Bryan/Sheamus explanation

A few sets of forums have posted my WrestleMania 50 crappiest moments piece, and a number of readers took issue with my placement of Sheamus/Bryan at #2. Some even said it wasn't a bad moment at all.

My gripe with the match wasn't that Bryan lost. I expected him to lose, and was just happy that he'd even gotten a reign as champion. But as a Bryan fan, I was particularly looking forward to his first Mania match, and they made it a farce. Now, I feel Bryan recovered well from said farce, thanks to the outrage from the fans (particularly the next night on Raw), but Sheamus kinda hasn't.

The reason I ranked it so high was the short-sighted planning in regards to Sheamus, whom the company had the faith in to win the Rumble, and become the first Rumble winner to go on and become champion at Mania since Taker in 2007. This is a guy whom the company (HHH especially) champions as a chosen one, which is understandable given his unique look and underrated abilities in the ring. But the way they've gone about booking him this past year and a half has been astounding. There seems to be a rule that all babyfaces have to be unlikable, impervious to logic, and obnoxious, and that's where they went with a man who they were banking on being the company's #2 or 3 babyface going forward.

In that moment, Sheamus reminded me of Hogan at WM9, where he took advantage of the heel (even if Bryan was caught up in a moment of arrogance), and he celebrates the victory that way. I don't blame him, it's just the way he's been booked. The only really likable babyfaces WWE creates, at least to me, have been heels who were turned face because of their entertainment value (Punk, Bryan) as opposed to wrestlers they equip with babyface cliches (lame insults, smiling more, ignoring the logical points of the heels, being 'wacky').

Much like the Austin heel turn entry from X7, there is a little bit of "hindsight" driving this, as Sheamus never recovered as a character from this moment. But at the time, I remember my friends and I at our annual WM party just looking at each other incredulous, most of us, laughing and rolling our eyes, and one of them, a Sheamus fan, was pissed off at the brevity of the match. He's not even a smark; he just wanted to watch his favorite wrestler do a little more to "earn" the title. So it's not even just hindsight; there WERE fans who thought it was bullshit the moment it happened (hence the continued chants of Bryan's name into the next couple of matches).

So in short, the reason I have that moment #2 is because it did no favors to Sheamus, who they wanted to get over as a hero. Bryan could lose a 6 minute match, a 16 minute match, etc, and I would've been, "At least he had his run." Hope you understand my point a little better, even if you don't agree.

I chalk it up to a colossal miscalculation on the company's part. It's an increasing trend where they stubbornly see the character landscape one way, and a good number of fans see it another way.

WrestleMania: A Complete Historical Perspective

From now through WrestleMania, I'll post my assessments of the impact of each WrestleMania that were written for Eric Gargiulo's Camel Clutch Blog. Check back each day for the newest entries.

WrestleMania I
WrestleMania II
WrestleMania III
WrestleMania IV
WrestleMania V
WrestleMania VI
WrestleMania VII
WrestleMania VIII
WrestleMania IX
WrestleMania X
WrestleMania XI
WrestleMania XII
WrestleMania XIII
WrestleMania XIV
WrestleMania XV
WrestleMania 2000
WrestleMania X7
WrestleMania X8
WrestleMania XIX
WrestleMania XX
WrestleMania XXI
WrestleMania XXII
WrestleMania XXIII
WrestleMania XXIV
WrestleMania XXV
WrestleMania XXVI
WrestleMania XXVII
WrestleMania XXVIII

The WrestleCrap Mystery Man.....REVEALED

And so it comes to this.

When the decision was made late in the summer to overhaul WrestleCrap.com, RD and I decided we were going to need reinforcements.

After all, other than 'guest inductions', which The Deal himself would fine tune, it was pretty much just he and I running the 'classic site.' And even then, my forays into football writing had pushed Headlies aside.  So more than ever, it became a one-man show.  RD wanted changes, but knew that just the two of us couldn't handle it.

RD and I have spent the last several months plotting what would be on the New WrestleCrap, how it should look, how often it would be updated, blah blah blah. Since RD was doing the technical legwork of designing the new-look site, I decided to help out by recruiting some fresh faces.

And we got 2 old ones.

I asked Sean Carless if he wanted to return, and he said yes. Also, it's notarized by Facebook, so any claim he's made that he doesn't remember agreeing, remember: Canadians are habitual liars, and their currency looks like Rip Taylor's confetti.

Then RD gave us all a Christmas surprise by bringing back the legendary Blade Braxton. Reunited are wrestling's greatest D-team since the GWF's Cartel, and trust me, there are way more than a 'dozen listeners' who are ecstatic the two are back together.

Jed Shaffer also returns for "Rewriting the Book", so WrestleCrap maintains some of its old flavor. This is for you hipsters out there that hate change, despite demanding it often. You know, like the way you patronize WWE ("Push someone new for a change! .....no, not him!")

Plus we have Paul Kraft, Emerson Witner, Michael Dunlap, Travie Yak, and Jordan Mishkin as our "rising stars", kinda like how WWE has NXT. In fact, next week, they will all get their new corporate-approved stage names the way WWE developmental talents do. For instance, Emerson Witner can keep his real name if he jumps to Ring of Honor, but now he'll likely be Hobie Bryant.

But there was one more man we had to get.

See, around the time I courted Sean with his usual bribe (a Vietnamese mail order bride dressed like Walter Sobchak), I also scouted someone who took the idea of "WrestleCrap" and ran with it in a way that has been very, VERY successful in its own right.

He is a hero and idol to many a wrestling fan who enjoy the "worst" of the industry, much in the same way that R.D. has presented for nearly 13 years.

Except he does it in video form.

That's right folks, the ace in the hole for the new WrestleCrap.com comes to us all the way from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, and he is now a big part of our strange fraternity.

The man.....

The myth.....

Botchamania's own, MATTHEW GREGG!

Yes, the man behind "People Talk Too Much", "Messed Up WCW Endings", Cornette Face, and curator of a million awesome Randy Savage soundbytes, is bringing his charming blend of absurdist humor and diehard wrestling fandom to WrestleCrap, and we welcome Matthew/Maffew with open arms.

At this time, Matthew's contributions are still to be determined. Certainly his latest Botchamania works will be promoted on the humor site, but he's also a man with tremendous gift for caustically breaking down WWE PPV's in rant form, as well as bleeding his heart about what's annoying him in the biz today.

Simply put, with Matthew Gregg here, the possibilities are endless.

So.....RD and Blade reunited, Sean returns, and we get the man behind Botchamania as well. Plus you have me, but who am I?

Oh yeah, the guy who brought Matthew Gregg on board. *pause for effect* You're welcome.

HIT MAFFEW'S MUSIC!

Interviews with Jerry Lynn and Blue Meanie

 

With Extreme Rising's year-end event approaching, I'd like to present a pair of interview pieces done with two performers working that night's show. And I gotta say, as a fan of ECW since I was nine years old (the TPE vs. Badd Company days), being able to write these two pieces means a great deal to me.

The first is with the soon-to-be retired Jerry Lynn, written after tagging along behind the scenes at an NWA event in South Jersey. Lynn gave much insight on his long career while providing a refining session for many young indy workers, and even played ping pong with me. For an hour afterward, I didn't even know what to do with myself.

The second was conducted this past week with a gentleman who shares my undying love of crappy Eagles football, The Blue Meanie. Meanie gave a little insight on ECW's past and Extreme Rising's future, while being his usual charming self.

As for Extreme Rising, let's just say this old ECW fan is giddy to have what looks like an authentic revival of the chaos he grew up enjoying.

Jerry Lynn interview (7/14/12)

Blue Meanie interview (12/13/12)

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Guys, Vince is Feeling Inadequate Today. Let's Tell Him How Buff He Looks

Let me ask you something. If you tuned into Monday Night Raw this past Monday, could you have been turned away by something?

Lemme make it clearer. You knew that, by tuning in at 8 PM EST this past Monday night, you would probably be subjected to the following: CM Punk continuing down his anti-primrose path of being Just Another Cowardly Heel, the Cena/AJ/Vickie/Dolph sludge that makes about as much sense as Kurt Cobain marrying Courtney Love in anything other than a heroin-blinded state, and 3 hours of Even-Steven booking in which whims, not wins, matter most.

If you've made it that far, at least moderately okay with the idea of all of this, chances are nothing else is going to faze you.

I mention this because WWE acted upon a quirk that I'd read about them (read: Vince) having months ago, when WWE ran Raw from Columbia, South Carolina. This time, the show was held at the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I realized that this 'quirk' looking like a pretty damning fact.

Several newsies have confirmed what I noticed. Other than Cena mentioning "Lafayette" in a promo, never once was the city name stated during the broadcast. Instead, Michael Cole would simply say, "We're here at the Cajundome" when prompted.

That's because Vince, old insecure and shriveling Vince, apparently doesn't want 'smaller' city names mentioned on the broadcasts, because it makes WWE look bush league.

I thought Michael Cole shilling for Twitter, bad Divas matches, Cena's stale act, a reliance on legends when convenient, and the bad writing made WWE look bush league, but what do I know?

Lafayette is the fifth largest city in Louisiana, behind New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and Metairie. If Vince is so worried about looking like a two-bit carny running towns of toothless crones (which Lafayette probably isn't), then I ask who made the call to run in those arenas?

WWE has had a history of running at the Cajundome in Lafayette. They ran a Raw there the night after the 2001 Royal Rumble, which was in New Orleans. Surely Austin, Rock, Undertaker, Kane, Triple H, Angle, and others at their peak, and headed for the most exciting WrestleMania of all time, didn't feel like lesser men for working in a 13,000+ seat venue that's less than thirty years old.

The managers and employees of the Cajundome probably went to a lot of trouble to make sure Raw ran as smooth as possible, and Vince somehow thinks mentioning the name of the city will cause Madison Avenue to throw its Cosmopolitan in his beggary face.

Put it like this: if you were soliciting a prostitute, you'd try to find one that met your standards. Say, a hooker that looks like Mila Kunis. You have about a 1 in 1000 chance of finding Jackie Burkhart patrolling the red light district, so you have to settle for a plain-looking street urchin. And you're disgusted, because she doesn't meet your standards, but yet still good enough to polish your knob, and do that thing you like that involves the table leg and some Nickelodeon Gak.

If, during her attempts to please you to your hearts content, you refuse to look her in the eye, or even treat her with a shred of respect or dignity, then you're Vince McMahon. It's that simple.

Maybe that's why Linda lost the election in Connecticut. Perhaps she did a campaign stop in some city with a low population like Beacon Falls, and some resident yelled "BEACON FALLS LOVES YOU LINDA!", and she recoiled in disgust, like she just smelled lentil soup-scented vomit.

I wouldn't rule it out. When it comes to the McMahon way of thinking, there are literally no boundaries to how you can diagram their thought processes.

When someone is good enough to give you their money to help sustain your empire, they're also good enough to be acknowledged, even if it's just their city name.

To do otherwise is just as insulting as the writing, and that's saying something.

WWE's 20 Best Matches of the Decade (So Far)

Just wanted to exercise my brain a little bit and take a look at WWE's best work since January 1, 2010. I had considered doing something along the lines of WWE's Greatest Matches Ever, or whatnot, for an e-book, so this is just a little way to get some creative juices flowing.

Besides that, you see debates for the best matches of the 90s and 2000's, but I wanted to focus a bit more on the "modern era" so to speak. Turns out, WWE's had some gems in this period when you step back and ignore the middling crap we read about seemingly daily.

Here's how I'd rank the best of the best:

You Have a Poor Attitude, or Rather a Poor Grasp of It

Yeah, Paul, I can't see through 3 hours of this tripe either.....

YOU HAVE A POOR ATTITUDE, OR RATHER A POOR GRASP OF IT
by Justin Henry

Wrestling fans have an interesting, if nebulous, grip on reality, particularly the diehards who've long ago sold their right to view wrestling storylines and productions with an outsider's eye.

I admit to sometimes falling into that trap, so don't confuse me for some lecturing coot. I still greet selected friends with the Mega Power handshake, despite how weird it looks to onlookers that never got to enjoy the frenzy that was Macho Madness in the 1980s.

Poor bastards.

But I digress. I was saying that wrestling fans, when immersed in this immortal coil of worked wonder, are sometimes less fazed when something ridiculous happens. We think nothing of a man wearing a green sock on his arm, designed to look like a snake, and using said-sock as his knockout weapon of choice. We've also long ago stopped questioning why cameras seem to catch intimate details of rather compromising backstage moments, and yet the parties involved never seem to notice the crewman holding the bulky video camera upon his shoulder just 5 feet away.

We admit that pro wrestling is a tenuous, yet flexible, reality that can only co-exist among the true believers, or at least those willing to play along. Otherwise, it's just a fat guy in a tracksuit and fedora pretending to be a dinosaur without any sort of encouragement from the people, and that's just embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassing, sometimes events take place in this rather unique world that a varied majority of fans want no part of, and shun instantaneously. It's happened more and more in recent years, especially as we've gotten older and a little wiser. 15-year-old me didn't see the harm in Chyna setting up Mark Henry with a transvestite; 29-year-old me thinks she has serious psychological scrapes (and 29-year-old me is correct).

But the unsolicited presentation of a she-male is merely silly when compared to the incident of CM Punk and Paul Heyman being brought to the ring for the sole of purpose of mocking a real life incident, that in which Jerry "The King" Lawler suffered a very real, not-so-worked heart attack at ringside during the September 10 Raw broadcast.

Even those who aren't so easily bewildered by wrestling's silliness said, "Okay, that's wrong."

Actually, not ALL of them.

Turns out, there's a considerable minority of fans who either liked the angle, or liked what it represented. A couple of memes have made the rounds over social media, mocking the outraged fans by calling them hypocrites. The formula for the visual joke goes like so.

1. WWE is PG
2. Fans: "WE WANT THE ATTITUDE ERA BACK!!!!"
3. Punk and Heyman mock a man's real-life heart attack
4. Fans: "WWE IS DISGUSTING FOR DOING SUCH AN AWFUL THING"
5. HYPOCRITES~!

I'm here to quell this idea that what Punk and Heyman were made to do was anything out of the playbook of the beloved Attitude Era.

The Attitude Era featured its share of tragedies and near tragedies. Among them, the death of Gorilla Monsoon, the accident which paralyzed Darren Drosdov, British Bulldog's domestic problems, and, most notably, the horrific death of Owen Hart on a PPV.

Last time I checked, none of these incidents were used to garner hatred and vitriol for any of the company's villains.

Triple H and Vince McMahon, in their most fiendish plots as the Attitude Era's most maniacal baddies, never had to air vignettes where they pissed on Monsoon's grave, or shoved Droz out of his wheelchair, or offer themselves as "real men" to Diana Hart-Smith, or in any way mock Owen Hart's death.

Obviously, that last one wouldn't happen due to Martha's impending wrongful death suit, but the point remains: WWE never needed to go that route to draw any form of heat.

In fact, the only time death, or near-death, became the focal point of a World Title storyline was when Big Show was champion in late 1999, and the Big Bossman went to absurd, almost comical, lengths to make fun of Show's deceased father.

At least with that angle, we got the casket-surfing incident. Punk didn't even make snow angels on the floor of the ICU that housed an ailing Lawler.

And before any of the cretins who called Punk and Heyman's mockery, "Attitude Reborn", here's some tips:

1. Show and Bossman's blowoff match was relegated to being 3 minutes long on a secondary PPV, and it wasn't even the main event.

2. There is no 2. 1 was sufficient.

The angle was considered a failure. 13 years later, it gives fans no positive memories except for those who appreciate the campy black comedy it provided, but nothing more.

And guess what? That angle actually had more merit than what Punk and Heyman did, because at least Bossman attacked someone indirectly involved in his match: the champion's father. Show would most certainly look to avenge his father's good name, so at least Bossman attacked someone with loose ties to the match.

All the good CM Punk's promo was meant to do was make the crowd hate his guts, because he's in there with 2 men who don't have as much support from the most vocal fanbases as Vince McMahon would want: the fabulously-faux gangsta in jorts, and the Sammy Hagar to Bill Goldberg's Diamond Dave.

I don't recall Steve Austin or The Rock being so divisive to the fans, that Vince had to have them save a heart attack victim, or a girl scout, or someone's grandmother, or The Pope, from harassment by whichever heel they'd been matched up with.

The Attitude Era wasn't about blood, or sex, or violence, or swearing. It wasn't about being controversial. Those were titillating incentives to go along with it, but the Attitude Era was really about action; about assaulting one's senses with non-stop chaos. Never a dull moment at its peak, good or bad.

If what Punk did was truly "Attitude", then the promo would have never happened. Because someone like Punk, who the audience turned face out of respect and want, would never cut that promo. He'd STILL be a face, not some pawn who is forceably made heel to accommodate The Rock and John Cena's big redux feud.

If this was the Attitude Era, Punk wouldn't be sidetracked with an announcer who has nothing to do with his big match on WWE's No. 4 PPV, and would instead be trying to drive a wedge between Cena and Ryback.

If this was the Attitude Era, the storyline would already have legs, and not need to involve a real-life scary moment in order to play with emotions that the fans separate from their suspension of disbelief.

If this was the Attitude Era, the people involved in the World Title match wouldn't receive constant criticisms like "they need to stop pushing him; I'm tired of seeing him!", because at least at that point, WWE catered to the fans whims instead of shoehorning their preferences into our favorite shows.

And if this was the Attitude Era, Vince McMahon would have a billion-plus dollars on paper, the self-esteem of a rebel, and the comfort in knowing that his most successful venture is all he needs to sustain his success.

So if this is really Attitude in one's eyes, then I suggest those folks step back, view the Attitude Era, and then view what happened Monday, and tell me that they're one in the same.

The true hypocrite is the one who demanded the restoration of eras past, and aggressively tries to convince smarter people that the imitation is the real thing.