1. If the WWE got serious about Cyber Sunday, they could virtually guarantee success.
So, today it's another column based on feedback. The master of the alphabet, Andy asked me, "Do you think Cyber Sunday should return within the next two years, if so, why?"
The simple answer is, "No." I don't. Period. End of column.
But, that would be kind of boring and a waste of time for all of us, right? So, let's go a little more in-depth. I have been a fan of the World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment for over 20 years now, and for about half of that time now I've wondered if the organization is really interested in what the fans think and would really want our input. And yet...when Taboo Tuesday (later Cyber Sunday) existed, I never voted for it, I never ordered it, I never bought one of the dvds. I never even bothered to torrent it. Why?
I always believed it was a sham. There were some things in the first year that made it seem like maybe I was wrong, and maybe that year was actually straight voting, as Shelton Benjamin won the I-C Challenger vote and upset Chris Jericho to become the champ; and I believe the WWE was really pushing for a chair match, but the fans voted in a chain match and the chair ended up being used anyway, even though it was technically legal. I could have that backwards. It's not important enough for me to Wiki.
The whole point is that I believe that the first entry in the series was a neat, unique idea and that they actually took the fans preferences into consideration. Oh, and it was a PPV that was on a night other than a Sunday, which is kind of cool, though it may make it tough for a child to stick around all night to watch. So, those were the positives I derived from it initally. As it rolled around each year, though, things started to seem kind of insidious.
Shawn Michaels was always one of the choices in the World Title match and--surprise surprise--he always won the right to challenge. Other things happened that just seemed to fall too in line with what the WWE were pushing, which means that either they manipulated the vote to get what they wanted or the WWE sheep are just as pronounced as the TNA ones I referred to the other day. I'm going to assume the former, and in the 2008 version, the only way you could vote was by text and you had to pay for each vote you cast.
I think that an event like Taboo Tuesday/Cyber Sunday could work if it were done the right way. Here's the rub, though. I not only think the WWE didn't do it the right way, I'm not even exactly sure what the right way is. I understand that they are running a business and the overall goal of that business--as it is in any other--is to make money, but at the same time sometimes you can get too set in your ways, sometimes you can miss the forest for the trees and want to push an agenda instead of doing something that seems obvious or organic.
It seems to me that instead of being used as just another--unneeded--monthly PPV that they could use it as a tool to gauge what their fans want to see. It would take more time than their former format and it would be tough to really put a push on to watch, but I think any financial loss or curb in creative direction and momentum would be offset by the gains they'd eventually make by knowing the fans needs and providing for them, along with going in a general direction that their audience is craving. How would they do this?
They could take the entire roster and set it up tournament style to have fans vote people off for each contest, and once that's accomplished they could decide which matches they want to use gimmicks in and set the gimmicks up in the same manner. So, this would tell them in essence where fans sees which superstars, who they'd like them to face, and what gimmick matches the fans like the best. Then they could either keep it honest and put on the event what we voted for, or they could air what they really wanted and keep the data for research. Obviously I'd prefer the former, but if they use the latter for our benefit, who could complain? Furthermore, who would know?
2. TNA needs to stop taking two steps back every time they take one forward.
I cry your pardon if today's thought isn't as polished as usual. I already attempted to write this once then I don't know what happened, but the computer went back to the previous page and everything was lost. It's very disheartening. Almost as disheartening for me is stepping on the scale today and finding out that after having walked about 10 miles in the last 5 days, cutting down on my eating, and switching to a lowfat diet I've lost a little less than a pound--assuming the two scales used are dead on with each other.
They're probably not, of course, how many scales are exactly alike? You know what else isn't dead on, though? The way TNA has opted to handle the announcement of the Hulk Hogan signing. Let me ask you a question: Would the signing have been any less relevant one week, two weeks, or a month from now than it was this past Thursday? If your answer is yes, I'd have to ask you, "Why?" since TNA has been rolling for the last 7 years without Hogan, though not always well, of course, and he won't be making his debut for a couple weeks.
If there's a defining characteristic of Total Nonstop Action Wrestling--other than their 6-sided ring--it's the fact that they can never keep a secret secret and they're always too anxious to jump at any chance for publicity they have. They've always treated every so-so signing as the biggest thing to ever happen for the company. Now, is Hulk Hogan signing with them actually the biggest thing to ever happen to it? No, it's the second biggest. The first was actually be signed to a respectible national cable television network.
That very same network, which has come to be known as Spike TV, is apparently kind of unclear about what the words "proud" and "supportive" mean, unless TNA didn't actually try to get a little more television time this week, which given some of the things their management does wouldn't really surprise me, I guess, but as I have no evidence either way, I guess the only way to be fair would be to blame both parties. So I'm going to now ask two questions. The first I've already basically answered, so I'll still dwell on it; since I'm me.
1) Was it absolutely necessary to air footage of the Hulk Hogan/Spike/TNA press conference this week to close Impact!? I really don't think so; I think it's another example of TNA jumping the gun with an announcement, and butchering their main event to do so. They'd already had the press conference two days before, it had been on the news, and it had been all over the internet. I doubt there was anybody with any access to the digital world who would have cared that didn't already know about this. We aren't living in the 80's anymore.
2) If it was deemed necessary, why didn't they get an extra few minutes from the network? They just had the most decorated single-champion in ROH history--the longest (now-defunct) Pure Champion ever and the second longest reigning ROH Champion ever--sign on with them and debut on the October 22 episode of their program by first complimentarily greeting Kurt Angle and then beating the holy hell out of him once and then again, ending the show by feigning breaking the gold medalist's surgically repaired neck with a chair and then walking away.
So, this week, at the beginning of the show Angle challenges Desmond Wolfe to a match that Angle says is going to be a "good old-fashioned street fight." Instead, what we get is about 2 1/2 minutes of chopped up ring action and then Kurt being carried away from the ring on a stretcher. So instead of a full blockbuster television main event, we get a match that looks like their new top "babyface" can't stand up to a clothesline. I rag on the WWE all the time for putting entertainment ahead of wrestling, but I can't imagine that they would ever pull this kind of cheap, dime-store trickery.
3. Jericho's been on the other side; this is called reciprocity.
I'm not a John Cena hater. Not at all. I actually like the guy, though I will admit to being sick of him being the WWE Champ prior to his injury when he vacated the title in October of 2007. This may seem somewhat contradictory to those I've had internet conversations with or long-time readers of The Northern Star because I've mentioned how the 2008 Royal Rumble--which I was watching partially because I always watched it with my brother, Trav, and I thought it might help the grieving process--was ruined for me when Cena appeared.
The reason it was ruined for me wasn't because I dislike Cena, it's because I was tired of him, especially as champ, and I assumed that he was going to win the Royal Rumble--which he did--then go on to Wrestlemania--which he did--and win the WWE Title--which he did not. I think a lot of people assumed the same thing and there were some on both sides of the argument. Once everything started heading towards Wrestlemania, I started to believe that Randy Orton was going to retain there and when it happened I was overjoyed.
Then Cena had a feud with JBL that started when they were both eliminated from the Fatal Fourway at Backlash where Orton actually did lose the strap and then lost at SummerSlam to Batista directly after that before going on the injury list yet again. Then he received a World Title shot at Survivor Series in his return match and in an excellent bout defeated Chris Jericho to become World Heavyweight Champion. The next month he defeated Jericho again in a strong match to retain the belt.
My friend and colleague, Doc Monk, wrote on Sunday that Jericho shouldn't have been entered into the World Heavyweight Title match because after his track of losing--also known as helping up and comers get over and learn--lately we can't believe him as a legitimate threat to the World Heavyweight Title. However, I don't remember Monk or anybody besides myself getting upset at Cena getting a World Title shot against Jericho after losing to Batista and then getting a shot immediately upon his return. Why? Because Cena is "the face of the WWE."
Big fucking deal. We all know that wrestling is predetermined, but does that mean that they have to constantly act like it? The job of the WWE writers and bookers (if there are any left) is to write storylines involving their performers that do two things: 1) Entertain the wrestling fan and 2) Suspend the disbelief of said fan. So, that being the case, if they are suspending our disbelief, shouldn't a wrestler have to actually, you know, wrestle a few matches upon their return to earn a shot at a championship?
If your answer is "No, Cena is a big main event star, everybody knows that. In kayfabe, he got a shot based on past performance," that's fine, but then you have to give Jericho that same benefit of the doubt. Cena jobbed to both JBL and Batista within a couple of months of his injury. Jericho may have been doing some jobbing lately, but he's also been getting some wins. After all, he's still one half of the Undisputed Tag Team Champions, he's held the Intercontinental Title this year--and a total of 9 times.
John Cena has never held the Intercontinental Title, has never been one of the Unified Tag Team Champions(which, granted, didn't exist at the time,)and had been a 5 time World Champion, which Chris Jericho is now. I won't dispute the fact that I'm a bigger Jericho fan than I am of Cena and I'm extremely happy that he finally got a pinfall victory over Mr. Deere last night, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is that precedent has been set before. It's neither unbelievable that Jericho has a title shot, nor that he can win the strap. He's done it plenty of times before and it's almost always been when the odds were against him.
4. Shit like this just shouldn't happen. Remember Luger and Rude?
"The whole fucking world is against us, dude, I swear to God." Jay said that to Silent Bob in the fifth film of Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy, but he could just as easily have been saying it to me after the last few weeks I've had with technology. First, my laptop starts deciding it's not going to boot up if there's anything attached to it at all. Then, my Zune cord is missing when I go to use it and once it's found, it's broken and ends up breaking my Zune. Then the warranty company breaks the laptop they're supposedly fixing.
I call them to complain and they basically said, "Too bad, so sad." Then an apparent technical glitch with our new DSL modem was thought to have been caused by us rearranging the living room, which was prompted by my Burnout: Revenge game being missing--long story. So, last night we moved the modem to another room to try to avoid what was thought to be the problem, and guess what we discover? It was my wife's work that's been having a problem with their servers, not our modem booting her off.
Plus, last Friday I lost my column for some unknown reason and it happened again today. Needless to say, I'm getting pretty sick of technology at this moment and I would like to have my memory wiped and step into a Delorian that'll transfer me back to the Stone Age so I can be a caveman and invent fire and all that stuff. Anyway! Enough of me venting, you probably clicked on the link today to read a column about wrestling, right? And for the next four paragraphs, that's what you'll get.
Technology, you see, is also not always the friend of professional wrestling, either. Case in point? TNA. Since you aren't the short memoried nincompoops that both Total Nonstop Action Wrestling and World Wrestling Entertainment take us for, you likely remember that I was pretty critical of TNA's decision to make a really butchered edit of the Desmond Wolfe/Kurt Angle Impact! main event in order to air a clip of a press conference that had already been all over the media and that any digitally savvy fan would have already heard about.
Now it turns out that I should have been critical of TNA airing said match at all. While I was watching RAW on Monday night and they went to either a commercial or an Ozzy and Sharon skit (who can tell any difference, anyway, right?) I remembered to set my DVR for the ROH replay (Hey, I love me some ROH, but their TV show is nowhere near as good as their dvds and I've got House and Heroes to devote some space to, as well, you follow?) and when I clicked on it, I got the nifty information that Nigel McGuinness was taking on Colt Cabana.
Are you fucking kidding me? They made the ludicrous, rushed, idiotic turn of Kurt Angle for basically no reason. Nigel McGuinness is one of my favorite wrestlers and a fantastic talent. I have no idea where ROH would be today without him, but almost certainly not on television, so I can see why TNA wanted to use him as soon as feasible. But this is how they handle everything. Sloppily and greedily with no regard as to the possible benefits or consequences of letting the cat out of the bag too early.
In this case, they look very bush league because a wrestler they've had under contract for around a month has now had a match air with another promotion on the first-run episode of what's really their top competition's wrestling show. WWE can't be their top competition, because TNA isn't in their league yet. I'll simplify this in words that TNA officials and marks can understand: Signing Nigel McGuinness good. Airing his first match with you before his final match with his former promotion airs (and ruining your storylines to do it) bad.
5. Days go by, but so does the scenery.
Hey, guess what? Today we're also not going to start by not talking about wrestling and delve into it in a little bit. I hope you're okay with that. As this isn't interactive, though, I'll just assume that you are and the rest of us (by which I mostly mean me) will roll on. My favorite author, hands down, over the years has always been Stephen King. In the parlance of today, or perhaps the '70s; everything comes around again, right?; I just really dig on his groove. I love horror stories and he writes the very best ones.
Yeah, he's derided by a lot of critics, but really, what do they know? They're looking at technical literature bullshit that I could give a shit less about. The same people run down Dan Brown, and though I think The Da Vinci Code was overrated and overhyped, that isn't because it isn't an entertaining read, it's because his previous book was so much better. To me, Stephen King is the best horror author out there because the characters and plots he creates feel genuine, my disbelief is always suspended, and I'm entertained straight through.
He doesn't exclusively write horror novels, though, as his lasting work should have been an alternate world fantasy series called The Dark Tower. I say "should have been," because despite occasional flashes of brilliance, the latter three books are nowhere near as good as the first four. Near the end of the seventh book, also called The Dark Tower, King takes a moment to try and convince the reader to stop because we've been through the journey to the Tower, and that's what's important, not what Roland sees when he gets to the top.
For what it's worth, I wish I had followed his advice because while there was certainly some sense of a resolution in the making, there was no real closure for either Roland or the reader whatsoever. It's almost like what one would have felt if the Lord of the Rings trilogy ended with Frodo standing at the edge of the cliff dangling the ring. We still would have seen him journey there, right? We still would have seen that snippet of his life, and just like real people, that's all we ever really get of their lives, just pieces...just shards.
As "the longest running weekly episodic television show in history," RAW has the potential to transcend the one in a way that no other fictional form that I'm aware of really has. Most television programs are not open-ended, though I guess a case could be made for the dying breed known as daytime soap operas. Regardless, I doubt the audiences overlap much, so let's (gladly) set those aside. In doing so, we can agree that for our purposes the WWE has had the ability to affect us as fans more than any other venture can.
For some reason, however, they choose not to. I can't remember who wrote it, but I saw an allusion last week to the IronMan Match between John Cena and Randy Orton being an analogy for their entire feud. I can't agree. I don't think the feud between the two was as epic as was made the claim, and--as much as I wanted to see an IronMan Match this year--nor was there enough build-up to warrant one. The match was amazing, it left me breathless, and if I had been sitting instead of lying, it would have had me on the edge of my seat throughout.
Their feud, however, did not. I'm as sick of seeing Randy Orton in the main event in 2009 as I was of seeing John Cena there in 2007 and WWE only has itself to blame. By having so many pay per views per year, we get the same main-eventers all too often and the same match over and over again. There used to be a method to a way a feud was built and it drew the viewer in. We were a part of the journey; not just a spectator. That's been lost. We are no longer passengers; we just tune in. How do you like our destination?
6. The rumored Class of 2010 has a clear valedictorian.
It's that time of year again. The leaves are blowing all around, snow is falling now and then to the ground, you just had little trick-or-treaters all over your town, and pretty soon to Thanksgiving will you and your family be settling down, and, of course, rumors of the Hall of Fame class begin to abound. (C'mon, I gotta get 10 points for that rhyme!) I don't know why we're never content to wait and see who WWE is going to induct; isn't any surprise ever okay anymore? Even one this small?
Apparently not, because when I saw the news item regarding the rumors this morning, I clicked on it right away, even though I knew it was going to direct me elsewhere. If you'll remember, at this time last year rumors persisted that "Macho Man" Randy Savage was going to be inducted into the 2009 class, but that obviously never materialized, and though WWE did produce a DVD on his career, I doubt there'll be a reconciliation anytime soon.
Of course, I don't think anyone thought that Bret Hart and Vince McMahon would ever let bygones be bygones, either, but Bret contributed to his DVD with them, was inducted into the Hall of Fame, made an appearance on RAW--though it was taped--and has expressed interest in coming back, so who knows whether Savage or McMahon will have a change of heart, as well? I guess time will tell on that, as well as how true the current rumors are.
For what it's worth, the rumored names at this time include Ted Dibiase (the original one, why does World Wrestling Entertainment insist on dropping the "Jr" from the names of its multigenerational stars?), Ron Simmons, Slick, The Road Warriors, Demolition, Lex Luger, The Honky Tonk Man, and the self-destructed one, himself, The Ultimate Warrior. That list is about the usual number of inductees, so it could be valid.
I doubt it very seriously, though. "The Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase is as much of a no-brainer for people of my generation as Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart. He was the heel in the World Wrestling Federation of the 1980's and really should have won the WWF Title. He did the next best thing, though: he created his own, that hopefully his progeny will bring back some day. I think Ted may even have hinted at that in a letter once.
The Road Warriors were always a tremendous tag team that was amazingly over everywhere they went and should've been there already. Demolition were a dominant tag team in the WWF, but Ax and Smash were really just Road Warrior rip-offs, so they definitely shouldn't go in the same year as Hawk and Animal. Ron Simmons and Slick should've gone in last year instead of Koko B. Ware. As for the other supposedly less likely candidates?
Warrior is a joke. He couldn't wrestle and was a danger, but he did sell a ton of tickets so should get in eventually. Luger was a little bit better than Warrior, but never drew much or for long, so he's low on the list. But, Honky Tonk? Jerry Lawler's cousin was every bit the midcard heel of the 80's that Dibiase was to the main event. For those two to go in the same year wouldn't just be just, it would be poetic. WWE, make it so.
7. Maybe women's wrestling isn't so bad after all.
I'm as straight as they come--married, two kids, hate seeing people act like the effeminate male, wish there weren't laws in some states now allowing same sex marriage, don't think same sex domestic partner coverage should be allowed; basically I believe homosexuality is an abomination. As enjoyable as sex can be, it's clear what the real reason for it is and that isn't something two men or two women can do together.
Still, when it comes to professional wrestling, I'd much rather watch two oily men in tights battle each other inside a misshapen circle than two women. Or, at least that's the way I've felt lately. I was watching my DVR of Impact! yesterday and when I saw the return match from the commercial was going to be Tara vs. Hamada, I surprised myself by stopping to watch. They put on a nice little encounter that got me thinking.
Professional wrestling may be known as The Sport of Kings, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be only for men, does it? It seems to me I remember enjoying wrestling at different times in the WWF/E, but there just doesn't seem to be much to enjoy there right now, so it's easy to write off and just simply say that I don't like women's wrestling, even though maybe that isn't quite the truth.
Honestly, I've never been into women's sports of any kind, excepting gymnastics, swimming, speed skating, and other Olympic sports every four years. I thought it was pretty cool when there was a woman trying to break into baseball as a catcher, I'd hate to try to hit fast-pitch softball, and I think Danica Patrick is amazing, but I've also been known to say that watching women's basketball is like watching paint dry.
Even that, though, can be entertaining when it's played right, coached right, and broadcast well...yet ever since Debra "defeated" Sable to become the WWF Women's Champion, it's been very rare that the female division in WWE has been worth a damn. They got close in 2004 when Molly Holly was getting her shaved-head push and Gail Kim was evolving from a spot monkette to a submission specialist, but now it's all eye candy.
I have zero interest in watching matches involving WWE Divas because the majority of the time the wrong person goes over and those that can actually wrestle are reduced to the sidelines, comedy skits, or mangerial roles while the supposedly hot ones are given all the tv time and titles. TNA don't play like that, though, and I'm glad for it. Sure, they have their beauties--but they allow their beasts to run wild, as well.
As far as I can tell heading into Turning Point, the two best booked matches on the entire card are Knockout matches, and both look like they're going to be awesome, as long as they limit the ring time of Lacey Von Erich. Each contains a volatile, nearly uncontrollable woman that has run roughshod over opponents. We need less women in wrestling like Eve and Rosa Mendez and more like ODB and Awesome Kong. AKA real women.
