Dean Ambrose vs. The Miz, WWE Extreme Rules (6/4/2017)

This was for Deano’s WWE Intercontinental Title, with the stipulation that if he got disqualified, he would forfeit the title to The Miz.

It’s a lovely little piece of nonsense on a show literally named after the exact sort of lawlessness that a stipulation like this seeks to counterbalance. One might complain about a match like this being on a show like EXTREME RULES, but one might then the target audience for a ruse like this, given that such a thing is exactly the point.

That’s kind of the thing with this match, and I love that.

Does Dean Ambrose vs. The Miz deliver a fine professional wrestling contest?

Sure. They’re fine wrestlers, and have another good match together, but that’s not entirely the point, and this is why this match in particular is easily the best of what feels like the few dozen that they had together in 2017.

It’s another one of those great total packages that occasionally breaks loose out of the WWE, rarer even than just the company getting out of the way and let the best wrestlers in the world cook. It’s something more impressive than that, the sort of thing I feel like I praise TNA/Impact for a lot this decade on the occasions in which I do praise them, helping a decent pairing of two decent wrestlers get over the top as a result of everything outside the purely mechanical. It’s the elevation of good to borderline great wrestling into something more than that through a nice and easy story not only with a coward and a dirtbag but the DQ rule constantly being bandied about in a few different fun ways, great construction, and above all, some real high level nonsense and cheating at the end with manager interference, the tease of a nonsense DQ title switch, only for Miz to steal the title in a wholly different sort of way than one might have expected going in.

Miz gets the title back on the absolute biggest bunch of bullshit he possibly could, and that is absolutely for the best.

People complain about things like this, finishes like this, and matches based around bullshit, but I think sometimes, bullshit gets a bad rap. Bullshit in professional wrestling is never bad, in and of itself.

Wrestling, fundamentally, is bullshit.

The problem is that, so often, you get incredibly lazy or poorly executed bullshit. The same tropes done over and over so they lose all value or impact. Those same tropes either plotted out by people who either never learned how to do them correctly or who no longer care/have forgotten entirely or carried out by people who can’t get the most out of them, usually both at the same time. Bullshit that isn’t good or that doesn’t make any god damned sense.

When executed right though — when done in interesting or less common ways, when you get a lot of different moving pieces and layers to the bullshit, when executed by a genuinely lithesome villain and purpetrated against someone genuinely and innately likeable — it is a beautiful thing, as seen with Eddie against JBL, a million different Raven matches, Jimmy Rave’s entire peak, things of that nature. When wielded responsibly and with the right people in the right positions when executing things like this, there is absolutely a time and a place for some good old fashioned bullshit.

This match is exactly such a time and a place, and I really loved it.

***

John Cena vs. AJ Styles vs. Dean Ambrose vs. Bray Wyatt vs. The Miz vs. Baron Corbin, WWE Elimination Chamber (2/12/2017)

This was for Cena’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.

First off, this is the official debut of what I’ve come to know as the Coward Elimination Chamber.

With the return of the Chamber comes higher ceilings and padding on the steel floors of the thing. That’s not to say those landings probably don’t still really hurt and that they don’t pack a bigger punch than landings inside the ring, It’s one of the great symbols ever of the WWE’s attitude in the 2010s towards matches like this, which is sanitizing everything to a disgusting degree, making everything safer and gaudier, while still just blatantly lying about what it is. The contrast is a maddening one, being told about how dangerous and brutal something is while clearly seeing that it’s safer than ever, and it’s one that arguably reaches its apex with the Elimination Chamber redesign.

In spite of that though, this is a really great match.

Partly, that’s because like the best matches of its kind — both Elimination Chambers and WWE multi-man matches — it gets the formula right. A lot of different kinds of wrestlers exist in one space here, from your brawlers to your power guys to your big flier in AJ Styles, and Dean Ambrose, who is a little bit of each of the above. Beyond the diversity of offense that it offers up, it’s another one of these matches that’s incredibly well booked and then constructed as well, for the most part. As more and more of the machine breaks down, matches like these are increasingly the only place on the main roster where you get it working like it’s supposed to (see: 2019’s Chamber), and this match shows that. The match is not always the greatest, having to focus on Barry Corbin and The Miz doing offense is hindrance to be sure, but it feels like the match gets as much as possible out of every element of the thing, while also shooting people off into these brand new directions for WrestleMania season. Corbin and Deano get redirected at each other after an Ambrose/Miz feud had led into this. Likewise, the Cena/AJ title issue gets turned into a Miz grudge on Cena, and the match always feel very measured in this aspect, getting a lot both in terms of match quality and match utility out of a line up that is not the best.

The other reason this is great is the most obvious one.

AJ Styles works one hundred percent of this match.

For something like eighty five or ninety percent of the match, AJ Styles and John Cena are both in the match as well, and having two all-time great wrestlers in a match turns out to have a positive effect. Cena isn’t the powerhouse here that AJ is, but he works here in classic Cena ways, both getting a lot of effort out of everyone, and making everything he does feel bigger. When he’s eliminated before the final two by Bray Wyatt, it really does feel like a big deal, in the same way that his shock first elimination in the 2009 Elimination Chamber did.

Styles though is on another level here, putting forth one of the best Chamber performances ever. If one of the last few of these wasn’t the 2014 title match Elimination Chamber, the best match of its kind ever, it’d be an easy thing to call this the best Chamber performance in a very long time. It’s up there with the great ones in this space from, well, everyone in the 2014 edition to Rey Mysterio in 2009 to Goldberg in 2003, and so forth. It’s maybe the greatest pure bump freak performance in Chamber history, aided I’m sure by the extra padding, but in a way that seems no less impressive despite that. He’s flying around from the start, and takes one real horrific bump off a pod into the ring, bumps on the floor, into the chain wall, all of it. Coupled with the usual AJ Styles stuff against Cena early and late, stellar chemistry with everyone involved, and it’s very clearly the performance that makes the match. If this match really is a machine, there is no question about who the motor of the gigantic beast is, and it is a mother fucker of a motor at that.

The AJ Styles vs. Bray Wyatt run at the end is also genuinely great and the best one on one work Wyatt’s been involved with since he faced the actual greatest wrestler of all time. It benefits from being a brand new match up, so everything they’re doing is fresh, as well as from the set up the match provides them (heel vs. heel is always interesting when the characters are this different, new champion guaranteed), but it also just rocks. Bray is FEELING IT in a way he clearly hasn’t in years, AJ Styles still hasn’t realized that he doesn’t always have to try super super super hard in the WWE, and it comes together as perfectly as it ever could for Wyatt’s big title win.

It’s not what it might have been had they taken the care with the character that they did initially. He’s still been booked into oblivion for most of the last three years, and it’s still just a set up for the Orton title win that seems like it exists largely as a make good for SummerSlam 2016, Wyatt winning the title almost entirely just because of who he was feuding with, rather than momentum or skill. However, as a result of the last four months of stuff and as a result of the match being as great as it was, Wyatt winning the title doesn’t feel like the complete and total miss that it would have had you told someone about it a year in advance, and that’s maybe the greatest victory of the match.

Real far from being the all-time greatest Elimination Chamber, as it was hailed as at the time from people who should know better, but certainly somewhere among the more impressive ones.

***1/4

AJ Styles vs. Dean Ambrose, WWE TLC (12/4/2016)

This was a TLC match for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Unfortunately, it is not an adequate sequel to their stellar title match three months prior.

That match was a classical title match, AJ Styles at his best lighting a spark again in someone who hadn’t had it for years, and forcing a certain distinct sort of a match onto WWE airwaves. It’s a spectacular achievement and, despite AJ having better matches than that in 2016, one of the more remarkable things he was able to do in 2016.

Instead, this is just kind of a WWE gimmick match.

No real flare to it, stock spots for the most part, and without a whole lot tying it together. Complete, of course, with a terrible finish in which no-chin sex creep James Ellsworth (they really were everywhere in 2016) turned heel, for some reason, and helped AJ Styles keep the title after pushing Deano’s ladder over. After a solid six months of AJ Styles as the sort of WWE heel not seen since 2012-2013 CM Punk, a gifted and intelligent wrestler who was just such a god damned asshole about the chip on his shoulder but largely winning through only minimal cheating and more skill than anything else, it’s an unfortunate thing to see. The sort of receipt that comes at the end of any good thing in WWE, the “take the ride” part of the equation.

Still, it is AJ Styles in a big dumb gimmick match and so, to some extent at least, it cannot help but result in at least a borderline great match.

AJ takes several truly obscene bumps, does a bunch of ridiculous things on offense, and is totally at home in a match like this. Relative to other wrestlers this decade to succeed in matches like this against Styles, Ambrose is somewhere near the bottom at least in this form, but he’s exactly still good enough not to let the entire thing down in his role as a warm body. Given how good he was in their last pay-per-view match and even in random television outings against Styles, one would hope for more, but this being the WWE, it is hardly a surprise that one does not get that which it hoped for.

Not the blowoff these two desereved, either in terms of match quality or especially in story, but a deeply endearing performance from both Ambrose and Styles in the attempt. What could be done on an individual performance level here was done, and then some.

Sometimes when it comes to this company, nothing more can be asked.

***

AJ Styles vs. John Cena vs. Dean Ambrose, WWE No Mercy (10/9/2016)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Like with the Styles/Cena match at SummerSlam, this is not my favorite thing in the world as a formula. It’s your stock kind of WWE triple treat match, looking at it from afar. A few multi man spots, but mostly just rotating pairings doing back and forth stuff, with very little focus or storytelling outside of the very simple things, a heel cheating, things of that nature. There’s not even any one big setpiece like the Royal Rumble 2015 match’s announce table elbow drop, or the sorts of things WWE will offer up in matches like these when they have higher intentions, like trying to make someone. That’s not the case here, I don’t think there is a single intention beyond filling up a pay per view title slot and stringing things along for the time being, and so it’s that trusty old standard issue.

Still, like the SummerSlam meeting, it’s a remarkable little accomplishment, as this thing I generally don’t enjoy much at all just manages to tiptoe its way over the line (or Cross The Line in this case, if you would prefer) and becomes a really great version of that other thing.

The trick is that, for the most part, matches like this — that is not to say all triple threat matches or multi man matches, but ones like this, ones just kind of hurled together and thrown into the world with no real objective — are just about doing cool shit.

Of course, there are smaller tricks of course. Not letting that cool shit be undercut in any way, with regards to bad selling or weak looking offense or repetition over the course of the match. Layout is also key here, even without some major story to be told, because all the cool shit in the world will absolutely be undercut by a poor layout. Yes, it’s a fireworks show and all about the bright flashes and loud bangs, but there’s an art to that too, escalation and diversification, peaks and valleys. Beyond that, when nothing feels connected, when all of the neat spots and tricky nearfalls in the world get undercut by a disjointed match, all skeleton and no tissue, none of it really has any weight or consequence, it all falls apart. Wrestling should never be boring, I always want to see some really cool stuff, but there’s an art to it as well.

You know who does some of the coolest shit in the entire world?

AJ Styles.

You know who is a master of the small tricks in fireworks matches like these, but also succeeds at injecting them with a certain weight? You know who’s really great at constructing matches like these and has been for a decade plus?

Sure, the answer is AJ Styles again, but it’s also John Cena.

It’s true that someone could probably pick out most of what’s going to happen in this match beforehand. Maybe not the order, maybe not 100% of everything that happens and the ways in which those things happen, but the general shape and form of the thing itself. There are no surprises here. Cena gives up an FU kickout for an easy nearfall, you get a few familiar counters, a three man spot or two, the works. It’s not the absolute most cookie cutter thing in the world, there are a few cute new tricks and slight modifications of the old classics, but this is not a match to offer up revelations.

None of that matters all that much.

Cena and Styles are just so great at matches like these, and while Dean Ambrose is clearly the lesser of the three, he once again fits in perfectly with everything that they want to do. Everything escalates brilliantly. The layout is pristine, with the sorts of fun small little touches you expect from both AJ Styles three ways and John Cena title matches. The construction of the thing is pristine. Teases and payoffs, protecting finishes with the exception of Cena’s bulletproof FU, and doing it in different ways to keep everything interesting. The thing with AJ and matches like this is not only that there’s so many cool moments, but that so many of them are cool in different ways, or at least in ways diverse enough to never feel like the match is going back over its own footsteps. On his end, everything’s tight with Cena, every little detail perfect, even down to the way he kicks out of some covers by not only pushing off the mat but by grabbing Styles’ or Ambrose’s hand and pushing it off of his body. AJ Styles is the one with the blueprints in the ivory tower, but down on the ground, John Cena makes this thing work as much as anyone.

The match’s low ambitions arguably wind up benefiting it, allowing them to just kind of riff around for fifteen or twenty minutes. All three of these guys can do better, of course, but it’s a real fun match and every great match, no matter how great, is one that didn’t exist in the world beforehand. It won’t make any lists, I’ll forget most everything about it besides the concrete facts of the thing in half an hour, but I’m glad it happened.

I’m not sure it’s a top three AJ Styles multi man match of 2016, but great is great, and this is yet another example that nobody hits that level in matches like this with more regularity or success than AJ Styles. One more for maybe the greatest multi-man match worker of all time.

***

Dean Ambrose vs. AJ Styles, WWE Backlash (9/11/2016)

This was for Ambrose’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.

When these matches get talked about, typically it’s their TLC match three months later. Either because it’s the flashier match with all the big smoke and mirrors bumps and things like that, or because AJ tore a hole in his tights and you could see his butt, which is very funny. Really though, as great as that match is, this one has always stood out to me as pretty clearly the best of the bunch.

In large part that’s because of not only the emotional release of the result and the ending, but also how rare this feels.

Whereas the AJ Styles matches against John Cena or Roman Reigns felt like, in some part, a concession or a series of concessions to a WWE style or a WWE formula, this is a match that feels more like a classic AJ Styles title match you might have seen in TNA or ROH or NJPW than like anything that would have ever sprung up out of WWE soil.

To me, the differences feel clear, as small as they are.

Most obvious is that there’s absolutely zero nonsense on the thing. No re-sets, no interference, none of that. Styles and Ambrose are free to simply have themselves a match, which feels stunning enough. Furthermore, it’s this match that’s allowed to do all of this cool stuff but without that grating WWE kind of “YOU’RE WATCHING A GREAT MATCH” overlay on it that always feels so present in other matches that attempt the same thing. It feels so much more natural than almost every other match like it, feeling like something that naturally develops, something much more in tune with AJ Styles’ long history of matches that seem to carry a closer connection to old NWA matches, the last traveling champion as he felt like in 2014-2015, but the old torch bearer approach from the best of his TNA title matches as well. Something about the entire thing just feels realer and more genuine, from AJ getting to talk shit in a more natural way to the way the match slowly and steadily unfolds and escalates.

These are small differences, the match is likely still really great no matter what, but I think these are small differences that matter a whole lot.

Performance wise, it’s maybe AJ’s best of the year outside of the Roman stuff.

He’s not putting on the generational bump freak performance he was against the Big Dog, but I like this just as much in an all around sense. The offense is perfect as always, but we get a little more here of AJ going to the leg. We get a little more drawn out of a process here of AJ getting cocky and then being made to eat a little more shit. As much as any small stylistic shifts, the older feel of this match comes from the way AJ Styles carries himself in this match, the best wrestler in the world being a total shithead but only ever cheating at the very end. In WWE, you get hit over the head with something, but in this match, it’s not quite that. There’s a joy in a coward and/or a fraud being exposed and beat to shit by Our Hero, but as this show understands, that’s midcard shit. What this match gets SO correct is that this is what a main event should feel like. AJ’s an asshole, an absolute shitbird braggart, but because he backs it up and saves the cheating for the exact moment when it (a) has the most value & (b) it bails him out right as he’s about to be proven wrong, the whole package works so much better.

This is an AJ Styles match through and through, but the match’s biggest secret might actually be that it’s the best Dean Ambrose performance in between the immediate Shield split stuff and his departure. Genuinely, he is great here. The knee selling is tremendous while it lasts, he brings it in terms of striking and offensive crispness when challenged by the best wrestler in the world, and there’s just a tightness and an urgency to him that is so often missing from the rest of of his WWE solo work.

Dean never quite feels on AJ’s level like a Cena or a Reigns, he always seems destined to lose this match, but over the course of the match, he looks less and less made out of paper and more and more like a champion worth dethroning. This match is always kind of a foregone conclusion, but through the effort of performance and the simple story of the match, it turns AJ Styles’ coronation into something that initially felt like a matter of procedure, and into what feels like a real accomplishment.

When the moment comes, it’s yet another tremendous piece of booking from this Smackdown Live run.

Ambrose fights through the knee stuff, begins to outbomb AJ in spots where others haven’t been able to, only for luck to finally turn AJ Styles’ direction in ways it hadn’t in his previous title challenges. AJ pushes Ambrose back blindly to block his DDT, momentarily knocking the ref down. As opposed to his two challenges to Ambrose’s buddy, there’s no moral dilemma or hesitation this time. No more half measures.

Styles rushes into a low blow, and one more Styles Clash later, AJ Styles is the WWE Champion.

Wonders never cease.

A truly wonderful thing, with a match great enough to back it up. A simple good vs. bad title match, an athletic shithead against a bluer collar hero updated with modern moves and ideas, working as well as possible (even if this doesn’t feel like a WWE match sometimes, it still has to reckon with Ambrose feeling like a replacement champ after the way he’s been booked for two years, you know?). The sort of match that brings to mind that the classics, be they stories or characters or just ideas about pro wrestling, are the classics for a reason.

Once more, AJ Styles offers a vision of what pro wrestling can and should be, and if not flawless, it is so much better than just about everything else out there.

While not the most significant aspect of this either, there’s also something deeply deeply charming about where it happens and the way the crowd takes to this. It is a beautiful piece of destiny that AJ’s first WWE World Title win happens not in a classic WWE/WWF city or building, but instead in an old WCW stronghold of Richmond, Virginia. It’s not Greensboro or Atlanta, it’s not quite that on-the-nose, but there’s still something to a match like this, a match about this thing, happening here. As the match goes on, Richmond not only comes alive more than usual as a result of a match like this, but they also begin to take AJ Styles’ side despite everything. When AJ does it, he does it to thunderous applause, WCW’s last young lion making good. I romanticize things like this, I obviously don’t believe that it was intended or even thought about at all, but there is something really beautiful in a cosmic sense about how this all transpired.

One more for the good guys.

***1/2

Triple H vs. Dean Ambrose, WWE Roadblock (3/12/2016)

This was for Hunter’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.

It’s a fun match.

Surprisingly so.

Triple H takes it more seriously than you’d think for a pre-Mania gimme defense on one of these early Network house-show-turned-sudden-psuedo-PPV shows that we got in 2015 and 2016 fairly frequently. Ambrose also turns in his most motivated performance since 2014, and while not a GREAT match as a result of pure physical stuff, it’s one that holds up pretty well, considering.

Nobody reinvents the wheel here, exactly, but it’s the sort of match that shines as a result of what comes off as clear and obvious care and effort. Triple H even bothers stooging a little early on, or at least what he imagines is stooging as a fun babyface gets to humiliate him a little and have a laugh at his expense. Hunter’s work in control isn’t especially great, it’s not exactly Mania 30 out there, but there’s a function and attentiveness to it. You watch enough of someone and you can tell when they care and when they don’t, and this is the former by far.

The same largely goes for the final half, where both guys turn it on and click surprisingly well in a big moves and kickouts section. Ambrose scores one of the great WWE nearfalls in recent memory where he has Hunter dead to rights off his move, but it’s actually Dean caught in the ropes instead. It’s the sort of thing I both kind of love and kind of hate. The latter because it’s a classic fascist ass WWE thing, Dean’s own lack of discipline coming back to haunt him here and later at the very end. The former because it’s this great little touch, Hunter himself was beaten and again this is a match that adheres to that classic heel principle of the real offensive thing being when Our Hero has something taken from him more so when the villain has something handed to him. This is ultimately something of a waste given that the payoff Triple H is being built up for won’t really work anyways, but in a micro sense, it’s great to see a WWE match that seems to put such a value on a traditional pro wrestling piece of ideology.

In the very end, Ambrose messes up a second time with an elbow drop through the announce table that Hunter dodges, leading to the Pedigree back inside for the win.

A heartbreaker to be sure, but also a little more than that in retrospect.

While he doesn’t leave for another three years and change and while he’ll still have some great work under the WWE umbrella, there’s a real finality about this for Dean Ambrose. A definitive statement of sorts that unless he fundamentally changes who he is, he’ll never beat anyone who really Matters, and even if that’s not the absolute final end, it does feel like an ending in its own way. Even if you thought you knew where the ceiling on this thing was, finding your hands on it as you reach up is just a little bit different, right? Thinking and then knowing concretely are two wildly different things.

This is more than JUST that though.

Forget Ambrose for a moment (this is easy, think about Jon Moley instead), because this isn’t really about him.

Here we have one-half of my favorite little parts of the Political Hit Theory, in which Hunter has a pair of defenses against long-underutilized fan favorite babyfaces in Ambrose, and later Dolph Ziggler. The matches are generally pretty fun, as Triple H works hard and they feel important because of how rarely he wrestles, even if they’re not all GREAT. There’s a drama created in them in spite of obvious results, and I leave relatively impressed by the exceeding of expectations, even if I recognize the nefarious nature of HHH “trying his best” for guys he could easily speak up for more regularly if he actually really cared, only as part of achieving a larger goal. Most interestingly though, this and the Ziggler match are these matches full of big action and a lot of motion, always feeling like they’re moving forward and retaining the crowd. It makes for a perfect set up for WrestleMania, in which Hunter wrestles a far slower, less exciting, and less interesting match against Roman Reigns. One in which he does lose, but does so in front of a crowd who loves him and while giving up far less than he does here.

The natural result of matches like this or HHH/Ziggler, far from guaranteed hits, being better and more exciting than HHH/Roman is that when one considers the common denominator between the three matches and finds one lacking, one is led to certain places, even if it’s obviously not at all fair, on top of the “HHH did his best, but we just HAD to go with this guy” part of it. Deeply evil, but you do have to admire the craft.

Absolute masterclass in the dark arts of pro wrestling, once again.

It’s not unfair to be mad about it, the finish, the message, or the Political Hit at large, but given that Triple H died of a heart attack in late 2021 and is being kept alive by pure fiction just like the Queen of England (probably) and given that Moxley eventually got free and became a huge star outside of the WWE, it’s hard to stay too mad.

All’s well that ends well.

The 2016 Royal Rumble, WWE Royal Rumble (1/24/2016)

This was for Roman Reigns’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

More importantly, it is one of the funnier matches in recent history.

Whereas the previous years’ match — the worst booked match in the history of professional wrestling — had the side effect of poisoning the well forever with Roman Reigns as a top babyface, this is a match where it seems that the actual goal of the entire thing is to make sure that well stays poisoned. Almost like it’s some kind of plot from on high, some kind of hit carried out politically or something?

The idea of the thing, when viewed from very far away, is sound.

Roman Reigns unfairly begins at #1, gets beat up all match, before boss Triple H puts himself in at #30 and he goes on to steal it.

You gotta look a little closer though, because this is full of little details and larger modifications that transform this match into something far more insidious and a thousand times funnier.

The first is to look at Roman in this match. Ideally, it fixes a lot of the problems from the 2015 Rumble. Not only that Roman loses, but that he lasts the entire way, suffers through things a little more, and that after a valiant display, he has it stolen from him. None of that is actually what happens though. Not a word of it.

First of all, Roman doesn’t REALLY last the entire way. He’s in this for the first and last thirds. The League of Nations attacks him at around twenty minutes and change in, and Rusev splashes him through an announce table.

(aside from the AJ Styles debut, this may be the highlight, as Rusev leaves holding one of the TV monitors and later claims it makes him TV Champion, in one of the great bits.)

Roman Reigns is taken out, and importantly, is not stretchered out. He gets off the stretcher, but is still taken away to the back, and will not return for close to half an hour.

It’s an important distinction, between what happened and what should have happened here.

Roman Reigns being unconscious and stretchered out would have worked fine. It could be argued that this is a detail that doesn’t matter, that the well is already so poisoned as it was, but I don’t think it’s nothing either. An unconscious man being put on a cart and wheeled away is different than someone admitting they’re too hurt, and having to go to the back. Roman’s walking to the back here. Not without help, but under his own cognizance

The other thing — and this sort of works hand in hand with his absence — is that Roman Reigns doesn’t really overcome anything or come close to it. In fact, despite this match ostensibly being about Roman Reigns, that’s very much not the case.

AJ Styles debuts at #3, as you all know.

He’s an immediate hit. A huge star that the crowd in his longtime home obviously reacts more positively to than anyone on the show apart from maybe Brock Lesnar (the company Ace, and so not a bad thing by any stretch), and who steals the first chunk of the Rumble. He’s dynamite against Roman Reigns, and then secretly, it becomes AJ’s match for a while there. What should be a display of Roman running through people to make this work becomes far more about AJ. He eliminates more people, mixes it up with all these people he’s never fought before, and even steals the attention of the camera in moments where commentary is shouting about Roman maybe being eliminated.

When Roman Reigns does return — half an hour later — two more important things should be noted.

The first is that that half hour he missed involved many of the match’s heaviest hitters and bigger moments. The Wyatt Family, The Big Show, Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn squaring off, and of course, Brock Lesnar. By the time Reigns returns to the match, all of them are gone.

This may not be an issue at all, had Roman returned taped up and in pain. The classic bit of pushing people away as he stumbles to the ring, valiantly trying to keep going. Instead, he bolts down to attack Sheamus in the aisle as he comes down at #29, and given the energy he has and the lack of damage shown, you would think Roman Reigns had just entered the match at #28. The beatdown has had no real effect, and so the result is that instead of it appearing as though he’s fought his way back, Roman Reigns has been rested, has recovered, and just decided to come back out when he was ready. Not only avoiding all of this, but very conveniently avoiding his #1 rival in Brock Lesnar. Between the timing of it and Reigns’ own failure to sell any beatdown whatsoever upon return, the entire idea of the thing is torn asunder.

Triple H then comes out last at #30, in what should be a gut punch, but as a result of the way the Roman Reigns thing has been handled up until this point, it has no such effect.

He’s another guy entering the Rumble.

Moments later, Triple H pretty cleanly eliminates Roman Reigns second to last, before then also eliminating Dean Ambrose to win the match and the title.

It’s here that the match and Hunter’s plan at large really hits its masterstroke.

As a result of the way Roman’s “injuries” were handled and Roman’s own failure to sell any damage, the elimination of Roman Reigns doesn’t come off unfair in the slightest. He got half an hour to rest, seemed fine, and just got outsmarted in a Rumble by someone smart and powerful enough to throw him out. The other half comes as Triple H then gets a little final run against Dean Ambrose, which is something the crowd reacts much more fervently too. Ambrose, as opposed to Reigns, visibly wears reminders of his earlier fight with a taped up shoulder and ribcage, on top of selling the damage. He’s an underdog enough to get the crowd behind him even further than they already were, and energetic enough against Hunter to make Hunter into a heel in the crowd’s eyes.

Compared to the way Hunter eliminates Reigns, the way he gets a knee up and then just barely manages to drop Ambrose over him from the apron and out, Hunter feels lucky against someone both smaller and more beaten up. Everything they failed to do with Roman is accomplished with Ambrose here, someone fighting through something hard who got robbed against Triple H, creating a sympathetic response, just for the wrong guy entirely.

Unlike the previous year’s Rumble, which failed miserably at its goal, one has to mark this as a success.

Especially so if one assumes the natural viewpoint that the goal here was to make Roman look like a bum, while still pretending that’s not the point, and to push Triple H as the one you ought to be cheering.

Roman has his on-paper endurance run, all while barely enduring anything and once again constantly ceding the floor in the Rumble to more interesting acts and better wrestlers. He’s overshadowed by an all-time great’s Rumble run, and even when he’s supposed to be robbed by the authority figure booking himself at #30, said authority figure does it entirely fairly, with Roman not even getting to be the last elimination, instead giving that up to someone the crowd likes far more, as if making sure to put that on display to the world too. What ought to be a slam dunk is undercut in every way something like this can be undercut. No moments to actually highlight the man, overshadowed at the start and finish, booked horribly so he appears like he’s taking a break for half the match like some kind of a 1999 Vince McMahon level heel, before coming back and then being eliminated in a fair enough manner to leave no room for complaint.

(the real contrast here is how Brock Lesnar, the actual top guy in the WWE, is treated in this match. he’s not in for long, but he steamrolls everyone, eliminates four guys, before it takes not only all four Wyatts to eliminate him, but having them do so largely illegally, as he had tossed everyone but Bray himself prior to that. it’s an actual example of how someone’s protected while losing the Rumble, the opposite of Roman Reigns here.)

It’s another Rumble almost entirely about Roman Reigns (on paper at least), and yet another one that leaves him far worse off than it found him.

With this company, you never want to ascribe malice where it could be simple incompetency at work, but with a match like this, one often gets the impression that they work hand in glove.

Dean Ambrose vs. Kevin Owens, WWE Royal Rumble (1/24/2016)

This was a Last Man Standing match for Ambrose’s WWE Intercontinental Title.

WWE gimmick matches are a real hard thing to do right at this point, or rather, they’re a real hard thing for me to really love at this point.

Robbed of the ability to bleed or take brutal shots to the head (safety is good etc. but there is very little as immediately exciting in a dirt stupid lizard-brain sense as someone getting hit very hard in the face with something) and with so much of the style having been sanitized and pared down to a few stock things that everyone does in matches like these, so few of these matches ever really stand out. You get chairs to the back, kendo sticks, a few token table bumps that you’ve seen before, maybe a safe looking barricade spot if you’re lucky. None of these things are inherently bad, in the right hands you don’t need a whole lot in a match like this, but it’s a rarity. More often than not, these matches are yet another WWE thing that provides that infuriating contrast between a match that’s very obviously routine and safe, while commentary shouts at you that none of this has ever happened before.

This is one of the better ones!

Not that they don’t have many of the prereq spots, but Big Kev and Deano are just feeling it tonight. Weapons swung a little harder, laying in chops and elbows a lot heavier than either man usually does at this point, and with some pretty cool new big setpieces thrown in there. It’s a classic kind of Kevin Steen brawl, adapted and sanitized for the WWE, retaining things like the constant shit talk and several multiple-chair-contraption bits and most importantly, at least one truly exceptional spot at the end.

Kevin Owens takes a flip off the top through two tables outside off a shove from behind, and it’s enough both to lose the match, and to make this match just a little bit more memorable.

A great little chunk of popcorn nonsense.

***

Dean Ambrose vs. Chris Jericho, WWE Extreme Rules 2016 (5/22/2016)

It’s the final part of the “five worst you can think of” commissions from Bren. You can pay me to watch either good or bad wrestling over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon.

The idea of “worst” is something I struggled with. Not only because I could have easily just jumped ahead and done five matches from late 2010s WWE entirely, but because the actual Worst Matches of all Time aren’t interesting to write about, really. I think of “worst” meaning less something like Sharmell vs. Jenna Morasca and more matches that totally failed up to live up to any potential or that went dramatically wrong. Sharmell vs. Jenna was always going to be a train wreck, but then there are matches with actual talents where things go very wrong or are impeded in some way or multiple ways.

There are then matches like this, which find ways to be even worse than expected and live up to my memory of how bad they were.

Equal parts lame WWE comedy and the even worse overly sanitized 2010s WWE brawl that tries to coat itself in the language of violence, but with actions that rarely come close to feeling that same way. Inside both of those is another painfully dull near half hour Chris Jericho feud ender, making this kind of a Russian nesting doll, where each thing is worse. Primarily though, it tries to exist in that sanitized and bloodless way. Barbed wire bats only used on the back of someone wearing a t-shirt, a long cage match that somehow results in no blood, and all of these things that are routine and embarrassingly safe. Both the comedy and violence sort of wash out the other in some way to make this a flavorless mess, but the main effect that the former has is managing to significantly downplay the occasional moments of violence that aren’t immediately phony, such as a big thumbtack bump. The result is that neither that nor Ambrose’s dive off the top of the cage gets much of a reaction at all, and the end of this feud is

It’s not a match entirely devoid of quality moments, but it’s also one that goes further to undercut these moments than many other matches of its kind, only pointing out the obvious contrast in a way that only highlights the inauthenticity of it all.

This isn’t the worst match I’ve ever seen, it’s not even the blowaway worst match of the year on pay per view, because Taker vs. Shane is probably just as bad, even if it feels worse because it’s not punctuated by any huge spectacle bump. It’s not as funny as Triple H vs. Roman Reigns either, and without and political intrigue to it either. It’s a normal kind of bad match that goes on forever, accomplishes nothing, but dresses itself up in the It’s a long very sluggish match that perfectly embodies everything wrong with the WWE as a concept.

i feel real bad.

don’t ever give me dealer’s choice again.

 

 

Roman Reigns/Dean Ambrose/Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt/Luke Harper/Sheamus, WWE Raw (8/3/2015)

More of that easy good shit.

To the surprise of pretty much nobody, six of the all stars of WWE’s 2013-2014 peak run manage to excel when they’re put back into a six man tag team match. It’s almost as if this is a very easy way to fill time on a professional wrestling show and that when it all runs right, it’s a way to deliver an exciting match that manages to both further your stories and also save just enough to keep them interesting.

This is absolutely a match that runs right, an incredibly low stakes example of how even on accident, the machine can still run like it used to. Clearly, somebody bumped into it on accident before this episode of Raw, between this and Neville/Rollins, and eventually shut it off after the show when they realized what happened.

Still, what happened happened, and somehow this weird little thing motivates all six to deliver some of their best performances in some time.

It’s hard to call it his best performance since then when something like WrestleMania 31 exists, but Roman Reigns is especially great in this match. The majority of the match runs through him, and he’s more excited than he’s been in a while. It’s a brief respite from the dour WWE top babyface push and more of a return to those old Shield babyface days, when it was fun to watch guys clearly having the times of their lives. Beyond that change, he also gets to spend most of this trading shots with Sheamus and Harper. The former is a great combination that isn’t new exactly (as Sheamus was one of the great Shield opponents) but that feels new with the switch in alignments. The latter is one of the quiet great pairings of the era, and delivers once again. As expected, Harper is the anchor on the other side and once again turns in a flawless big man performance. Every bump feels earned, and every morsel of offense looks and sounds both beautiful and horrifying. Sheamus is just as great against Reigns, but it’s against the other two that Harper shines even more than that.

Beyond the two anchors and Sheamus, this also gets the best out of everyone else. Ambrose, Wyatt, and Orton have all suffered from low energy levels at times in the last year, understandably so, but in a match like this, they’re perfect. It allows them to get in and out, hitting their bigger stuff, and relying on the anchors of the teams to provide most everything else. It helps too that Ambrose seems genuinely fired up again for the first time in a while, and as a hot tag and face in peril guy in the middle, his enthusiasm means that nothing’s lost in the bridge from the early Roman brawling sections with the big guys to the fireworks show at the end.

The last third of this is also crazy and unbelievably well assembled in a way that hasn’t been seen since The Shield broke up. A thousand things in a row, all unique, all perfectly placed, and all flawlessly executed. You get some pay offs here and there, like Ambrose’s struggle to hit his dive all through the last third and Bray finally being unable to avoid Reigns anymore, but it’s primarily just this perfect section of chaos. Things finally turn right for the babyfaces. Dean can hit his dive to remove Harper, and then nobody can bail out Wyatt and Sheamus. Bray eats the RKO when trying to avoid Reigns again, and Sheamus runs into the Spear to end the match.

Naturally nothing was learned from how well this worked and things returned to a more boring standard the following week, but a wonderful brief return to form all the same.

***1/4