Tag: wwe

It’s a work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Daniel Cormier wins  UFC heavyweight championship, immediately provokes Brock Lesnar afterward, inviting him into the Octagon from the audience

When in doubt, it’s probably a work (read: premeditated).  As the line continues to blur between the UFC and WWE, with stars jumping from one promotion to the other, there’s one thing that has always been crystal clear: the pursuit of money.  Both are businesses, with the goal of making as much money as humanly possible, and despite the fact that one is more legitimately a sport than the other, the objective remains the same.

UFC promoting a Daniel Cormier vs. Brock Lesnar fight will draw millions of viewers, as there’s a legitimate correlation between gigantic numbers and Brock Lesnar fights.  Which equates to a whole lot of money.

WWE having Brock Lesnar as its champion will create a cross-pollination of viewership, drawing interest from UFC fans who want to see Lesnar perform in the fake sport, whether it’s out of curiosity, or to see if any of his three matches he’ll have this year might give away any sort of intel to strengths or weakness for betting purposes.

And in the end, regardless of who wins in the Octagon, both parties and all involved participants stand to make a gigantic payday out of this affair. 

Not that it really matters, but it’s still all probably a work, if you look into the details of the scenario.

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JOBBERS

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The skinny: three professional wrestlers take on a 2.5-year old lion in tug-of-war, fail miserably

Honestly, I wouldn’t have guessed that the humans would lose, especially in such a dominant fashion.  The laws of physics would say that the three wrestlers combined to outweigh a not-yet fully matured lion, and that they should probably be able to simply brute force win a match of tug-of-war.

But I guess this is where we as humans get cocky over our position on the food chain and underestimate the raw primal strength of wild animals.  The lion doesn’t even appear to budge, against three men who are practically required by their profession to hit the gym and have more strength than the average human being.

Granted, as talented as he is in the ring, Ricochet is still probably like 185 lbs. and classifies as “a small guy” in the wrestling industry, so I’m not surprised that his contributions to this battle were probably minimal in comparison to the jacked Fabian Aichner, and the fat guy Killian Dain.  Even still, the three of them combined had to have been nearly double the weight of a young lion, yet they still jobbed like the Public Enemy going against the Acolytes.

Not a good look with NXT TakeOver: Chicago happening tomorrow.  If Ricochet ends up losing to the Velveteen Dream over the weekend, that’ll be twice in the same week where he’ll have been televised jobbing, which is never good for anyone’s body of work.  But then again, you kind of deserve it if you screw around too much against actual lions.

I feel bad for the B-Team

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If there’s ever one thing I’ve observed about the WWE throughout the decades, is that every now and then, you can tell when there’s a character or character(s) where it’s extraordinarily obvious that the Creative department has absolutely no ideas for.  However, the performers themselves are either competent in the ring and/or are personalities that are genuinely decent, therefore they are desired to be kept on television and therefore employed, as opposed to being completely taken off of TV in general and allowed to rot in obscurity.

More notable and recent examples of this would be early incarnations of The New Day, Damien Sandow and Rusev, whom were all given pretty lame duck seeds for characters, but were all pretty decent performers or supposed good locker room guys, hence the desire to keep them at all, even if their personas were lacking in effort.

The thing is, the wrestling smark culture is smarter than ever with the advent of the internet and the ability to know what’s going on the vast majority of the time, or at least be able to talk it out with other wrestling fans and come to conclusions that differed from the days when communication wasn’t quite so simple.  Subsequently, whenever the smarks have been able to identify when a wrestler or wrestlers were getting the shaft by Creative, these are precisely the wrestlers that they begin to get behind, in a defiant, contrarian manner to kind of play a chicken and egg game with the industry to put the test towards the claim that the fans make the stars and not the other way around where stars make fans.

That said, all three of my examples are cases where almost by sheer will and a relentless refusal to give up with seeds they’re sowing, got over with the fans, and to gargantuan amounts.  The New Day singlehandedly resurrected tag team wrestling in the WWE in an age where countless names in the industry have stated the company’s secondary opinion of it, and have become probably the most lucrative merchandising property in the company.  Damien Sandow became Damien Mizdow, the super-over stunt-double for The Miz, and probably spun more gold out of shit than anyone else before him, and Rusev took a dead-end partnership with Aiden English, and through forced-meme determination, gotten the Rusev Day gimmick over like crazy.

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KANE FOR MAYOR

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In short: Glenn Jacobs, better known as WWE wrestler “Kane” wins the Republican primary in the Knox County, Tennessee mayoral race

In other words, Kane is one step closer to becoming an actual mayor of an actual county in an actual metropolitan area in the United States.  Not a bad achievement for a guy who makes his living fake beating people up in a fake sport.  The only thing that stands in the way of total victory now is the Democratic candidate in the general election in November.

Honestly, I didn’t think Kane was going to make it this far, because despite how ironically funny and cool it would be to see a professional wrestler ascend the ranks of government and take public office, cooler heads tend to prevail in the end, and the career politicians usually end up winning most of the time.  But now that Kane has emerged victorious in the first critical step, I want to see nothing more than for Kane to go all the way and become MAYOR KANE, and send Knox County, Tennessee straight… to… HELLLLLLL.

Lest we forget Kane’s resume for becoming a mayor:

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Greatest Royal Rumble my ass

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It took two sittings to watch it, because a five hour show is asking too much for anyone, much less anyone actually in attendance, but I just made it through watching the WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble special out of Saudi Arabia.

Mercifully.

It goes without saying that I did not have high hopes for this special, therefore it was of zero shock and surprise that it turned out to be the mediocre, glorified house show that I figured it would be.  The events of Greatest are for the most part non-canon to current storylines, but the performers still have to put forth the effort and the work to next to zero story advancement to the rest of the events that are happening in current WWE programming, which is about as zero-sum as it gets, considering the sheer amount of time, resources and physical effort necessary to hold what’s basically an unnecessary show.

The matches were almost all terrible, the performers were clearly jet-lagged, a step or more slow, and completely uninspired performing in front of a mostly confused and/or apathetic crowd.  Predictably, zero titles changed hands, and the only notable thing that occurred in the entire show was the crowning of Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt as winners of the vacant RAW Tag Team Championships.  The rest of the card was underwhelming and underperformed, and the 50-man Rumble match itself was loaded with jobbers, no-names and C-listers who would otherwise have no chance of performing regularly on the average North American tour rotation.

Not to mention the fact that due to the antiquated misogynistic Saudi culture, none of the WWE’s women were permitted to perform, much less any women really be present in King Abdullah Stadium without the supervision of a man, which is a little bit of egg on the company’s part, as they could have really made a global statement by refusing the show in the first place because of their cultural restrictions but whatever, that’s Saudi Arabia for you.

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If the John Cena-Nikki Bella split isn’t a work, it should be

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at how much mainstream media coverage the breakup between John Cena and Nikki Bella has been, because no matter how big or small wrestling gets, performers in the industry seldom make any mainstream media unless it involves them dying or they’re The Rock.

I can’t say that I’m the least bit surprised that this happened because ultimately I don’t believe that people are really capable of change without some traumatic or life-altering instances happening in their lives, and considering John Cena’s life and career has been mostly the same over the last decade, I’m pretty sure that regardless of what ear candy he’s said about having changed towards the ideas of marriage and children, he really hasn’t.  As much as sucks for Nikki Bella or any person who has to endure a breakup with a long-term love, it’s hard to say that John Cena wasn’t being transparent about his attitudes towards certain things, for quite some time now.

Sure, it’s probably a dick move that he proposed and let this roller coaster ascend to the heights it did mostly because of the fact that Cena is a moment-junkie, in the sense that he’s completely sold on the notion that Wrestlemania is where “moments are made,” and he probably went a little too far in the pursuit of a moment and proposed marriage despite the fact that he was against marriage, but frankly as much as it sucks right now, it’s probably for the best that they ended things now instead of after being married and possibly with kids that also Cena would have been against in the first place.  Sure, Cena would have obviously protected himself with a pre-nuptual, because he wouldn’t even let Nikki move in without any sort of contract, much less married her, but divorce regardless is undoubtedly messier than a breakup between non-spouses.

At first blush, my knee-jerk reaction to this news was that it was the seeds to what could possibly be the first real swerve towards an audience beyond just the wrestling fanbase, considering that both John Cena and Nikki Bella have transcended the wrestling industry with movies and their reality television shows.  If the WWE played their cards right, it would be a golden opportunity to get people outside of wrestling fans to possibly tune into flagship programming and/or tie themselves into WWE Network subscriptions, because they’re drama junkies eager to see the blurred reality of the fallout of their breakup – but in the ring.

Now more level-headed thinking probably understands that this is probably more on the side of reality, since despite his in-ring persona, John Cena is barely anything other than a robotic tool, moldable to promotion and malleable to anything that can continue to make him look like a superstar, and getting married and being strong-armed into having kids would definitely compromise his stardom potential.

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Final Thoughts on Wrestlemania week

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been completely slammed at work, so I haven’t really had much of a chance to write about my thoughts about the grandest show of them all™, but on the other hand, with the entire week now behind us, I’ve had more time to play catch up with everything from the pre-pre show (NXT TakeOver), the pre-show, the entire five-hour clusterfuck that was Wrestlemania itself, highlights from both the following Raw and Smackdown, as well as the first NXT show post-Mania.

Needless to say, I have opinions on all of it, otherwise this post wouldn’t exist.

It goes without question that NXT TakeOver: New Orleans was the clear superior show over the last week, and I’m really beginning to question the WWE’s methodology of pairing TakeOvers with the big four PPVs of the year.  According to multiple sources (wrestling personality autobiographies), it’s been stated that Vince McMahon himself and his production team have this idea that crowds have a finite number of “pops” AKA crowd reactions per night, and that certain wrestlers have been discouraged from saying certain things or doing certain moves that would elicit a pop at a point of the show that would be one less pop for during the main event.

Although the terminology is kind of silly, there’s no denying the idea that crowds do have finite amounts of energy, and that it is entirely possible to burnout a crowd with shows that go too long, or there simply being too many shows to catch.  That being said, all of the aforementioned shows occurred in the same two venues within New Orleans, and sure thousands of people converge on a city whenever Wrestlemania is in town, but it’s safe to assume that the same people are often times the ones hitting up all of the shows all week long.  I love wrestling as much as the next smark does, but I for one have zero desire to go to that many shows in a week.  Give me TakeOver, and I’ll be content to watch the rest of the programs on my projector from the comfort of my cushy leather recliner.

Back to the point, I think WWE isn’t maximizing their pop potential by pairing TakeOvers with the big four shows of the year; if anything at all, it’s almost counterproductive to the logic of burning out crowds, especially when the facts have been that the NXT roster has been routinely outperforming their main roster counterparts for the better part of the last two years now.

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