Tag: wrestling

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.

Continue reading “I feel bad for the B-Team” →

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:

Continue reading “KANE FOR MAYOR” →

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.

Continue reading “Greatest Royal Rumble my ass” →

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.

Continue reading “If the John Cena-Nikki Bella split isn’t a work, it should be” →

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.

Continue reading “Final Thoughts on Wrestlemania week” →

The zero-sum gain of jobbing Asuka

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because I was out of town during Wrestlemania, I didn’t get home until the show was pretty much over.  Miraculously, I was able to stay away from the shitshow cancer of social media and somehow avoid all of the shitty live posting that people I know tend to do, but at mythical gf’s advice, I decided to watch some of the matches that I really wanted to see and not get spoiled to, instead of going to bed immediately after getting home.  There wouldn’t have really been any way to have avoided spoilers the following day, considering aside from the wasteland of social media commentating on everything, mainstream outlets like ESPN now like to cover wrestling as well these days.

Needless to say, among the two matches I was most intrigued about going into Wrestlemania, one was the AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura match, and the other was Charlotte vs. Asuka.  Those were the only two matches I bothered watching immediately when I got home; and although I am glad to have gotten through both of the matches without getting spoiled, when the night was over I was disappointed in both, for slightly differing reasons.

Styles and Nakamura completely failed to capture the magic of Wrestle Kingdom 10 in Japan from just two years ago, leading to a fairly uninspired and lackluster match that makes me feel like both have aged past their primes and it was painfully apparent and/or the fact that WWE has the miraculous ability to hinder and suppress the talents of even the most capable wrestlers on the planet.

But obviously, the bigger objection I had from the entire show was the [spoiler alert] decision to have Charlotte defeat Asuka, thus ending her undefeated streak, the single most valuable commodity that the WWE as a whole had left.  As silly as it sounds to be willing to wager on a fake sport with predetermined outcomes, I would have wagered money that Asuka was going to defeat Charlotte, take the blue Women’s Championship, and then held the belt for at least another year, before her streak would have come to an end.  Along the way, they would do some shitty technicalities like having her lose in a tag team match, lose via countout or disqualification, before she would eventually have the last bastion of claiming that she had never been pinned or forced to tap out, preferably sometime in 2019, where she would eventually lose to someone completely deserving or qualified.

However, WWE seemed to have different plans in mind, and just like that, Asuka’s streak is over, and she’s now just another member of the women’s roster with nothing special except superior workrate, deep arsenal and international flair.

Continue reading “The zero-sum gain of jobbing Asuka” →

The NXT North American Championship seems like a waste

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much of a wrestling smark as I can sometimes be, I’m not going to pretend like I knew much about Adam Cole prior to his arrival in NXT.  I knew of his name, and that he was a guy that was pretty big in Ring of Honor, but frankly I didn’t even know what he looked like.  When he showed up in NXT and superkicked Drew McIntyre, my knee-jerk reactions was that he was kind of a Shawn Michaels clone, in look, ring presence and the fact that he whipped out a superkick as the very first thing on screen.

Over the following weeks, I watched Cole with interest and naturally read up on his career up to date on Wikipedia, but I had this suspicion that he was probably going to be an entertaining guy to watch.  Between all the matches he had jobbing to Aleister Black, War Games and his other sporadic appearances, it’s safe to say that I felt that he was a really good talent, and was among the guys I looked forward to seeing the most on episodes of NXT.

When NXT announced the creation of the NXT North American Championship, and that the inaugural champion would be crowned during a six-man ladder match, I kind of cringed when I saw that Adam Cole was tabbed as one of the contenders for the new belt.  But at the same time, I had a sinking suspicion that he was the one most likely to win the belt, because the whole Undisputed Era stable seemed like one of the things going to be relied upon to carry the brand over the next calendar year, and there would be no more serious way to bolster them than to have Adam Cole himself getting his hands on some hardware.

And true to prophecy, Adam Cole did win the North American Championship, and I was a combination of happy to see a guy I enjoyed watching win a title, unsurprised because I kind of figured this was going to happen, but at the same time a little bit disappointed that Cole won it.

Continue reading “The NXT North American Championship seems like a waste” →