Back to that Black Friday Sale commission work. This one comes from Darren. You too can buy a review of any match you’d like over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon at $5 per match. If you’d like more (or less? I can review parts of a match if you are short on cash?), we can negotiate in the DMs.
This was for Michaels’ WWF Title.
To get it out of the way, yeah, there’s a bullshit finish. I don’t especially care. I think this is a great enough match to where the lack of a real finish simply means this can’t be even greater than it already is. Given that we get twenty five plus minutes of what this looks like before than and given that it comes right about at what would logically be the end of the match, it doesn’t feel like I was robbed in any way. To me, nothing fundamentally changes about the way I view this match because it ended with a disqualification instead of a pinfall. It’s the right fight to have a lot of times, especially with regards to matches in this company, but it doesn’t feel like much of a real issue here.
As for the match, it’s one of the all time conundrums.
Here, we have a match in which work on the hand plays a major role in how the match unfolds later on, hitting on not only a WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG? level but also hitting on one of those other little tropes I love a lot, a match suddenly changing at an unexpected moment as a consequence of something that happened.
On the other hand, it’s a Shawn Michaels match.
However, this is one of the best Shawn Michaels matches ever.
It’s not exactly a secret that I don’t like Shawn Michaels.
Much of that specifically has to do with his second run, which I find overrated to the point of feeling gaslit sometimes. It’s not to say he’s never had good matches, but it’s a career of stuff that I rarely loved, while seeing these stunning reactions. That and everything he did personally, including the obviously fake back injury and cloaking himself in a cross upon return. While the first run evoked the same hyperbolic praise that one is accustomed to with most periods of Shawn’s career, the two years or so prior to his back “injury” in 1998 saw the best versions of Shawn that could have ever existed, and are the only two years of his career that I have very little issue with. The 1997-98 bad guy run in particular is the best work of Shawn’s career, as it felt like the only Shawn run ever when he was actually being true to himself (that is, a appallingly loud and obnoxious piece of shit), but 1996 saw most of the best babyface work of Shawn’s career as well, despite unbelievably offputting things like ending pay-per-views by stripping and having Vince McMahon on commentary with off-the-charts levels of lust in his eyes and voice for everything Shawn did.
In a near career year, this is the best of all of those matches, and the best match Shawn Michaels ever had as a theoretical good guy.
The trick, shockingly, is that this doesn’t look much like a Shawn Michaels match at all.
For once when tasked with someone different or who doesn’t fit perfectly into some Shawn Michaels bullshit epic, Shawn’s response isn’t to try and shove them into his match anyways regardless of what the opponent does well. Mick Foley isn’t going to fit into a normal Shawn Michaels match, and so this is something different. For once (outside of working with friends, in which case he’ll move heaven and Earth to accommodate them and shine them up), it’s Shawn Michaels crafting a match around what someone else can do and the gifts that they have. So here we have a more grounded, more of a sprawling sort of a match, and definitely one with more thought put into it than usual.
After a hot start, Shawn begins using Mankind’s manic nature against him and wrestling a smarter match than usual. He suplexes Mankind on the floor once and his leg hits the steps. Much later in the match, he barely avoids the Mandible Claw two or three times, and then attacks the right hand. Beyond the desperation present in these attacks that makes this match feel different and like a real challenge that puzzles Michaels, it’s also something that succeeds because of the way it’s done. Shawn Michaels is not so smart that he necessarily plans to trip Mankind up, outmaneuver him, and take a leg away and then go to the hand to disable the Mandible Claw, but smart enough that when things happen, he takes advantage of them. It’s a great choice, because while the former wouldn’t feel quite right and is much more of a Bret Hart style attack, Shawn Michaels succeeding because he’s a lucky opportunist is exactly on the nose enough to play as genuine.
What also plays as especially smart is that while Shawn is capable of exploiting situations in front of him, he’s not an actual technician and has no follow through. Mankind is hurt, but the whole deal is that he has a higher pain threshold than anyone else in wrestling. When he can do things like get Shawn off the leg, Shawn never goes back to it. He’s so rattled by Mankind doing things like using a ringside casket as a weapon or being willing to do things out in the aisle that he never goes back to the leg. The same thing comes with the hand, as Mankind does every other move he can think of and even, stunningly, a try at a fancy cradle. It’s both an incredibly neat way to tell the story but also a perfect explanation for why a scatter-brained mostly-flash wrestler like Shawn Michaels would go back to the work he knows.
As one may be able to tell, this all succeeds to the level it does because of Mankind.
He’s incredible here, a virtuoso performance in terms of this sort of a thing. When the matches takes different directions, such as focusing on his knee or later on his hand, he spends the rest of the match still focused on these things and never allowing them to fade out of mind. They’re pieces here that could easily become elements that feel like a waste of time in the hands of someone far lesser, but Foley is always hobbled because of the knee from that moment on. With regards to the hand, he doesn’t go out of his way or make a show like with the constant hobbling, but he holds his hand in a certain way that feels real and natural as someone who’s hurt a hand and still had to work with it. A clear effort to keep it as still and tight to the body as possible, whenever possible. More than that, the choices he makes on offense to sell the Mandible Claw being taken away are the exact sorts of interesting approaches that I wish more people would take. It’s more than just communicating that this is physically disabling, it’s the thought about how this changes the match.
It’s not just one great approach to selling that Mankind takes in this match, it’s two of them, and he does them both perfectly.
That isn’t to say that Shawn is worthless here or that this is some kind of masterful one man performance from Foley in which he weaves something beautiful around Shawn Michaels which renders Shawn as little more than a piece of the set. That’s not fair. Shawn’s good here. He’s not asked to do too much more than his usual pieces of offense and simple work in terms of the new directions the match takes, but he turns in one of his better performances anyways. He’s able to nail all the character beats well and the moments where they’re not on the same page and just trade these great punches and scuffle about are the rare time when Shawn being a real shithead actually benefits the match.
For once, everything works.
It’s another example of what happens when the machine runs like it’s supposed to. An interesting match and an interesting story, not only with people who have the abilities needed to pull it off, but shape the story to those abilities. Mankind turns in perhaps his best antagonistic performance ever, and I’ve never seen a Shawn Michaels match with him cast as the hero in which he delivered a performance as good as the one here. It’s a match clearly designed to establish toughness in him as he’s able to use Mankind’s game against him in the end with the table spot and superkicking a chair into Mick’s face right before the non-finish, but honestly, it works. At least in this moment, it does. He’s not Bret Hart, he’s not John Cena, he’s no Punk or Bryan, but for once, he captures that sort of a classic champion feeling. Catering the match to an opponent, coming off as an actual blue collar wrestling champion instead of the fortunate Golden Boy he often comes across as, and wrestling a match with thought to it. For once, he feels like the sort of babyface I could actually like. It’s the highest compliment I could ever give him.
Fittingly, the one time Shawn Michaels conducts himself like a top babyface worth cheering for, it results in one of the best matches of his life.
HANDWERK 