Triple H vs. Sting, WWE WrestleMania 31 (3/29/2015)

Second to the Daniel Bryan stuff months before, the most personally offensive thing to come out of the WWE in 2015.

If you liked this match, stop reading the blog and unfollow me. This is not for you and I don’t know how you got here.

The entrances tell the story.

They sort of get Sting right. Some drummers, the face paint, but also the vibe is entirely wrong with a weird Kabuki sort of feeling too. Most importantly, they fuck up the most crucial bit of the Crow Sting deal in the song because everything has to be this lame WWE branded version of itself. It’s bad enough to feel intentional, like this thing that looks just enough like what the act is supposed to be that nobody can accuse them of deliberately ruining The Stever. Of course, nobody in the WWE is competent enough to do this, no matter how truly evil they are. But it does feel that way.

You can tell the incompetence from the Triple H entrance immediately following it, bringing his streak of surprisingly good WrestleMania entrances to an end with the single lamest entrance of his entire career.

There is perhaps no greater illustration of the fall from grace over the last twelve months.

The year before, Triple H had his greatest ever entrance when it was so over the top that it reached a point of total parody. “THIS IS WHAT TRIPLE H ACTUALLY BELIEVES” practically subtitled below all of it. Naturally, he understood none of that and how well it played into the Daniel Bryan feud and simply just thought it was actually super fucking cool. Twelve months later, it’s this unfathomably lame corporate tie in that he clearly thinks is good as hell, walking to the ring looking like the biggest loser in the history of the medium.

So naturally he wins.

The match itself is a big piece of shit. One for the “WOW THAT WAS BETTER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE!” crowd, up there with the Triple H vs. Kevin Nash sledgehammer ladder match three years and change earlier. Sting looks really good. Triple H looks like shit. Commentary won’t stop crowing about WWF vs. WCW and WCW being the b league, even though the story was explicitly stated by Sting as trying to be The Conscience of wrestling and stopping a tyrant who had gone too far. Naturally, the match eventually ignores that too, involving both DX and the NWO for the far-too-often bullshit legends parade, leaving Sting looking like an even bigger idiot for being the only one involved in the feud not just shouting “WCW SUCKS”. I feel genuinely terrible for Sting watching this back again, like he finally fell into a trap and we all just have to watch it. It sucks. It sucks so much and genuinely just feels rotten.

Most insultingly is that for some reason, the NWO tries to help Sting, and then also get painted as losers when he just can’t beat the almighty Triple H.

Don’t cite the Wolfpac to me, nobody in this is in black and red. If it was just Nash, maybe alright. Hogan and Hall though? Absolutely not. Get the fuck out of my face. You didn’t even watch WCW, you fucking narc.

Had they immediately also turned on Sting, it would have been good nostalgia. Old dudes doing things that make sense within the confines of what they’re referencing. They were sent to kill WCW, they now all team up to take down the face of WCW. But instead, it’s some dumb bullshit that references the material without understanding a single thing about it.

Triple H wins with the second or third Pedigree, doing the classic Triple H bit of letting someone kick out of his finish before he wins a match he has no business winning while getting the rub off of a far bigger star.

Generally, there are three major reactions to this. Joy, laughter, and anger.

There are somehow people who really liked this. I can’t imagine these people aren’t either on the payroll or didn’t aspire to be there some day. The gutless strivers and would-be grifters of the world. Your Ryan Satins and the like. The main response was to say how much fun it was to see them all together as if nobody had ever seen one of the 5-10 Legend Reunion Raws, Smackdowns, or WWE Network specials over the previous half decade. The other was to attack people who were justifiably pissed, as if we hated joy and needed to lighten up. The “let people enjoy things!” crowd, which always only seems to extend to when they specifically are enjoying something that absolutely sucks shit. I enjoy hating things, you know? Let me enjoy myself, etc. There are then people who thought this sucked and either laughed at it or got really angry. You will be stunned to learn that I was the latter. It’s great to laugh at some real shitty stuff, it’s how I felt about later years stuff like Hunter vs. Roman or the Hunter/Batista WrestleMania program in 2019. But doing it to Sting just isn’t especially funny to me, nor is this incredibly bizarre digging up of a fourteen year old dead issue just to flog the corpse once again. It’s weird and it feels bad and wrestling isn’t supposed to feel bad.

Ultimately, I respect the people laughing at this far more than anyone trying to earnestly praise it, because it’s the only response other than obscene anger that makes any sense.

A gigantic self serving piece of shit, the exact thing everyone feared when considering the idea of Sting ever being in the WWE for all those years before this. Twenty minutes of Triple H’s fanfiction brought to life, and the third pay per view of 2015 in a row with something that feels deliberately crafted to make a section of the audience totally miserable.

WCW should have won the war.

 

Adam Cole vs. Kyle O’Relly, PWG Sold Our Souls For Rock & Roll (5/23/2014)

fucking terrible

not a worthless pairing as ROH work shows, but god damn, this absolutely sucked shit.

one of the worst PWG main events of all time. horrible selling both micro and macro, shitty offense, real weird construction and composition. Cole’s title reign deserved way better after almost eighteen months than this as its blowoff. Candice should have won it and not had to share her big career defining win with a serial rapist.

wrestling sucks.

 

Kyle O’Reilly vs. Johnny Gargano, PWG Mystery Vortex II (3/28/2014)

Emotionally vacant Future NXT Main Event shit.

Arm stuff that means nothing, entire exchanges that have no value, goofy selling in weird spots, way too long, etc. Like many later period NXT main events, it’s an attempt to deliver a big great match but without seeming to actually know how to have a great match, praised by people without the taste or sense to know better. A knowledge of the ingredients but no sense for what order they go in or how much to use.

It’s always just a little more art than science, but neither of these men have much of a taste for either.

Davey Richards vs. Michael Elgin, ROH Showdown In The Sun Night Two (3/31/2012)

this was bad

yes i have been drinking

no it wasn’t because of this match but it definitely didn’t help

big david’s brain has broken so much since like 2016 or whatever that i’m not super confident in saying this is the worst of all the famed Five Boys, but it’s a really awful match and it’s worth watching alongside the Richards/Edwards matches as a testament to how horrible this era of independent wrestling could get. everyone who genuinely liked this at the time now mostly pretends that they didn’t, much like 2017 being the elite/marty scurll fans or something, like cowardly frenchman in the sixties and seventies lying to their children about complicitly supporting vichy france

this match wasn’t worth using capitalization on

it’s boring until a switch flips and then suddenly it’s awful. whatever big/little psychology you might invent as a way to pretend this match has any substance at all isn’t actually there so much as that this is a big (muscles) guy who is wrestling a smaller guy and it’s easy to confuse one for the other. big stupid epic. elbow exchanges that absolutely suck shit, incredibly weird transitions, no sort of hook or idea presented at all besides “look, moves”. i don’t hate early elgin and i don’t really hate davey in the way that people think i might and i don’t usually make such purely declarative statements about personal taste, but this match sucked and if you liked it, then you have none.

if you liked this, i assume you don’t actually know the difference between good things and bad things, and will praise anything that a.) someone tells you is good actually and/or b.) just has a lot of kickouts and moves in it.

if you’ve seen it before, don’t watch it again

do something more productive like lifting weights or cutting your hand off

this was not even interesting enough to be truly awful, the absolute worst sort of wrestling

Street Profits vs. Viking Raiders, WWE Backlash (6/14/2020)

Johnny Gargano vs. Tommaso Ciampa, WWE NXT (4/8/2020)

RIP Cinematic Wrestling.

April 4th, 2020 – April 8th, 2020.

This was one of the worst things ever put into the world by the WWE. It’s sort of like the Boneyard and Funhouse matches from the WrestleMania the previous weekend, except that NXT is run and put together by two of the least thoughtful and subtle performers in the history of wrestling, who haven’t ever been able to convey a thought in the ring without having to shout it or having it shouted for them. As such, NXT is no place for subtlety or for anything but the dumbest and most emotive wrestling. Something like those matches, which reveled in their own silliness and were something other than pro wrestling, is not a thing that can happen in NXT. It’s cinematic, but there’s a ring and a referee, it’s clearly some kind of a professional wrestling match, so fuck them, I have to treat it like one?

The first thing that stands out is that it’s simultaneously both too dark and too bright somehow, and that’s sort of the match.

WWE tries to do an empty arena match but fundamentally doesn’t understand grit or restraint so it fails on a basic level by being in this all blacked out arena except still with gigantic spotlights for some reason? because it’s more important that it looks good. For some reason, the Dunn style constant cuts stood out way more here than in any other WWE match I’ve ever watched, and I almost definitely have watched more of them than you. This is Riptide style camera work with Kevin Dunn in the production truck. For some reason, they’re trying to mimic Dark Side Of The Ring footage??? Nothing about this makes sense. They constantly make the worst possible production decisions about what to film, when to cut, when to go to break, etc., and they’ve had days (weeks???) to cobble this piece of shit together. About halfway through, they fight outside onto a semi truck and do their version of the Edge vs. Orton stuff on top of there, where nobody has the courage to actually take a big bump to make anything from that high up worth it.

After the commercial break, they’ve found their way off of the truck.

They wander back inside without ever doing anything interesting outside.

Someone was very nice and brought them a case of bottled water before the match started.

This is a match that both revels in its brutality while never showing the impact of anything that happens. Everyone involved with producing this is clearly very happy with themselves, as if the match only goes in the directions it does sometimes so that a certain camera shot can happen. Everything about this match is wrong and offensive. Instead of letting anything speak for itself, they constantly just shout exposition at each other. For a match that’s given an hour and allowed to be anything, it’s so fucking TAME too. They don’t do anything cool, even with all of the window dressing of cool shit potentially happening. John Boy takes the apron DDT on exposed wood panels, and even with ten different cameras constantly cutting between each other, they choose to show the camera angle where john boy’s head was fucking inches above the wood and clearly never hit. They have some of the least inspired trash talk in the history of wrestling. This entire thing could still — well, no, hold on. This entire thing could simply NOT be the worst thing in the history of professional wrestling if I could actually believe they hated each other, but it’s so unconvincing.

Candice LeRae then came back into the black box theater and shouted that she hated her husband now, like they’re trying to babyface the feud itself for finally making her realize the truth. Four wrestlers were involved with this match once the bell rang, and unfortunately, the match wasn’t between Drake Younger and Candice LeRae. The sole interesting part of the match on a physical sort of level is then revealed to be a total ruse, as John Boy pulls out a cup after Candice also kicks Tomato in the hog too. Johnny then hits Ciampa’s finish, which is now (has been? probably!) a worse version of the Angel’s Wings and Drake counts to three. It’s over for them, but it will never be over for any of us. I cannot stop writing about this match. I haven’t had a drink in weeks, but that changed when I opened up this fucking document again. I pity every wrestling fan who died before April 8th, 2020, because they didn’t have to see this, hear about it, or God forbid, witness anything that comes about as a result of this.

In a world with any sort of consequence, USA would sever ties with NXT immediately after this and anybody involved with it would never work in the profession again. This match is bad enough to turn everyone into Jim Cornette. I’ve enjoyed a lit of things both of these men have done, even before NXT. Gargano had at one point become a solid little spot guy in like 2013-2015. I was a proponent of Tomato Chomper back in the Embassy, I always thought there was something there. None of that matters quite so much to me anymore, I don’t think. This is their legacy, now. They had the worst wrestling match of all time, and while a bad act doesn’t wash out the good, it’s a real heavy counterweight in any argument we’re going to have years later.

I bullet pointed this match as I watched it live. I don’t make a habit out of that because I do’t often review live wrestling. I did it with WrestleMania and it didn’t bother me because I didn’t have a lot to say about those matches. I could have written a lot about the two major attempts at Cinematic Wrestling, but I didn’t. They weren’t framed as wrestling matches, nothing about them felt like wrestling matches, so I didn’t bother. This is a wholly unique piece of shit though, so I’m just going to share it with you.

This is the worst piece of media I’ve ever consumed. I will die thinking about this match, and it will not come soon enough. There are honestly, fuck it. To put it simpler —

This is not a place of honor.

No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location. It increases towards a center. The center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape and below us.

The danger is still present in your time as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body and it can kill.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

Edge vs. Randy Orton, WWE WrestleMania 36 Day Two (4/5/2020)

This was a Last Man Standing match.

Awful awful stuff. Old man WWE setpiece brawl except that all they had was the Performance Center gym. Highlight was Randy and Edge calling back to one of the only wrestlers ever to get great matches out of both of them when Orton tried to hang Edge with a Bowflex. This is the sort of thing that happens when you push two Project Guys super hard for their entire careers and get tricked into thinking they’re actually good. They went on a 400 hour long tour of the building, in which they ostensibly were trying to hurt each other but also trying very hard not to harm anything in the WWE owned facility. They fought on top of a semi truck for like ten minutes and nobody took the bump. Edge hit a Conchairto on top of the truck for the win.

One of the worst matches in the history of WrestleMania. I owe every other match on these two nights so far an apology.

I owe most matches in wrestling history an apology.

We’re only three months and five days in, but this is almost definitely the worst match of the decade. Overwhelmingly bad match that you don’t come across that frequently. I can only assume this was some sort of attempt at high art, to stimulate what having the coronavirus feels like.

Fuck me. 

rating: falling down the stairs forever, your favorite song no longer existing, the absence of anything good, a boot stomping on a human face forever, the concept of unending and universal suffering summed up inside of a professional wrestling match. the worst thing that ever happened to you, but it’s always happening on repeat while your significant other starts cheering for the New England Patriots. 

 

Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Keiji Mutoh, NJPW Wrestle Kingdom III (1/4/2009)

This was for Mutoh’s IWGP Heavyweight Championship.

An important match, if not a good one (and it definitely is not a good one). If you’re reading this, and if you’ve read this Tanahashi series so far, I think you know the history. To summarize, Hiroshi Tanahashi was a Mutoh student before he left New Japan in 2001-2. Tanahashi patterned himself early on after Mutoh and Tatsumi Fujinami, and whenever Tanahashi’s been involved with people from AJPW, people have used the Shining Wizard on Tanahashi or vice versa, as a nod to this. It’s both fanwank and canon, and their meeting here is a big deal for Hiroshi Tanahashi. 

This is also important because it marks the end of pretending that Hiroshi Tanahashi is not The Guy. They tried with Shinsuke Nakamura, he failed, and having Tanahashi in this spot and not Nakamura is a not so tacit acknowledgement of where things lie now. It’s not a random title change, it’s the first time one of the Three Musketeers has lost the IWGP Title and passed a torch in almost a decade. This is less of a failing by the Lost Generation than it reads like because Chono may as well have never had it, Mutoh was gone for most of the decade, and Hashimoto is dead, but it’s a big deal and it’s not going to Nakamura this time. It’s a very clear statement. 

The match itself is not good, as I said. In fact, it is very bad. It’s needlessly half an hour — because it is both a Tanahashi and Mutoh epic — and Mutoh is beyond washed up. So much of this match feels like a bargain on Tanahashi’s end, like he’s going through this stuff because it’s the sort of bullshit one has to wander through to appease older people at work. Mutoh is obviously not on his level on the mat in the early grappling run, but everyone has to pretend. Tanahashi’s knee work is obviously far better and nastier than Mutoh’s half speed attempts at the same thing, but everyone has to pretend. And oh boy, the fucking double knee work. I actually started this match over because I wanted an actual count on this thing, and there were fourteen different dropkicks to the knee(s) and thirteen different Dragon Screws. The majority of both came from Keiji Mutoh. There were also three different long Figure Four spots with no real difference between them. People accuse a lot of New Japan main events of aimlessly filling space, but this is the most aimless and blatant of all of them. None of the knee work mattered much at all, and the bare minimum route of “Tanahashi does Mutoh’s thing better than him” is something they pretty much run away from as Mutoh’s knee work dominates the match and Tanahashi comes back without it. That could be a conscious choice here in Tanahashi’s big stage coronation, to show that he’s TOUGH, but it doesn’t really land. It doesn’t land because Mutoh’s knee work sucks, Mutoh is visibly pathetic, and while the intention is something like, “wow, look how tough Tanahashi is! What guts!”, the result is more like, “yeah, OF COURSE Tanahashi is tougher than this. Are you kidding? What are we doing here?”.

This had all of the bloat and lack of self awareness of a modern Triple H big stadium epic, except with Keiji Mutoh genuinely trying and not actively trying to ruin the career of his opponent with such a bad match (for once). I don’t know if that’s better or worse. It’s less interesting. It’s a little more endearing. I hate both of them a whole lot regardless, and I wish this match was held up among the worst ever just like those are. It deserves it just as much. 

Tanahashi wins the title back with a series of High Fly Flows, which is far more than this deserved. This is two or three times as long as it should be, and achieves about the opposite of everything it sets out to. The tag on this is usually that it’s some necessary evil we had to get through, but fuck that. Tanahashi isn’t passed a torch here so much as he’s allowed to hold up the one he’s already had for the last year and change, and that isn’t worth celebrating or bargaining with. It’s always nice when a promotion stops lying and embraces the reality they’re presented with, but this is one of the worst ever instances of a promotion going through that cycle, because it doesn’t even allow the visceral thrill of some sort of symbolic act to confirm this. It’s a plodding and predictable mess that offers nothing exciting for most of it, and then turns it on for a good final sixty to ninety seconds. That’s all that it has to offer and it took half an hour to get there for some reason. Tanahashi finally expelling this old shit and his ilk from the main event scene is something to celebrate, but not so much when it comes at the end of the worst Wrestle Kingdom main event of all time. 

One of the bigger pieces of shit of the last fifteen years. Absolutely loathsome match.

Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE Royal Rumble 2004 (1/25/2004)

This was a Last Man Standing Match for Triple H’s World Heavyweight Title.

True to form, they follow a more simplistic and pared down match with some real bullshit. They go right into punching and fill a few minutes of space with Shawn working the knee before going outside and abandoning that pretty immediately. Shawn misses a dive and goes through the table. He recovers enough to fiddle with something near his head before the camera quickly cuts away, and by the time it comes back, he’s bleeding. Must have slipped out of his hands and across his forehead, very unfortunate accident. This then becomes one of the worst match types in wrestling at this time, The Passion of the Shawn. He bleeds buckets and keeps falling down and over himself and barely making his comebacks, before collapsing again. It all feels very fake because the only way he ever knows how to sell anything is that he’s about on death’s door. While it’s a shame that the door never opens, it gets harder and harder to believe. It doesn’t relate to the match entirely either, but there’s always something so annoying about the crutches that these two are allowed to have that nobody ever else seems to really get at the time.

Hunter’s work on the cut is fine, but pretty limited. Triple H also gets busted open, but the camera at least covers for his bladejob much better than they did for Michaels. He comes back quicker than Shawn did after bleeding, which can maybe be covered up by saying Shawn was already suffering from blood loss, but it’s definitely another one of those real borderline little touches where the only point seems to be getting over that Triple H is the toughest and strongest, despite being scripted as the top bad guy. They both bleed a lot and lie around in between casually sort of trading big offense. Last Man Standing is the worst (well, second worst…third worst?) stipulation for these two to have. They’re two guys who are guilty of just lying still for long periods of time and calling it selling, and no stipulatiion encourages that sort of behavior like this does. Last Man Standing is one of the better WWE stipulations, but what it really does is hold a magnifying glass up to who wrestlers really are, and these are two bad, lazy, and unimaginative wrestlers.

I’ve had relative praise for their two more pared down efforts, but those weren’t especially interesting matches so much as they were well done formula matches. This match allows the potential for so much more, and they just used it to do a very normal match, with a little more blood and much more lying around. In addition to being wasteful and sort of disdainfully normal, it feels strangely behind the times too. You can look at something like the inaugural Last Man Standing match in the company (Mankind vs. The Rock) almost five years prior, or even Triple H’s own Last Man Standing Match with Chris Jericho in the past, and they did infinitely more with it. Those were still fairly restrained matches, but they were matches with focus and far more interesting offensive ideas. Those were also match ups that have happened a lot, and those LMS matches felt like departures from what they were usually doing. This was another Hunter vs. Shawn match, just without pinfalls, and using buckets of blood as a prop to try and do the narrative work that they’re too lazy and intellectually bankrupt to accomplish themselves.

With no fan excitement for the feud but it needing to happen again, because fuck you, they needed to drum something up this time. They slapped a Last Man Standing label on their usual bullshit and like the stipulations in the Three Stages of Hell match, they just treated it with contempt and worked around it rather than within it. It’s an incredibly odd trend for two guys who have had more influence on their booking than all but a few in wrestling history without actually having the pencil in their hands.

**

Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE Armageddon 2002 (12/15/2002)

This was for Michaels’ World Heavyweight Title. It was also (needlessly) a THREE STAGES OF HELL match, with a Street Fight, a Steel Cage match, and lastly, a Ladder Match. Definitely two guys who should be having a ladder match.

Personally, this is a very important match, because it’s the first time I can remember watching a big PPV main event (no longer buying every PPV home video release, love u KaZaA) and thinking that it just kind of sucked. I wasn’t watching TNA downloads just yet, I didn’t even see a handful of 2002 Low Ki matches from ROH for a few more months either, but I’m not sure if any of that would have been possible if not for how bad this all was. And truly, just a remarkable dud, an absolutely awful match. Very possibly the worst of the series, and as deserving as anything else for voting as the worst match of 2002. The build up of the match is about if Shawn is The Showstopper again, or if he’s just regular Shawn Michaels. I’m not really sure what the point is, given that regular Shawn Michaels beat Triple H twice in a row. It about amounts to him wearing some old Shawn tights instead of the bad new gear or street clothes, and that’s about it. He moves around slower so I guess he’s not The Showstopper anymore, but outside of one spot near the end, commentary and the match treats it like he’s still that guy. Triple H will not allow any win of his to be impugned by anything, even not just the fact that time is linear, so there really is no difference. Nothing’s more fitting for these two and their feud together than the practice of having the production aspects do all the work to set them up, and then royally shitting the bed once the bell rings, because they’re just not capable of doing anything more than the most glaringly obvious and boring work together, then doing one thing in like 40 minutes and trying to pretend they hit on something deeply emotional and real.

Triple H has his right quad taped up and limps around early on despite the hot start, so we’re in for one. Nothing about it is really mentioned on commentary as having anything to do with recent storyline events, so it’s just Triple H being a tough guy and more put upon than a babyface opponent, because nothing’s going to stop him from being the focal point of the company, not even concepts like basic storytelling. There was an old post on some forum (DVDVR or PWO most definitely) about how Triple H booked himself as the secret babyface of the WWE for years, as he was always set upon in some way, and everyone sort of just said he was the actual best wrestler like they never have before or since for a heel. This match and this fall especially makes a great case for it, as “guy fighting his former mentor who he’s never beaten before” is inherently a babyface position, and Ric Flair is ejected immediately, so it’s always fair. Everything’s still very very clunky, especially so when they try just about anything more complex than punches, kicks, or slams. Shawn working on the back is a good receipt, and is quickly hurt by Jerry Lawler doing a bang-up job and questioning why he’s not working the taped up leg. Hunter is the one to work on Shawn’s leg instead. Not bad work on the leg, as if nothing else, Triple H at least watched a little bit of Ric Flair tape when he was preparing to pretend like he idolized him. They take a break to do a walk up the aisle brawl ending in a barbed wire 2×4 on fire spot that looks like shit, and go back to wrap the fall up.

This is very silly, and I want you to look at it for as long as you can.

Shawn’s selling is actually pretty good here. With that out of the way, they go back to the Secret Babyface stuff, as Shawn needs a low blow against Triple H and Hunter doesn’t really do anhything illegal to have earned it. He makes his comeback, but Triple H responds to the kip up with a chop block and hits the Pedigree to win. Shawn cheated first, but Noble Babyface Triple H stuck with his plan of attack and earned the clean win to go 1-0. The next to falls then have him revert back to being a heel again, for reasons that escape me.

The cage comes down. Real toothless cage match. Triple H was apparently busted open by the 2×4 shot as the wire somehow went through the hand covering his face, and they bust Shawn open with the cage and then move through it real quickly. Ric Flair comes back to ringside and that’s just allowed, I guess? Given that the first fall was a stipulation without disqualifications, it just raises the question of why he left to begin with. He gets in the cage and despite having a solid 20 years on him or something, he’s outbumping Hunter here. Shawn hits a real shaky splash off the top to put Hunter through a table to force it to 1-1 and giving us a ladder match. Entirely useless cage match as they only used the cage until Shawn bled, and then it not only failed to keep interference out, but actually drew interference in.

The ladder match is then also bad. Boiler plate ladder spots and then a super hamfisted “SHAWN ISN’T THE SAME ANYMORE” spot where he misses the big WrestleMania X splash off the ladder, but it looks like absolute shit because he just sort of falls down. There’s a Pedigree, then a Sweet Chin Music, and Triple H clumsily pushes Shawn off the ladder through the customary WWE Stacked Tables before very slowly climbing up and regaining the title.

Absolute dogshit.

Fittingly bad match, as the Street Fight was easily the best part. Had they had to confidence to just run that one fall match, this wouldn’t have been GREAT, but it would have been boring and just kind of there. They then ran two gimmick matches that they seemed to run through with a real disdain for the actual gimmicks they were employing to trick people into thinking this might not absolutely suck. Treiple H spent the first half the match as a put upon babyface doing his best and using his brains while Shawn cheated, before they suddenly shifted back to working within their actual slotted roles. As for the thing they were actually pushing on commentary, the story of Shawn trying to turn back the clock and not being able to is interesting and something that I could have really gotten into, had it amounted to more than the one spot at the end. That idea led into the great Chris Jericho feud, and then was eventually abandoned like all interesting ideas in the WWE are.

A boring but functional first half combined with a truly abhorrent second half makes this a historic turd. It’s a real testament to the cult of personality around this god damned hack that the blame for this is largely put on Triple H. It’s not undeserved on his end, as he can barely move at this point, but it takes two to shit the bed here. Triple H winds up winning the feud because he’s “better”, but does it in such a dreadfully terrible match that they won’t be able to resist running the feud back in a year and giving it another go.

*3/4