I said once that there were very few full shows that I would ever even consider writing about in full, and this is one of them. Possibly the one of them.
It isn’t that it’s such an overwhelmingly great show that I couldn’t not do it all at once. It’s moreso that the matches and narratives on this show all feel so connected to each other and to something bigger that it would feel incorrect on some level not to just write about the entire show. Especially if I was already going to write about most of it anyways, just split up into more traditional match reviews. It’s too good, too important, and too interesting of a show not to cover as one complete thing.
MATCH #0: THE USOS VS. THE REAL AMERICANS VS. RYBAXEL VS. LOS MATADORES
This was an elimination match for the Usos’ WWE Tag Team Titles.
It’s fine pre-show work! Most of the quality in this match comes from The Usos and Cesaro, if we’re being wholly honest, but that’s a great tag team and one of the best wrestlers in the world. The fourth most important person in this is El Torito, and he manages at least one spectacular dive here to almost steal the show in a pre-show match. Cesaro and Swagger run through the two jobber teams before getting to the match that should have simply been here all along, and it’s wonderful. Cesaro against The Usos is wonderful, and they’re a fun enough babyface team to get the most out of Jack Swagger for the limited amount of time that this match asks him to do much of anything. A miscommunication between Cesaro and Swagger gives the Usos the win.
Nothing blowaway here, but a brisk, easy, and fun match. Usually not the case with WrestleMania pre-show work, and it’s almost entirely due to a tag team that deserves more than the pre-show and a wrestler who will finally (briefly) get his due later on.
three boy
Following the match, tensions finally come to a head, and Cesaro does the thing people have been begging for en masse for the last month since his breakout February, and dissolves the team. Cesaro does so with a crowd pleasing many rotation Giant Swing, which is about all that Jack Swagger, this act, and this unbelievably wasteful team ever really deserved.
WWE WRESTLEMANIA XXX
APRIL 6TH, 2014
SUPERDOME
NEW ORLEANS, LOUSIANA
The show begins with one of the more fun pieces of WWE nostalgia bullshit ever. Usually, it’s the same three groups or same twenty people we always see, but with three of the WWE’s former Aces in the ring and three of the four or five top guys in company history, it’s just really cool. Also Hulk Hogan fucks up and says “Silverdome” instead of Superdome and that’s like a bit for a thousand years.
More than just being cool, it’s also done in a very cool way, as Stone Cold interrupts Hogan and clowns him, leading to a real fun little bit of tension and also Stone Cold getting a “WHAT” for simply listing the first ten WrestleManias off when describing Hogan’s run. The Rock then comes out to ease the tension, and all three do a spectacular job redirecting it to the current generation, likening Hogan to Cena and Austin to Daniel Bryan, before all three share some beers.
Genuinely cool!
The exact correct use of nostalgia.
Before the show actually starts, the best WWE hype video of the last decade airs –
DANIEL BRYAN VS. TRIPLE H
It’s the best build up and storyline in WWE history.
I am done coaching it in “perhaps” and “maybe” and even “of its time”. It’s better than Austin and McMahon in 1998-1999, and that’s not the fault of either Austin or McMahon. The fact that people had to force this and the rest of this show into being adds a sense of stakes and real struggle to it that Austin and McMahon simply can’t entirely match up with, because Austin was just so obviously the man. All of the little touches between SummerSlam and Elimination Chamber are basically perfect. The Shawn Michaels stuff, the title ceremony, the Wyatts/Bryan feud with the only reasoning being “the devil made me do it”, etc.
Once the match itself got made, just about every segment was a classic. If I was a maniac enough to rank the best segments of the year, I’m pretty sure all of them would come from this program. Hunter’s refusal was perfect, the veneer just barely still on. The invasion of the fans under an OCCUPY RAW banner to force the match, then following up with the fake police handcuffing beatdown, as seen in the video above. The comeback weeks later, Hunter’s shitheel video of all the other fan favorites he’s buried, even these promos on early WWE Network Raw post shows that were just pure shouting about the rights of workers against The Authority. It’s all perfect.
The presentation of this as well is stunning. Daniel Bryan makes a spirited but very normal entrance, eschewing any of the WrestleMania pomp and circumstance usually afforded to people as over as he is. In contrast, Triple H makes this all-time over the top entrance presented as like the version of himself he sees inside his own insane and diseased brain. This gold coated warrior god-king surrounded by his NXT golden girl valkyries. It’s truly truly deranged, and absolutely perfect.
The match itself is one of the best in WrestleMania and company history.
In this match, Daniel Bryan is nearly perfect.
The arm work isn’t entirely airtight, that’s really it. Otherwise, an incredible performance. The fire at the start, the wry sort of way he dominates Hunter initially, even something like changing up the knee off the apron into a tornado DDT off the apron. Read it as a bigger move for a bigger show, or changing up because Triple H is an obsessive tape watcher, it works just as well either way. Say the same for Bryan breaking out a repeated Tope Suicida spot for the first time in forever, so it feels like a huge deal. The selling itself is terrific. Only using the one arm, having problems with the Yes Lock and other holds, classic stuff. Beyond the mechanical, it’s an all time great WWE babyface performance. He’s sympathetic enough to work as a classical underdog babyface, but then fiery enough and whipping enough ass to work as a classical WWE top level babyface in the same match.
The best thing Bryan does here might not even be anything he overtly does from bell to bell. As you may have read on this blog, Bryan is the greatest wrestler of all time, and as much of that is about individual performance as it is about bringing the best out of other wrestlers. Sometimes it means him pushing someone to something or providing an example for someone like him. Other times, it’s a more nebulous thing, with the reputation that Daniel Bryan has forcing someone to bring their best to the table for fear of being to blame if a a match isn’t exceptional.
This match is the ultimate statement of that, because there has never ever been a better version of Triple H than the one we saw here, the King of Kings Road. He’s had matches as good as this, a few even better, but they’ve all had some shortcut attached to them, some gimmick to help him out. This is a boiler plate professional wrestling match, and he has never looked better in one or performed more intelligently in any single wrestling match.
Bryan comes in with his left arm and shoulder bandaged up from the months going into this of people targeting it, starting way back in December 2013. Bryan’s smart enough to keep Hunter away time and time again. There’s a great undercurrent to this that Hunter isn’t quite the technical wrestler he imagines himself to be, and it’s not until he can get into some Attitude Era bullshit with an announce table does his arm work actually pay any sort of dividend. That’s what works so well about this match for Hunter, is that Bryan seems to get the essence of the Triple H character its core and works to it. It’s not some genius god-king like Hunter thinks, but it’s this power wrestler who knows JUST enough to be dangerous and who has absolutely no moral limits. He can’t fight Bryan on the ground, not really and no matter how smart or well schooled he is, but when he can get a Divorce Court on the announce table, he can finally do something. Much like the rest of the feud, they’re also smart enough to weaponize Triple H’s past, as best expressed with his use of the repeated Crossface holds. It’s not a thing that can ever really be said, for totally fair and obvious reasons, but Triple H now using the Crossface is SUCH a god damned thing, and him doing it to Bryan is perfect. This symbol of another thing he snuffed out once upon a time, but also another example of Triple H not totally getting everything he’s doing. He’s smart enough to go to the hurt arm, he’s seen enough to know the right things to do, but he never totally gets how to make the most out of an arm based attack and has no real idea how to win with it.
Hunter goes back to his power game when it gets too hard, and it dooms him. Bryan’s tough enough to kick out of the Pedigree, but that’s all Hunter has. He gets mean and nasty, but at the other end of that is simply going for it again. Bryan escapes, outmaneuvers him, and wins clean as a fucking sheet off of the running knee.
A genuine epic level struggle, but one that manages that without going anywhere close to too far, and one that achieves that status while always being real and grounded. A masterpiece of a match that in retrospect, only Daniel Bryan could ever have gotten off of the ground, Not simply because he brought the best out of Triple H, but because only he could create a scenario wild enough for a match like this to happen, but also for a match like this to be able to be this restrained in the first place. The all time expression of the unstated and often unintentional politics of being the best wrestler of all time.
Bryan gets to the main event after all, and Triple H finally gets one of these “I did the right thing!” moments that he’s actually allowed to talk about, which you know he’s been mad about for the last seven years.
****
Following the match, Triple H and his wife attack Bryan’s arm with a chair, to try and put the main event participation of Our Hero in doubt, despite not being able to actually stop him themselves. The working class hero did the work and got there fairly, only to be kneecapped anyways yet again because The Game has been rigged from the start. So it goes.
THE SHIELD VS. KANE & THE NEW AGE OUTLAWS
It’s two minutes.
It’s two minutes and it’s PERFECT.
The Shield completely runs through three old hacks. It’s exciting and incredibly fun and wholly dominant. They get maybe a punch or two in, but thankfully, this match totally abandons the pretense. These guys are old, they can’t hang, and The Shield completely runs through them. Roman spears all three, Dean and Seth dive on them repeatedly, and the match ends with the first ever Double Triple Powerbomb. Or the Triple-Double. It’s a waste of The Shield, they could have done more on this show, but at the same time, it’s such a wonderful show of force.
At the end, JBL delivers one of his better serious calls ever with, “there goes the Attitude Era”.
It’s obviously bullshit seven years later, but in the moment, following all the fun and positive things that happened so far, it really did feel that way at the time.
THE ANDRE THE GIANT MEMORIAL BATTLE ROYAL
The best WWE battle royal in a long time, close to a decade. There were several surprisingly good ones in the mid 2000s, and they succeeded for the same reason that this did, and it’s the overwhelming pool of talent in the ring and some creative composition. The dead weight gets out of the ring fast and for the most part, it’s all fun and creative. You get down to the meat of the thing, and it’s all great wrestlers. The Big Show, Sheamus, Del Rio, Mysterio, Ziggler, Cesaro, Goldust, and the like. Cool eliminations, fast pace, really gets rid of every issue with boring and routine WWE battle royals.
Somehow Cesaro makes it to the end against obvious winner The Big Show.
Except that Cesaro just explodes on him? He hits a flurry of uppercuts on the big fella, AND THEN SLAMS HIM OVER THE TOP AND OUT HOLY SHIT WHAT?
It’s another seemingly impossible feat on this show. A battle royal win that genuinely feels like a huge deal and a starmaker. Beyond that, a battle royal with real substance and that’s full of cool stuff, instead of just being the means to an end. Easily the best of all of these Andre battle royals, as the only one they took entirely seriously, and the best WWE battle royal in close to a decade in either direction.
***
Between the big turn earlier in the show and a win as powerful and definitive at that, it seems almost impossible to deny Cesaro going forward.
Before the next contest, WWE manages to accidentally touch on something real in the media world at the time when it’s happening. Another total stunner, I know. Bray Wyatt comes out to his swamp voodoo song in New Orleans with a live performance from the band in these elaborate and creepy little costumes, at the exact time that the first season of True Detective (the good one) was a big and major deal with a real similar overall vibe. We’re in Carcosa now. It’s the peak of Bray Wyatt’s career, this incredibly cool entrance while the entire act still feels like a huge huge deal.
JOHN CENA VS. BRAY WYATT
I’m not going to waste whatever credibility I may or may not have selling you on the idea that this is great.
It isn’t.
What it is though is a whole lot of fun.
The story itself is quite silly. Bray wants Cena to kill him and reveal that he’s a monster as part of some plan to show the world that Cena can be mean and violent too and that their hero is no better than him. It’s especially weird because like…yeah, no shit? If you have a working memory, you remember all these big violent things Cena’s done to end feuds. The part of it that does work though is Bray trying to bait Cena into a disqualification so he has a huge WrestleMania win, but as always, the story told bell to bell is rarely the same as the one told on commentary when it comes to these WWE concept matches.
If you can get past that though, this is a lot of fun. It’s Cena against a Monster of the Week, but Bray’s physical and over enough for it to be a fun application of formula. Cena breaks out a lot of the bigger stuff for a WrestleMania match, even if he’s in the middle of the card for the first time in a while. Wyatt matches him with a few bigger moves and more spectacular moments than usual. It’d be ideal, if not for the end, when that bullshit comes back around. Bray gives Cena a chair for some reason, like he’s going to hit him with it, but without being nearly annoying or mean enough to warrant that. Cena hits the Family outside with it instead, and counters Sister Abby into the FU to win. I’m good with the bullshit on some Buy The Ticket shit, especially with a match this fun otherwise, but yeah, real weird and a depressing harbinger of what’s to come, both for the feud and for the entire Wyatt character, who will not be covered very often on this site from now on.
Pure WWE bullshit, but wrapped up in a surprisingly fun match bell to bell.
an extremely borderline three boy
THE UNDERTAKER VS. BROCK LESNAR
We’re not here to talk about the match. You know that.
This one’s all about the finish, and saying that, this is probably better than its reputation but also nowhere near good enough to eclipse the moment itself. The entire deal is about Undertaker being so assured in his victory after the last five years he’s survived, but no longer really doing anything to guarantee that. The entire match he feels half a speed off, and leans entirely on what worked on the past. He tries the Hell’s Gate from his back that’s won a few in the past, but it totally fails. He never makes a real honest comeback until the last few minutes, and when he needs to do more, all he can break out is fucking Old School or a Kimura. He wrestles like someone assured that something will eventually break in his favor, because for 21 shows and 24 years, it has.
Except it doesn’t.
Brock just never allows him that break, and on the third F5, it finally happens.
“The Streak…is over.”
I’m not going to eulogize the fucking Streak like it’s a person or something real, but it is a major moment.
Around the time this happened, I read a wonderful and insane piece of fanwank, the sort of theory that redefines fanwank and sticks with you. It stated that Heyman saw Undertaker up close the previous year at Wrestlemania in the Taker/Punk match and saw what was there, that The Undertaker largely won because Punk hurt himself on the big table spot and barely defeated someone like two-thirds his size. Heyman also had a history of paying off The Shield to help his clients, and conveniently, they targeted The Undertaker and hurt him. Brock Lesnar’s next match is then against CM Punk, where he finds himself just about equal and more physically dominant, before nuking another big guy, The Big Show, earlier in 2014 in his next match. Brock fails to make any mistakes here, learning something from almost losing to Punk , and specifically, he fails to make the mistakes others have made against Undertaker in the last few years, despite Taker having been shot since the dive in 2009. It all feels like a plan finally coming to fruition.
Or it’s all bullshit that just happens to conveniently fit together. It’s sort of the beauty of fanwank. Do it with enough art and skill and hey, why not? It’s the WWE, you never expect anything out of them, but it makes sense, so…fuck it. Why not?
Really though, it’s one of the most significant things to happen in the WWE and pro wrestling all decade. A pro wrestling sort of 9/11 or JFK assassination, not in terms of actual importance (this is all nonsense fake fighting, none of it is actually important, we are all incredibly dumb for caring about it at all), but in the sense that most people I talk to seem to remember exact circumstances of their viewing experience or where they were or what they were doing when they found out. It’s not a unique thing, people tend to have those sorts of memories for the big things, but this is such a big thing that it seems almost a universal experience.
For me, I was in my sophomore year dorm room, leaning back in my shitty yet weirdly comfortable standard issue chair after digesting a Dominos pan pizza and bread bites, either drinking an Oberon or leftover Guinness from the holiday a few weeks prior. Headphones in to be nice to that fucking freak Kevin, the roommate who lived on Subway tuna melts and Pepsi Max, talking in a group chat. I was stunned. Genuinely stunned. It’s a result beyond even Oracle capabilities, I’m not sure that I closed my mouth for a whole minute. I’m not sure anyone in the chat wrote anything for a minute or two, which I’m not sure I’ve ever experiences in years of watching live pay per views in group chats.
I’ve never really experienced a feeling like it when watching wrestling otherwise, and the best thing I can say about it is that it’s the entire reason you manufacture streaks to begin with.
The only thing wrong here is that The Undertaker ever wrestled another match after this.
A stunning display of an entire company’s inability to look at a calendar.
THE VICKIE GUERRERO INVITATIONAL
I’ll give this as much respect as the company did. I think that’s fair. It wasn’t especially good, the only match on the show that’s obvious filler and that you could cut and lose absolutely nothing. That being said, after a thing like what came before it, you needed a little bit of a break. Feel sorry for all the women who got thrown to the wolves like this, but it was also easily the weakest match and weakest build on the entire show, so it’s not like it was the wrong choice of matches to sacrifice either.
RANDY ORTON VS. BATISTA VS. DANIEL BRYAN
This was for Orton’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.
Even if it’s not better than Bryan’s first match on the show, Hunter once again simply HAVING to outshine his proteges, it’s still a much better match than most people remember.
Obviously, this should have simply been Orton against Bryan. It’s been the central feud of the WWE over the last six plus months, really going back to their series in June and brief team against The Shield before that. It’s not the end of the world though. Batista is an addition that adds to the match in his own way, both as this obvious corporate avatar in contrast to Daniel Bryan, but also as the other representation of the last decade plus of WWE plans that Bryan’s upending.
The match itself is really great. A lot of complaints I’ve read and heard are about sections where Bryan is gone, like it’s WrestleMania XX or something and there’s a long stretch without him, but that genuinely is not the case here. The story is moreso that they try and do that, but never really can. It’s that all the bullshit in the world finally just can’t succeed anymore. The arm doesn’t stop him from getting there. The combined efforts of the two chosen ones aren’t enough, because he’s just better than them. Failing that, Triple H and Stephanie come to stop his win once, and they wave crooked referee Scott Armstrong back out after his absence for months after the plot in the fall of 2013. Bryan’s finally both done playing the game the right way, and also in a spot where he no longer has to, and kicks him in the head. A dive takes out The Authority, and when Hunter goes for his trusty sledgehammer, Bryan easily takes that and knocks him out with it too.
Subtlety may not or may not be for cowards, but there is a time and a place for it, and it sure isn’t now.
Big Dave and Randy manage their big spot to take Bryan out, but it simply doesn’t work. He refuses the stretcher and instead of some big sequence like I think people have turned it into in their heads, Randy simply brings him back into the ring. The big final ran is tremendous. Batista hits his marks as well as he ever had to. Randy’s tremendous. Bryan simply won’t ever go away. They tease a few different results as well as possible, making the most out of a real audience fear that they still won’t ACTUALLY do the right thing, before then actually delivering. Bryan wipes Big Dave out with the knee, and then goes into the Yes Lock. Good things can happen sometimes. Batista taps out, and it’s all finally over, and a year of faith is rewarded.
Daniel Bryan is the WWE World Heavyweight Champion.
It’s not the greatest match ever. It’s a WWE three way, and it has many of the problems of the WWE three way in terms of feeling somewhat aimless at times and three ways being less satisfying in major moments like this. However, they still packed so much into this in terms of the story elements, and with a performance as great and evocative as Bryan’s was, so much of those problems simply do not matter, outside of that I wish he simply just got Orton one on one at the end of all this. It’s a fortunate thing that this was a great match, another fortunate success for Daniel Bryan, but up to a certain point, this was entirely about the result and the match more than came through on that result.
***1/4
There are very few times in decades of watching wrestling that have felt as good as this.
Many are tainted, and the only one remotely on the same level is Money in the Bank 2011. It’s apples and oranges, to some extent. That was a short three week build, and this was something close to a year in the making. The qualities of the former allowed it to feel like a genuine revolution, a combination of a coup d’etat and a college football rivalry game. In contrast, this was the payoff to such a long and arduous struggle. They’re different situations and different feelings. The live element of MITB also can’t ever be separated. They also feel very connected in my head, one cannot exist without the other. Or rather, this cannot exist without that opening the door. All the same, this is the high point of that movement and feeling. It’s the high water mark of a wave of unrest that Punk began, and that Punk eventually sealed with his January 2014 walk out.
I reviewed this entire show at once not just because it’s such a well put together show, or because I like it so much, but because of what it felt like at the time and what it feels like now. It’s such a hopeful wrestling show, the likes of which you rarely get from the WWE, let alone from other pro wrestling. Virtually everything on this show is about the future, and closing the book on the past for good, save for Cena/Wyatt, which exists both as an outlier and as this reaffirmation of Cena as this new generation’s living legend. A new era’s been inching closer for a few years now, and this is the show where it feels like it’s finally upon us.
To put it in another way, if the WWE is a long running television show, this entire event feels like a series finale.
Perhaps not a willing one, but definitely a show with that sort of a tone to it. It’s not exactly “Made in America” or “Felina” or “Family Meeting” or the last episode of The Wire, or any of these finales that feel like they know they’re finales. But like a television show that knows it might be the end, and which seeks to wrap up every loose end just in case.
The Bryan thing obviously works to that.
When The Authority formed after SummerSlam, there was kind of a wink and nod way they did it where it felt like the WWE admitting they didn’t want smaller workhorse types to actually be on top, with the entire “B+” and “good little wrestler” lines echoing so much, and justifying a lot of past actions with guys like Punk, Bret, Benoit, Eddie, Jericho, etc. They weren’t just heels, they were this entire system that a lot of fans hated, put on screen, the implicit made explicit. It was made even more real when Punk had enough and quit, so Bryan wasn’t just fighting some good heels with an uncomfortable truth to them, but he was fighting the WWE. This entire thing that didn’t want people like him to succeed, and actively wanted them to either die, give up, or leave. He was fighting the idea of the WWE, the kind of place that’s always told people what they want instead of really listening and valued a certain body type and image in the face of everything else, and it put Bryan over the top as a People’s Champion. So when Bryan wins here, it genuinely feels like he’s broken that. Like WWE finally stopped fighting it and accepted that Daniel Bryan is their top babyface and this needs to ride out, like Bret Hart in the mid 90s. You knew he would never get the full promotional machine, but it seemed like this would at least play out until Reigns and Rollins and Ambrose and etc. were ready, and Bryan would be that guy, in the moment and euphoric feeling that came out of this show.
On top of that, Bryan did it by going through Evolution. Triple H has long been WWE’s most enduring schemer and this was the night that all his schemes over the last ten to fifteen years completely failed in front of the world. Triple H finally gave the kind of performance that seemed to match how he’d always seen himself in his own mind, and it absolutely did not matter. His hubris got the best of him and his world collapsed and his philosophy was defeated on the biggest possible stage. He couldn’t beat Bryan and his greatest creations failed to do the same, so he had nothing but the job title. Triple H’s days on camera being done seemed like they were coming to an end in a 100% believable way befitting of that character at the end of the show. He’s COO now because he married well and because he has the mind for it, but in a Vic Mackey-ish way, where it’s all he has left and he hates it. He’s been so exposed that that’s all there is, and it’s the exact ending he deserves, an embarrassing striver exposed and beaten in front of the world, and resigned to something he hates doing.
Beyond that, The Streak ended. WWE’s longest running story came to a close and got blown off, and The Undertaker finally got beaten. Based on everything else, he should be gone. Done and retired. The Attitude Era was seemingly laid to rest by the new hot group. Cesaro became a star in an amazing moment. John Cena is the outlier, but he works with a hot new heel, leaves him something, and establishes himself as the living legend to a new generation in the way The Undertaker was ten years earlier.
I’ve never seen a WWE show that wraps up this many loose ends.
So naturally, because they put on this “episode” – one of the most satisfying episodes in the entire genre’s history – the show is renewed. Like any good show, they allowed themselves stories to continue and expand on. The Shield are now firmly babyfaces, but now are bound to run afoul of top heels now, with all new match ups there. Bryan as champion and the top babyface in the company, obviously. Cesaro’s babyface turn. Bray’s continued rise as a top level heel, and Cena’s “THE FUTURE GOES THROUGH ME” speech from a month ago as this challenge to all the young guys in the company, many of whom still have yet to test that. And of course, that clear return match between our two top heroes, with a new God level monster Brock Lesnar waiting in the wings.
There’s all this stuff to continue on with in as satisfying a manner as the last twelve months have shown them capable of proceeding. Except, they didn’t. But we can get to that later, say after a certain event on a certain Raw after a certain early June pay-per-view where WWE intentionally ruins their hottest act at a time when with a certain injury to a certain top guy, and the way they’d ruined a certain battle royal winner seemingly 100% on purpose, they needed them the most.
On this night though, everything works and leaves me and you and all good wrestling fans unable to remove the smiles from our faces. The future, if it exists, is the brightest it’s looked after a WrestleMania in 16 years, if not ever.
The WWE has reached something like a peak again near the end and everything that could be blown off has been blown off. A rocky ride, but one hell of a final season.
Everything after this is non-canon.
HANDWERK 