Botched! 3.25.17: Shane-O Mac, Exposed Turnbuckles, More

Welcome back to the column that nobody in the world of professional wrestling wants to be mentioned in, Botched! Thanks to all of you that voted for me in this week’s Wrestling Fact or Fiction column and made sure that result wasn’t goofed up. Here’s a few things that were goofed up this week…

1. Randy Orton Is Not The Youngest WWE Champion In History

SmackDown Live likes to include fun facts about the wrestlers on their pre-match graphics most of the time. I like the idea, as it lets the fans know what these folks have accomplished over the years and builds up their credentials. Somebody like Randy Orton has accomplished so much over the years that you could fill a few graphics with his various title reigns & large event victories.

So why is he being credited for things he didn’t do?

Randy Orton is not the youngest WWE Champion in history. That accolade belongs to Brock Lesnar, who won the WWE Championship at SummerSlam 2002 at the age of 25. Randy Orton accomplished a lot early on in his career, including winning the World Heavyweight Championship at SummerSlam 2004 at the age of 24.

The World Heavyweight Championship was not the WWE Championship. They were unified later down the line, but we all remember that one was the Raw championship and the other was the SmackDown championship. The WWE Championship was the spinner belt that had a lineage dating back to Bruno Sammartino & Bob Backlund, and its lineage is recognized as belonging to the belt that Bray Wyatt currently holds.

The World Heavyweight Championship was brought into the fold by Eric Bischoff because Raw needed a champion when the youngest WWE Champion in history, Brock Lesnar, made himself SmackDown-exclusive. Randy Orton won that championship in 2004 & became the youngest World Champion in history. He was not WWE Champion at the time, as if memory serves me correctly that was when John “Bradshaw” Layfield was in the middle of his reign as champion.

I know this whole part of the column was tremendously geeky, but some of us still take our wrestling championships kind of seriously. I usually don’t, but that one is a particular pet peeve of mine.

2. SHANE MCMAHON OFFENSE!

So we’ve hit the physical part of the AJ Styles/Shane McMahon feud. Shane feuds always get interesting around this point because he starts beating people up and the results are usually hilarious.

Shane “Money” McMahon going crazy with the rabbit punches on unsuspecting people. It’s great for all the wrong reasons. AJ Styles got some of this treatment on Tuesday night & the results were about what we expected.

All sorts of weird stuff going on here. The vertical suplex by Styles into the barricade was pretty nice. Another staple of Shane’s offense is the elbow drop through the announce table, which he hits with varying results. He didn’t exactly hit Styles this time, but he did hit the table & the camera angle was good enough to make it not look terrible.

3. Aren’t Exposed Turnbuckles Disqualifications?

Tony Nese & T.J. Perkins had a nice little match on 205 Live with lots of well executed spots & maneuvers. They were on point, but the finish left something to be desired.

See, everybody knows that using the steel rod uncovered by an exposed turnbuckle in front of referees leads to disqualifications. It’s one of the first rules every wrestling fan learns. That’s why referees are supposed to fix them when they have an opportunity to do so, and it’s why the bad guy will attempt to ram their opponent into it when the referee is distracted by something else, knocked out or otherwise indisposed. The referee can’t call what he didn’t see. This referee saw Nese suplex Perkins into the exposed steel turnbuckle, and should have disqualified Nese for this offense. He did not.

4. Mustafa Takes A Header

I like what I’ve been seeing from Mustafa Ali. He’s the kind of cruiserweight that would have fit right in with the crazy flipping guys back in the day. He does some amazing things and had a great match with Neville this week on 205 Live. I think there was one move he was feeling a bit more than the others the next morning…

Around the 3:34 mark in the video, Neville German suplexes Ali off the top rope & Ali lands face-first. On the non-clipped version on WWE Network they show the slow-motion replay to let you know that dude landed right on his face. Holy ouch. The cruiserweights are starting to take more risks in order to stand out from the crowd, & Ali is one of the guys at the forefront of that effort.

5. Rebel vs. ODB

I like Rebel. She seems like good people. She’s cosmetically pleasing. I had a feeling that her match with ODB would provide something for this column though, and after watching it I’m not quite sure what to narrow it down to.

1. Rebel’s belt somehow gets broken, which is always bad but especially bad during an ODB match.

2. The TKO finishing the match looked like no TKO I had ever seen before.

3. The Earl Hebner interaction with both ladies was complete garbage and indefensible on any wrestling show in any era, much less 2017. We don’t really cover booking botches here, but that merits mention for sure.

If this is the direction the Knockouts Division is heading in, we should have plenty of material for the next few months.

Thanks for reading! If you see (or hear) anything wrong in the world of wrestling, let me know via Twitter or e-mail at [email protected]. See you next week!