Jake’s Wacky Wrestling Takes: WWE Title Stinks, RAW Invasion Tanks & Wrestling Without the Stars

Are we supposed to take wrestling seriously or should we always watch now with a constant critical detachment? This philosophical brain-squeezer is a plague on the wrestling fans of today. No one wants to be in that stupid live audience cheering and chanting 1980s Network-style, your McMahon-manipulated emotions popping whenever Hogan slams some big brute as if Superman is saving a Titanic full of war widows. Nah, we’re all Pat Patterson-ing from the office in our man caves, too “smart” to actually care passionately about one wrestler doing cool stuff and trying to be the best.

It’s passé to cheer for someone you actually LIKE nowadays. Our whole pro-wrestling fandom revolves around being these little arrogant Wizards of Oz who know exactly how to control everything from behind the curtain, be it merchandise sales, webs of creative dramatic arcs, or even manipulating those dummy fans of which, of course, you cannot be.

Honestly, it’s almost like we’re watching a puppet show with the whole stage removed. We expect the puppets to do their job and put on a flawless, generic show – that’s just a given – while we focus on what the puppeteers are doing, what the people cleaning the floor behind the puppeteers are doing, and what the weather is like out the window behind those cleaners. It’s a very odd kind of fandom, taking these factors and running some calculus in our heads to constantly come up with hypotheses on the “proper” future. I’m not sure what we can even compare this to? Game of Thrones, for example, is something we all know is a scripted, fictional program, but for that hour the show is on most fans are watching it engaged in the characters and moments. It’s not like people are pissed, “Oh, Jon Snow looked stronger than Tyrion in that scene, so damn it, that means next season he’s going to get more close ups.”

And yet, I’m as susceptible as the next mark, smark or bark to the gossip industry that fills all of our righteous boiling blood with this noble authority on how all pro-wrestling should be produced. So then why do I love Dino Zee’s weekly 411 column The Officially Unofficial Grand Championship Rankings so much? I highly recommend this PWI-style analysis of the TNA/GFW/Impact Grand Championship. That timed-rounds and judging-system belt is itself a goofy anomaly on a goofy anomaly of a wrestling show, but Dino captures the essence lost in pro-wrestling fandom with his genuinely logical break-down of this superficially dopey concept.

At an historically confusing time regarding what titles in pro-wrestling mean and how we all have a goddamn opinion on who deserves what because of Structuralist readings of garbage culture texts, it’s refreshing to see someone put kayfabe focus on something so minutely un-important in the grand scheme, thus negating that judgement on the topic in the first place.

Which brings me to my first very un-ZeeWI topic of the week!

Has the WWE Title Ever Meant So Little?

Throughout the Wrestlemania Era, the WWF/E Championship has been the premier title belt in the pro-wrestling galaxy. Yes, arguably there have been some years when you might have ranked it a bit lower than some other belts – the NWA Title, AJPW Triple Crown, GHC Championship, ROH Title, TNA X-Division Title, IWGP Title, and even the WWE’s version of the World Championship, all would have had years where they’d been a bit more important, but that original Hogan-held belt was always hovering just below.

The darkest year in its history was probably the take-my-belt-and-go-home 2014 Brock Lesnar run that just removed the title for months from the WWE narrative with no explanation, especially considering it was in the same year Daniel Bryan was literally storyline stripped of the belt for not being able to defend within the traditional 30-day window. It didn’t hurt that New Japan’s IWGP Championship was being fought over in some legendary bouts while that federation itself was seeing new global popularity.

But this year, ugh, the WWE Title has never been this low on a hypothetical rankings of importance, has it? With the WWE focusing on the Universal Title as the main belt, the poor booking and mini-matches around it have made the back-seated WWE Title look like the nWo Black & White during the Wolfpac era. Even the historically shit Intercontinental Title feels like the 2nd most important belt in WWE just because The Miz is such a transcendent presence. Add in the New Japan’s main titles, the Lucha Underground Championship, the World of Stardom Championship, Zack Sabre’s run with the Evolve and PWG Titles, and that old stalwart of pro-wrestling prestige – the WWE Title – might not even be in the Top 10 most relevant belts in 2017.

Jinder Mahal wasn’t able to accomplish what JBL did during his first 6 months as lower-tiered WWE Champion, but I don’t necessarily blame him for devaluing this sacred symbol. It was Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton that took the title to the depths of hellish shittiness following the great AJ Styles/Cena feud. Orton & Wyatt’s lame-osity made it palatable for a wrestler of Jinder’s ability and stature to have a mediocre run that few would notice.

As long as the WWE Title is on Smackdown, it’s clear that it won’t be the #1 title in the WWE, let alone the world, but one would have to imagine what an unleashed baby-face Sami Zayn could do against the legion of natural heels stockpiled on the blue brand. Of course, it’s more likely we’ll see Royal Rumble winner Baron Corbin vs. Bobby Roode for the WWE Title jerk the curtain at Wrestlemania 34, but what can you do? Rather than cheering for an awesome wrestler in awesome matches, now we all get to complain about the WWE’s un-savvy business decisions online, which just must be a better statistically time consuming social media activity for customers to be engaging in – and, you know, all we really want to see are those ratings and stock prices go up, right?

The VKM… I mean, Bullet Club “Invasion” of RAW!

The Bullet Club “invaded” RAW last week, in a nostalgic moment of fan-archy many compared to the legendary DX invasion of a parking lot where WCW Nitro was filming.

Of course, there are lots of problems with that comparison. WWF and WCW were locked in a ratings setting TV show battle at the time, whereas today the WWE is a live TV pro-wrestling monopoly and the Bullet Club represents a T-Shirt brand more than anything else. But what I found funniest about the whole thing was the true parallels to when BG and Kip James invaded WWE Headquarters in Stanford over a cease and desist order in TNA years ago.

Just like then, the 2nd tier unit were outside while the originators of the “brand” were inside the building. The leaders of DX Triple H and Shawn Michaels were working for the WWE at the time, while the New Age Outlaws were with the irrelevant TNA, just like the original creators of the Bullet Club Prince Devitt and Karl Anderson were at RAW while newer members, and (lol) ROH title holders, Cody and the Young Bucks were on the outside trying to get some attention. Also, when HHH and HBK were leading DX, they could be funny but they were also a serious threat in the main event scene of a company at the top of one of the most creative periods in pro-wresting history. Sure, these Bullet Club members today are main event-ers in that pseudo-indy, late night informercial ROH, but in their home promotion, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, these guys are at best the equivalent of 2005 VKM. If Fale and Omega are gonna invade a parking lot, then let me know, I might just have to Tweet about it @MatchADay like a sucker!

Min-BORE-u Suzzzzuki

Speaking of boring, one-note factions, the leader of barrel-bottoming New Japan faction Suzuki-Gun, Minoru Suzuki is one of these great foreign myths that continues to perpetrate in western pro-wrestling punditry. He’s often considered a tough guy, bad ass, capable of great matches, when in fact, the dude is a bore! Always has been. Sure, he’s had a few good matches, but hell, so has Dolph Ziggler, and you’re not gonna suffer years of boring-ass matches just to pretend you’re into something that’s not mainstream, are YOU? Oh, yeah, YOU will.

Incredibly, with the exception of the way-too-good-to-be-there Zack Sabre Jr, Suzuki’s faction is made up of wrestlers just as bland as him, with equally as stubborn longevity. Davey Boy Smith Jr., Lance Archer and Shelton Benjamin, you couldn’t have asked for 3 more Suzuki like duds, that are consistently discussed in some lower circles of internet fandom as guys with great untapped potential. Yoshinobu Kanemura and Taka Michinoku have floated by so long in Japan without ever breaking through to the next level, because they’re boring! Taichi, El Desperado are dull flops, and even madman Iizuka is more a one-note Tiger Jeet Singh than a wildly fun Sandman.

– he couldn’t possibly get a boring match out of Kobashi, could he?

But no surprise ROH gave Minoru Suzuki an ROH Title match at the Death Before Dishonor PPV. Why bother with Tanahashi, Okada, Naito, or Shibata and Nakamura when they were active, what did those guys ever do to deserve title shots? Nah, let’s give an old bore like Suzuki a chance to have no threat of winning and the likelihood of putting on yet another stinker, especially when in there with Cody “Coast to Mediocrity” Rhodes himself. I’d say give Yuji Nagata or Togi Makabe shots next, if they want a guaranteed New Japan loser who might put on an okay match, but knowing ROH it’s more likely to be Manabu Nakanishi or Toru Yano who are next in line.

UPDATED – Oh shit, sorry, next in line is clearly the “deserving” KUSHIDA, a junior heavyweight in NJPW who literally just lost the ROH TV Title clean to Kenny King. All the qualifications of a legit ROH world title challenger.

Who is the STAR of the WWE?

This is a huge issue that I’ve been really focused on in a variety of articles I’ve contributed to throughout the year here at 411mania. The WWE has no “star”. Most eras in WWE history have had that one main character who the whole narrative ecosystem revolves around, but the past few years it’s gotten harder and harder to decipher just who that is supposed to be anymore. Complicated and multi-layered stories have some semblance of a protagonist, even the most Joycian, Lynchian of stories, but the WWE is defiantly star-less, producing stories that are neither linearly satisfying or abstractly interesting. You’d puke in about 10 minutes if you were playing a drinking game based on how many times you’d hear the term “storytelling” thrown around in the online expert pro-wrestling punditry sphere, from Twitter threads to the podcasting-verse, and yet I’m scratching my head to see any resemblance to storytelling in the WWE, be it classical or of the wrestling genre.

The WWE today is a serialized soap opera with no Victor Newman, no Brandon Walsh, no Matt Saracen, and definitely no more Hulk Hogan. The longest running “star” in WWE history was always the protagonist who set the themes and direction of the entire federation. Sure, in the 80s producing wrestling was a much lighter and sparse gambit, and Hogan was probably on the regular shows as much as Brock is today, but you can’t deny the power of having one character at the top of the fountain with clear motivations, that drips down into the wrestlers and angles below, delineating what makes a face or heel throughout. That’s what made Hogan’s nWo so effective, everyone in WCW needed some position in this fighting league in regards to the mutiny going on at the top. These days, fourth-walling through feuds about who deserves to be the face of the show doesn’t necessarily shine the actual narrative spotlight on one specific protagonist, nor put any other characters in dilemmas to define their journeys.

On the surface, the star today really should be Brock Lesnar, but as we all know, the guy has brought new meaning to the term “part-time” – I mean, if what he’s doing is part time do you think if you double it he’s working full-time? With so much content and so little Lesnar, he appears to thus have no character or personality, he’s a blank slate we have to imprint a whole lot of perceived bad-assery on, which becomes less and less believable the further away he gets from his (half-good) UFC career, and closer he gets to his mid-40s. If the best thing Brock’s done as star of the WWE in the past year was the collective 10 minutes him and Golberg spent wrestling in WWE rings over the span of a near 6-month feud – that’s pretty damn empty. Clearly the WWE ran out of ideas for Brock once they thought it would be cool to use him to squash John Cena in place of Daniel Bryan in a PPV main event, yet it never paid off other than in those few moments, of which now the shock means even less. And it’s clear that a global fake-sport soap opera needs more than a shoot steroid-abusing old tough guy throwing a dozen suplexes in the six 3-minute matches he works a year to drive their nine-hour-a-week narrative.

Then you have John Cena, who contributes more of the personality, matches and star power than Brock, but has transitioned into a part-timer himself and thus used in lesser roles when he’s available than what his ability should allow. The WWE’s masterplan of Facebook-ing pro-wrestling is going to cost us Cena’s 40s where he could have truly played that legendary heel so many have begged for, in a Hollywood Hogan like run. Nah, the WWE would rather figure out how to sell tiny little pieces of cheap shit to the largest amount of poor people possible and continue to run their employees like they’re in a sweat shop, rather than focus on producing Hollywood levels of prestige content in lesser amounts for a higher value. So Cena will pop in and out for a while doing his crowd-pleaser bit, as he makes the money in the movies that WWE could technically pay him if they cared about creating compelling storylines with gifted performers. And therefore we’re all left with… let’s say it together now… Roman Reigns!

Roman Reigns is this odd mix of Cena’s in-ring charisma and Lesnar’s run-through-you presence, but he’s still not the “star” of the show. Unlike Cena and Lesnar, who have at least always been superficially booked as face and heel respectively, regardless of the audience buying into it or not, Reigns is a tween-er playing like a face to the crowd but acting like a heel, which makes his rivalries confusing and the stories around him difficult to write. So the WWE has held back on really shinning the spotlight on him, which might sound crazy considering how much of a focus he is, but you really can’t say Reigns is the “star” of the show. Even after main eventing three straight Wrestlemanias, it’s hard to conceptualize who Reigns is a character, what he wants, how he’s vulnerable, why anyone should like or hate him other than to spite intellectual battles between wrestling critics who are either pulling for WWE’s business success or proclaiming its downfall. There’s nothing compelling about Reigns as a character and it feels like the WWE senses this too and prefers to coast on the average level of sales he can make rather than taking a risk to narratively course correct.

There are other candidates to be the “star” of the WWE, sure, like AJ Styles, Kevin Owens, Seth Rollins, The Miz or Dean Ambrose, but let’s be real, the WWE is not at any time going to focus the entire show around these guys. All of them have experienced their greatest heights in the WWE, at least in this current iteration of roster and management. I also have a hard time seeing Nakamura, Balor or Strowman as the next in line, or really anyone in the NXT system right now, because they feel too small, too plain or too odd to join the ranks of past WWE stars upon which the entire show revolved. Guys like Hogan, Savage, Warrior, Bret, Diesel, Shawn, Austin, Rock, Cena, Punk or Bryan, you could see it coming with these guys from miles away, that same way we all did with Reigns when he was in the Shield. Sure, the WWE is going to press on with Reigns as their “guy”, but that does not a story make, and a true “star” should be someone we want to follow on their heroic quest.

205 Live has actually the WWE brand with the most focused booking, in terms of having one main star in which the narrative of the show revolves every week. For most of the year, heel antagonist champion Neville was doing a great job in the role, I suppose, but it’s not a given that the audience is going to care about good booking either. Austin Aries was a great challenge for the bad guy “star” to overcome, but the WWE sells this as lighter-weight cutting edge wrestling, when it’s really just very nicely done, basic ring work. You could almost forgive the audience for not getting it, if the wrestling was at the level of the CWC, but everything they do on 205 Live looks the same as what you’d see on RAW or Smackdown, it’s the WWE style and the general audience already gets enough of that. So the pivot to Enzo Amore, a strong WWE-style talker, as the “star” of 205 Live is an interesting move compared to how he’d be lost in the shuffle of the main brands’ star-less-ness systems.

Enzo has stumbled into the best possible situation here, and there’s no doubt he’s been on the cusp of a legendary solo heel career since we all first heard him open his mouth. So while it might sound insane, watch what happens with Enzo very closely, because this is a crucially empty period in WWE creative and anyone who shines is going to look like a fucking diamond right now. Turning around 205 Live, which it feels like he’s already done even if there’s no data to prove it yet, is going to be a pretty ridiculously amazing bullet point to have on your pro-wrestling resume in 2018 at a time when everything is pretty generally terrible. And compared to every top guy in the WWE right now, Enzo has talked himself into having the clearest character arc in the WWE in years. Add in the fact that your basic live audience legit loves Enzo, hot damn, when he re-turns babyface this could very well be the WWE Champion who saves that belt and takes over as the top star in the company.

If you want to look like a puppet-master predictor, biz fan-genius, as so many today do, then I’d say jump on the Enzo bandwagon quick, before it’ll be too late to say “I told you so”. Or you could just Zee-WI hate Enzo for being a jerk on 205 Live, unless you smark hate him for being a jerk backstage. Or maybe BOTH are part of the story and you’re being manipulated no matter what? So maybe YOU’RE the jerk, did you ever think about that? And by “you” I don’t mean you, I’m talking about YOU… you know what I mean, how you doin’?