Tag: wwe

This will probably be the best ppv of the year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the thought that crossed my mind when Stephanie McMahon announced the women-only Evolution special, set to air in October.  I get that such isn’t saying that much since the ppvs of the year have been kind of lackluster, but I state such acknowledging the genuine importance and historical significance of the WWE embarking on a women-only special.

A friend of mine and I discussed what it would be like if the WWE had a women-only show, and my first thought was that it would be the kiss of death for the women’s division.  Despite the fact that a show featuring solely cruiserweight probably would have been the hottest shit on the planet back in like 1999, 205 Live is kind of proof that good ideas don’t always translate into good results.  Much like it, and Main Event (if that’s even still around) are good indicators that a show solely dedicated to women would probably not be a good idea, and the women’s division doesn’t need anything like such to derail the equity that they’ve been building over the last few years.

Stuff like the Mae Young Classic and the women’s Royal Rumble have proven that there’s a demand and appreciation for the women’s division, but it’s far too early to let them stand alone and throw them into the deep end on their own.  For true equality to exist, the women need to be on the same shows and booked by the same people that all the men perform on.

A stand-alone special show is absolutely the right call for this idea, and regardless of the fact that 2018’s ppv lineup has been kind of mediocre, Evolution very much has the chance to be the best special of the year.

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I still can always sniff out winners in a fake sport

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know whether it’s just the WWE is just that predictable, or that I really am the self-proclaimed Oracle™ of professional wresting, but I just kind of knew that the B-Team was going to win the tag team champions at Extreme Rules.  Very likely just the former, even if the whole point of the B-Team was that it was supposed to be two jobbers who just keep lucking into wins.

The reality is that the union between Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt seems to already be getting old, and I figure that Creative has better ideas for the each of them as singular performers instead of this tag team that was more or less a hold pattern for two individual stars.  Or seeing as how Jeff Hardy jobbed the United States championship away in a gratifying squash match, maybe the Hardy’s latest run has already come to an end, and it’s time to start saying goodbye to them again, until they make yet another surprise comeback in 2019.

Who knows, who cares?

Either way, the fanboy in me is happy to see the B-Team win, because who doesn’t appreciate it when two guys who have been jobbing to the stars for the better part of the last two years finally get a little bit of recognition and reward for their dutiful work?  The funny thing is that in spite of the lovable losers that Curtis Axel and Bo Dallas portray, the two of them are guys with tons of potential and talent that is more or less kind of expiring unused on the road.  I mean one is the son of Mr. Perfect, the other the son of Mike Rotundo, so they’ve definitely got wrestling in their genes.

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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

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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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