WWE had so many other plans and things going on, you could almost completely overlook this one, and also forget that it led to Undertaker’s most sustained run with the world title, and not really miss anything. Word was the Ultimate Warrior, who’d attempted a grand comeback the previous year, was supposed to be featured in this one. Against Undertaker? Well, that would have been awesome indeed.
25. IX (1993) Yokozuna vs. Bret Hart
Seriously, who booked this stuff? If anyone has any real memories of Hart’s first championship run that seem significant, please let me know, because it seems like, even though 1992 seemed to have a succession of transition champions that should have been better than that, its sole purpose was to transfer the ball to Yokozuna (and then, to Hulk Hogan, and then back to Yokozuna, and then back, improbably, to Bret Hart).
26. VIII (1992) Hulk Hogan vs. Sycho Sid
Speaking of 1992...! If he ever had a blatant misuse of influence, and a baffling one, this was it. He reportedly vetoed a match with Ric Flair, and opted for this last effort at dragon slaying, in what was basically his WWE swan song. Apparently he forgot about:
27. II (1986) Hulk Hogan vs. King Kong Bundy
Bundy, and no great offense to him, or Sid, but he was no Andre, as Andre himself had to prove a year later. Why this was a WrestleMania main event is somewhat beyond me. But as we all know, WrestleMania managed to survive it, and I guess that’s what really counts.
II. Ranking the WrestleMania Main Events
Oftentimes, when fans look back at WrestleMania, they remember the matches that stole the show, and they aren’t always the main event. In fact, although the hype traditionally rests at the top of the card, it’s perhaps just as traditional for superstars other than those who perform last to leave the lasting memories. You may know those better, actually, so rather than preamble further, let’s jump into the list, and revisit the intended attractions.
1. XII (1996) Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels
This is the famous Iron Man match, which in itself is perhaps special in the annals of WWE lore, but as many purists will tell you, broadways have often been used to test, and on a regular and frequent basis, the best wrestlers in a given promotion. That WWE actually headlined a WrestleMania in such fashion, however, required a ton of hype, and two very particular competitors. Hart had been champion off an on since 1992, and that’s the year he and Michaels first clashed for the title, at Survivor Series. Nicknamed the “Heartbreak Kid,” Shawn had for years pushed himself to be one of the best wrestlers in the world, but had long been denied headliner status because of his comparatively small stature. WWE had attempted to fill the vacancy of Hulk Hogan in many ways, and seemed as happy as it was reluctant to do it with the “Hitman” for the past several years. His most notable opponent over the past four years was Yokozuna, who was not exactly best attuned to fight the kind of match Hart was best suited for. Neither was Ric Flair, or Randy Savage, or maybe the company simply believed Bret deserved someone of his own generation. That would turn out to be HBK. By the time this match took place, Hart’s time as champion was effectively over. He’d have another run in 1997, and another Survivor Series title match with Shawn, but the perfect confluence was here, when all points came together, and the best pure wrestling match WWE had seen was finally allowed to happen.
2. XIV (1998) Shawn Michaels vs. Steve Austin
It’s ironic, since 1996 also saw Steve Austin’s transformation from gifted but generic wrestler to a bona fide star, when he preached the “Stone Cold” gospel at King of the Ring, and he still had to wait, like HBK, several years before he was granted what he had earned. So despite a lot of pain, Shawn helped make the transition official, took the next four years off, and allowed the Austin era to begin. It might be said that the only stars WrestleMania itself was ever allowed to make were HBK and “Stone Cold,” and so that’s reason enough to place those main events at the top of this list. Hulk Hogan had a succession of these things to make his legacy, but it only took once to make it stick for the main event to make the appropriate statement and moment for these two.
3. XXVI (2010) Undertaker vs. Shawn Michaels
The other great legacy of WrestleMania is “the Streak.” The Undertaker, since WrestleMania VII in 1991, has overcome each and every one of his opponents, a total record as of 2011 of 19-0. A couple of stars (Kane, Triple H), he’s defeated twice, and this match marked another one, but there was even more significance. There have been a few deliberate rematches in WrestleMania history, but none moreso, when HBK chose to end his career in much the same way he’d helped Ric Flair two years earlier. I had something of a problem with this match initially for that very reason. It seemed too obvious, and didn’t seem to honor Shawn in the right way. The match itself, as it first seemed to me, seemed nothing more than a methodical rehash of the original encounter, a classic version of “epic encounter” where the point really seems to be to slip almost immediately into desperation mode, into one giant climax. Then I watched it again. And then again. The final moments of the match are what really make it, when Shawn finally brings his own unique stamp to the occasion. He briefly flares up into the defiant imp he’d become in his original DX days, when everyone started to legitimately hate him, when they thought the selfishness and destructive impulses he himself would admit to truly had permeated his professional career. All that in a flash, a show of defiance in the face of what Undertaker, and everyone watching already knew, from that other match, that Shawn couldn’t win. Suddenly the booking made sense. All of it made sense. If Shawn wasn’t ready for this moment a year earlier, he helped make it better by making everyone stew on it for a little while longer. A WrestleMania main event where a world title isn’t defended is pretty rare. This was the best of them.
4. 21 (2005) Triple H vs. Batista
Triple H is kind of a funny case. He has appeared in six of the twenty-seven WrestleMania main events to date, more than Hulk Hogan, more than Shawn Michaels, more than any other WWE superstar. About the only year of the modern era when he was healthy that Hunter skipped that honor, ironically, was 2003, the year everyone agreed he’d reached the apex of insufferability. Part of what skewers his legacy, despite a sustained and inspired career, is the fact that, unlike HBK and Steve Austin, he didn’t have his championship breakthrough at WrestleMania. “Stone Cold” had to pass the torch in the summer of 1999 so he could go off and have career-salvaging surgery, and that’s how Triple H finally won the gold. We’ll get to his first WrestleMania main event with it a little later, but there’s a sense that his momentum was a tad sabotaged before it was even begun (something of the story of his career). But Hunter still did wrestling good. He built a whole stable, along with one of his primary inspirations, Ric Flair, around Randy Orton and Batista, both of whom would go on to have arguably even more successful careers. What makes this particular main event so fascinating is that it was exactly the opposite of what everyone expected. Orton was supposed to be “The Man,” and 2004 was all about making that happen, but “The Game” instead tapped the relatively unproven Batista for the WrestleMania honors. It turned out to be the right move. “The Animal” proved to be WWE’s revision of Ultimate Warrior and Goldberg, a reliable and consummate champion with his own brand of unusual charisma, and this match had the whole story. Batista might not be Shawn Michaels, or even Triple H, but he’s as close to the next Hulk Hogan that the company has ever found.
5. 25th Anniversary (2009) Triple H vs. Randy Orton
But getting back to Orton, he’s perhaps still more fascinating. As I said, he was, by all signs, intended to be the main beneficiary of the Evolution stable (even in the early days, when it seemed like just a bunch of goons to keep the gold around Hunter’s waist). The “Legend Killer” came into WWE in the same year as John Cena, 2002, but was fast-tracked to world champion status almost a year sooner than “The Champ.” Turns out, however, it was a little premature. Orton spent three years waiting for his next run with a heavyweight title, during which Cena spent the majority of that time with just such a title firmly around his (neck?), and Triple H not so far away with another. He spent that time developing a calculating persona even more coiled than his mentor’s, becoming “The Viper,” and turning his attacks on and relationship with the McMahon clan even more personal than Triple H’s from the McMahon-Helmsley Era. Much of it was a new version of what had made Steve Austin a star, but what made this match so special was that it inverted just about every bit of conventional wisdom, from the fact that Hunter would finally draw inspiration from his real marriage with Stephanie McMahon to having a grudge match that was constrained to conventional rules. Even an Orton-Hunter match, which had been seen many times, felt special. Most WrestleMania matches should be exceptions because they’re uncommon encounters. This one really was the reverse of everything fans had grown to know.
6. 2000 (2000) Triple H vs. The Rock vs. Big Show vs. Mick Foley
I don’t know how many other fans have a special place in their hearts for WrestleMania 2000 (fun trivia that never gets old: this is the only card in WrestleMania history to not feature a single one-on-one match), but it’s the only one I’ve seen on PPV, so there’s that at least, and beyond that, it’s almost the one most like the first WrestleMania, at least in terms of the main event, that WWE has done since. This match should have been Triple H and The Rock. Everyone knows that, or at least should. The two had engaged in feuds long before either one was a world champion, and this particular feud continued for several months afterward. Mick Foley, one of the most unlikely world champions ever (whether you consider his titles in WWE or TNA), won his way to the main event thanks to sentiment (and, no doubt, literary prowess, having become the most successful wrestling memoirist ever at that point). Big Show had his only WrestleMania main event, probably to round out the match, make it even less predictable. Hunter had done his best to enrage Vince McMahon, as only Steve Austin had managed to accomplish previously, by stealing power, and the boss’s daughter, and there was a McMahon in every corner for this match (watch out for Linda!). The finish is still a classic for me, even though the exact same thing was done the next year, with Vince screwing over The Rock to give Hunter the win. It was a win Triple H needed to be a legitimate champion, even though I still kinda wish Rock would have been successful (his anemic wins later in the feud did nothing to make him look better, but it’s not as if his legacy needed a strong run as champion).
7. 23 (2007) John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels
The constant knock on John Cena is that he isn’t much of a wrestler, and this match was clearly designed to counteract that argument (well, beyond the fact that HBK was subbing for an injured Triple H). For an improvised feud, it worked surprisingly well, and it really didn’t hurt that it was probably Shawn’s last great card (the two would but on an even better match several weeks later on Raw), the better for its spontaneity (not to knock the ones with Chris Jericho or Undertaker, but you can still hear the same desperation from them that Edge wrung from HBK not long before this match). Not surprising, then, that Shawn’s next three WrestleMania matches basically summed up his career. He really had nothing left to prove.
8. III (1987) Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant
It seems a little perverse to list this one so low, but that has nothing to do with the momentous nature of seeing these two titans clash so much as the actual quality of the match. Andre was a living legend, the Undertaker of his day, with a mystique that had seen him, to this point, remain undefeated, and he was basically retired by the time he agreed to it. He enjoyed a career resurgence, and in turn gave Hogan the legitimacy two previous WrestleManias couldn’t. Still, maybe there’s a reason why everyone still argues that the best match from this card was Savage-Steamboat, the first time in WrestleMania history, in the first one that lived up to the hype, where a match other than the main event stole the show. That has got to say something. But it’s still weird to say that this match shouldn’t, by definition, be at the top of the list. That’s the evolution of wrestling, folks.
9. XV (1999) The Rock vs. Steve Austin
In a perfect world, the first time Austin and The Rock clashed should have been something like Hogan-Andre, but the truth is, Rock hadn’t hit his stride yet (that was the thing that was basically squandered at WrestleMania 2000, even though it turned out to be a good thing), so as good as The Rock was at this point, he was basically cannon fodder for “Stone Cold,” even more blatantly than Andre. That’s what makes a blockbuster encounter like this rank so low. The Rock’s greatest WrestleMania match was against Hogan. Everyone knows it. That’s where the magic is. It’s not here.
10. XXVII (2011) John Cena vs. The Miz
This year’s WrestleMania is still pretty fresh, and in point of fact, I haven’t even seen it yet, but I am still willing to rank it, in terms of importance, because of what was quickly announced in its aftermath. If it really happens, it’ll be the biggest thing to happen to WrestleMania since Hogan-Andre. I’m talking Cena-Rock. WrestleMania III ignited an arc that continued at least through WrestleMania V, an uninterrupted story that saw Hogan’s quest to regain the title after his war with Andre evolve with the emergence of Randy Savage as an unexpected threat. So this is not to say that The Miz is akin to Andre the Giant, much less Hulk Hogan. But John Cena is on that level, and The Rock, even though he has not actively participated in a wrestling match since 2004, is beyond even that. To have The Rock push around the company’s top star is comparable to Vince McMahon helping Triple H win at WrestleMania 2000, and to have the promise of Cena-Rock finally happening (a dream match Cena has actively pursued for years) is like having the biggest blockbuster imaginable, and between two stars who will actually be able to perform at more or less the same level. So cheer up Miz, that’s what you’ve accomplished so far!
11. V (1989) Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage
If Hogan were at the same level as the “Macho Man,” this match would serve as a precursor to the kind of action we might expect next year. But while Savage was at his best (though reports have it otherwise, much like Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania XIV), bouncing and leaping all over the place, Hogan does his usual, almost making a mockery of the occasion. I’ve never really gotten around to actively loathing the “Hulkster,” but I can see how he came to actively support his own career at the detriment of others. Charisma is not the only thing that makes a career, but Hogan came as close as anyone to creating that illusion.
12. VI (1990) Hulk Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior
What Savage couldn’t do, Jim Hellwig did his best to achieve, which was to meet Hogan at his own level, and this was an epic clash that had all the kids in the schoolyard buzzing, which is something I remember vividly to this day. If anyone ever came close to truly subverting Hulkamania, it was the Ultimate Warrior, who offered an equally overblown and one-dimensional hero for fans to believe in, and a limited ring presence worked to its most efficient capacity. Warrior had a better match with Savage, not surprisingly, one year later (and just imagine if that had been a WrestleMania main event; you’ll hear about that one again later in the Jabroni Companion), and Hogan subsequently did everything he could to get the attention back on himself. More on that later.
13. XIX (2003) Kurt Angle vs. Brock Lesnar
This was a dream match between amateur wrestling stars, and a clash of styles, and all you really needed to know was that “The Next Big Thing” was supposed to receive his crown as the new Hulk Hogan that night. Well, one botched shooting star press later, and even Lesnar seemed to have second thoughts. Gone from the company a year later. Still, those of us who experienced Lesnar know that Batista still owes him big-time. A monster who could do whatever he wanted (except, it seemed, when “the lights are on bright,” as JBL liked to say), Lesnar gave Angle his only WrestleMania main event (something that TNA clearly feels was a huge oversight, and this journalist agrees with). Another match that could be ranked higher, without a lot of argument necessary.
14. IV (1988) Randy Savage vs. Ted DiBiase
I have nothing particular against “The Million Dollar Man,” but a tournament that deliberated eliminated Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant was the only way he was ever going to find himself in a WrestleMania main event, whereas for Savage, it was exactly the scenario that would best differentiate himself from either star. He was everything they weren’t (including DiBiase), and while this was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time, more often than not, that’s exactly the opposite of what the career of the “Macho Man” came to symbolize.
15. X (1994) Yokozuna vs. Bret Hart
I loved the idea of an unstoppable monster being champion of WWE, and Yokozuna was far more capable of filling that role than just about any other big man the company has seen before or since. He was predictable and unpredictable. He could do anything that was required of him. The only problem here is that the truth could not be said of Bret Hart. I love Bret Hart, but he never had any business competing against Yokozuna. That much was proved the first time around (more on that later), and only because Vince was annoyed that Lex Luger told somebody what would have been obvious to anyone, he was given the chance to do it against, this time even more lamely. Still, on Yokozuna’s end, this particular main event was still pretty awesome, at least the build-up.
16. X-SEVEN (2001) The Rock vs. Steve Austin
Much like HBK-Undertaker II, very little was done to make this sequel very sensical other than that, for practical reasons, it simply had to happen. The Rock was in better form, but the company was more interested in rebuilding “Stone Cold,” but that didn’t really happen until the WCW/ECW invasion (more on that later), so this just seemed lazy. But good lazy!
17. I (1985) Hulk Hogan & Mr. T vs. Roddy Piper & Paul Orndorff
I realize that in order to make it a spectacle, to make it feel like something special, something out of the ordinary had to be featured in the main event, but the first WrestleMania could have fulfilled that imperative without bloating the match. It should have been, simply, Hogan-Piper, and that match would have been, to this day, one of the greatest encounters in wrestling history. But instead, and no disrespect to “Mr. Wonderful,” we get Mr. T and Orndorff plugged in, plus a half dozen others, and nothing much at all. But at least there have been twenty-six other WrestleManias since!
18. XI (1995) Lawrence Taylor vs. Bam Bam Bigelow
Like the above, though it was good for business it’s still baffling historically. And while it’s also good that Bigelow, the “Beast from the East,” did get into a WrestleMania main event, well…
19. XXIV (2008) Edge vs. Undertaker
I’ve been one of Edge’s biggest admirers from the moment he first appeared in WWE, but I would never describe his wrestling style as anything but “controlled awkwardness.” Some argue this to be one of the best matches they’ve ever seen. It’s a good match, but I would never be able to say that. Sorry, Edge.
20. VII (1991) Hulk Hogan vs. Sgt. Slaughter
The only time Slaughter was relevant as a WWE competitor was when Hogan needed someone to make him seem like the greatest symbol of patriotic valor imaginable. So naturally the company turned to the only other guy who had literally built his career around that model. Yes, it makes sense. No, it is not actually compelling to watch as a match, at least not on this level. But Hogan had done worse in this regard.
21. XX (2004) Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels vs. Chris Benoit
Let me just start out by saying I’m not ranking this so low because my opinion of Benoit dropped like a stone in 2007. Quite the opposite, really. I remained a supporter of Benoit’s legacy through the most vicious reactions that year. 2004, however, belonged to Eddie Guerrero, if it belonged to any former WCW cruiserweights matriculated as Radicalz in WWE. As much as I loved to watch the “Rabid Wolverine” compete, it was always a bit like seeing, well, a rabid version of Bret Hart throwing himself around the ring, with less charisma, and to make that man world champion was like endorsing “Hitman” as champion, and I was never able to do that, either, except during the summer of 1997, when Hart really seemed to get into his character for the first time (ironically, as it turned out). Triple H and HBK are there to round out this match, in the same way Big Show was at WrestleMania 2000. How is it that two out of three competitors are there to round out a match? Exactly.
22. 22 (2006) John Cena vs. Triple H
The year after John Cena became a heavyweight champion he was still fighting to form the definitive statement for what it meant for him to have that title. He didn’t have that statement in this match, and neither did Triple H.
23. X8 (2002) Chris Jericho vs. Triple H
It’s a damn shame that “Y2J” competes in the WrestleMania main event, and becomes completely invisible, not because Triple H hogs all the glory, or Rock-Hogan had already stolen the show, but that Jericho himself is completely uninspired. If you’ve read either of his memoirs, you’re probably wishing he’d gotten a second chance. That would have been froot!
24. 13 (1997) Sycho Sid vs. Undertaker
I like Sid, and I’m a big fan of the Undertaker, but WWE had so many other plans and things going on, you could almost completely overlook this one, and also forget that it led to Undertaker’s most sustained run with the world title, and not really miss anything. Word was the Ultimate Warrior, who’d attempted a grand comeback the previous year, was supposed to be featured in this one. Against Undertaker? Well, that would have been awesome indeed.
25. IX (1993) Yokozuna vs. Bret Hart
Seriously, who booked this stuff? If anyone has any real memories of Hart’s first championship run that seem significant, please let me know, because it seems like, even though 1992 seemed to have a succession of transition champions that should have been better than that, its sole purpose was to transfer the ball to Yokozuna (and then, to Hulk Hogan, and then back to Yokozuna, and then back, improbably, to Bret Hart).
26. VIII (1992) Hulk Hogan vs. Sycho Sid
Speaking of 1992...! If he ever had a blatant misuse of influence, and a baffling one, this was it. He reportedly vetoed a match with Ric Flair, and opted for this last effort at dragon slaying, in what was basically his WWE swan song. Apparently he forgot about:
27. II (1986) Hulk Hogan vs. King Kong Bundy
Bundy, and no great offense to him, or Sid, but he was no Andre, as Andre himself had to prove a year later. Why this was a WrestleMania main event is somewhat beyond me. But as we all know, WrestleMania managed to survive it, and I guess that’s what really counts.
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