Friendly Competition 9.01.07

I get in to work Monday morning and am expecting quite a busy week, so of course the first thing I do is take a break and check my MySpace. They’ve had some weird ads on there, but I see one link for Mike Jones ringtones. My first reaction was “Virgil has ringtones? That’s weird.” I’ll admit, his WWF music was pretty catchy, but I don’t know if I’d want it as my ringtone. But since it was “ringtones” as in plural, that must mean there’s more than one. I can’t imagine what else they could have for Virgil ringtones since his gimmick was that he mostly didn’t say anything for most of his career. Like, you can’t have a ringtone of him flashing the 4-Life hand gesture, and that’s basically all he did for like three years. Can you have a ringtone of somebody doing the job? Maybe I should have my coffee before writing these things.

Gee, There’s Nothing To Talk About This Week…

I think that as much as we wanted to believe the WWE really had good intentions with the Wellness Policy, we all knew deep down that it was designed for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to get people to back off after Eddy Guerrero died. “No, look guys! See, we’re testing everybody now! This is never going to happen again, until it does.” So, against our better judgment, we took WWE at their word and accepted that they were really going to start policing the roster about their substance abuse issues. However, after last year’s Great American Bash fiasco (which saw three key players pulled from the show for Wellness issues), we all of a sudden started hearing less and less about the Wellness Policy. Before long, we found out that the policy had changed and, instead of being suspended (which would be more beneficial to the offending talent’s overall health), they were just made to continue without pay. After a while, it became something WWE used as an avenue for getting rid of talents they wanted gone, such as Joey Mercury and Test. Slowly, the guys who got REALLY SKINNY after the Wellness Policy was instituted suddenly started getting big again.

Fast forward to August 2007. It’s been two months since Chris Benoit had his little party, and now WWE is going in front of Congress to debate the drug issues and how exactly they’re handling it. Lucky for them, it’s been long enough since the Benoit Incident that the heat is starting to cool off, and the media has moved on and found some other crappy situation to latch on to and exploit. Given the breathing room they’ve now got, WWE is probably going to have an easier time explaining themselves than they would have in June. Yeah, it’s a shame about the whole Benoit thing, but enough time has passed that this little Congress thing is just going to be business as usual.

Oh, silly me, I forgot to mention this latest little Sports Illustrated story exposing yet more wrestlers as having received steroids under questionable circumstances. As of this writing, there were like 12 or 13 names that were given as customers of this mail order steroid place and, though I don’t feel compelled to go look up all the names, there were a few important ones worth mentioning, and the most notable name on the list to me was Eddy Guerrero. According to the report, he was receiving steroids as recently as a few months before his death. Not for nothing, but I find it a little difficult to feel bad for him after discovering this, and it really shoots his whole “reborn clean living” image to hell. Okay, good, he gave up the drugs and drinking, good for him. He was still destroying his body with the steroids and he should have known better, especially given what he had already done to himself. So are we still to believe that he died because “even though he had given up the vices, the damage had been done”, or are we to realize the truth and accept that he was continuing to kill himself, but qualifying it by focusing on the other stuff he had given up? We all knew that he had indirectly killed himself, but it’s really tough to feel sorry for him at this point knowing that he was lying, albeit lying via omission.

And I also have to say that little Chavo is a real fucking idiot. He not only knows what this stuff did to his uncle, but actually found his dead body in the hotel room, yet continued to take the stuff himself? Does anybody else see the problem with this picture? These guys have enough problems just doing what they do for a living, but then Chavo’s willing to continue using steroidss after seeing them kill one of his closest relatives? Same goes for Benoit. He knew what Eddy was doing, I refuse to accept that he had no idea. His best friend died, yet just like Chavo, he kept it up. Now he’s dead too.

We as fans get all up in arms when confronted with the idea of government regulation of professional wrestling, yet at this point I think it’s pretty clear that WWE’s only going to do anything about the problem for as long as they think they’re in danger of getting in trouble, but as soon as the heat’s off, it’s back to business as usual. They’ve been flying under the radar for many years, but I have a feeling that those days are over.

Summerscam

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I rarely, if ever, catch WWE or TNA on TV anymore these days, though I have to admit that as Summerslam approached, I kind of wish I had paid closer attention to what was going on so I could contribute to the staff roundtable preview, but as it was I really hadn’t been paying attention and had nothing to contribute, so I didn’t. I really felt bad about that because, even in light of the fact that my schedule has become VERY tight over the last few months, I felt like I should at least keep up to date enough on what’s going on to contribute to features like this. Granted, it wasn’t the strongest looking card on paper, but this is one of the big four PPVs of the year, and theoretically one of the four times of year I really should be paying attention, right?

Then I read the report of what happened and realized that I was worrying over nothing because WWE gave us a nothing show. Even with the returns of Rey Mysterio, Jr and Triple H, it felt like a show that was just put on for the sake of putting on a show. It’s one thing if they do that with, say, the Great American Bash or No Way Out, but when it’s one of the Big Four,k I feel like they should put more of an effort into making the show appealing to potential buyers than they did. No title changes? CM Punk loses again? Oh yeah, and Kane vs Finlay. What a show. Supposedly one of the big plans for WWE in the immediate future is to raise the PPV buys they’re doing, but until they give us a reason to buy, we’re not going to. Let me put it this way: despite the fact that there were three “World Title” matches on the show, what was the real draw? The returns of Triple H and Rey Mysterio, right? Is there anybody reading this who thought for a minute that either of them were going to lose? Of course not, so if we know they’re going to win, why buy the show? We’d do better to save the money since the rest of the show looks like it’s going to suck and just wait to see them on Raw and Smackdown, right?

They’ve already gotten to the point where they’ve turned Survivor Series into just another show and all but destroyed the original concept. Is Summerslam, which has often had better overall wrestling than Wrestlemania itself, next on the list of shows that are going to be just another PPV? If WWE wants people to start buying all the PPVs, they should concentrate on elevating the in-between shows instead of cutting the legs out from under the shows that people somehow still care about.

Live Thoughts From ROH’s Manhattan Return

Ring Of Honor returned to the Manhattan Center in New York City last Saturday night for Manhattan Mayhem II. As usual, I was there and, as usual, they brought their best to NYC. I have to admit I was surprised to see Morishima-Danielson go on second from the top, but I guess that just goes to show what high regard the Briscoes are held in by ROH management. I also think it’s really refreshing to see a promotion that treats its titles with such dignity that their World Tag Team Title can headline a show in their biggest market. What I find even more remarkable about the situation is that the other guys in the main event of that show were Kevin Steen & El Generico, because if you’d told me in January that those two would be main eventing a Manhattan Center show by the end of the year, I’d have said you were crazy. As I expected, the Briscoes retained, meaning they went 2-0 against Steen & Generico this weekend, and had a hell of a match in the process. I do have to make mention of the insanely sick bump when the Briscoes hiptossed Generico from the ring, out over the cornerpost, and to the floor. It was easily one of the most insane bumps I’ve ever seen in my life, and I have to give Generico a lot of props for agreeing to take a bump like that.

As good as the main event was, I have to say that I thought the ROH World Title match between Takeshi Morishima and Bryan Danielson was even better. I was wondering going in what Danielson would do to try and beat Morishima because I figured that most of his usual offense would be ineffective against a guy the size of Morishima, but as usual, Danielson knew exactly what to do to make the match entertaining by working over Morishima’s legs, and in the process he not only made it seem like he had a chance of winning the title, but for a little while I actually started thinking it was going to happen. When Danielson caught him with the MMA elbows and then turned it into a series of stomps onto Morishima’s face, I swear I thought the title was his. To be fair, Morishima didn’t just get his ass kicked the whole time, because he did have a good stretch in the middle of the match where he literally kicked the crap out of Danielson with some of the realest kicks I’ve ever seen live. The match had a cool ending when Danielson made a rare mistake by trying to give Morishima a belly-to-back superplex, which Morishima reversed to come down on top of Danielson, and one backdrop suplex later Morishima had again successfully defended his title.

Unfortunately for Bryan Danielson, he came out of the match on the injured list because he suffered a cracked orbital bone and actually lost sight in one of his eyes due to the stiff nature of the match. Apparently, Danielson couldn’t even control the eye when he got to the back, and once he was examined by a doctor, it was discovered that he also had detached his retina. He underwent laser surgery to reattach the retina, and the doctor’s have said there’s a 90% chance that he’ll regain his sight, but it’s possible that it will be blurry even if it does come back. If nothing else, this just goes to show what a trooper Bryan Danielson is. If there was any doubt as to how tough this motherfucker is after the shoulder injury, the way he handled this latest injury ought to drive the point home. Sitting there watching the match, you would have never known what had happened to him because he worked as smoothly as he ever does despite working with 50% of his normal vision. The bad news is that he’ll be out of action for two months or so, and this means he had to be pulled from the finals of the NWA World Title Tournament, which he was widely expected to win. Tough break.

The only match of the night I was disappointed by was the Claudio Castagnoli-Chris Hero match. It’s not that it was a bad match, but I expect better out of both guys and I felt like it wasn’t as good as I’d have expected after waiting eight months to see it. Plus, I felt like the wrong guy won. That’s not a knock on Claudio because he’s rebounded from getting canned by WWE to become one of the top guys in ROH right now, but he beat Hero totally clean and essentially ended the feud before it even had a chance to go anywhere. Now, where does Hero go from here? Unless they have another match where Hero goes over clean, I feel like a feud which could have been one of the best of the year was totally blown off because, for whatever reason, pushing Chris Hero is not a high priority for Gabe Sapolsky.

Overall though, I thought the show was excellent, easily better than the first Manhattan Mayhem and I think it was an overall stronger show than Respect Is Earned. I don’t think it topped Glory By Honor V Night Two, but then again, GBH5N2 was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, certainly the best I’ve ever been to, so I realize it’s probably not realistic to expect any show to top it. Still though, probably one of the better ROH shows I’ve ever been to, and that’s saying something.

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That’s it for me this week, I’m off to enjoy my Labor Day Weekend, during which my girlfriend will thankfully not be going into labor. You all enjoy your long weekend, and I’ll see you back here in seven.