How WWE Got The Women’s MITB Ladder Match Story Right

I had a feeling going into the Money in the Bank PPV that the Women’s Ladder Match would generate the most discussion coming out of the show. I had no idea what would actually happen, but the women have had a way of stealing the show for awhile now and the historical nature of the match had me feeling like something big would happen.

I even thought Carmella had a good chance of winning the match somehow. Not that I stuck with that original thought in the Preview here at 411 or my picks in other places where money wasn’t involved. I’m the first person to admit that my prediction record in wrestling, sports and pretty much anything else in life is pretty sorry. But my prediction to myself that the Women’s MITB Ladder Match would be the most talked about match of the night sure came true. We’re not talking about Baron Corbin with the Men’s MITB briefcase, or the awesome sequence in the Men’s MITB Match with AJ Styles & Shinsuke Nakamura, or Jinder Mahal somehow still being WWE Champion. All of these notable developments took a backseat to the finish of the first-ever Women’s Money in the Bank Ladder Match.

Becky Lynch was about to win the match when Carmella’s boo, the no-good James Ellsworth, interfered on her behalf, knocking the ladder over and sending Becky tumbling to the ground. He then decided that he would climb the ladder, take the briefcase and toss it down to Carmella so she would win the match. It’s a sleazy way to win, no doubt about it. But exactly what you’d expect from the likes of Carmella & Ellsworth.

As Carmella pointed out in her promo on Tuesday night’s SmackDown Live, she was concerned with victory while the rest of the women were focused on making history. There’s also the question of what exactly the rules are in a ladder match. Whoever ends up with the briefcase is the winner. That’s the one rule everybody agrees on. There aren’t any specifications about how you end up with it. Yeah, it’s a bad look if you’re not the person that actually takes the briefcase off the hook, but Carmella did get the win and that’s typically what matters.

Many pundits took the opportunity to get up on their high horse & bloviate about how it undermined the Women’s Revolution to have James Ellsworth, a man, climb the ladder, retrieve the briefcase & pass it down to Carmella so she can win the match. I expressed my reservations in my MITB Report Card, which were mostly based around the fact that it was the very first Women’s MITB Ladder match and maybe waiting for the third or fourth one to start with the Russo finishes might be for the best for the credibility of the match. Considering all of the other BS that went on during the evening, I still feel that at least one of the matches would have benefited from ending cleaner so the fans wouldn’t have been completely deflated & defeated at the end of the night. I think there’s a much thinner line between “mad at the heels so we’ll come back and watch them get beat” and “mad at the promotion so we’re not going to come back” than a lot of people want to admit.

However, the whole argument that James Ellsworth helping Carmella win undermines the Women’s Revolution is ridiculous in my eyes. Does nobody else remember the days when all that Sherri Martel or Madusa Miceli were allowed to do on wrestling shows was help their men win matches? When Sunny, Sable & Marlena were the only women that would appear on WWF programming for weeks at a time? We still have Maryse & the recently welcomed back Maria Kanellis to fill that role for their husbands, but now we have James “The Big Hog” Ellsworth as a valet.

A man is a valet for a woman. His main purpose is to support his woman and do whatever he can to make sure she is successful. His needs & desires are secondary to hers. He is a supporting character. We would love for Carmella’s rivals to beat the tar out of him, and nobody really thinks that Ellsworth has a chance against Becky, Charlotte, Naomi or whoever. From a kayfabe and real-life perspective, they are all more physically imposing than he is.

The idea that James Ellsworth proved that he was superior to women on Sunday night because he was a man…that’s just pure lunacy. He’s not superior to anybody! That’s what’s great about him!

Speaking of Maria Kanellis, her debut with her husband was another sign of the success of the Women’s Revolution in WWE. Mike didn’t even have a match on Sunday night and he already has heat with everybody. Not only did he marry Maria, so we all have to be jealous of him for that…he took her name! You could hear the disgust in JBL’s voice, and it’ll be the same disgust a lot of fans will have for Mike Kanellis in the weeks and months to come. Another instance of the man being subservient to the woman.

While I didn’t agree with the reasoning the people complaining about the finish of the match used, I will always approve of people expressing their complaints about pro wrestling. How else is WWE supposed to know what their fans want to see? One of the people in the center of this controversy; SmackDown General Manager Daniel Bryan, knows from a personal perspective just how important it is for the fans to express their displeasure with what WWE is doing. Even if you want to buy WWE’s story about early 2014 that the plan was to give Bryan the WrestleMania XXX moment all along, it’s hard to believe they would have kept going with that plan if the fans had just sat on their hands, sung Kumbaya and said everything was going to be ok, like some online voices & people in the wrestling business believe the fans should do at all times. They expressed their outrage during various parts of Bryan’s journey, and WWE responded to it.

Keeping that in mind, when Bryan tweeted during the PPV that he would address the situation on Tuesday, it seemed pretty obvious to me that the decision wasn’t going to stand. Storytelling 101.

Bryan making the decision on Tuesday to hold the briefcase up was the right decision from a moral perspective, and also from a business perspective. The last couple of days showed us that there was plenty of interest in the first Women’s MITB Ladder Match, so holding another one on free television should be good for SD’s ratings. I know people like to downplay WWE’s ratings issues due to various factors including the change in how people view content. The problem with that outlook is that they still make a ton of money off of their TV contracts and need to deliver good numbers to their partners to keep that money rolling in before things totally bust in that form of content distribution. The hope is that people will skip out on viewing clips via video sharing sites & actually tune in live to see what happens. There’s a level of interest there, it’s a matter of just how interested people are.

Also the right decision: Banning James Ellsworth from ringside for the re-match. This goes to show that crime doesn’t pay, kids. Actions have consequences. Maybe not all the time, especially in professional wrestling, but if the show is being marketed towards children it’s a bad look for the cheaters to always come out on top. Sunday’s PPV had an over-abundance of that, so at least in this instance the villains had to pay for their actions.

Of course, the people that were complaining about how a man climbing up and taking the briefcase down were also complaining about a man overturning the decision and making things right for the women. Come on now. Did you want Stephanie McMahon to randomly show up, put Bryan’s cojones in a jar and overturn the decision so a woman would be responsible for it? I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for a male authority figure to actually do something that benefits women at large. I respect the right to complain and don’t mind taking advantage of it myself, but when the complaints start going in circles they tend to lose their effect.

So next week we’ll get another Women’s MITB Ladder Match on SmackDown Live. Some will say it lessens the effect of the first one by having another one so soon. Some will say they should have had a proper finish the first time instead of screwing around. Some will say they should have stuck with the finish and let Carmella’s cheap tricks run rampant. Some will say WWE did the wrong thing on every step of this journey.

I will say that WWE did the right thing, and the Women’s MITB Ladder Match is here to stay.