John Cena/Edge/Chris Jericho/Daniel Bryan/Bret Hart/John Morrison/R-Truth vs. The Nexus, WWE SummerSlam (8/15/2010)

This was an elimination match.

It actually rules.

There’s no reason it should.

I don’t just mean it in the usual way, which is to say that the Nexus (post-Bryan of course) was made up of mid-level talents at best, although they were. I mean that it is 2010 and the Team WWE side is not great either. Jericho is about a year past the point where I would call him more than average, and the same goes for Edge, as their bad series earlier in the year showed. R-Truth is out of his element in a match this high profile, and Bret Hart is a retired old man who has not wrestled in a decade because of a gigantic stroke. John Morrison, despite having his talents, should not be the third best guy in a fourteen man match put on by the biggest company in the world, but he is, and that’s what the match has to deal with.

Despite all of that, this rocks.

Above all, the match is a victory for strict planning.

To whatever extent this match achieves, it does so because of the regimented approach to it. These are not great talents, but almost nobody is ever in the ring for long enough for that to become SUPER obvious, save Wade and Gabriel in the last five minutes or so. People either do a few things they’re good at (Ryback, Tarver), hit the highlights that they still can (Jericho, Edge, Bret), and get out. Some of the longer tenured Nexus guys get exposed by the end, or with a total dud like Otunga, you see it immediately, but the match continually moves along to the next thing before it can drag the match down too much.

Being an elimination match also helps out a lot, as they’re able to use the elimination to not only get rid of guys but create a larger sense of drama through things like Skip Sheffield’s monster elims at the start making his eventual defeat more impressive, or the way the WWE team clearly has it before egomaniacs Edge and Jericho cost their team when both are eliminated because of minor spats with other teammates about trivial bullshit.

When the match comes down solely to John Cena and Daniel Bryan against the three left of Wade, Gabriel, and Slater, the match really shines, both through the performance of Cena as the sympathetic face-in-peril selling his ass off and making the basic attacks of the FCW kids far more interesting and dramatic than they would be against anyone else on the roster and then also of Bryan as this ball of energy ass beating hot tag.

Everyone knows, I think, what happens at the end.

Daniel Bryan gets it to two on two before The Miz run out to cost him to continue their feud, and Cena is all alone. He suffers a DDT on the exposed concrete floor, only to no-sell it and eliminate both Justin Gabriel and Wade Barrett on his own, super triumphantly, to save the day. It’s been criticized ever since, called out as selfish and dumb and this all-time bad example of a no-sell, all of that.

The thing is that that isn’t actually what happens.

Go watch the last two or three minutes of this match again.

John Cena’s selling is good.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. I wish there was a little more put into it, maybe a count out tease before they want to actually pin him and drag him in, maybe some more taunting, maybe a pause by Barrett when it comes down to one on one and John is still nearly motionless. There are a bunch of little ways where it could have been better, but it is so so so so so so far away from being bad, and even farther away from being what it’s been criticized as ever since it happened.

Cena doesn’t move without being dragged up, shoved in, and pulled into position for a minute or two. When he beats Gabriel, it’s a last ditch roll away from the 450 Splash and diving slightly into a cover. When he beats Wade, all he does is take him down to the mat (without ever getting to his own feet) after Wade taunts him, going into the STF all while yelling out in a more intense way than usual in a clear show of pure adrenaline, before then immediately collapsing again as soon as the match is won.

I don’t often come on here and find myself defending often criticized selling performances, it is far more frequently the opposite, but Cena rules here, and I want to talk for a moment specifically to everyone who was mad at this at the time, has been mad at this since, and especially anyone who (and I wouldn’t think these people still existed if not for a recent Twitter interaction with one of them) is somehow still upset about John Cena at the end of this match.

You are all babies with absolutely zero sense of consistency, there have been a thousand worse selling performances on shows of this magnitude or around it in the years since, and you have been babies for this long because what you’re actually mad about is the finish, which you are also wrong about.

It was and still is the right call.

The Nexus was a great angle for a few months. Their weaknesses — all of them being fairly middling guys, representative of the failure of WWE developmental at the time — were hidden in rare squashes and mostly working angles. However, as everything after this showed, not one of them really had it. Wade and Ryback came close at times, but years off, and not on a level where you can make any rational argument that they should have won. Wade had his chances and hw was what he was. Ryback maybe got hurt by getting hot in the middle of Punk/Cena/Rock up top, but failed to show much for years after that. It’s fun to complain, but this has always struck me as something not worth complaining about. Nothing was lost by them not winning, they likely would have fallen apart even had they won, with a loss to this team of eventual also-rans only hurting the Ace and friends in the process. What we have instead of doomed-to-fail wishcasting is just a proper ending to what, up to this point, was a good and different sort of a feud.

That’s why I like the match a lot.

It’s where the angle should have ended.

Nexus was never the NWO. It was never the WWE’s Generation Next. It wasn’t even the Impact Players. You were in a desert watching the WWE in 2010 and you thought you saw water, but thirteen plus years later, I hope everyone has grown enough to admit what it was (and that I was always right about this). 

Seven developmental ass developmental guy got as far as they could with the element of surprise and total cohesion and unity, taking advantage of a weaker roster, but when it came time to actually do it against the top stars and slowly robbed of their numbers advantaged, they were revealed as what they always were. Good and promising talents, but either not yet or not ever good enough and tough enough to achieve when everything was fair.

The match succeeds as much because of its craft as it does because of its honesty, and because if nothing else, it knows enough to center the match around two of the greatest of all time, and to trust in how great it will feel when John Cena dispatches with yet another would-be replacement and absolute fraud.

Unlike the Nexus, so much much stronger than the sum of its parts.

***1/3

Aztec Warfare, Lucha Underground 1×09 ~ “AZTEC WARFARE” (1/7/2015)

(Setting a ground rule going forward for any matches like these I cover, I don’t feel obligated to recap the order of entry and every elimination. There are dozens of websites you can go to to find move by move recaps of matches.)

This was the inaugural AZTEC WARFARE match to determine the inaugural Lucha Underground Champion. It’s a Royal Rumble staggered entrance battle royal, but with the vital change that eliminations happen through only pinfall or submission and with anything goes rules.

The rules help this SO MUCH, but it’s also planned and plotted out incredibly well. In fact, this is probably a god damned mess if not for the construction of the thing as a whole. People talk about Ricochet under a mask and the future Lucha Brothers and Drago and Cuerno and Mil Muertes, but this is a rough roster, especially at the start. There’s some weird shit they throw out there to fill out the line up, and that means Ricky Mandel and all of the guys in Big Ryck’s heater group The Crew and Super Fly. It’s weird and fun, but the whole thing could have very easily been dead on arrival in any number of other places.

This is still a pretty rough roster, but they get the most out of it through some real smart match construction. Johnny Mundo goes wire to wire for one, and Prince Puma and Fenix are there somewhere close to that. Beyond that, there’s rarely a moment in which a good wrestler isn’t in the ring, be it one of those three or a Drago or King Cuerno or Mil Muertes. If not that, there’s always something happening. That doesn’t always mean something GOOD is happening, as there’s too much of this devoted to Chavo Guerrero Jr.’s big heel run and the feud with Sexy Star and Sexy Star in general, but there’s never a bit in this match that feels unimportant.

Beyond that, every great wrestler is put in the best situations to do a lot of really really cool stuff, so like 75-80% of this just absolutely whips ass.

Narratively, it’s pretty perfect too. You have your big story with Puma and Mundo going to the end to redo the main event from the debut episode, but virtually everyone or every feud gets helped along here. Cuerno and Drago are a great pairing here, with Cuerno being the one to take full advantage of the rules by hanging out on the floor and taking advantage of the work of others so he can eliminate his rival. The big dudes in Big Ryck and Mil Muertes are also put to stellar use. Fenix gets a big win by managing to pin Ryck, even just as the third guy in a row to hit him with a top rope move. When Mil is the other guy in at the end against Mundo and Puma, they come out more impressively than ever for being able to gang up on him and get him out, and it does a whole lot for Muertes as well. It’s such a testament to Mesias that even with minimal work as this character, he’s able to immediately project himself in such a way that it not only feels believable that everyone has to gang up on him, but also that it makes Mundo and Puma more credible for doing it.

Unfortunately, it comes down to this far far far less interesting pairing of Puma (Ricochet) and Mundo (Morrison). As viewers of their more recent WWE work together can tell you, this is not an interesting pairing. Neither is without value, Ricochet’s one of the best high fliers in the world, but they’re both these sort of empty calorie gymnastic wrestlers and you don’t throw two of those guys at each other. When people say “styles make fights”, it means that there needs to be more than one style for it a fight to be as interesting as possible, and this isn’t that. It works narratively, and LU does the right thing in giving Prince Puma the win and the title in the big match, but it’s a far less interesting finale than any of the match ups left on the table. There’s something to be said for that, that Aztec Warfare itself is enough and you don’t need to blow Puma against Fenix or Drago or Mil or Cuerno just yet, but understanding something doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it.

All said, there’s just too much good here not to like. I don’t know if it’s the best Aztec Warfare that LU runs, I tend to side with the Season 2 version that happens in 2016, but this is a really remarkable achievement for a company like this. Warts and all, it’s in the running the best battle royal of the entire decade. More than just that, it’s a real startling contrast given what happens in a match a lot like this later in the month. 

***1/4

 

 

Johnny Mundo vs. Prince Puma vs. Big Ryck, LU 1×07 ~ “TOP OF THE LADDER” (12/10/2014)

This was a ladder match for $100,000, as the episode title very subtly points out.

Along with the Sheamus/Morrison miracle from 2010, it’s one of the better ladder matches of the decade, if only for its efficiency.

It’s not all that inventive or anything, not unless you’ve only seen WWE ladder matches, but it’s just tight and good and interesting. The dynamic between the three adds so much to this, with Ryck not only doing the “non-flier is scared of ladders”, but having henchmen to constantly help out and take the big bumps. The only real error here booking-wise is that they reveal B-Boy as a third henchman late in the match, but it’s ineffectual, so it has no impact and thus is the one wasteful part of this. Otherwise, it’s a ton of really cool stuff that’s laid out perfectly, and allows everyone to shine. Puma has the coolest stuff, but makes mistakes by not climbing at the most opportune times, since he’s supposed to be a super rookie and not Ricochet. Ryck is powerful, but slow, so veteran guy Mundo can outmaneuver and outsmart him when ladders come into it. The match suitably rewards Mundo for being the best suited to this match, as it should in a young promotion still establishing not only who all these people are, but what all these matches are.

A tremendous finish as Ryck uses two ladders to give himself more comfort, but it leaves him prey for Mundo to easily push them apart and kick him in the hog. The flunkies climb one, but Mundo shoves them off of it and gets the money down. That’s not as cool as the spot that immediately preceded it, but it’s still a hell of a bump all the same.

An imperfect thing, but still incredibly done and as with many great things in Lucha Underground, one or two bad decisions away from being among the best of its kind.

***1/4

 

Damien Priest/Bad Bunny vs. The Miz/John Morrison, WWE WrestleMania 37 Night One (4/10/2021)

ah whatever.

this isn’t for people writing blogs or who care about whether or not matches are good, it is what it is. It’s WrestleMania, you’re gonna get stuff like this. Buy the ticket, take the ride, all that. Bunny looked real good though, relatively. The best working punch in a match with three long-tenured veterans. Training with Drew Gulak for weeks going into this helped out. If not the best guy in the match, he at least is clearly not the worst one. The layout of the match made it seem more like the actual pushed professional wrestler on the babyface team was the actual one they didn’t have faith in, which is incredibly funny and probably the correct estimation. Much like Omos, Priest’s entrance into the match got built up for most of the match.

Unfortunately, Priest was not as good as Omos.

The highlight of the match was canonical Wrestle Factory grad Bad Bunny doing a Canadian Destroyer, before then pinning The Miz with a Doomsday Crossbody.

The sort of WrestleMania celebrity nonsense that you can half watch, go “yeah, that was fine”, and then never ever think about again going forward. Because once again, it’s not me or anyone like me, and that’s okay and probably good. A good wrestling show is a circus, after all.

With that in mind, I watched a perfectly fine DDT tag on my laptop during this. Incredibly proud of my son Yuki Iino and his wonderful belt. Great dancer too.

 

Sami Callihan vs. John Morrison, 2CW All Or Nothing (8/3/2012)

Graphic design is my passion.

Aside from that, this was a banger.

It’s definitely a weird fit in which Sami tries to adapt his sort of wrestling into a more mainstream paced and styled match. Luckily, Sami Callihan is, at this point, a really great professional wrestler and can do that. John Morrison wasn’t always a great babyface, but only after he was largely abandoned to the midcard as a JTTS babyface did he develop the ability to actually sell a leg well. You might never expect him to do it, but it’s the sort of thing that takes this from being a fun sort of “hey, that happened once” match up into being a great little match.

Following a brawl designed to let Morrison do some cool parkour shit, which is kind of whatever save for the one big parkour spot (which ruled), Sami goes after the leg. It’s nice to see Sami engage in a prolonged attack like this. He’s no stranger to a flurry of attacks on the leg near the end of a match, but he rarely gets to target it for any real length of time with the pace at which he usually conducts himself. It’s a less common thing, and thus, a little more interesting than the usual formula can be. Morrison sells in interesting ways. He maximizes his footwork to be able to pull off a lot of his usual stuff, but while always reminding you that he’s hurt. The sort of performance all high fliers should study before they try to have a match even remotely like this.

Morrison’s the recently departed TV guy, so of course he goes over with his move. Sami never really put it in doubt because it’s not the sort of thing I could ever doubt, but he did a great job of making Morrison have to earn it. For once, Sami bothers making himself look good in a loss instead of just tough but stupid.

The rare pro wrestling novelty that delivers as more than a goofy youtube link someone might drop in a slack chat one day.

***

The Miz vs. John Morrison vs. John Cena, WWE Extreme Rules 2011 (5/1/2011)

John Cena finally wins the title back inside of a steel cage.

This match is perfectly alright. The triple threat structure allows Miz to hide, while John Cena hits his main event theatrics and John Morrison does some really cool spots. It’s a spiritually and physically bloodless WWE cage match where the cage is there more because they needed another gimmick and the match pays more respect to the cage as a thing to climb than a dangerous part of the match, but, you know…it’s not bad. It’s not offensive. It is what it is.

I’m not writing about this match to write about this match.

It used to be said a lot that the WWE failed following 2001 because it no longer captured a sort of cultural zeitgeist any longer, like it did in the late 1990s and 2000. That’s obviously a little less true than hardliners think, and definitely so for a few moments in the 2010s.

Nothing, to me, sums up American culture in the first half of the 2010s like John Cena, fresh off of regaining the WWE Championship in a steel cage match against two absolute mopes, announcing publicly — BEFORE THE U.S. PRESIDENT, BEFORE ANYONE EXCEPT THE ROCK’S TWITTER — that Osama Bin Laden had been killed caught and compromised to a permanent end, before walking up the aisle with his gaudy belt and jorts and saluting to “Stars & Stripes Forever”.

It’s one of the funniest and dumbest things that’s ever happened.

History books will not write about this, but it absolutely will be covered by whatever the equivalent of a comedic history podcast is in the year 3000. It may be the only piece of professional wrestling that endures for centuries to come. Funnier people than me have made jokes about this, but every time I write it or think about it, it fills me with glee. It is preposterous to me in the most beautiful sort of way. It’s too stupid to exist and I am constantly thinking about the fact that it does.

I will explain the decade to my future children using the two minute video of the announcement.

I’ve made the argument here and on Twitter that decades, as we know them, don’t really start for a year or two into the decade, both in culture at large and in any subgenre of entertainment. The 1990s probably didn’t start until 1992, arguably even 1993. 9/11 is an easy one for the 2000s, but professional wrestling entered the 2000s, functionally, during the week of March 25th through April 1st, 2001. The argument can and has been made that 2010s professional wrestling seemed to begin when CM Punk sat down on a stage, and I don’t entirely disagree. This is less a cultural reset for professional wrestling than it is a cultural reset that just so happened to occur in the sphere of professional wrestling, involving a professional wrestler. It does not seem all that surprising that within five years, a WWE Hall of Famer will be on the cusp of becoming the President of the country.

This is John Cena’s legacy. It’s not the Umaga match. It’s not entirely the Rock feud, or anything against Edge, CM Punk, or Brock Lesnar. It isn’t even his significant contributions to charity. It’s being the guy to announce the death of the world’s most famous terrorist, following winning the WWE Championship, dressed like a child.

John Cena is not the wrestler of the decade.

John Cena is, however, the wrestler who opened the decade.

 

John Cena vs. Randy Orton vs. CM Punk vs. John Morrison vs. Sheamus vs. R-Truth, WWE Elimination Chamber 2011 (2/20/2011)

This was the Elimination Chamber match, with the winner challenging The Miz for the WWE Title at WrestleMania 27. 

The driving force behind the match is CM Punk’s feuds with both Randy Orton and John Cena, but everyone’s pretty great in this match. The match smartly begins with Sheamus and John Morrison, who continue to just have a sort of weird chemistry with each other. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, they’re not as good with most of their other opponents around this time, but it works. In the history of this sort of match, there’s a lot of good opening bits, but there’s also a lot of bad ones. Usually the good ones are fast moving or simply two great wrestlers unleashed, but this was a little more cautious. Slowly introducing the chamber, but saving a lot of the bigger stuff. More so biting around the edges of the thing than usual. Randy Orton then makes his way in, so he can do a lot of things to them, as he is a much bigger star. Randy took about a year to find his groove as a babyface in the ring, but he’s tremendous here. There’s an energy and looseness to him, but he always still feels slightly predatory. He’s not very likeable at all on a character level, but he’s real nice to watch here in his sort-of second peak of 2011-14. 

He gets what he wants, like usual, as CM Punk is the next one in. Very conveniently, a lot too conveniently given most other Chamber matches (not a conspiracy, just lazy booking), his pod door gets stuck halfway open. He can’t get out, and Orton is able to hit him. He drags him in and RKOs him to eliminate him, only for Hornswoggle The Computer to say it doesn’t count because of the miscue, and he gets to move back into his pod. Real crappy little thing, clearly only happening to involve the Anonymous Raw GM in this in some way. 

The other entries and eliminations come without much fervor for a while. Punk’s berth as the new final entrant allows him to take advantage and eliminate Randy Orton, so as to prolong their feud and keep him there as a WrestleMania prop for the real star. At one point, John Morrison tries one of his big setpiece bits, but the timing is a little off, and it looks more like he just falls on top of Sheamus sloppily while Sheamus waits for it to happen. Morrison gets to last until the final three, and he and Punk get to have their quietly tremendous match up one last time in any sort of way that matters. Punk also takes advantage of Morrison’s higher risks finally failing, and eliminates him after a bit. He doesn’t get to be much more than a cheap shot artist for Cena to take down at the end, but he puts so much into it that it works. In little moments where he can crowd John, he feels more convincingly dangerous than the guy he’s actually building Cena up to challenge. It’s a hell of a thing. Right after Punk is able to pin Morrison, John catches him sleeping. Cena dispatches him in a way that still protects him as something a little more than a villain of the month, an FU onto the steel grating, and John Cena is Going To WrestleMania. They did a lot to still keep that match up fresh and viable, and while the match is again kind of a waste of how great this gimmick can be, it was a nice little self contained story. A schemer tried to take advantage of everyone, but the hero caught him quickly when he thought he’d won. 

Backstage, The Miz and his toadie look sideways at a flat screen monitor. The Miz holds his title up at the television set for some reason. Great reminder that no matter how good they can make it for these brief little moments, it’s still the WWE and it can always get so much stupider at the drop of a hat.

***

John Morrison vs. Jimmy Uso vs. Kofi Kingston, WWE WrestleMania 36 Day One (4/4/2020)

This was a ladder match for Morrison (and Miz)’s WWE Smackdown Tag Team Titles.

Yes, this is a triple threat singles match for tag team titles. Yes, it was also a ladder match in a fucking empty arena. I feel the worst for these guys so far, because they clearly put a lot of thought into the fancy things they were going to do here. A lot of very cute and fancy spots. Everything about this match in particular felt incredibly stupid though, as more than any other match on this show, it drove home how insane it is that this imposter show is even happening. I feel about this show the way that I imagine Cleveland Browns fans felt watching the team return in 1999. The colors and settings are correct, but this is deeply deeply incorrect.

After a lot of cool and dangerous and entirely ridiculous spots given uh, you know [gestures at everything], Morrison comes down with the titles when all three fight over the title holder thing that also doesn’t really need to exist.

In the defense of this match, it was also insane and accidentally violent enough to make me momentarily forget about how dumb it was that this show is happening and made me think more about how unnecessary some of the particular things in this match were. That is something, right?

This supposedly “steals the show” but I’m not sure how that can happen when there are no reactions to speak of. A stark reminder that they are going to tell the stories they are going to tell, regardless of whether or not anyone cares, or whether or not anyone is even there.

***

 

The Miz vs. John Morrison, WWE Raw (1/3/2011)

This was a Falls Count Anywhere match for Miz’s WWE Title.

In the midst of creative bankruptcy and a lack of any sort of real spirit, The Miz wound up with the WWE Championship and would hold through April, headlining WrestleMania. It all seems very embarrassing now, and to be fair, it wasn’t all that great at the time. This is part of a hamfisted attempt to legitimize him as Tough instead of just being a smart weasel with a human shield in Alex Riley. No, I don’t know why he needed to be more than that. It didn’t really work out that way because while Morrison is popular and does cool moves, beating him doesn’t exactly make you a tough guy. The Miz as a dangerous tough guy is one of the most unbelievable things the WWE has ever attempted to sell, including that these fights are real in any way. 

A certain part of this feels like a put on in the ways that Miz matches sometimes always do, like he’s less a wrestler that should exist in our reality and more like one from a movie that’s sort of about pro wrestling. Like the midcard version of Jimmy King from READY TO RUMBLE (2000) except that he’s not as talented and less suited to hold the top championship in a promotion. The weapons and nature of a match like this help him so much, as well as having an opponent as motivated as Morrison briefly was around the turn of the year. Morrison also feels hot here in a way that seems impossible for a WWE upper midcard babyface nine years later. It feels possible in part because of Miz being the way he is, anyone can believably beat him, but it lends a certain something to the match either way. That’s what this has to offer beyond some cool spots. To their credit, there are some cool spots in this, as Morrison can jump off of things and add in little touches like still selling a slightly hurt knee from a ladder match two weeks before it. He is much better here than his opponent, which makes the outcome disheartening in a classic kind of WWE way, where someone contributes nothing and then wins, because it’s just been decided that they’re Special and nothing can ever shake that.

In the end, he pays for doing cool things because in WWE, you should never do cool things.

Following that, The Miz makes some real WWE Faces at him before hitting the Skull Crushing Finale on the floor for the win to keep the title. 

This made the big list of stuff to go over because I had remembered really liking it. I’m posting it less because of that and more because it’s a tremendous way to illustrate a lot of the problems with 2010-11 WWE (and beyond…) in one match. It is cool at times, but only a fraction as intense as it constantly takes credit for being. The narrative in front of you doesn’t really line up with the narrative being shouted at you from commentary. I still like it, to some extent, but I’m not really sure what I liked about it so much at the time. It’s a three boy, but a borderline three boy. I had stopped using hard drugs, so I don’t really have that excuse the way I did for weird things in 2009 and 2010. John Morrison individually is very good in this. I don’t consider myself a big John Morrison fan, but he was always capable of performances like this, and if he spent time in companies that were able to put him in situations like this more often, he might very quietly be a top 100 wrestler of the decade. This is WWE though, and The Miz is the one here that matters. The weird looking company man keeps his title because he has been preordained and John Morrison has not.

Commentary acts as though he overcame something much more grueling than it was and in a much more impressive fashion that he did. Part of that oversell is a heel act, which shows the problems with having the voice of the company level play by play man do a heel act. It’s hard to tell what’s part of his specific act and what’s actually the thing the company is putting out there. That’s a little bit less troublesome in a situation like this though, when both absolutely suck and aren’t worth listening to. Believe your eyes, and not your ears. Wrestling is best when both line up, explaining why WWE is rarely good at all.

**3/4