wrestling / Columns

Moving On Up: Can The Ascension Avoid Being Just Another Team?

September 27, 2014 | Posted by Dino Zee

To start off, let me admit: I don’t watch a lot of NXT. For reasons that are lame and uninteresting, I don’t have legit internet at my house. I have internet on my phone, and that’s it. So, I’m not too interested in watching stuff on my phone all the time. I’m lucky to have friends with the Network, and so if there’s something I really want to check out, I’m able to go watch it there.

For a while, I had heard about this team, The Ascension. I was basically guaranteed by a few friends that I’d immediately love this team, and that they were, for better or worse, “the shit.” I did some superficial research on the team, and recognized one of the guys as “Conor from the NXT show.” I couldn’t believe people were trying to tell me that this dude was a part of a team that I was going to dig. Frankly, I thought Conor was stupid the first time around on NXT Season 3, and wasn’t really looking forward to seeing this team.

Let me also be clear that the only version I was being told about is the current version of Konnor and Viktor, and not the version that had TNA’s Bram included. It’s at this point that I’m contractually obligated to remind everyone that Bram rules the world.

So a couple months back, I finally got the opportunity to check out The Ascension. It was on one of the NXT specials, presumably aRrival, I believe. And out come Konnor and Viktor, and I’m thinking “okay, they have a decent enough look to them,” and then the match starts, and these two just keep beating the crap out of their opponents. I already feel like they remind me of another team I’d seen before, and when they hit their finisher, it all clicks in my head. It’s the Eliminators, I think to myself.

No, they’re not EXACTLY like the Eliminators. Sometimes, comparisons are done between things that are similar, though not exact. Some people need that clarification, it seems. I remember the first time I saw the Eliminators wrestle – Barely Legal, 1997. I had read about them for years in PWI, but had never got the chance to watch them. When they obliterated the Dudley Boys, I had a new team that I thought ruled the world, especially with Total Elimination, what I considered the most unreal move at the time.


The point I’m making is, The Ascension made a great first impression with me. Not since The Eliminators had a tag team won me over so quickly, and wanting to see what was next. To me, it seemed obvious that these guys would be joining the main roster shortly.
However, that time hasn’t come yet. It appears it may be coming soon, as they recently lost the NXT tag titles to Kalisto and Sin Cara, kicking off another round of “they’re coming up to the main roster!” talks.

And so, the question I ask is, when The Ascension arrives in WWE, is there any hope for these guys? Can they spark another round of tag team love? Will they flop on arrival? Will they languish in tag team midcard hell?

I’ve written before on my dislike of how WWE can treat its tag teams. How they’ll go out of their way to create an actual team (like, say, the Matadores) and immediately use them as jobber fodder for some new superteam that was just created the night before. For the last two or three years, we watched as The Usos, Matadores, 3MB, and Prime Time Players were treated as jerks so that Team Hell No and the Rhodes Brothers could instead hold gold. The Shield was the rare case of an actual team that was treated like a threat to everyone else, which was nice, but then guys like Harper and Rowan still don’t really win anything meaningful. No, not every team has to win the titles, but watching the guys who are actually in the division become marginalized by two singles wrestlers who put a team together on the fly has never been something I enjoy in my wrestling.

And so, again we wonder, what happens when The Ascension joins the WWE roster? And yes, I’m going with “when” over “if” because I personally feel that the jump to the main roster is a given. I could be wrong, but I’ll continue on with that line of thought for the rest of the column.

The first thing that strikes me as something that could really hold them back, is their presence on the mic. Granted, I have not seen a lot of them talking, but the little I did, really didn’t strike me as anything that impressive. In my opinion, these guys should almost never speak, and should instead focus on showing up and beating the other guys in the ring. Sure, we could give them a mouthpiece, be it a retread or someone new, but we could just as easily make them the types that just don’t talk that much. Have them set up backstage for an interview, and have them say like three words before leaving. Either way, these guys should not be cutting promos, in my opinion.

Another thing I think will hurt them is if they are simply treated like any other team. I know that WWE likes to make talent “prove themselves” or whatever, but having The Ascension show up and decimate whoever gets in their way off the start is not the worst idea ever. These guys have built a rep with a portion of the audience already, why piss that away by having them lose early in their start? WWE needs to get behind these guys and push them hard, and make them seem like a big deal. There’s been a tricky battle of “Chicken and the Egg” between us, the fans, and them, WWE, in regards to what makes a star. WWE seems to think that they’ll put anyone on TV with little fanfare, and if they’re really anything good, we’ll just pick up on it and notice. If they fail, it’s not WWE’s fault for barely trying, it’s the talent’s fault for not getting over.


However, that ignores the idea that we as fans can tell when they don’t care about a talent, and so we don’t waste our time trying to get behind them. It’s like I’ve said before, if something is supposed to be a big deal, then you have to treat it like one. If The Ascension shows up and is just two new guys in WWE, then why would we get excited? The last time a true tag team of only two guys showed up and got a real push was… what? The Hart Dynasty? And isn’t that the most liberal use of “real push”? I might be blanking on a different team, but it took The Usos nearly 3 years to finally win the gold. The Prime Time Players never did anything important. The Matadores were “serious” for maybe 5 seconds before we saw Torito. Bottom line: tag teams haven’t mattered in WWE for a while, and we all know it.

If The Ascension is going to matter, they have to do more than just beat up the same teams we’ve seen lose to everyone else under the sun. A debut where they take out two singles stars having a match (in a similar vein to Brock Lesnar showing up and destroying everyone in the ring) could make a statement. Imagine a match where Big E faces Cesaro, and they end up both being attacked by Konnor and Viktor. Sure, in WWE logic, the superteam of Cesaro and E would probably win the match, but the visual of the tag team taking out two former singles champions would leave quite an impression. You could then leapfrog from that moment to having The Ascension call out the champs, and boom, we’ve suddenly got a new team with a lot of buzz with a stated goal of winning the championship. And like that, there’s actual intrigue in the division.

So far, it seems pretty easy, right? Limit mic time, and treat them like a big deal. It’s almost like wrestling, at its core, is something that’s pretty simple, and only gets ruined when things are made too complicated.

One final suggestion, if we’re going to make The Ascension matter immediately upon arriving to the main roster, would be to back off on whether they’re heels or faces. Let them float seamlessly in that tweener space. Let them simply focus on beating people and winning. They don’t have to tag every hand of every fan, but they also don’t have to try to be super heels. This team strikes me as one that can very easily split the fanbase by simply being themselves. They don’t need to pander one way or another. They don’t need to form stupid unions with other teams just because they both happen to be on the same side of the heel/face spectrum. They simply show up and win.
In the end, I have huge hopes for this team. I honestly feel like they could be the shot in the arm the whole division has needed for a while. Sure, Goldust and Stardust are fun, but what’s their competition? What’s their feud? What if, in order to get to the Cosmic Key, they have to rise above, to touch the heavens, to… ascend? Konnor and Viktor have a style that WWE’s tag division hasn’t seen in a while, with a presentation that also hasn’t been abused to death.

These guys have shown they can connect with a crowd by simply doing what they do. Let’s hope that when they finally show up on Raw, it’s not to provide yet another example of WWE not giving a crap about tag teams. These guys can be the next big tag team stars. They just have to be treated as such.


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