It’s the last of the Black Friday Sale commissions, hitting Big E. Vil’s final submission. You too can pay me to watch and then write about wrestling matches over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match, and if you have aims on something else, feel free to hit those DMs and we can talk.
For this last one, I was simply asked to pick my favorite Royal Rumble ever.
Every few years, someone I’m talking to or someone on Twitter will do Rumble rewatches in January and I’ll think that I should do that. I’ll hit the old favorites mentioned above, but inevitably when I get to this one, I’ll just stop with this one because few of them ever feel as “correct” to me as this does.
There aren’t a lot of Royal Rumble matches I really like. There are hardly a shortage of great Royal Rumble moments ever. The problem is that many of the Rumble matches at large struggle to connect good sections to each other, and even versions in recent years feel more like a fun spectacle than a great match. They’re often poorly organized, especially in the last ten years, with long dead patches where the ring fills up and nothing of much note happens. Often times, they’ll peak before the end, and wind up also being a victim of these matches having easily predictable winners more often than not. It doesn’t seem all that hard, having seen all of them, to do the math on a good Royal Rumble. Interesting order, stories throughout the match, If pressed, I’d say obviously 1992, then 1997, the run from 2001 through 2005, 2007ish, maybe 2010 or 2011, 2014, 2016 (if I remember it right), and then 2020. Given that it’s been running for over thirty years, that’s not a great hit rate. Usually you need either one or two long narratives throughout (1992, 1997, 2004, 2016, 2020) or a lot of cool stuff happening almost all the time (2003, 2001, 2007, etc.), and very few Rumbles have one, let alone one or the other. So this isn’t all that hard of a question, and not one that I struggled with at all.
I know immediately that 2001’s is my favorite Rumble ever.
No hesitation.
Part of that is the fact that I was at the perfect age to really love a big WWF production (11) the first time I ever saw it, but I’ve seen it like a million times now and what worked about this originally still works so extraordinarily well.
Outside of one admirable endurance run by a great wrestler like a Flair or Benoit or Austin or Mysterio, this is a Rumble that gets it almost all right. This feels like the first time everyone came together and got the formula exactly right for what a “modern” Royal Rumble can be. Your big monster run, your endurance run, your weird nostalgia bit (something that’s been largely absent from Rumbles for the last five or six years, maybe even back to 1993 with Bob Backlund), a funny celebrity piece, dramatic moments between big stars, the face/face staredown (perhaps most comically utilized ten years later when they tried it with Cena/Orton and the reaction was hilariously muted), all it. They’re all facets that we recognize, but this is the first time they’re all tied together this well, put together into a blueprint that almost every Royal Rumble for the next twenty years has copied to some extent. If not built with this blueprint in mind, it’s certainly one that it feels like every Rumble since has taken some sort of a look at.
Being important and being groundbreaking doesn’t mean that something’s great by default, but I don’t think very many other Rumbles ever did as much with these little pieces and tropes as this match did in 2001.
It’s not to say there aren’t moments here of dead space. There are. Particularly in the last third or so as they transition to the final set of guys in there as they load up the ring with guys like Bradshaw and Hardcore Holly and Albert and the like so that Big Show can run through them, but there’s so much less dead space than in almost every other Rumble match. What dead space there is is much less objectionable than usual, because it’s at least honest. It’s not dead space because they don’t have any ideas, it’s a valley in between significant peaks, filling the ring up to do big and impressive pieces of classic WWF spectacle bullshit.
What really works so well about this one compared to most others is how well it’s assembled. Primarily, it’s how well things flow from the next bit to the next bit, but also in how well executed these things are and how different they are from each other. It’s not the only Royal Rumble ever with distinct parts and sections (see: 2010’s CM Punk led first third, then going into the Shawn Michaels drama, then ending with Edge’s return), but it is the one that I think balances all of these segments the best, and which transitions between them with more grace than any other.
A Hardy Boyz led first few minutes leads to the Drew Carey spot. That leads immediately to Kane’s run and the Hardcore Rumble element with guys like Raven, Blackman, and Saturn that’s so wildly different from most other segments in Rumble history. As soon as that’s over, another star in The Rock enters, and he and Kane lead the next bit. The Big Show returns, leading to everyone getting cleared out, before The Rock gets a big hero moment in eliminating Show — a distinct little message about Rock’s improvement from year to year, having no problem doing it in 2001 after barely getting Show out to win the previous year. Show has his revenge with a Chokeslam through the announce table outside, giving Rock an out for the rest of the match even when he gets up, and one sold properly as such. Undertaker and Stone Cold (complete with sneak attack from Triple H to bloody him up real good going in) and Rikishi and Haku make their way down for the final run, which is as good as most of them ever. The Rock vs. Stone Cold is as great as always, with another little teaser of how The Rock is a lot closer to Austin than he was when Austin went down in 1999. It’s Kane who winds up eliminating The Rock when he’s about to get Austin out too in a little bit of a surprise, smartly not allowing Austin to get a single thing over The Rock before the all-time WrestleMania main event a few months later.
Kane seems weak on paper, if one hasn’t seen it, but the real thing here is how well the match does building him up to that point. Not only all the people he throws out, setting a record that stands for thirteen years, but how much he survives and how long he sticks around. Combined with Austin’s crimson mask, they’ve at least created that vital “well, maybe” that opens the door to believe anything, even if that’s just turning Kane into someone that it feels impressive for Stone Cold to eliminate, and for creating a situation with Austin’s blood and pre-match attack that it feels impressive for Austin to have overcome. Instead of the big endurance run going to someone the Rumble is trying to make with a win (Flair, Benoit, Rey), this match takes a totally different approach, and combines the Endurance Run with the Diesel Push to totally rebuild Kane as a genuine threat, get him to the end, and allow Stone Cold to feel like he’s really genuinely pushed through something to win, while also not having him totally overcome old foes Rock or Undertaker just yet, to keep those alive for later in the year.
It’s a masterful piece of booking in a few different ways, carried off perfectly with a career level performance from the big guy in executing the simple idea, and yet another 100% picture perfect turn from Austin as our hero.
This is never quite as great as it is in my brain when I rewatch it, but memory’s a son of a bitch and that’s just how it goes sometimes.
It’s still my favorite and I’ll watch it again in two or three years, having retained nothing but the best parts of this.
star rating Royal Rumble matches feels like a very silly thing to me. ***1/2? ***1/4? i don’t know. i love this one though. take that away from this instead of a number, you freaks.
I don’t make a habit out of reviewing the Royal Rumble. It’s a hard thing to do a real analysis for because of all the moving pieces and the emphasis simply on activity over anything else. Also because many of them simply are not great, outside of your rarities like 1992, 2001, 2004, 2007, and arguably a handful of others.
However, I don’t know how I can not cover this.
Part of that is a sort of handout to anyone following my writing since before this blog existed, because writing about it at length Elsewhere was a piece of writing that a lot of people really liked.
The other part of that is because holy shit. I wrote in the 2014 YEAR IN LISTS article that the skeleton key to the entirety of WWE history up to that point existed in the year that the WWE had in 2014. In this match, one can find the skeleton key for every year that the WWE has had since.
In a classic bit of hyperbole, I called it at one point the worst match of all time. That’s not entirely fair. There are trainees working 2020s IWA Mid South shows or other lower level independent shows putting on worse matches like this. Not to put anyone out there like that, but I’ve seen several of them on IWTV live steams just in the last month. Almost everyone in this match had some basic level of competency that puts them above the sorts of people having truly all-time matches. I think to hold claim to that, you need more than simply bad booking.
It is however the single worst booked match of all time.
The best matches and angles are lessons. They’re moral tales. Realistic tales and valuable lessons about people getting what they deserve, and actions having consequences, and hard work paying off. Jimmy Loves Lacey/Jimmy’s entire ROH career arc, Corino and Homicide, Steen and Generico, Homicide’s chase, Hero/Tornado/Candice, Zayn and Owens, Misawa and Kawada, Austin and McMahon, Bryan and The Authority, etc. This is the opposite. If you look to this match for a lesson, you will find nihilism.
The first thing to go over here is that Roman Reigns clearly is not ready. That’s not to say he’s bad. He’s becoming a very good wrestler and goes on to have a wonderful 2015. It’s impossible to say whether Lesnar/Reigns at WrestleMania 31 would have been as great as Lesnar/Bryan with this set up and this story (as opposed to their 2018 encounter), but it doesn’t feel too insane to say it’s probably a wash there also. So, you know, Roman’s fine. He’s like six to twelve months off from being ready, and that’s especially considering Daniel Bryan. You can maybe argue if Bryan wasn’t around that, yeah, sure. But with a more popular and better wrestler around, with a better story both individually and against Lesnar, and Roman dropping bomb after bomb after bomb on the microphone (Jack & The Beanstalk wasn’t even two weeks before this, an all-time dude that would get anyone else’s main event push killed within moments of Vince hearing it), there’s no real reason to go through with it. There’s especially no reason to go through with it like THIS.
It’s a match that’s deliberately harmful, conducted with the grace of an addict consuming all of the drugs/alcohol/junk food in their domicile at the moment so that it will be gone and they won’t have to do any tomorrow. The entire match feels like this thing they’re doing to force themselves to go with Roman Reigns, because the match goes out of its way to destroy everything else that they could possibly go with. Every other person in this gets eliminated. They can’t get mindfucked like they did in 2014 and get pressured into a three way, they can’t give up on Roman after all that they burned down to get him here and to WrestleMania.
Which naturally makes it all the funnier when they bail on going all the way with Roman two months after this.
Beyond the thing everyone knows about, it’s also just a really poorly done version of this match. They blow through many of the workhorses early on that you traditionally count on to lead a match like this. The entire first half seems dedicated solely to getting Bray Wyatt over, as he runs through most of the field, and even gets rid of a guy like Luke Harper who can be counted on to be the backbone of a match like this for at least 50% of the runtime.
Daniel Bryan is able to come in early on, an obvious set up for a classic iron man performance en route to the obvious. The match is immediately more interesting and exciting with him in it. That goes for a purely mechanical sense, as the best wrestler in the world and the greatest of all time is able to get the most out of everyone he comes into contact with, but also in the sense of audience engagement. He’s obviously still The Man, having yet to be really defeated in any fair sense since SummerSlam 2013, and with the crowd supporting him like nobody else on this show outside of John Cena. It’s classic top guy shit. The machine working as it should.
Of course, he is then eliminated halfway through the match in incredibly nonchalant fashion, naturally by Bray Wyatt.
As if it’s not enough, the immediate next entry is there almost entirely to rub it in everyone’s faces. It’s one of the most hateful things the company has ever done to its audience, and that is an especially high bar.
You know what happens after this.
Nothing works.
The plan was to get Bryan out of the way before Roman Reigns could come out, but that shit does not work. First of all, the entire build to the match was based around the two of them as the only possible winners. Everyone else in this match is a midcarder or a loser without momentum. In an attemept to not get Roman Reigns booed in his big moment, the match not only fails to do that, but telegraphs the result of the match with the back half of it still to unfold.
Most important is that it doesn’t work at all. Of course it doesn’t. The entire Bryan rise was based on this idea that the crowd was willing to burn everything down for Bryan, to turn on entire matches and segments. Naturally, the same happens here, and doubly so. The 2014 Rumble crowd reaction was a response to Bryan being excluded, and him being treated like shit in the match a year later doesn’t magically fix anything, because it happened in such a dull and phony way that it blows the entire thing apart. If the crowd isn’t chanting for Daniel Bryan, they’re either booing indiscriminately for anything and everything happening in the ring or they’ve gone entirely silent. It’s not just the Bryan stuff though. Genuinely. There’s a chunk right after Bryan is gone in which they boo every single person to come out (Goldust, Kofi Kingston, Adam Rose, Roman Reigns, Big E) before finally cheering the Damien Mizdow act. He’s eliminated within ten seconds of getting into the ring. There are people in this match like Cesaro or Dean Ambrose or Dolph Ziggler who grab the crowd’s attention too, only to be swiftly cut off and deposited outside.
With Ziggler especially, it feels especially depressing and final, because this isn’t a guy yet that’s been beaten to death with shitty and deliberately harmful booking against Bray Wyatt or some losing streak. He’s off the hottest few month stretch of his career to end 2014, and this is the culmination. Beyond just what the match tried to do to Bryan, it’s also the final heat death of whatever was left of Dolph Ziggler.
That’s sort of the other thing about this.
That it’s The Big Show and Kane doing this.
As perfect of a symbol of the old guard as any two wrestlers left, teaming up to get rid of all the younger guys you actually like and want to see succeed, being set up as the big and incredibly obvious obstacle for Roman Reigns to get past, as if that would help anything. It might be something if it was Luke Harper and Bray Wyatt doing it, or Cesaro or new monster heel Rusev, but it’s this deliberate choice of the most boring and frustrating route, even when Rusev is in the match until the end himself. Roman also barely does anything in the match. It’s hard to say if that’s because he’s still inexperienced enough to not improvise or if it was a deliberate sort of thing to shield him from the reaction so everyone could say it wasn’t about him specifically, but it’s there. So he’s lying around while all the other babyfaces do the far more exciting work, giving zero reason for a hostile crowd to ever be won over. Forget performance, there’s barely even achievement to speak of. He’s a ghost until the last moments.
Roman Reigns eliminates both of the old men to thunderous boos, which audibly grow when he begins to mount that comeback.
Rusev is the last man left, but The Rock returns to help his shitty little cousin-nephew out.
Naturally, they also fuck this up, with the Rock solving Roman’s problem almost entirely on his own. Roman can throw Rusev out, and he wins the Royal Rumble. The Rock raises his cousin’s hand, and he himself is mystified by the reaction. The Rock being an incredibly savvy and smart marketing guy has yet to associate himself with Reigns again on WWE television, unless I’m forgetting something, and that sure doesn’t feel like an accident.
Nothing good came of this. Nobody benefited, except for the guy whose elimination caused the crowd to turn on the match entirely with half of it still left to go, once again becoming a martyr, which is the only thing the WWE still has a 100% success rate at creating in the last ten years. The company ruined its big babyface hope for the future in this match. Roman Reigns never became the babyface that he very easily could have been. That’s not entirely on this match, it’s on years and years of mismanagement including somehow waiting FIVE AND A HALF YEARS after this to let Roman be a bad guy, but it all starts here. In an hour, there were maybe five good and exciting minutes. This is the worst booked match of all time, and I don’t have enough things to say about it. I don’t know that anyone can.
On a personal level, it’s the most defeated that I’ve ever felt as a wrestling fan. It’s close to the angriest. It’s the last time I really got like outright MAD ONLINE at a WWE booking decision, the sort of mad where you don’t want to log off and just want to read and listen to other people also being really mad, and then it sort of just dissipates after a day and a half. There are things in the following months in wrestling that I got a lot of joy out of, so I can’t say it ruined wrestling or anything, but I was genuinely kind of bummed out about wrestling for a solid few months after this. I’ve certainly never liked the WWE in the same way since this happened (so maybe it’s not all bad!). It’s a pretty significant match in my individual fandom.
At the time this show happened, I was in college and lived like five minutes from the campus gym. I started going more and more because of some personal issues (you gotta wait for the 2015 YIL sorry) that really only went way for the sixty to ninety minutes that I would do cardio and lift heavy things. Part of getting myself to do that more and more was podcasts, and having known one of the members since forum posting in the 2000s, I primarily listened to the RBR podcast. A long show that dropped weekly, not capable of getting me through the entire six days of workouts (Saturdays off, you gotta rest one day at least), but it handled most of it. Anyways, the show after this is one of my favorite episodes of a wrestling podcast ever, and one of the only memorable wrestling fan podcasts that’s ever been recorded. Not sorry. Most of you are boring. It was a three or four hour discussion of the show, with one of the hosts doing a Don Hughes level troll bit in defense of every second of the booking and everyone else being as apoplectic as many of us were. There was an analogy on the show that’s always stuck with me, that I’ve shared with others, and I’m not 100% positive which of them came up with it, so I will instead credit nobody but the show itself and repeat and expand upon the concept.
The 2015 Royal Rumble was like going to a restaurant or a friend’s house or anywhere for dinner. A year ago, you went here and you had some great chicken, some of the best chicken that you ever have. Traditionally, this is a place that serves steak and maybe you like chicken more, but you know what the deal is (buy the ticket, take the ride). You go there and you order the chicken, but they say there’s none of that. You settle for a steak. However, they make a show out of bringing out all of the chicken that they have and throwing it into the trash in front of you. On top of that, they claim to serve you a steak, but in actuality, someone has just taken a shit on your plate and the owner tries to pass it off as steak. Maybe there’s some bits of steak in there. Weird apologists for the restaurant as why it’s so bad to eat shit, criticize you for expecting chicken, and pretend steak and shit taste roughly the same. Perhaps they wonder what the internet dining community had to say about a meal that was served in 2005, as if the internet was invented in 2012.
You get a nice beer with your plate of shit. An apology. Not enough to not shit on your plate, but a…you know, hey, sorry we shit on your plate. You like beer though right? Beer is The Rock.
And it’s great.
I like beer. I like beer a lot.
You still just took a shit on my plate though?
I know this is a steak restaurant. Your specialty isn’t chicken. Other places make good chicken, but this is the biggest restaurant and they have the best chicken and over the last year, they’ve had the best best chicken meals, even if it’s not what they market themselves as or what the owner sees them as. I can deal with that. I’ll even have a steak, because they can make some good steak when they set themselves to it too. What I’m not especially interested in is paying for a hot log clogging up my plate and then being lectured for not being happy about it.
At some point, everyone gets sick of eating shit and stops lining up for it.
It’s not the only restaurant in town.
I am not obliged to eat shit every time I get hungry. Nobody is.
I’d love to tell you I stopped immediately, that I never tried again. It wouldn’t be true though. I’m a stubbornly loyal viewer, especially once I get into a routine of watching something regularly. The best I can tell you is that I was done by the end of the year. It took the interminably long Seth Rollins vs. Kane feud to break me free entirely of the weekly viewing habit, but this is the last point in which I remember ever being able to be let down by the company and more effectively, caring enough to be let down at all. It’s the stupidest and most insulting match in history, a match in which they tried to end the Bryan thing one and for all, but inadvertently salted the Earth before their new crop had finished growing. It’s a beautiful sort of cosmic thing in the end, that the price for killing this off was that Roman Reigns could also never truly be accepted as a top babyface either.
A must-see match, and truly, a generational achievement.
One of the most fascinatingly bad pieces of business in wrestling history.
Daniel Bryan is back, and he is still the best wrestler alive.
Along with him comes a WWE television six man tag working when you plug in Bryan and the now former Shield. Doesn’t matter if it involves Kane and Big Show. Something about this combination simply works and clicks immediately, even if two of them are now on Bryan’s team.
To be fair, it’s not all on Bryan. By that I mean that it’s a lot on Dean Ambrose too. He’s been selling a leg injury lately and after the initial fun Roman vs. Rollins exchanges, the heels get to work on Dean Ambrose. In most cases, I would say “on Dean Ambrose’s knee” because I think clarity is important and I like to paint the clearest possible picture. However, that’s not really what they did and it makes the selling of Ambrose all the more noteworthy and impressive. The transition to him as the face in peril revolves around the leg but save a cut off or two from Kane and The Big Show, they largely stay away from it and just let it exist as this thing holding Ambrose back from 100% strength. It always bothers him, and he’s so great at selling it in every type of way. When he fights up in a routine chinlock, he’s fighting up on one leg. It’s great stuff, and surprising given how rarely you get anything approaching real hard effort from Ambrose in 2015, or from late 2014 on. It’s hard to say Kane and The Big Show are outright better than Rollins, especially ten days out from one of Seth’s career performances, but it’s arguable that they bring as much to this match as he does, and that’s not a great thing for him at this point.
While Ambrose is so impressive in this match, there is something just perfect about the Daniel Bryan hot tag at the end.
Beyond just that he’s a master at putting it together and keeping it fresh, it just feels right again. It amounts to nothing but spit in the face ten days from now, but in the few minutes between Bryan getting the tag and the end of this match, something just feels cosmically correct again about the company. The most popular wrestler in the company is beating up the heels and everybody is with it. It’s beautiful. It’s fleeting and a little infuriating in retrospect because of how obvious it is, but it’s great all the same.
Most of all, you can experience very clearly in these moments what it looks and sounds like when people are genuinely excited for something. There’s crowd_cheer.mp3 when Roman does some stuff, you get crowd_boo.wav when the heels cut Our Heroes off, but when you can see the crowd stand up when Bryan comes in and hear an actual crowd response, it all seems phony in retrospect. It makes all the sense in the world, because most other WWE babyface acts seem just as phony compared to Bryan doin g his thing in the final moments of the match.
The good guys cut off the bad guys, and Bryan beats Kane with the running knee for a little revenge.
A fun last hurrah for this combination. More importantly, a great and undeniable sign of where fan support really lies going into the Royal Rumble! I can’t wait for Lesnar vs. Bryan at Wrestlemania!
This was a Survivor Series elimination match, with The Authority’s jobs being on the line against the jobs of everyone on Team Cena, with the exception of Cena because he’s too big of a cash cow to get rid of. To make it worse, they’ve built the match around what team The Ryback would join and a last second Erick Rowan babyface turn, neither of which has much bearing on the match at all.
It’s some bullshit everyone knows will be undone in six weeks or less, but when the bell rings, it doesn’t matter so much. It doesn’t matter because there’s a particularly good Michael Cole performance to sell the absolute shit out of the thing, but also because of how well this is put together. It’s one of the best assembled pieces of classical WWE bullshit in recent memory, definitely since the 2013-2014 peak period ended. It has to be. Look at that roster. All respect to what good big men guys like Show and Henry were once, but in 2014, there’s three wrestlers in this match who can really be trusted and I’m pretty sure you can figure that one out. Necessity is the mother of inventions, and while this doesn’t exactly invent or reinvent the format, necessity forces them to dip into the old magic to make this work. It’s genuinely one of the best booked Survivor Series elimination matches ever, really only topped by other big dramatic matches like Winner Take All in 2001 and the Austin vs. Bischoff one in 2003, which had the benefits of better line ups and more shortcuts (blood, a hot crowd) that the WWE either isn’t allowed or has burned away by this point.
If not for the ending, it still might be the best one period.
A big part of that is that for once, they all seem to get exactly what each guy in this match can do and how to use that to achieve maximum drama. Mark Henry running right into the big right from Big Show for an immediate elimination at the start is a little wasteful, but having the worst booking recently (unlike the far more useless Kane), he’s the most expendable. It’s a great opening otherwise, this big thing immediately going wrong for the bad guys. Beyond that, there’s a great grasp on who can do what. You can really only trust Cena, Harper, and Ziggler to stick around for any length of time, so they move people in and out real quickly. The booking itself also works with that super well. Rollins can’t be counted on in large segments outside of big moves, so he’s utilized in a way that genuinely does help his growth as a near top guy, by always being the one to cut off a big offensive by one of the good guys. He cuts off Ryback to let Rusev finish him off, he cuts off Cena, he cuts off Rowan to let Harper pick him off, he’s the one who transitions to Ziggler being isolated, all of it. The point guard of the team, every major success by Team Authority flows through Rollins. You can only fix so much with booking, but it’s the best that his skillset has been employed post-Shield.
The control work on Ziggler itself is all real great. Harper carries the load as the best wrestler on the team, but Rusev and Rollins do pretty well sticking and moving. Ziggler doesn’t adhere to the Steamboat Rule perfectly, but there’s some element of that in his performance. The MVP of the segment might not even be in the ring though, because in some of the big moments, I was drawn to John Cena on the apron. He’s always shouting encouragement at Dolph, signaling to the crowd that it’s only two when Dolph kicks out, encouraging them too, and just living and dying with every hope spot and cut off that the guy suffers through. It’s not all John, because the booking and performance work in unison, but the crowd really genuinely does wake up and get into Ziggler as it goes on. One particularly great sequence sees the match break down without him getting to the tag. The result is that it can spill outside more organically than just jumping to the next bit, and Ziggler is able to dodge Rusev’s multi-announce table running splash and get in, eliminating the big guy by count out. Not only is it this great little hope spot in and of itself, it’s also the closest that Rusev’s come to being beaten since getting to the main roster.
The tag eventually comes, but when that Rowan elimination happens and when Cena is cut off real quickly, The Big Show comes in. He spent that last segment checking on a spent Ziggler outside, trusting in John to handle it, but John didn’t handle it. Show comes in and punches him out for Seth to cover and eliminate. Show shakes hands with Triple H and walks out for a count out self-elimination. It’s another thing that in a larger sense means nothing. It’s the 37th Big Show turn ever or something, they haven’t had much of an impact ever since like 1999-2000 where he turned five times in a twelve month span. It’s also 2014 and almost 2015, nobody’s really about Big Show back in a position of prominence as a top level heel. In fact, it’s going to be partially responsible for one of the worst booked matches in the history of wrestling in a little over two months. In the context of THIS MATCH though, it’s great. It’s perfect. The match presents him with a totally valid reason to become a coward, threatened with the same thing that briefly made him an Authority stooge a year ago, but now committing entirely. It’s a character move that makes sense, but one that also provides a great contrast for Cena and especially for Dolph Ziggler.
The Authority then has a 3-1 lead, and like another famous evil team two years later (I obviously mean the 2016 Cleveland Indians), they blow it and it’s wonderful.
This part in particularly is perfectly done. The initial beating, the failed bursts, the big comeback on Kane actually happening. Ziggler does it clean on Kane with a superkick and the Zig Zag, before Harper cuts him down. The process repeats, only with a boon to Harper now (as these two are currently feuding — a fact not mentioned once on commentary, naturally), as Ziggler has to go to another of his tight cradles to steal that one. The Ziggler vs. Rollins bit is then genuinely really great, and some of the best Rollins heel run stuff ever. They had like five or six TV matches full of Ziggler trying to get Rollins over as a new heel, and it’s both practice for this big moment and establishes this foundation of Rollins having Ziggler’s number that makes this payoff just so so so good. To complete the great performance, Ziggler avoids all the stuff that beat him before. He’s not the captain like Rollins is, but to continue the metaphor, it’s one of the greatest clutch performances in WWE history. 2013 Ray Allen, but if he was on the other team. 2019 Dame against OKC, right down to getting obliterated in everything that comes after taking Not A Good Shot.
Ziggler has it won with the Zig Zag, only for the bullshit to come. It’s another great call in this match, to have him get more than one visual win, because he’s then also overcoming Authority bullshit after already getting the best of Rollins. Climbing one mountain is satisfying, climbing an unexpected second one is even more powerful. J&J get taken out, Steph is sent off the apron into her lesser half, but after a second Zig Zag, Triple H gets rid of a second referee. Ziggler is hit with the Pedigree, stooge referee Scott Armstrong gets waved down, and then that’s it.
Had the match not done it like this, had the second Zig Zag done it, it’s an all time great match One of the great smoke and mirrors jobs ever is completed in the most triumphant and interesting way possible, as this beloved utility player gets the biggest win of his career right when he’s starting to peak again. The WWE does something unexpected and good and does it in the way that gets the most out of it and does the most good for the greatest amount of people.
Of course, that’s not what happens, and this is never about any of the ten men in the match
It’s Sting.
He and Triple H circle around for a while, mostly to no reaction once the Sting pop dies down, before a probably fake “THIS IS AWESOME” chant spontaneously breaks out. Sting hits his move on Hunter and then puts Ziggler on top of Rollins for the three count.
There are three people in the world who might genuinely want a Sting vs. Triple H feud and one of them is in it himself and going over at the end. Shit sucks. There’s a fair point of view regarding not doing Undertaker vs. Sting because at this point, it can never live up to anything, but given how much of a pile of shit Triple H vs. Sting was, I’m not sure that has any bearing either. Even still, there’s a way to do this without doing something like this, that overshadowed the match entirely. Ziggler overcomes a 3-1 deficit, ties Roman Reigns’ 2013 record of four eliminations, and sends The Authority packing. It’s also not just his moment, it’s also the first time since the heel turn that Seth Rollins really eats shit, and it barely feels like it happened because the end was about Sting and Triple H. Sting didn’t win the match for Ziggler, it’s one thing they get right, but it’s still this gigantic shadow over what should be a career moment. You can’t rightly say this did nothing for anyone, but it did far less than it could have.
Ultimately though, it’s not something really worth staying mad at. Another disappointment of many, one more fart sound at the end of an otherwise perfect symphony.
It’s cool that Sting got to do it. It’s also definitely not worth being upset that they robbed Ziggler of something big again when he was just getting over as a top guy again, because they were going to do that until crowds stopped falling for it and no longer went after the football when Lucy was holding it. It is what it is. While it’s not the perfect summation of the WWE at this point that the Ambrose/Rollins HIAC match was, this is right up there, and might be a better summary of the rest of the decade. Someone gets hot, things accidentally fall into perfect position, and while they technically do something good, it’s also just fodder to go into a trash dick old man feud that virtually nobody but the sort of grey brained husks who would eat any slop shoveled in front of them anyways would ever be interested in. Even in a match as great as this was — and that’s REALLY great — nothing is ultimately worth anything.
The match is exceptional though. I don’t want to get lost in the bad ending. It holds the match back from being a slam dunk pantheon match, as far as these sorts of matches go, but the work done before it both by the talent in the ring and the people putting it all together is still just a lot too great to be torn asunder by the company remembering what it was, is, and always will be by the end of it. Even the ending isn’t TOTALLY useless, even if that bright spot is unintentional. That sole highlight from the last minutes of this are that, inadvertently, because Rollins stayed down the entire time and Ziggler got up first despite taking far more punishment than Rollins, the match winds up booking Ziggler’s finish to be more powerful than the Pedigree.
It’s meaningless and unintentional and this minute stupid little detail, a total accident because Triple H isn’t actually as smart as he thinks he is, but that’s sort of the match. It’s all a fluke. A dumb happy accident that wound up way better than it should have veen. A fluke injury to an ascendant Roman Reigns giving the spotlight to Ziggler as the only one left is the sort of thing that makes this so great to begin with, because Roman could never be either as sympathetic or as good a babyface wrestler in 2014 as Dolph was here. The miracle run would never feel like a miracle, just another Hail Mary that felt like someone shouting at you to like this guy. It’s still good, but if Roman was in the spot, that’s probably all it gets to be. It’s only fitting that the only solace at the end, once they’ve built something beautiful and then suddenly tried to ruin it, is this other lovely little hollow fluke.
This was an EXTREME RULES match for Bryan’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.
To be clear, this is extremely stupid and because of Bryan’s injury weeks after this as a result of being run into the ground for the last year, it’s the only WWE Title defense Bryan gets to make on pay per view until 2018. The obvious first challenger for Bryan was Cesaro, fresh off a hot split from his anchor of a partner and the starmaking battle royal win. Of course, that didn’t happen because Cesaro never got to be anything, and instead, it’s an incredibly dull Kane feud. It’s the tired old angle of “Kane is evil again and stalks family or whatever”.
It’s not exciting and while the match is borderliine great, everything positive here happens entirely in spite of Kane, this decrepit old relic who can barely move around and which the series finale of the WWE seemed more than happy to write off with great haste a month prior.
That being said, it’s a promising sign for what might have been, as this is tried and true WWE top babyface nonsense. The sort of stuff that CM Punk never really got to do in a similar spot as Bryan in large part, the sort of goofy nonsense that really only gets handed out to guys at the very tippy top, and which explains why the WWE is the WWE and the last thirteen months was a complete mirage.
It’s a big stupid Kane match but with Daniel Bryan characteristics. You get all your big set bits — a brawl all over the arena, featuring not only stock finisher kickouts for our hero, but the survival of an announce table bump — but all done with more interesting set ups and executions than usual, and with Bryan’s manic bumping (which is truly unfortunate that he wastes a lot of those on a match like this) there to bolster it as well. Most of all, Bryan gets a big vehicle spot, as he forklifts Kane back into the ring from backstage and then does a headbutt of of it. Vince McMahon absolutely god damned LOVES commandeering or abusing a vehicle spots, it’s how you know someone is truly The Man, and it might be the most concrete evidence yet that for a solid eight or nine months, Daniel Bryan genuinely was The Guy.
Part of me thinks that it’s not that they tried to shove him down with a fucking Kane feud, it’s more that this is something that they genuinely thought would be good and work. Like Kane was still an opponent worthy of this, like all they had to do to get over him being murdered and seemingly killed off forever a month prior was just throw the mask back on him yet again and throw this back out there. Bryan’s still hot enough to make just about anything work, provided that he wins, so yeah, it’s classic WWE horse shit. It’s not an aberration, it’s not deliberately harmful, this is just what they do.
I would believe that a little more strongly had this show not then ended with Kane sitting up, shooting off fire from the stage, and having his music played while Bryan had to pretend to be afraid despite beating this loser up and winning fairly, while Michael Cole shouted that Bryan was lucky to have survived.
The golden age isn’t quite over, because there’s such an emphatic and obvious end to it a month from now, but watching this, I think that might just be a simple nail in the coffin because holy shit, the golden age is over.
This is a deeply stupid company and it genuinely was all an accident. Even if you get everything you ever wanted, the postscript is wasting Daniel Bryan’s last healthy month on a fucking Kane feud where someone who survived Evolution and all these odds then has to cower in fear over someone they literally just beat clean as a sheet. It’s bullshit. It’s obviously bullshit. Nothing ever changes at this point.
A different face is all the change you were ever going to get. Slop with a different face on the canister for the time being, the one the paypigs and pisspigs spent the last nine months shouting for. It’s not different, but for the time being, you’re stupid enough to be fooled by simply the illusion of difference.
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.
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.
To get it out of the way, yeah, maybe it was too soon. I don’t know. I think everything turned out alright for everyone involved anyways, so it’s hardly something to waste words complaining about. Should this have been on Smackdown? No. Of course not. Since the brand split softly ended around the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012, Smackdown has not mattered. WWE has sent signal after signal for the preceding eighteen months that this show was inessential. If this happens on Raw, where it isn’t spoiled days ahead of time, or even better on pay-per-view, this is even better. It’s already one of the best matches of the year and one of the most impressive and memorable things that the WWE’s done in the last twenty years, and it could have been even more than that.
And yet, absolutely none of that matters. When talent is this good and treated this well by the writing, it always shines through.
Initially, it’s your standard Bryan vs. The Shield match, with the usual changes here and there that flow from the matches and segments before it. Earlier in the show, Bryan, Kane, and Orton seemed to bury the hatchet. Orton and Bryan were given a Tag Title shot at the pay-per-view after last weeks two on two win. Kane was given a US Title shot. Bryan and Kane seemed to amicably part ways after an argument where Bryan seemed to finally shed the idea that he was the weak link by saying that, yeah, actually it was Kane. Randy Orton was a voice of reason. The match serves all of that.
Unlike a week ago, Orton and Bryan are much more willing to be a team. They’re not going to double team anyone or do the arm wringer into a double axe off the top repeatedly, but the tags come quick, and they never get in the way of each other. Kane gets in and out. Randy Orton has another tremendous mid-match hot tag, only now for The Shield to be the ones learning too, blocking the Double Hanging DDT that Randy had been using on them over the previous week, and shutting him down easier than ever before. It’s a newer idea they present here, and it’s an actual work of genius to now present the concept that The Shield are learning about these guys from match to match too in the match when they’re finally put down. They look better and more dominant than ever in the match when something finally breaks. It’s the letdown of the June 3rd win, now coupled with something else. Incredibly smart work and a super novel idea, just like virtually everything else they’re doing.
The work in control isn’t quite as great and robust as it was in the June 3rd version of this match. They don’t have as much time, because Smackdown is always cramped for some reason. My gut says that three hour Raws led to WWE writers forgetting how to format two hour shows. I’m pretty sure this is still the case. Not that it matters in this match, because it excels in other ways. The control work is fine enough. Kane gets the tag and does fine, but it sets up Bryan to now force his way in when Kane is once again dispatched with such embarrassing ease by The Shield.
The Bryan hot tag here, man. Heart eyes. It’s not as good as the one on June 3rd, just because that one was one of the best assembled hot tags I’ve ever seen, and this one is similarly on a bit of a time crunch. It also leads to a different sequence than the first iteration of this match up, so Bryan puts it together in a different way, where he doesn’t handle all three at once with separation, but instead dives onto two of them at once.
Where this maybe has an edge is the last two to three minutes, which is some of the best minor detail work in the history of the WWE. There are all these little payoffs to the Shield series so far, all these fireworks lit off perfectly in a row for maximum impact. Bryan again misses the Diving Headbutt like how they lost the six man with The Undertaker, but he kicks out this time. Kane comes through by stopping the Headlock Driver that’s got Bryan a few times now, but when Roman again takes him out, Randy strikes. Except now Roman Reigns is the one who’s learned something and he’s able to counter the RKO, hit the Spear, and go out to keep Kane away, leaving Ambrose and Rollins once again in a two on one with Bryan.
The Shield looks to have everything set up once again.
Until they don’t.
Kane finally comes through outside, dodging the Roman Reigns cut off and throwing him into the timekeeper’s area, before also chokeslamming Ambrose over it and down onto him when he tries to help. Rollins is again alone, but this time, he can’t manipulate his way into any miscommunication and there’s nobody to bail him out to stop the match. Kane pushes him off the top. This time, Orton doesn’t vanish, and he’s ready with the RKO out of the air. Bryan is waiting, and Orton lets him have it, as Bryan goes into the YES Lock. Rollins taps. Every problem with this team and with teams with Orton, Bryan, and Kane on them against The Shield in the past gets solved. Nobody hogs anything, Kane doesn’t disappear, everyone keeps their anger in check. Wrestling a perfect match, The Shield finally loses.
Why am I over the moon about a pay per view go home build up tag on the B show? I’ll god damned tell you why. Because this is everything major televised mainstream professional wrestling can and should be. Some of this is rooted in titles, but most of it isn’t. Most of this is just about personal issues and individual character arcs, and with nothing on the line, they created something really fucking special. This is as much a road map as it is a historical text.
It’s a display of the power of a good payoff and how much it can help a match and how much it can do for individual wrestlers. The result is the best non-title win payoff in the history of the company.
Because again, absolutely nothing was on the line here in any traditional way that we think of prizes in wrestling. The Shield has two different titles, neither was on the line. Nobody gained anything tangible from this, not even a title shot or just an extra percentage on the check or anything. And yet with no stakes beyond “can someone beat these heels?”, the end of this feels like the most important thing to happen in the WWE all year. People are jumping out of their chairs, and while it’s hard to ever tell with crowd_pop.wav being dubbed over, there’s a real excitement to it. For a match on the B show with absolutely nothing on the line. Eight years later, I still got into it sitting at home. It’s a wonderful thing here, and one they built largely from the ground up. Team Hell No was a comedy midcard team. Randy Orton was Randy Orton, ever the golden boy, but one who’d been ice cold for a year and a half. But since this kicked off the night after WrestleMana, The Shield now feels made as an upper midcard act, Randy Orton and Kane are reinvigorated, and Daniel Bryan went from comedy midcarder to being on the precipice of main eventing pay per views. They built something by treating every single piece like it mattered until every single piece began to feel like it mattered.
The things that can be accomplished when booking is done with care and patience are maybe never on better display in the WWE than they are in this match and this feud. The Shield was nothing seven months ago. Hell, TWO months ago, they were barely anything in the ring. This is more about the booking than match quality, but it’s a testament to their improvement that this works as well as it does too. Because with this feud, the booking went hand in hand with in-ring work in a way that WWE feuds virtually never do. Usually, finishes matter and maybe a trick here and there if we’re lucky. Here though for once, it was so much more. Every match built to the next one, leaving a window open and this germ of an idea of how maybe the thing could get done next time. Spots called back to and changed, evolving strategies that were tested out and constantly improved upon, and all of these questions of what the problem was with the babyfaces trying to do it. Team Hell No ends with Kane finally coming through for Bryan and not hindering him. Randy Orton briefly finds a shred of selflessness somewhere within him. The insecurity that plagued Bryan’s WWE so far, both as a good guy and a bad guy, is laid to rest with the win he gets here, and he moves forward with a total confidence in himself against the very best in the company.
All done in a match for absolutely nothing.
I imagine the WWE would love to tell you that Team Hell No skits is what led to Bryan being as over as he was to begin the summer of 2013. This is bullshit told to justify the decision to do that in the first place. It’s this feud. It’s this feud, that got to be so overwhelmingly smart and interesting, with the payoff like this. I wrote a few matches in this series back about how after beating and surviving Cena and all these other different combinations, the person who could do it would genuinely gain something huge. That’s what Daniel Bryan got here. It’s not the comedy or any chanting that did it. It was this months long fight against this group and against himself, this clear trial and error process in front of the world, before figuring it out like this. A likeable good guy given a mountain to climb and slowly climbing over it while everyone falls in love with him. One of those times you remember that, oh yeah, they DO actually know how to make stars after all. They did as well by Bryan here in this feud as they have by any potentially ascendant babyface since John Cena became a star, in a way that still almost has to be an accident, given how hard they tried to stamp it out once someone realized in the fall that they’d accidentally spent the last six months finally successfully building a Cena successor.
One of the most special and correct things the WWE did this decade. I cannot recommend this enough, so long as you give it the proper respect of watching it in context. Perhaps the nicest thing to say about this match and the rivalry going into it is that for once, “give this the same respect the WWE did” not only isn’t an insult, but is actually a gigantic compliment.
This comes days after Bryan’s all-time great save on the previous Friday’s episode of Smackdown, when he destroyed The Shield pretty much all on his own.
Once again, I’m watching the best Shield six man ever up until this point.
They play with all the same themes, but in the most organized and efficient package yet. Bryan once again dominates at the start, before Kane blows it and gets worked over. Randy Orton’s mid match hot tag is a great addition, both on its own merits and because it frees Bryan back up to work one in at the end instead for maximum value. Orton again seems like he has The Shield figured out just as much as Bryan does, with the Orton/Bryan team seeming like the best team up against these guys left.
Orton gets caught and worked on, and it’s the best Shield control work yet. Dean Ambrose is always grabbing at something, the sort of neurotic and consistent press that’s really fascinating to me and perfect for who he is. Rollins sticks to the high spots. Reigns gets more to do than ever in control, and he absolutely carries it with ease. One particular sequence stands out, where he transitions out of a chinlock to a full nelson, so Randy can’t elbow out like he had done to the previous hold. When Orton gets up, he swings the leg around to knee him in the side to stop the comeback. Even now in 2021 when he’s in the middle of a career run as a character working heel, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t delivered a better performance as a heel bell-to-bell than he does in this match. Orton’s able to break loose, but only after Bryan shouts at him that Seth is going up top, so Randall can dropkick him out of the air. Teamwork (TEAM WORK!).
Of course, the Daniel Bryan hot tag is perfect. Just absolutely picture perfect. The pace, the intensity, the crispness, the little changes here and there, the heat he brings out of the crowd, and most of all, the flawless way he strings it all together. I’m not certain this individually isn’t the best hot tag that I’ve ever seen.
Everything once again comes down to this idea that a team comes closer than ever to figuring out The Shield, until suddenly and heartbreakingly, they don’t. Kane tries to help, but he’s again just kind of useless. A big part of my love for these matches is the way they never really try to lie to you about what you’re seeing, and a big part of THAT is the way Kane is treated. He’s big and strong, but he’s also old and slow and not especially smart beyond just being a guy who’s been around a while. Roman is able to push his hand off of Rollins when Kane tries a double chokeslam, and Seth is able to hit his gorgeous Enzuiguri to set up the Spear. Within thirty seconds of trying, Kane’s totally taken out.
Orton tries to apply what he learned a week and a half ago on Smackdown and he evens it up by taking Rollins out with the RKO. This time, he doesn’t also take himself out with it, and the odds are actually even after his big move. Simple progression. Of course, the “until they don’t” immediately follows this big hopeful moment of improvement and knowledge. Orton tries the RKO on Roman, but he pushes him off into Bryan. He takes Randy outside after, and while Bryan is briefly groggy, Ambrose pins Bryan again with the Headlock Driver.
Relative to the other losses, this one hurts a little more, coming off the incredible Bryan save on Smackdown, and now featuring two guys who both totally get The Shield and can also handle them. There’s not a real hopeful thing coming out of this, a window cracked open just a little. The flaw is clearly Kane at this point. He’s not smart enough to see things coming and keep them all separated like Bryan does on the hot tag, and he’s not explosive enough like Randy Orton. He’s very clearly the weak link, this old man that The Shield has completely figured out top to bottom.
It’s the best Shield match yet because they got closer than ever to that perfect synthesis of compelling ideas and great wrestling. All of the strategy and match-to-match storytelling you’d want, now with two really great wrestlers in there for big hot tag runs again. The Shield tightens up in story here just as much as they did on a mechanical level throughout the match, which helps this so much even relative to something like the April 29th tag, where the middle was something of a weakness. There are still moments and it’s still the WWE to some extent, but this feels like the best possible version of what WWE TV wrestling can be. Beyond the improvement of The Shield, Randy Orton is feeling it for the first time in a year and a half. Kane is hidden. Most importantly, I’m now left without any real doubt that Daniel Bryan is the best wrestler in the world again.
This series does not miss, and this was the most accurate hit yet.
It’s the match that they should have had on pay-per-view. In theory, anyways. As usual with this series and the first six or seven months of The Shield in general, too much thought is put into these matches for them to not perfectly follow up on the matches that came before it.
As usual with this series against Daniel Bryan, it’s mechanically perfect and super exciting and always different enough to still feel incredibly fresh, but still packed with all of these great little touches. There’s a Hart Attack to pop the simple minded Canadians early on, but it’s also a direct line back to a backstage segment earlier where Bret Hart told Bryan that he didn’t think he was the weak link either. The match also continues to softly put out there that the aggressive version of Bryan is the best one. Eager to prove he’s not the weak link — because despite evidence mounting that Kane is actually the weak link, this is and has always been just an expression of insecurity — he again takes on a heavier burden than before, and doesn’t really have any problems with it now. Daniel repeatedly handles things and kicks the hell out of both Rollins and Reigns, only for Kane to be very easily cut off.
We don’t get the FULL Daniel Bryan hot tag run here, as you can’t ever trust Kane to be a face-in-peril (a major weakness of Team Hell No), but we get it in two different parts. Once again, it’s the best thing in wrestling at this point. The perfect intersection of cool moves, a ton of charisma, and a story people can easily get behind. It’s this thing people have tried to nail down forever, and it’s fitting that the greatest professional wrestler of all time is the one to do it. Fittingly, it’s this 2013 run where I first considered that not only was Bryan making The Leap (sorry to write like fucking Bill Simmons, but I read a lot of Grantland as a teenager, and it’s such a good and obvious term), but that he might just be the single best wrestler ever. He’s so great, and he’s so great at everything. Here, he puts on the sort of big bumping performance when in peril that he hadn’t quite yet in the series, working a lot with Reigns now and making him look better than ever before. Kane is also once again surprisingly decent as a hot tag. No, I won’t stop being surprised by it. Weeks don’t cancel out years. A handful of good acts don’t wash out the bad. He cleans house and Rollins takes some great bumps for him. Rollins likewise looks better than ever here, this being the rare match from him where I struggle to find a single thing I disliked. A genuinely great performance, as once more, his calling was always as a tag team wrestler.
To keep banging the drum, these tags work because the matches before them always seem to be taken into account. Someone on one side or another always seems to learn SOMETHING, and this time it’s Daniel Bryan. After Orton’s new idea on Smackdown to take Reigns out, Bryan goes after him completely outside to help Kane. He gets Rollins alone, but for some reason, he’s distracted by Bryan kicking ass. He stops him on the apron and tries to get him to go back to their corner. I’m not sure why? This particular act doesn’t make a lot of sense — it’s still the WWE after all — but it explains the finish.
The hesitation lets Roman catch Bryan’s knee off the apron into a slam outside, and the distraction off of THAT allows Rollins his springboard flying knee strike on Kane for the win.
Daniel Bryan not only clearly isn’t the weak link anymore (it’s Kane, the last two weeks has made this very clear), but he seems now like the guy who both gets how to maybe get this done, but can do so with the passion and intelligence that Orton and his team lacked three days before. ONCE AGAIN, it’s a Shield match where they win for a clear and logical reason, but with a window open that still leaves a “but MAYBE” in the air for the next one. At this point, this is one of the best tag team series in WWE history, made all the more impressive by Bryan doing it with a bad and old wrestler at his side and against a total mediocrity and a near rookie. The greatest ever.
It’s a follow up to the night before, as the three champions who lost their titles to The Shield team up for a little revenge. Also relevant is a backstage spot earlier in the night, where Kane had the temerity to try and calm down an angry Daniel Bryan, after his anger cost the team all throughout April and even the week before in the elimination match. Kane referred to The Shield sniffing out any weakness, a comment that Our Hero read into as a subtle suggestion by Kane that he was the weak link.
And so this really kicks off.
There’s all the carryover from the previous week’s match where things just suddenly all fell into place, but a small loss from replacing John Cena with Kofi Kingston. Kofi is a perfectly fine wrestler, but he lacks the punch of a John Cena, both as a wrestler and in terms of his impact on the unfolding Stop The Shield story. That being said, Kofi does seem to get that this is a bigger and more important spot than he’s had in probably like three and a half years, even if he’s just a warm body, and has his best performance in some time. Some life behind his strikes, great bumps, and a ton of real feeling energy instead of his usual “energy” that so often just feels like someone clocking in and out and doing exactly what they have to do and nothing more (which is entirely understandable!).
Daniel Bryan is, of course, absolutely immense. The “weak link” thing is immediately the story, and not in the obvious way. In an effort to prove he isn’t, Bryan now consciously takes on a bigger and bigger share, and fights angrier and meaner than ever. The hot tag is rearranged to go into the commercial break instead of being at the end so it lacks the same impact and ferocity, restrained even in some minor way because literally nothing in the world at this point can follow the Daniel Bryan hot tag. He’s a terrific face in peril too, with The Shield once again improving as a team week by week.
The big thing people note is how Roman Reigns improves in the ring with every match in 2013, especially once he begins working Bryan all the time. It’s not wrong. This is obviously the point, it’s a WWE practice dating back to all of the Evolution tags where Batista was constantly against Chris Benoit, other great wrestlers (and also Shawn Michaels), and improved significantly from the beginning of 2004 to the end. Virtually the exact same thing. The attention grabber for me in this match, in terms of noticeable improvement, was Seth Rollins. The more he and Bryan face off in these tags, the more I inevitably think about how that little fraud owes his entire career to Daniel Bryan for making him in 2008 (and Nigel McGuinness as well, and also guys like Jimmy Jacobs for plucking him out of nothing when he hadn’t shown much at all in IWA Mid South up to that point). One of the things I always used to criticize in those matches was the piss-poor attempts at trash talk by Tyler Black (now Seth Rollins). Some of the most embarrassing stuff ever committed to film in this genre. Excruciating stuff. Here though, he’s great! He leans on the Weak Link stuff a lot, but it’s much more confident and believable. It’s annoying, but annoying in a heel way where I badly want to see Our Hero get up and pop this little worm in his shit eater.
The hot tag is left to Kane, and like before, it’s not bad. It’s always been the best use for this incredibly limited wrestler, and it works now with the story. A red hot crowd certainly helps, but Kane seems motivated in this feud like he also hasn’t been in years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years. Bryan and Kofi help briefly stop the numbers game, but Kofi is sent into the post. When Kane knocks Ambrose outside, he’s able to delay Bryan just long enough for Seth to strike. He saves Roman with the springboard knee once again, The Shield’s big magic save at this point, and Roman spears Kane for the win, because he’s the actual weak link.
It’s another great Shield match, another great Shield vs. Bryan match, and another of these that comes down to the littlest things. Shield matches operating on a higher logic than everything else in the company at this time is down to all the pieces mattering, and that doesn’t just mean who does what when. As we see here, it’s just as much about who is in what position at what time, it’s as much about where Shield members are as it is about what they do. It’s both math and art, but it’s also geography in a way. There’s a gravity to it, in every sense.
HANDWERK 