The Hart Foundation vs. The Rockers, SWS Wrestlefest in Tokyo Dome (3/30/1991)

While The Rockers and The Hart Foundation never wrestled on film to the extent of the more prolific WWF tag team pairings of the time, like Rockers/Brain Busters or Harts/Bulldogs or the Rougeaus against either team, they did wrestle enough that, without going back through all of them, it’s hard to definitively say what the best was. The April 1990 SNME main event, November 1989 MSG “20:00” time limit draw, or for all its faults, the “lost” WWF Tag Team Title change from an October 1990 THE MAIN EVENT IV taping are all fair contenders and great matches. You can pick any of them and I won’t argue too much. It’s a great matchup, so ask me on three different days and you might get three different answers.

This is not among those answers, but by far, it feels like their most interesting match, largely because of location.

Not because of environment exactly, as this is a not-super-full Tokyo Dome with 36,000 in attendance, so they are not heated like a Korakuen Hall crowd might have been for the match, but in terms of the differences in the match to account for card placement in the middle of a major Dome show (something they never had to deal with before, always having a fairly clear runway), focusing more on a fast pace with super well executed basics rather than than any bigger offense even by Golden Age WWF standards, as well as slight stylistic shifts in the match.

It’s the shifts that interest me the most. Some are little things, like Bret clearly directing Neidhart to get a little more physical, including one sequence off a tag where Jim holds his boot up for a classic American spot, only for Bret to instead hold Shawn back so Jim can throw a loud club across the chest instead. In general, although not in some Valentine/Garvin type of way, the match is more physical than usual whenever Bret and Jim have a chance. The match is also more Japanese style than a Harts/Rockers tag might otherwise be, with very few double team attacks and more tags once control work was over, and more one on one fighting.

These are not big changes, but in a run by SWS full of appearances by WWF guys who could only really work the one way and failed to adapt (see a Tenryu/DiBiase match from late 1990 or throw a dart elsewhere) and on a show with some having similar problems, it’s something worth noting. These are not things that make a match great, exactly, but they’re always impressive ones to see, wrestlers adapting themselves to less common environments and succeeding in a new way.

Fortunately, underneath the fun and novel little changes, the match is also great in all the ways Harts vs. Rockers always was.

Bret vs. Shawn may not have ever been better than it was in a tag team environment (possibly their 1993 Coliseum Video cage match), and that is again the case here. The chemistry, especially with the real fast basics and sequences based on dodging and outmaneuvering each other that this match affords them, is remarkable, and makes it easy to forget some of their later failures against each other. Individually, Bret once again manages to work from above with an edge but never crossing a line, with the sort of mastery that will forever make people call that sort of a thing “Bret style” work in control. Neidhart is again at his best too setting smaller and faster guys up to take him down after a few attempts at it, and The Rockers are electric. They look like the best tag team in the world, both these awesome hot tags full of life and energy, sympathetic when called upon, awesome bumpers and sellers, crisp as hell, all of the things you want from a flying young babyface team like this. It’s around the in-ring peak for at least half of this match, arguably everyone but Bret, and the match very clearly shows why it is that a lot of people can say that with a lot of confidence.

In short, nothing all that fancy ever happens, and every inch of it is really great.

Shawn goes for a crossbody off the top, but in a kind of classic SWS mission statement, the fancy stuff falls short, and Bret rolls through into a tight pin to win.

There are better Harts/Rockers matches to see, but on top of being a great match on a great show full of other curiosities, it’s another one of those quiet things that I find so impressive, as good and great wrestlers have advantages removed and handicaps put on them, and in the mark of greatness, find a way to succeed anyways.

Wonderful meat and potatoes.

***

Hulk Hogan vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE SummerSlam (8/21/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent contributor YB. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

At the time, this was talked about as a bad match. Being fifteen at the time and just getting into ROH and the indies as a whole, it happened at, like, the worst possible time for me to like it. Years later, I think people came to it as like some great Shawn performance in the face of it, doing these over-bumping and over-selling bits as some kind of protest movement as if he didn’t do this shit all the time, the sort of thing I eye-rolled and used my hand to make a jerk-off motion about.

Years later, I can appreciate this entirely for what it is.

Pure spectacle, and the joy of seeing my least favorite wrestler of all time getting owned, in spite of every motion and attempt to claim that he wasn’t actually.

Before anything else, I want to say that Hulk Hogan is far from my favorite wrestler. Beyond the obvious very very very upsetting quotes, there are things like basically his entire WCW tenure, where he just about burns down the greatest wrestling promotion that there ever was in service of his own ego, in many ways and at many different points. Even beyond that, going into the far more direct and specific, there are things like what he did to Randy Savage in 1988 and 1989 or what he did to Goldberg a decade later or what have you. I like a lot of his wrestling, I think people who think he was bad have simply never seen the 1980s house show footage or maybe just have boring/bad takes, but I am not super invested in defending him, outside of a defense of why he might make my GWE ballot.

However, I have to say, that in the spirit of Winston Churchill once saying that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons, there are greater enemies among us.

Which is to say that when Shawn Michaels goes after Hulk Hogan, I am here to make nothing but favorable references to Hulk Hogan in this, the public forum that I have.

This match fucking rules.

Before we get into everything else, it is a genuine spectacle. That’s not an easy thing to achieve all the time. It requires more than just great booking or performances, it requires a buy-in from the audience that not everything has, but that this does. It also requires the wrestlers to act, at every moment, as if this shit really really really fucking matters, and Hogan and Michaels do that.

I brought up Hogan and Savage earlier, and what this reminds me of most is Hogan and Savage at WrestleMania V, another historically underrated match because of the result.

Michaels is your big bumping heel against Hogan, eventually succeeding through a combination of hard work, intelligence, and skull-duggery, and it genuinely works. People point at this as some example of overbumping, but for most of the match, that is at bay, and it simply feels like a little guy bouncing around like he ought to for someone with supernatural strength before succeeding through pure force of will. Shawn is not exactly peak Randy Savage on any level, but he gets the idea right, being an athletic bulldog against the big buy, leaning a lot on punches and a larger plan to try to wear him out and hit and move.

Speaking of this on another level, so much of why I like this is because, like very few other matches in his comeback save the first Undertaker Mania match and the John Cena ones, it not only allows me to feel about Shawn Michaels the way I naturally do (hope he dies, fuck him, I take pleasure in every failure of his outside of those against Triple H, he may have genuinely ruined the art form, Bret forever, I am inherently on the side of anyone attacking him, the Hitler/Bin Laden/Toby joke from The Office but with Shawn Michaels), but encourages it. He is a mother fucker. Not only his stupid little jerk off sympathy play bumping LIKE HE HAS THE FUCKING RIGHT TO BE MAD AT ANYONE FOR REFUSING TO DO A JOB OR POLITICKING AT ALL AND ISN’T JUST THROWING A FIT THAT HE’S FINALLY WORSE AT IT THAN SOMEONE (IF SHAWN MICHAELS WAS ACTIVE NOW, HE WOULD PLANT A STORY ABOUT HOGAN GETTING COLT CABANA FIRED) but in constantly cheating and fighting dirty and being generally at a loss, it encourages my natural response to him in a way Shawn work rarely does, save the 97-98 heel run, which unsurprisingly, is my other favorite work of his as a singles wrestler.

To really bring it home, Hogan also does something in response to him that I really love.

Following Shawn taking the boot at the end off the Hulk Up by taking the bump, then standing up to take another, after a match full of stuff right on that border and Shawn making shovel motions before the bell, Hogan makes sure to rub that shit in. Hogan poses with the ears and pointing to the crowd for WAY longer than usual before running to the ropes for the leg, making Shawn look like a way bigger asshole than anyone I can ever remember him facing, as if it is completely and totally in response to what Shawn tried to pull on him.

Hogan himself is a piece of shit, but God damn, sometimes it is really really really fun to see someone get what they have coming like this.

Independent of the politics or what it lets me feel in response to either of the horrible men at the center of this great conflict, on a pure engineering level, it is also so well assembled and executed.

The idea of the WCW Super Match is thankfully not the province of Shawn Michaels, never having the courage to step inside God’s own wrestling promotion, but this feels closer to that ideal than even Hogan ever really got during his six years there. It achieves the feeling not only that every twist and turn matters as this attempt to move forward and win the match, but also feels important. Beyond that, it feels like a titanic struggle between styles of pro wrestling combat in the way that few wrestling matches do besides the best in this genre, along with the feeling that it is simply (relative) good against evil, with the former triumphing over the latter, following a match drawing the possibility of that outcome into question.

Shawn loses to the big leg, as God intended.

It’s a faith affirming sort of match, where the only regret that I have is that I didn’t see this for the first time as an adult, and thus was unable to achieve true joy by going onto any random message board to talk about how this is a better match than the Angle/Michaels one that came five months before it.

Otherwise, beautiful stuff.

Hogan vs. Shawn is not only a match that hits on a certain level and in a certain way that is both deeply impressive and unlike so many other pro wrestling matches, but also has a way of scratching an itch and being satisfying in a way that even fewer can offer up. Not only a genuine spectacle, but also one that gives me the greatest possible thrill, and one that really cuts to the heart of this entire genre (seeing the worst person in the world totally humiliated and beaten horribly).

The real shit.

***1/4

Shawn Michaels vs. Kurt Angle, WWE WrestleMania 21 (4/3/2005)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor Parkmap. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

Sometimes, it is hard to totally grasp what a commission for a review is asking for. Given that this was a first-time order (I believe) and that the other matches chosen were good picks, I tend to believe this was not ill-intentioned, as opposed to picking, like, Seth Rollins vs. The Fiend for example. If this came from somebody I knew more or talked to a lot about wrestling, I would believe this pick came with some glee and a little hostility (towards me or towards the match? hard to say), but it doesn’t, so who knows?

Even if it did come from someone I knew trying to punish me with it, the joke is on them.

Really and truly, I do not hate this match.

I definitely used to.

That sentence, that I don’t hate it, might be a shocker to some longer term readers or even a few I would call friends from online, because I HATED this for a long time. In retrospect, I think what I really hated was everything around the match. The manufactured feeling around it. Obviously, all wrestling is manufactured to some extent, but this always felt like they had decided on a Great Match and worked backwards from there. The match itself, at the time, was also sold as this pre-ordained classic, before it ever happened. It is hardly the first time you can note for something like that in the history of wrestling, but in real time, it was the first time I had really noticed that, and as someone who at the time was beginning to discover other wrestling and like the WWE less and less both in concept and practice, it really really rubbed me the wrong way. For every time I’ve ever written or suggested that a reaction to a match, the “why did you like it THAT much?” part, had ever caused me to dislike a match more than it maybe deserved, this was the first time in my life I ever experienced that feeling, and it will always, even as a little bit that fades as times goes on, be a part of this match to me.

What doesn’t help is that the match is far from flawless.

The problems of the match are not always super obvious, but they are there. Some are more obvious, of course. The manufactured Pre-Determined Epic nature of the last third of the thing, the phony theatrics of a Shawn Michaels performance that constantly wanders back and forth between good selling and hammy bullshit, Shawn lasting like two or three minutes in the final Ankle Lock, which itself is perfectly emblematic of the larger problem where I am just never going to connect with a match that ever asks me to feel bad for Shawn Michaels. Some are less obvious, and revealed themselves more to me on this viewing than my last, like the weird construction of the thing. The transition from the early matwork to Angle in control feels like it skips ahead three to five minutes and on top of that, the transition feels real choppy too, in a way that has an effect on the rest of the match. That bell, the idea that something felt off and like they clearly just leapt into the next section, is the sort of thing that cannot be unrung, as the match (most matches) can never turn it back around once the seams — the idea that this is a performance — get opened up like that.

Kurt Angle vs. Shawn Michaels is a good match though.

It might even be a great one.

What works best about this match is the big picture stuff.

The idea that Shawn would outwrestle Angle is often criticized by people who hate this as much as I did at the time it happened, but in the context of Kurt Angle in the WWE, I actually like it. Angle has his credentials, but it is a long established thing — going back to Benoit and Austin and others — that Angle struggles with traditional back and forth pro wrestling matwork. Headlocks and armbars, like Shawn uses early on. Angle can come up with counters and escapes, as he does very very well here, but he struggles with the sorts of things he never really learned. It’s a fine line to walk, and I think other matches walked it better, but there’s some consistency and foundation to it, the idea that Angle’s technique is best put to use when firmly in control, either as a feature of his arrogance (struggling when really challenged) or of his quicker route to the top.

Another great aspect of this, narratively speaking, is that the real struggle is Kurt Angle against himself. As the one who challenges Shawn on the mat and gets too annoyed to do anything but bait him into a bomb throwing contest to get out, or as the guy so intent on making a point that he often gives up the lead to do so, Kurt is his own worst enemy in the match. It’s only when he adjusts and adapts, when he goes to the thing that actually works in the ankle locks and huge bombs to focus on the hurt back, that he’s able to succeed. Performance wise, Angle is really really good at communicating this. The frustration and petty anger, the aggression in control, all of it. It’s the sort of thing that in modern WWE would have 200 close ups and take another ten minutes to get across, but in 2005, got to just be, to his and the match’s benefit.

Shawn is also not awful here.

His early matwork is nice, his selling of the back is mostly good (including one great moment where he slips just a little bit on a crossbody dive to sell it) when he isn’t playing to some fictional 5000th back row, and he lays it in a lot more than usual. The chops are always good enough, but his punches look better here, and there’s one especially hard clothesline that borders on a Lariat. As a confirmed and proud 2000s Shawn Hater, it’s the sort of performance that while not his best of the decade, is the sort of thing I wish he showed far more of.

The match is also — relative to WWE epics, especially what comes after this — pretty well put together, outside of some of the transitions from block to block. It escalates very well, there is far less wasted space than I remembered or that you may remember, and while the final ankle lock bit lasts obscenely long, I don’t think the match itself is too long. The last third is all your fireworks, but the fireworks make sense, within what the match established. A lot of it is, for sure, the old idea that so much of what’s come since is bad enough that this thing, now also old, feels better in retrospect, but I think it works.

Kurt goes back to the ankle locking, and after roughly 82% of the match spent in the last ankle lock, Shawn gives up.

It’s still flawed. I still really do not love it. But I no longer hate it, especially not in the way I hate something like their iron man match later in the year, and as long as the praise is a little more sensible, it’s no longer really a match I have any interest in fighting about. Even if I never fall in love with it, every time I watch this match, I like it just a little bit more, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of great or supposedly great wrestling matches.

Kurt Angle vs. Shawn Michaels is exactly good enough, that in the right mood, I might even call it borderline great.

This is that right mood.

gentleman’s three boy

 

Evolution vs. Chris Benoit/Shawn Michaels/Mick Foley/Shelton Benjamin, WWE Raw (4/12/2004)

Commissions continue, again from Shock, as the snake reverses. You too can be like them and pay me to write about anything you’d like. Most people tend to pay for reviews of wrestling matches, but I am happy to talk about real fights, movie fight scenes, movies in general, make a list, or whatever. You can head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that, just make sure I haven’t already written about it first. The going rate is $5/match, or with regards to other media, $5 for every started thirty minute chunk. If you have a more elaborate thing in mind, hit the DMs, and we can talk about that too. 

This is much more like it.

Something you should know is that, at least as it pertains to the upper section of the card, I love 2004-5 Raw.

Call it a guilty pleasure if you would like. You could also call it the tail end of childhood nostalgia, as 2004 was the last year I was really like a WWE Fan proper, before the combination of TNA on free television and starting to regularly download matches from ROH and other indies at the end of the year got rid of that pesky little habit. But all of the different combinations of Evolution tags and matches against a tremendously skilled upper to midcard babyface core (Benoit, Shelton, Jericho and Edge when they were capable of being in good matches, Tajiri) do a lot for me. They’re not always perfect, old man Flair is not the most physically gifted and not every babyface there is great on their own, Shawn Michaels and/or Triple H is often also involved, etc., but any combo of Orton, Batista, and Benoit in a tag in 2004 is a slam dunk, and the brand has an astonishing success rate when attacking the rim here, so to speak.

(does 2004 Raw follow the theme of the year and Go To Work? Some would say yes. There is a man called Big (first name), an undersized all-world talent running the point, part of the team is now a coach for one of the most loathsome outfits in the sport, someone constantly getting in foul trouble, etc. If a basketball cannot hold a grudge, it also probably does not lie.)

I would love to write a bunch of words about the better Evolution tags of 2004, and their many virtues. The way they feel like updated versions of old Horsemen TV tags, the old style structure wholly unique in a WWE environment, the emphasis on hard hitting and violence, the manic finishing runs, all of that. Outside of Bryan vs. The Shield, it’s the best continuous series of matches involving a singular faction in WWE history, and I have a whole lot of time for these matches, and for writing about these matches.

This, however, is not one of the better ones.

Part of that comes down to the line up, as the very best ones tended to have a Benoit/Edge/Jericho babyface core, or the one-off Benoit/Orton/Shelton combo that came after Orton’s turn at the end of the summer. Despite the all-star line up, this makes a few choices that separates it in a more negative way from the better Evolution tags and six-mans that mostly followed.

Specifically, because this is essentially the root of every choice made, there is too much focus here on wrestlers who either totally mail it in or are not very good, and sometimes the two overlap. Almost every other great Evolution tag does not involve Triple H, who is simply not an especially good wrestler on a week to week level. The best Evolution tag work sees Orton and Batista in there for long stretches against Benoit, as he basically spends the year molding them into great wrestlers in a way you may have seen a decade later in the Bryan/Shield series (these have basically the same idea, glue your golden boys to the best wrestler in the company for 6-12 months and force them to get great as quickly as possible). Likewise, there’s a lot too much here of Shawn Michaels and Mick Foley compared to the other two babyfaces, with one (Foley) who would have been out of his element in a match like this even as an active wrestler in his prime and who now is semi-retired and clearly saving himself for the weekend’s pay-per-view, and another (Michaels) who has none of those excuses, but simply turns in an uninspired house show ass performance.

The latter is the one that really hurts, as while Foley is minimized and Hunter only in for bursts, Shawn Michaels is the one who gets the majority of the match’s big moments like the dive into break, the hot tag, and the majority of the finishing run. It’s not surprising, of course it is all about Shawn even when he is like the sixth best wrestler out of eight in the match and the third best on his team, but it’s especially grating when he turns in a dull and passionless performance off the tag and two wildly energetic and/or psychotically intense wrestlers wilt on the apron.

Generally speaking, the match simply lacks the energy of the best Evolution tag work, especially down the stretch, where a lot of things do not go right, and the usually more intricately put together Benoit-led finishing run is instead taken over by a half-speed and quarter-assed Michaels style one instead.

It is not without its virtues though!

The first half in particular is especially good. This is mostly Flair playing the hits against Shawn and then trading leather and some heavy hands (again, Flair never quite gets credit for those great corner punches) with ex-Horseman Benoit. Shelton gets in on the act and the big fella Big Dave has a few really impressive moments. Up until the commercial break, it is a genuinely super fun match. The control work on Benoit and then Shelton is also very good, largely led by Batista and Orton against both guys. The weak spots are there sprinkled in, but most of this is really really good. It’s just that it falls apart in the key moments, and for all of these foundational strengths and great flourishes throughout, it lacks the quality moments in the most memorable parts of the match, and suffers for it in ways other Evolution tags simply do not.

Shawn pins Orton with the kick, whatever.

Real far from the best version of this thing, but a fun enough house show version that just so happened to make it onto television.

three boy

Diesel/The Undertaker/Shawn Michaels vs. Camp Cornette (Yokozuna/Owen Hart/The British Bulldog), WWF Raw (10/9/1995)

A commission here from old friend and spiritual advisor Big E. Vil. You too can pay me to watch any wrestling match you’d like and write a few hundred words about it if you head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match and if you would be so kind, make sure I haven’t already written about it and, if you want to be very cool, include a link. 

A famous piece of wrestling TV amongst a certain sect of us, the famous brief Bill Watts era of Raw.

Before discussing the match, there are two things before and around the match that strike my interest in particular.

The highlight of the entire segment and show might have came before the bell even rings, with this absurd video of Shawn Michaels talking to kids and then being interviewed about it. He’s a stammering wreck, constantly talking instead about how cool it is that kids think he’s important and how good it feels for him, just total maniac shit, unable to talk about anything but himself and doubly as inept at portraying himself as a good human being. Shawn obviously can talk, but he’s not a very good liar. There’s an old Patton Oswalt bit from the early 2000s that I’m sure is nowhere near as funny now as it was then about how George W. Bush was only a dummy when he had to talk about normal stuff, but could talk when he was talking about war and vengeance. That came to mind again watching this, this total dullard at a loss for words when asked to convey any sense of sympathy or humanity, revealing this dead eyed husk going through motions because he’s supposed to care about kids or something. Shawn isn’t exactly W, but they are both cokeheads from Texas who got positions far beyond their skills or talents based entirely on personal relationships, so one can’t help but see that also.

The other, of course, is how great Vince McMahon is on commentary.

You can say he’s bad. Talk about him enthusiastically shouting “KICK SOME BUTT” when Diesel comes out or the perverse groans of sexual elation that escape his lips when Shawn Michaels comes down the aisle, or when the big guys are fighting. None of this is incorrect, and it’s one of those situations in which I 100% see the other side and acknowledge it as equally correct. Much like with points of view on Davey Richards’ wrestling, I don’t think there’s a wrong opinion.

Is Vince bad on commentary? Yeah, maybe. He certainly undercuts his top acts by being so lame and over the top in his obvious cheering. At the same time, I love it. That’s not just because he’s one of the voices I grew up with as a result of constantly renting these tapes from video stores when I ran out of 1998/1999 WWF and WCW pay-per-views to rent, but I get a real thrill out of it years later too. Not only is he wildly entertaining and very funny on accident, but I always really like it when you get a booker or the head of the company behind the announce desk.

Not only is usually it a sign of a true control freak like a Vince McMahon or a Gabe Sapolsky (Ian Rotten may be the exception here, as always), which is always fun, but it’s a chance to get the true unfiltered vision of what something is supposed to be. As direct a presentation of someone’s ideas, in this medium, as there possibly can be.

Honestly, any booker who doesn’t also do commentary on their shows is kind of a coward.

Anyways, there’s also a match here, apparently?

The match itself isn’t some bell to bell marvel exactly, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. If I was reviewing 1995 as a whole, it’s the sort of a match I would put on a preliminary list, but not feel too shaken up about cutting if I wanted to hit a certain deadline or if I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s good and I like it a lot, but as a match itself, hey whatever.

Shawn and Owen work really well together for most of this. I like Shawn with all three of these guys, honestly, and Taker and Yokozuna is a great match up that emphasizes the best qualities of each man. There’s guys here that I think people might expect me to be mean towards and that I usually love to be mean towards, but this is not a match that inspires any sort of meanness. Shawn does nothing offensive, Kev and Taker are utilized in short bursts, and everyone on Camp Cornette is so much fun to watch. It’s pure formula, but one executed well. Offense that mostly looks good, big personalities, not a lot of waste. Certainly there are better versions of a WWF/WWE TV main event tag over the years (one of them being perhaps my single favorite match ever), but this is all fine enough.

The meat comes after the match, in a classic Wattsian finish and post-match.

Bulldog benefits from the Camp being a much more polished unit, hitting Diesel with his slam and getting the pin when Yokozuna follows it with one of those big boy 600 lb legdrops, getting a mostly clean win going into his title match on pay-per-view. It’s sort of wasted on a nothing challenge like Bulldog as nobody believe he would beat Diesel anyways, but it’s a nice sentiment with Diesel’s first loss in a real long time and it coming in a perfect sort of a way, clean but still just a little bit unfair.

After the match, both King Mabel and Dean Douglas come down and help the Camp beat up the good guys (certainly not Our Heroes, but the protagonists of the story all the same). Shawn gets the piss beaten out of him by Shane Douglas on the outside in perhaps the best non-Yokozuna bit of action in this entire thing, ending with a Gourdbuster on the steps. Mabel and Yokozuna gang up to hit like a thousand splashes and leg drops on the dead guy, eventually breaking his face.

A more prolonged, effective, and brutal beating than you usually get from the heels in the WWF, resulting in them (briefly) feeling like actual threats instead of just villain of the month tackle dummies as they so often did in the mid 1990s.

Less great as a match than I remembered, but a lovely angle and a wonderful chunk of pro wrestling television. A real classical sort of a thing, and different from so much WWF TV. First in having them still down in the ring after the break, giving you the feeling this is something a little more than a TV show about wrestling as something goes wrong like they do in real athletics. Couple it with a classic territory style promo at the end of the show, and it’s no surprise people have remembered it for all this time. Not a reinvention of the wheel, but a hell of a wheel on display all the same.

Something to be watched and studied, and something that still stands out over a quarter century later.

Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind, WWF IYH: War Games (9/22/1996)

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.

****1/4

Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE Bad Blood 2004 (6/13/2004)

This was a Hell in a Cell match.

I wish this was a worse match than it was. Everything about it is deeply offensive to me. The forty seven minute runtime is obviously the worst part about this match and where all of the problems come from. Prior to 2019 and the truly disgusting NXT Takeover main events that these two perverts put together for other people, no other non-iron man WWE pay per view match got to go nearly this long. That’s the first level of how upsetting the runtime is, but then you begin to think about all of the many many people who got cut from pay per view or had these truncated matches where things never got to breathe. It’s so prevalent in the company and has been for the last ten to twenty years or so, but these two got to wrestle for forty seven minutes. It’s not a forty seven minutes that they use all that well either. It’s

a forty seven minute WWE brawl. Again with these two, it’s not a particularly inventive one. They don’t bring anything new to the tableand instead hit all the old standards in the most lifeless way possible. They throw a lot of shitty WWE Punches to fill space, there’s some focused work in the first half, but it means nothing and has no real value. The only entertaining part of this was Triple H getting busted open five minutes in, but then taking over within a few minutes anyways and ruining any impact of the cut. Later on, when Shawn (to his credit) hit an absolute gusher, Triple H had to re-blade lest someone only attribute the blood in this match to Michaels. Triple H has a two control segment run that kills about twenty minutes and none of it is very good. He works the back for half before cutting off a brief comeback with a weapon and Shawn bleeding goes into the second better one. There’s then a comeback and that last half goes something like twenty plus minutes itself. There’s so much that doesn’t need to be there and it comes at a point when everyone is dead. This always gets buried for how long they lie around motionless under some guise of selling, and that’s not wrong. The last five minutes sees four moves (three Pedigrees, one Sweet Chin Music) and a whole lot of dead space. The third Pedigree finally ends it.

The worst part of the match, and the most offensive, is how boring it is. That’s the worst part of this entire series. Over a twenty-two month span, these two had five one on one matches and a handfull of multi man types of matches, and barely did anything with it. They had the most unimaginative regular matches possible, repeated spots constantly, and never showed any sort of progression whatsoever besides that Shawn stopped being able to counter the Pedigree as it went on. Only the Three Stages of Hell was every truly repulsively bad. There’s a good, if again uninteresting, twenty minutes to this. I’m a big time blood pervert and while nothing was all that exciting, unprotected chair shots an a table spot could have been enough. But these two wouldn’t be who they are if they knew when enough was enough, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be who they are if there was anyone to stop them from doing absolutely everything they could ever think of.

The actual issue with this feud isn’t that their thoughts are bad, it’s that they never had any to begin with. Even their first match was incredibly simple. Since then, they’ve just been retreading that ground in one way or another. The matches in NXT with wrestlers forced to just redo parts of this series/feud forever, that these two have overseen, are usually much much worse than these matches, but they’re ultimately far more interesting because they have the courage to be truly awful. I wouldn’t usually call these two cowards, but this is a series without any kind of courage. They had forty seven minutes and the best that they could do was this tired formula match, now with them lying down for longer periods of time. That’s the big progression by the end of the series, that they’re just worse and more tired wrestlers now. Credit for authenticity, I guess.

Like the match itself, I’d assumed this review would be a big stupid summary of their whole feud, but I don’t have anything to say. I’ve said it all. These two have nothing new to add. They’ve done it all. Triple H sucks. Comeback era Shawn Michaels sucks.This isn’t good, but it’s not exactly torture either. This match and series has a reputation that it doesn’t really deserve. There’s so many worse things out there someone could watch or pay someone else to write about, and what this series really deserves is just to be forgotten by history. It’s not worth talking about. It really isn’t. They had all the time in the world and accomplished absolutely nothing. Ultimately, I’m going to try and do what these two didn’t, and have a little respect for your time and leave it there.

**1/2

Chris Benoit vs. Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE Backlash 2004 (4/18/2004)

This was for Benoit’s World Heavyweight Title.

Another rematch that doesn’t live up to the original. There’s not any fun interesting reason for it, it’s just not all that interesting or good. The most “interesting” thing about the match is in Chris Benoit’s hometown entrance, where his weird still-alive son David and Benoit’s dad go nuts for him in the front row, and it’s all skin crawlingly weird.

The match itself is frustratingly normal. Triple H and Shawn are no longer on their best behavior, as the right guess is again made that this absolutely doesn’t matter. This exists to fill space and run a PPV main event without actually doing anything. As such, they spend a lot of the match not doing much. As such, they reveal the perfect time and perfect place effect of the match at WrestleMania, and how much was carried both by the moment and by the question of if the moment would ever come. This is worked a lot smaller, and you can very clearly mark the lack of effort Hunter and Shawn put forward by the fact that they don’t bleed. If they gave a shit, they’d bleed, because that’s code at this point for them thinking a match is important. Lack of effort wouldn’t be half as upsetting here if the match didn’t now go half an hour either. Lots of time to fill with either repeat spots or obviously lazy work. Benoit is Benoit, but the focus again is really just on Hunter and Shawn, and he could be anyone. Finish is all about them again, as Benoit makes Shawn tap out to the Sharpshooter, but after he’s in it for like a minute and a half, and just in time for Hunter to start to crawl in and to where they’re fingertips apart. Christ.

The hook is supposed to be that Benoit is super popular here in his hometown and that Shawn is a villain in Canada, but he was already super popular in MSG, with both Shawn and Hunter getting treated poorly by the crowd there too, so nothing about this is all that different besides how two-thirds of the match no longer saw fit to put in the effort.

**1/4

Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels vs. Chris Benoit, WWE WrestleMania XX (3/14/2004)

This was, yet again, for Triple H’s World Heavyweight Title.

This is the best match I’m going to review in this project, by a mile or five. Big part of that is that it involves one of the best wrestlers in the company at the time, and he manages to reign in two of the worst wrestlers in the world pretty much on reputation alone.

One of the best things that being the consensus Best In The World gets you is that people try harder against you because it’s obviously a bad look to drag down someone who normally produces gems on a regular basis. I don’t think Benoit is the best in the world anymore in 2004. I’m not really sure if he ever was, on a definitive basis, in the first place. Consensus is what it is though, especially in a kind of a mainstream bubble, and at the time, Chris Benoit was the Best in the World, years before becoming a coward who killed his wife and son and skirted all responsibility. As such, these two absolute dopes are on their best behavior. Shawn needs to preserve the house of cards that is his reputation as a still-great wrestler after the work Chris Jericho, Bill Goldberg, and Mark Henry did in 2003 to prop it back up. For Triple H, it’s the first example on this blog of what’s one of the most fascinating relationships in wrestling history to me. Triple H clearly loved Chris Benoit. It doesn’t stop him from fucking the absolute shit out of this title reign until they simply have to get the title back on Triple H because this experiment “failed”, but he clearly loves working with the guy and tried harder against him than he did against anyone post-quad until like Daniel Bryan and that 2014 patch with Mania and the Shield feud. So, both Triple H and Shawn Michaels are better here than they’ve been in this entire series.

You can’t just flip a switch and make two bad wrestlers magically great again, but there’s more hustle to them. They move faster, they’re more active, and in general, they do as much as they can to keep up with Benoit. It’s a WWE three way, so it has certain one man out, two men in tropes, but like bad commentary, I’ve simply watched so much that I’m numb to it. Here, they’re at least always moving forward and at no point does it feel like any of the three is out of the match for far too long, solely to accommodate this other thing needing to happen. The story of the match is supposed to be Hunter and Shawn trying to get rid of this other guy to continue their feud and Benoit trying to break through the glass ceiling as such. They sell it as these two hating each other so much, but it inadvertantly just becomes a great commentary on class mobility.

This can all be framed it as being Benoit’s big moment, but interestingly, he feels like the third most important guy in the match. The crowd doesn’t feel that way, and he gets the crowning moment, but the match isn’t built that way. Shawn gets the big highspots of the match and is clearly set up as the babyface of the three. He bleeds big time midway through, again getting that crutch instead of the guy who this match is supposed to actually be elevating. The camera at least doesn’t totally expose him blading this time, so that’s something. Once they team up to take Benoit out with the big table bump outside, Shawn and Triple H fight for the majority of what’s supposed to be the big dramatic nearfall run of the match. Triple H also bleeds, because holy shit, he just doesn’t know how to do a big match without the crutch. Like the last match, he has to be the strongest and toughest anyways and comes back faster after hitting a vein than Shawn did. It happens so often by now that it’s becoming funny, and it obviously didn’t harm the moment but like, Jesus Christ you two. Come on. In a match ostensibly built around elevating someone the fans love and giving him a moment, even if it’s ultimately just a lifetime achievement award, they can’t help but expose the entire thing as a crock of shit by taking the shortcuts and little smoke and mirrors displays to try and steal the attention for themselves. It doesn’t work, because the crowd doesn’t let it, but it should never be forgotten that they didn’t just start fucking with the reign after a month or two, but they they started before it even began.

Their run against each other is, once again, real dull. Their individual good behavior against Benoit doesn’t suddenly make their one on one match up any better. However, it is made just a little more entertaining than usual, which is to say at all, by the crowd totally revolting against it. Nothing like the 2014 or 2015 Royal Rumbles or any of that Daniel Bryan adjacent stuff, or any of the other crowd revolts the dregs of the 2010s have seen, but responding to a punch exchange that fishes for a reaction by chanting for the guy on the outside instead. It’s very good, and very well deserved. There’s always that old adage about how the audience Vince pays the most attention to is the Madison Square Garden one, but like so many old truisms and patterns, that’s out the window when it’s at all negative towards Hunter and Shawn, I guess. One more sign that almost nobody in the entire world is as interested in this feud between Hunter and Shawn as Hunter and Shawn. Their fight is broken up, naturally, when Triple H has Shawn defeated with the Pedigree and Benoit saves. Of course. Of course.

Shawn is eventually taken back out, and as everyone knows, Triple H taps out to the Crossface. Not without struggling for a minute while drenched in blood, and nearly escaping, but he taps out. He does the right thing, while absolutely kicking and creaming and being given every concession for it, if only so you can talk forever about how he did the right thing. Proof is in the fact that he repeated it a decade later, since Benoit killing his family and skirting all responsibility meant he could no longer hold this up as proof that he can play ball and elevate people. Shawn’s behavior here is a little less revolting, but it’s still an immensely selfish and embarrassing performance. He at least won’t try and use it for years as some proof that he can do the right thing, but that’s because everyone very willingly bought into him pretending to be born again, so he didn’t have to. Physically, they put in much more effort than usual in an attempt to not get totally blown away by an actual good wrestler, and achieved the best match either had been involved in in some time, but on a political level, this was as deplorable as always.

Triple H’s political instinct is unrivaled, and he rightfully saw that it didn’t matter what the body of the match was so long as the finish was him tapping out to Benoit. The finish is ultimately uplifting, to be fair. An everyman workhorse blue collar worker pushes and pushes, as the upper classes of an unashamed blue blood and a fake populist marketing an obviously false bootstraps story unify for brief moments to stop an interloper from joining the club. He fights through every attempt to hold him back and achieves something he was never supposed to, although on a sub-surface level, his success is ultimately just an illusion, and nothing’s actually changed. Ultimately, the impact of the match is spoiled by them only pretending to let him actually break through the glass ceiling before pretty succintly putting it back over his head within six months and then disavowing the entire thing after he was chewed up and spat out with only lip service paid to all of the problems that his fate brought up to the surface. Still, it’s a great match that actually accomplishes something, which makes it the best match of this specific little project by a thousand miles.

The best matches are about something bigger than themselves, and this was a great match. I usually mean they’re about things like personal growth or the power of self knowledge, and not the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but the 2000s were a weird time for everybody.

***1/2

Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE Royal Rumble 2004 (1/25/2004)

This was a Last Man Standing Match for Triple H’s World Heavyweight Title.

True to form, they follow a more simplistic and pared down match with some real bullshit. They go right into punching and fill a few minutes of space with Shawn working the knee before going outside and abandoning that pretty immediately. Shawn misses a dive and goes through the table. He recovers enough to fiddle with something near his head before the camera quickly cuts away, and by the time it comes back, he’s bleeding. Must have slipped out of his hands and across his forehead, very unfortunate accident. This then becomes one of the worst match types in wrestling at this time, The Passion of the Shawn. He bleeds buckets and keeps falling down and over himself and barely making his comebacks, before collapsing again. It all feels very fake because the only way he ever knows how to sell anything is that he’s about on death’s door. While it’s a shame that the door never opens, it gets harder and harder to believe. It doesn’t relate to the match entirely either, but there’s always something so annoying about the crutches that these two are allowed to have that nobody ever else seems to really get at the time.

Hunter’s work on the cut is fine, but pretty limited. Triple H also gets busted open, but the camera at least covers for his bladejob much better than they did for Michaels. He comes back quicker than Shawn did after bleeding, which can maybe be covered up by saying Shawn was already suffering from blood loss, but it’s definitely another one of those real borderline little touches where the only point seems to be getting over that Triple H is the toughest and strongest, despite being scripted as the top bad guy. They both bleed a lot and lie around in between casually sort of trading big offense. Last Man Standing is the worst (well, second worst…third worst?) stipulation for these two to have. They’re two guys who are guilty of just lying still for long periods of time and calling it selling, and no stipulatiion encourages that sort of behavior like this does. Last Man Standing is one of the better WWE stipulations, but what it really does is hold a magnifying glass up to who wrestlers really are, and these are two bad, lazy, and unimaginative wrestlers.

I’ve had relative praise for their two more pared down efforts, but those weren’t especially interesting matches so much as they were well done formula matches. This match allows the potential for so much more, and they just used it to do a very normal match, with a little more blood and much more lying around. In addition to being wasteful and sort of disdainfully normal, it feels strangely behind the times too. You can look at something like the inaugural Last Man Standing match in the company (Mankind vs. The Rock) almost five years prior, or even Triple H’s own Last Man Standing Match with Chris Jericho in the past, and they did infinitely more with it. Those were still fairly restrained matches, but they were matches with focus and far more interesting offensive ideas. Those were also match ups that have happened a lot, and those LMS matches felt like departures from what they were usually doing. This was another Hunter vs. Shawn match, just without pinfalls, and using buckets of blood as a prop to try and do the narrative work that they’re too lazy and intellectually bankrupt to accomplish themselves.

With no fan excitement for the feud but it needing to happen again, because fuck you, they needed to drum something up this time. They slapped a Last Man Standing label on their usual bullshit and like the stipulations in the Three Stages of Hell match, they just treated it with contempt and worked around it rather than within it. It’s an incredibly odd trend for two guys who have had more influence on their booking than all but a few in wrestling history without actually having the pencil in their hands.

**