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”The Doc” Chad Matthews has been a featured writer for LOP since 2004. Initially offering detailed recaps and reviews for WWE's top programs, he transitioned to writing columns in 2010. In addition to his discussion-provoking current event pieces, he has written many acclaimed series about WrestleMania, as well as a popular short story chronicle. The Doc has also penned a book, The WrestleMania Era: The Book of Sports Entertainment, published in 2013. It has been called “the best wrestling book I have ever read” and holds a 5-star rating on Amazon, where it peaked at #3 on the wrestling charts. Follow @TheDocLOP Pros and Cons From WWE This Week Finally, Kurt Angle Is Back With WWE! Undertaker Vs. Braun Strowman And Smoke-Screens For WrestleMania 33 Plans Pros and Cons From Raw, Smackdown, and 205 Live QUESTION OF THE DAY: What is your Win (best of) and Fail (worst of) for WWE this week across all three main roster shows? Monday Night Raw: Two Pros -The opening segment on Monday, much like the closing segment a couple of weeks ago featuring Goldberg, did a more than adequate job of hyping the Royal Rumble Match with a slew of teases for potential battle royal-interactions. Though a microcosm of Brock Lesnar’s continued downtrend from star who backs up considerable hype to perhaps the most over-hyped commodity in WWE today – he was basically just another top guy in that melee – the start to Raw continued to fuel speculation as to what the plans might be for the Rumble and beyond. As of this writing, no one has emerged as the clear cut, odds-on favorite to win WWE’s most popular match of the year. It seems wide open, we do not seem to be careening toward the jarringly inevitable; and that is the best kind of unpredictability. -Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson, it would be fair to say, have been total busts in WWE since their debut last April. Some of the blame justifiably rests on their shoulders, as they have only on rare occasion displayed the kind of in-ring chops that their reputation seemed to suggest of them; some of the blame goes to WWE as well for not playing to their strengths as they did with fellow Bullet Club alumnus, AJ Styles. Because of the past nine months, I personally had zero investment in their Tag Team Title shot against Cesaro and Sheamus, so I fast-forwarded until I saw The Club actually win the championships! The ensuing “Dusty Finish,” during which the referee changed the decision to a disqualification-victory, was very well executed and gave an otherwise listless rivalry a shot in the arm. The old American Dream booking strategy born of his NWA days is utilized sparingly enough in the modern era to be really engaging. Consider me re-engaged, at least for now. Monday Night Raw: One Con -Based on your perspective, the Bayley-Charlotte promo exchange could have been considered as much a “Pro” for the manner in which it gave everyone’s favorite Hugger more character development in ten minutes than she had received in the last five months but, unfortunately, the entire thing just felt awkward overall. Charlotte is very good at being detestable, but her speaking delivery waxes and wanes between much-improved and still a work-in-progress; this week was an example of the latter. Bayley, meanwhile, struggles to emote on the microphone and, though you can believe what she is saying when she is telling her story, she is difficult to stomach when trying to stretch the range of her limited verbal charisma, as she was when trying to be the joke-cracking babyface via her poems. The scripts for the women and babyfaces in general continue to be low points for the red brand. Smackdown Live: Two Pros -Mickie James had been rumored to make a return to the Smackdown brand since her enjoyable match with Asuka at Takeover: Toronto two months ago, yet there seemed to be little speculation that she might be the one revealed as La Luchadora. Perhaps that was because we have been conditioned by WWE to expect legendary stars from the past to nearly always take precedent over their modern counterparts. It was refreshing to see James assist the current Women’s Champion, Alexa Bliss, and while you could easily argue that Mickie’s comeback overshadowed Alexa’s accomplishment in winning the first women’s Steel Cage Match in thirteen years, in no way is James being positioned above the division. An intriguing turn of events, the Mickie reveal breathes new life into a rivalry that needed something fresh to keep it going. -Four months ago, Randy Orton and Bray Wyatt were two top-tier stars going nowhere particularly interesting, but The Viper’s surprising decision to join The Family has proven a catalyst for infusing all involved with renewed vigor, to the point that the once-controversial booking move is now prompting analysts and fans across the land to decree that the recent signs of breaking the trio apart would be a mistake. The dynamic is working, whether they are all on the same page or not. Orton’s loss to Dean Ambrose after another week of Luke Harper’s ill-timed interference fanned the flames of the on-going saga. It seems fairly clear where this is headed now – Orton vs. Wyatt at WrestleMania – and, if that happens, there will be a far more appealing reason for it this time around as compared to their hum-drum feud leading up to a bland main-event at No Mercy last year. Smackdown Live: One Con -Two weeks ago, I wrote a column praising the concept of the Dolph Ziggler heel turn, feeling as though it might give him a chance to return to a more natural state for his character and get one more shot to cash in on the upper limits of his potential as a result. That still may happen, but his appearance on “The King's Court” with Jerry Lawler was absolutely not compelling television. It watched like one of those instances in which WWE married itself creatively to Memphis, TN being Lawler's home town instead of what might be the most appropriate course of action for Ziggler and, when they realized they had something that was not going to work, rather than call an audible, they pressed forward and allowed an angle that could never have gone over well to fall flat on its face. Best for everyone to just pretend that this week's Smackdown did not actually feature Ziggler and erase the segment for all of eternity. 205 Live: Two Pros -Gentlemen Jack Gallagher vs. Ariya Daivari was a strong main-event that allowed the participants an opportunity to spread not just their wings, but the wings of the entire cruiserweight division. “I Quit”-type matches are seldom employed by WWE; gimmick matches in general have rarely been afforded the cruiserweights. How nice was it to see the cruiserweight-only program be given the boost of such a stipulation, even if in a PG world such a past recipe for violence was forced to be so tame? Even if the performance had tanked, the mere mention of Gallagher and Daivari in the same breath as Rock vs. Mankind or Magnum TA vs. Tully Blanchard would have elevated the two of them and the division as a whole. Fortunately, it was a very enjoyable match. Put me down as one of the fans that never thought an umbrella would be a superstar's primary weapon of choice, by the way. -205 Live is the only one of the main roster TV shows that has figured out how to consistently have matches that seem like they exist to do more than fill air-time without involving championships or #1 contenderships. Part of it is inherent in the knowledge that you know that the vast majority of the rivalries on 205 Live are not going to be showcased on PPV, so you feel more compelled to watch how the stories progress on TV, but it would be a disservice to whoever is booking the show not to point out that subtle things like the backstage interview with Tony Nese before his match with Mustafa Ali (very much enjoying his work) or Noam Dar and Alicia Fox influencing the pre-match ritual ahead of Cedric Alexander vs. Drew Gulak make all the difference in the world sometimes to create interest in the wrestling. 205 Live: One Con -Though it is a great platform for the cruiserweight division to establish and develop characters, 205 Live has not featured much more than standard WWE style matches with a little bit of extra acrobatic flair thus far. The Cruiserweight Classic was a showcase of what modern cruiserweight wrestling can be and not a single match on 205 Live to date can hold a candle to the Top 10% from the CWC. Some of that problem boils down to how fast and hard everyone works these days, granted. Still, there could be a lot more accomplished inside of the 10-15 minutes regularly afforded to these 205 Live matches than what we have seen. Maybe the Cruiserweight Championship match at the Royal Rumble will open up the playbook and loosen the restrictions, making the 205 Live tendency to slow things down more of a conscious decision to enhance what happens on PPV....maybe. Finally, Kurt Angle Is Back With WWE Oh, it’s true! Yesterday, ESPN broke the news that Kurt Angle was on his way back to WWE to be inducted into the Hall of Fame this year, ending a hiatus from the world’s preeminent sports entertainment conglomerate that dates back to 2006. Intelligence, one of Our Olympic Hero’s “Three Is,” is an appropriate word to describe the move for Vince McMahon and Co.; Angle’s absence had become glaring amidst this decade’s tendency to bring back top wrestlers from the past. During a period in which WWE has become so conscious of legendary legacies, Angle was the outlier whose contributions were so large but whose presence was inexplicably non-existent. Angle, recall, was one of the Top 5 stars of the latter part of the Attitude Era, rising to premiere status in the summer of 2000, headlining Summerslam twice, and holding the WWE Championship on two separate occasions amidst the stiffest competition arguably ever in pro wrestling lore. He then became one of the pinnacle talents of the original Brand Extension Era, when he achieved his greatest professional successes despite a rash of recurring neck injuries. For four straight WrestleMania cycles between 2003 and 2006, Angle was one of the featured performers at “The Showcase of the Immortals,” wrestling for the World Championship three times and stealing the show in one of the greatest matches ever (with Shawn Michaels) in between. Simply put: Angle was the only living wrestler among the Top 30 stars of the WrestleMania Era not to have had any association with WWE this decade. At the end of this week, count the number of Kurt Angle columns that have been posted and you will likely gain an enhanced understanding of what he meant to a lot of wrestling fandoms that have roots dating back to the early 2000s. It seems like yesterday that I sat in my parents’ house watching him gut his way through the main-event of WrestleMania XIX with Brock Lesnar. He needed surgery and decided to postpone it so that he could reach the summit of his career; the borderline classic match with Lesnar took a backseat on that night to the exhausting emotional circumstances of seeing Angle wrestle with his life on the line and, truthfully, show few ill-effects. It was the gutsiest performance that I can recall in modern WWE lore; JBL may have called himself the “Wrestling God” in those days, but WWE’s living deity at that time was Angle. That was just one of a plethora of Angle memories. Throughout the entirety of 2002, the Olympic Gold Medalist reached heights with his performance level that only a handful of others in history have equaled. He was so diverse, both as a character and in the ring. In one program, he would be the world’s most intense human-being, to the point that you could believe he might snap and break someone’s ankle by accident when applying his signature submission hold; in the next, he would be such a goofball that you would struggle to stop laughing at his antics. Sometimes, especially during the first half of his WWE career, he would fluctuate between deranged psychopath and goofy moron in the same night or even in the same match. Angle had personic range and had the diversity to work against a lot of stylistically different wrestlers to incredible critical acclaim. Over the years, I have categorized there being two types of “favorite wrestlers”: the types that you organically gravitate toward for whatever reason and then the ones who earn that status through respect-building awesomeness. Angle, like Ric Flair before him and CM Punk after him, became one of my favorite wrestlers because he was just so good. For five years, nobody was as automatic a classic match as Kurt Angle; the expectation level rose a few notches whenever he made his entrance. HBK spent the time that Angle was in TNA throughout the remainder of the 2000s solidifying himself as the greatest big match performer of the decade but, before he left, Angle was legitimately HBK’s competition; that was partly what made their WrestleMania 21 match so amazing. Angle was WWE’s MVP in 2002 and 2003. Like Bret Hart or HBK in the New Generation, he was a pillar of the WWE product during a less-heralded period, which frankly tends to underrate how much he helped cushion the blow of losing Austin and Rock in the same year and how monumental it was (albeit risky and potentially deleterious to his long-term health) for him to come back from his post-Mania XIX neck surgery in three months; it would have been a vastly different, far less healthy product without him. The overall Angle best-of list if you either need to become familiar with him or would like to refresh your memory includes classic matches with The Rock, Shane McMahon, Steve Austin, Edge, Rey Mysterio, Chris Benoit, Lesnar, Eddie Guerrero, Michaels, and Undertaker. Out of sight and out of mind, Angle’s legacy has been obscured by his absence. Unable or unwilling to talk about him over the years, WWE has undermined a huge part of their early-to-mid-2000s history. Along with his impressive championship trophy case and headlining statistics, his in-ring track record was second to none; as great as the HBK vs. Taker or Austin vs. Rock matches were, one of the unquestionable Top 5 matches of last decade was Michaels vs. Angle – what Bobby Heenan referred to as the best match he had ever seen and to this day the only match I personally have ever watched that lived up fully to the near-impossible expectations I had heaped upon it prior to. It’s the modern equivalent of WWE having to, in the late 1990s, purposefully downplay Randy Savage’s greatest hit from the 1980s, like the match with Ricky Steamboat at WrestleMania III, because he was with WCW. Uneasy was the way it felt then with Macho Man and uneasy was the way it felt with Angle until the familiar opening chord's of "Medal" struck live on Raw last night, signaling that WWE can now openly acknowledge all of the amazing things that he did for them. The Road to WrestleMania does not officially begin until the Royal Rumble next Sunday, but Angle’s Hall of Fame induction announcement makes it seem like Mania Season got its typical January spark two weeks early. Undertaker Vs. Braun Strowman And Smoke-Screens For WrestleMania 33 Plans The difference between a piece of news and a rumor is that a piece of news is a report about something that has or is set to actually happen, whereas a rumor is conjecture regarding that which could possibly but may never happen. In wrestling, especially in recent years, the line between news and rumor has been blurred as companies like WWE utilize the so-termed “dirt-sheets” and social media to test the waters on certain angles in the works or outright attempt to influence fan reaction to their television storylines. A lot of rumors have been flying around about The Undertaker’s upcoming role in the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania 33 this year. Several months ago, it was rumored that Taker would face AJ Styles for the WWE Championship at the Rumble, segueing to what many felt was the obvious decision to finally run The Phenom vs. John Cena at WrestleMania; weeks later, it was rumored that Styles vs. Taker might be postponed until WrestleMania, but that the odds still heavily favored Cena-Taker. Last week, rumor had it that Vince McMahon changed his mind about Cena vs. Taker and that a match between them was no longer planned for the Orlando-based spectacular in April. Instead, Taker would be involved in a yet-to-be-determined non-title match against perhaps a Raw brand superstar not named Braun Strowman, who was said to have been crossed off the list of candidates to wrestle The Deadman at Mania. If you are having a hard time keeping track, do not feel bad; it is easy to get caught up in the whirl of the rumor mill. As much as it is WrestleMania Season, it is also the season in which the rumor mill heats up to its yearly peak. Undertaker’s opponent is absolutely newsworthy and is one of the most engaging WWE talking points to discuss right now, but the problem is that we have no actual news on the matter. In trying instead to digest all of the rumors, let us concentrate on what we presently know for sure: Undertaker is the only superstar in WWE to not officially be attached to a brand, as he has appeared affiliated with both Raw and Smackdown over the past two months; he is going to be in the Royal Rumble match in two weeks; and Braun Strowman was watching him on a backstage monitor when he showed up on Raw last week to announce his Rumble participation. Based on what we have seen, Strowman is either being positioned as Taker’s opponent or is being purposefully teased as Taker’s opponent in one of the aforementioned scenarios of WWE using the rumor mill to its advantage, in this case to avoid telegraphing their actual plan, to decrease anticipation for Taker’s match, and to then spark a surprise-fueled rush of enthusiasm when the real match begins to take shape. Strowman vs. Taker is not exactly filling the diehard fanbase with optimism and it would be an unconventional choice given that the last time that The Deadman faced someone at “The Showcase of the Immortals” who had not already been well-established via past WrestleMania success was 2006 and, given the infrequency of his dates and the amount of money one would presume WWE offers him each year for his grand stage one-off, it would be safe to assume that the only matches Taker will ever wrestle from here on are against fellow top-tier talents. Conceivably, Strowman could emerge as a top-tier talent in the next year; finding anyone who would put him in that category right now, though, might prove difficult. If WWE has decided on Taker vs. Strowman, then clearly they have their eye on making their next great big man, albeit through a fairly inorganic manner that will surely provoke the wrath of their most ardent supporters. A safer prediction would be a spotlight interaction between the two giants in the Rumble either mid-way through or during the climax. Beyond a match with Strowman, Taker’s appearance on Raw and his brief engagement with Stephanie McMahon do indeed hint at him facing a wrestler from the red team. A name brought up by both myself and others is Roman Reigns who, Universal Champion or not after the Rumble, is in a unique position to be in a headlining match with Undertaker this year given both what he has accomplished over the past two Mania cycles (Rumble winner, two WM main-events, three-time World Champ) and the vitriol that he evokes from the WWE audience. Reigns, controversial as it may be to say, is the biggest star of his generation and facing Taker is a logical move for him given WWE’s propensity in recent Mania Seasons to put him against legendary figures. It has the makings of one of those rare circumstances when everyone would care about it for one reason or another. Since the use of legends irregularly featured on WWE programming became so prominent at WrestleManias early in the decade, “The Show of Shows” formula has been to have one match involving multiple legends and to pair other legendary names with fresher talents. With Goldberg vs. Brock Lesnar already penciled in for Mania 33, pairing Taker with a wrestler of the current generation of stars (like Reigns or Strowman) makes a lot of sense, especially if you now consider John Cena a part-timer. Taker vs. Strowman, with all due respect, drags The Phenom’s match into the middle of the show, but Taker vs. Reigns ensures that The Deadman remains at (with the title) or near (without the title) the top of the card for his yearly epic. Of course, all roads could still very well lead to Taker vs. the winner of the Styles-Cena match for the WWE Championship, making the Raw appearance, Strowman’s monitor-watching, and all of the recent speculation a smoke screen for executing the originally rumored plan without previously established fan knowledge of the outcome. Rumor is soon to become news either way.
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