This was a rematch for Punk’s WWE Title, now with no disqualifications or count outs.
It works! It works for all of the same reasons the match two weeks prior was so good. Which is fitting, because they sure are not allowed the bells and whistles that the match might suggest. In fact, save for the finish and maybe thirty seconds in the middle, you might never know this was any sort of a unique match. Why’s that? Well, John Cena had his own Extreme Rules match later in the night against the vaunted and feared Lord Tensai, and needed every shortcut he can get. The cool thing about WWE is that everything is so stiffly regimented and plotted out that they make it very easy to tell you who they care about and who they’ll throw into the wilderness, so to speak.
In the wilderness, the WWE Champion who opens the show instead must do without, save for a singular steel chair.
Fortunately, someone as smart as CM Punk can build something that both works as a whole match and doesn’t feel totally out of place as a ersatz No Holds Barred Match in spite of only being allowed the one prop. Like his spiritual forefather close to twenty years earlier, CM Punk is not a best in the world level guy because of incredible strength in any one area, but because he’s smarter than almost everybody else, and can accomplish things like this, even while so embarrassingly hamstrung by the company that he, in theory, represents.
So, what this can’t have in shortcuts, it has in pure old-style roughness. Punk is more aggressive than he was two weeks beforehand, having learned about trying to outlast Henry, and instead just going for it. He’s diving around, he’s using the environment outside in fun ways, and hitting as hard as possible. Punk’s not a dude with a reputation as a great striker, almost entirely because of those less-than-ideal high kicks, but he’s hammering on the big guy with the elbows here, adding a badly needed sense of urgency to everything. That’s the sort of thing that carries this. Mark cuts off Punk real easily whenever he gets an opening, and Punk feels increasingly worn ragged and desperate as the match goes on. When a match is allowed no larger details, it has to make use of smaller ones, and few wrestlers of the era have done as much with small details as Punk. As it goes on, he wears out Mark more and more, he goes to the knees, and eventually sends him back reeling with a high kick. Clear progression from the first meeting, when he couldn’t handle him nearly so well.
Mark Henry himself is good again. This isn’t about him so much. It’s Punk overcoming the odds in story and out of story, but Mark’s a great brick wall. He withholds enough early on and withheld enough in the first match that moments in this one mean a little more. They built him up again as a monster, so it feels like a reasonably big victory when Punk’s able to survive him and this time, when he’s able to win. I won’t call it a great Mark Henry performance, but it’s the last great Mark Henry match of this big run, and he doesn’t let anyone down in it.
In the end, Mark again throws Punk off the bulldog, only for Punk to maneuver in front of a chair in the corner. He’s able to lead Mark into an ill fated charge into it before upgrading the old Cactus Jack chair elbow to come off the top now, and that gets the win.
Look, this isn’t going to blow you away. Their first match was better than this, and that probably also won’t blow you away. But whereas that last TNA match I watched felt like a fake storefront in a museum version of a JCP or WCW match, this felt closer to the real thing. Pared down, desperate, a scientific face overcoming a big man through gritty application of technique, etc. It’s an alternate ending to the Steamboat/Vader mini feud in 1993. It’s not what it could be, but I love what it is. It’s an old school match not because it aims to be or aims to recapture any of those hallmarks, but simply because it’s simple and direct, and that’s so often something you don’t get in this environment.
I’m not so insane as to say Punk was hung out to dry or set up to fail or anything so nefarious. That’s far meaner to Mark Henry than he deserves, because he was good in this. HOWEVER, this is yet another example of how as the WWE Champion, he was repeatedly dropped into environments where he could have easily not delivered and nobody would have been surprised. It was a simple match, they didn’t get to go into your standardized motions for a Great Match. Punk wasn’t allowed any of the crutches that WWE’s golden children or special projects always are when a match simply MUST succeed, but wound up actually accomplishing something in spite of it. Time and time and time again.
Nobody is doing more with less in 2012 than CM Punk, and this is as perfect of an example as you’ll get.
HANDWERK 