Saturday 25 July 2015

Quick Thoughts #4: You Can’t Manufacture Special Moments

Last night Ring of Honor presented the thirteenth edition of its annual Death Before Dishonor event and overall the show was very good.

Obviously it wasn’t a top level show but it was more than worth the $19.95 asking price.

A decent card from top to bottom with nothing mind-blowingly good saw Adam Cole and Dalton Castle have probably the best match of the night.

The point of this article though is to discuss pro wrestling’s obsession with trying to manufacture special moments.

It is a problem that seemingly plagues all companies from the very top to the smallest indie.

We see it in WWE all the time what with Jerry Lawler screaming “Wrestlemania moment” about thirty times every April.

And last night we saw the epidemic strike in ROH.

A decent show was heading to what looked to be an exciting conclusion with a tantalising main event pitting Jay Lethal against Roderick Strong.

Lethal and his cohorts in the House of Truth, in particular Truth Martini, have provided us with some of the most entertaining moments of 2015 so far and Strong seems to have had more great matches this year than I’ve had hot meals.

So you could forgive me for expecting great things from this match.

The bell rang and for the next sixty minutes those two men beat the living daylights out of one another.

I could not begrudge the wrestlers what they did in this match because they gave it everything and looked understandably dead on their feet by the time the match ended.

The problem was the result; they went to a sixty minute time limit draw.

Now I have no problem with time limit draws and as a matter of fact I think they are a woefully underutilised trope in pro wrestling.

The problem was last night ROH tried to manufacture something special whilst failing to realise that you can’t manufacture a special moment – it has to occur organically.

I realise that in a business like pro wrestling which is pre-determined people will be thinking that nothing can happen organically and you have to manufacture everything but last night proved that simply isn’t the case.

ROH has a history with time limit draws and following the match I measured the quality on my own personal ROH time limit draw scale which starts at Aries vs. Black from Final Battle 2009 and goes all the way up to Joe vs. Punk from Joe/Punk II.

I came to the conclusion that this sat at about the level of Punk vs. Daniels from The Homecoming show during Punk’s title reign.

And I stand by that, it was a solid, if unspectacular, time limit draw.

The problem was ROH had clearly tried to manufacture this match into a truly special moment planned to be a moment that fans would talk about for years to come and organically it just wasn’t.

In that sense it reminds me more of the Austin Aries vs. Bryan Danielson match from Testing The Limit.

At that show, if my memory serves me correctly, Aries and Dragon went 78 minutes in a 2/3 Falls match and at the end it felt like we were supposed to be in awe at the epic moment we’d all just witnessed.

But once again it felt forced, it felt like they were too focused on creating history and manufacturing that fabled special moment that they forgot to have a good match.

And that’s what Lethal vs. Strong felt like last night, it was good but the match was too focused on trying to be special to actually be special.

Pro wrestling as a whole has got to realise that it can’t create these moments and they have to just let them happen organically.

Obviously you have to book the best show you possibly can but a booker can only create what he, she or they believe to be the best narrative possible – the rest is out of their hands.

There is a multitude of different factors at play and you can’t just decide, right, this is going to be a special moment – we’ll make sure of that.

You can have an inclination that something could be special but you can’t force that fact down the audience’s throat otherwise it will never be that special moment.

Daniel Bryan’s moment at WrestleMania XXX felt special because it felt organic, not because Michael Cole told me it was special.

Last night felt like Kevin Kelly trying to force me into believing I’d seen something special.

Undoubtedly ROH can now take this forward in a myriad of interesting ways though.

The one positive they can take out of this is they now have a match lined up that possibly could be remembered as epic.

As a result of this draw we will obviously see a rematch and after a sixty minute draw there’s only one specialist ROH match that would be a fitting stipulation for said rematch – a Ringmaster’s Challenge match.

The Ringmaster’s Challenge is a 2/3 Falls Match with a few additional stipulation’s.

The first fall must be won via pinfall, the second via submission and the third if (note: when) required is a 15 minute Ironman match.

Pitting Lethal vs. Strong in this type of environment would be fantastic and quite possibly allow ROH to have the moment they were so desperate for last night.

Add the ROH World Championship (and possibly the Television Championship too) into the mix and you've got yourself a potentially epic main event for further down the line.

That is providing they don’t try hard to make it special and just focus on producing the best match they possibly can.

Monday 20 July 2015

Quick Thoughts #3: Is Battleground Cursed? A (Not So) Brief Review/Rant



I may be beating a dead horse here because I’m sure many of you out there have made similar gripes to what I’m going to outline in this article but here goes.

Last night WWE produced their latest PPV/Special Event – 'Battleground'.

The card on paper looked a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde affair.

The undercard looked bland and uneventful but the top two matches seemed a lock to deliver.

The undercard actually performed a little better than I expected. I got nothing personally out of the Sheamus vs. Orton contest but the Tag Team Championship match was better than I’d hoped and even Wyatt vs. Reigns was not as bad as I’d feared.

It also taught me that Bray Wyatt has one of the most brutal looking lariats in North America at the minute – a true thing of beauty.

We also got a nice little bonus in the fact that we got a follow up to Monday’s debut of Becky Lynch, Charlotte and Sasha Banks as we got to see Charlotte vs. Sasha vs. Brie Bella in a three-way dance.

The match was probably the best diva’s match on a main roster PPV since AJ Lee and Kaitlyn at ‘Payback’ in 2013.

It wasn’t quite up to the level of the NXT matches we’ve seen but it was very, very good and told a good storyline.

I’m really looking forward to seeing where they take this in the future.

Next we get into the meat of last night’s problems with the double main event.

First off we had John Cena and Kevin Owens lining up the third match in their budding rivalry and I was expecting very good things.

Their first match was excellent and the United States Open Challenge has led to some great moments.

This looked like it could be a culmination of all that coming together.

I, admittedly, didn’t care for their second match too much because I felt it was just a re-hash of their first match merely in a different sequence and with a different winner.

But that didn’t put too much of a dampener on my hopes for this outing.

After all, they weren’t likely to have the same match three times and the storyline had built to a perfect conclusion.

There are some times in wrestling where I get an indescribable feeling about how something needs to play out.

Sometimes it is just the absolutely right time to pull the trigger on a performer.

The examples I have been using that recently gave me this feeling was I felt TNA needed to pull the trigger on EC3, which to the surprise of many – me included, they actually managed to pull off – and at Ring of Honor’s June PPV ‘Best in the World’ they needed to pull the trigger on Jay Lethal which they did.

I actually wrote an article in this series a couple of months back where I referred to the need to pull the trigger on Lethal and ROH did just that.

Last night was WWE’s moment.

The storyline, the performers, the stage, the moment – everything was perfect to pull the trigger on Kevin Owens by having him beat John Cena and win the United States Championship.

I had justified the result so much in my head not just from the point of view of what it would do for Owens and how big of a star it could and would make him but also how it would help the rest of the card.

I had already heard about the impending arrival of The Undertaker (a scenario we’ll get to in a little bit) and his apparent feud with Brock Lesnar into ‘Summerslam’.

This fact would leave Seth Rollins with very little to do at the third biggest show of the year – something your WWE World Heavyweight Champion should not be doing.

But by having Kevin Owens beat John Cena you had the perfect opportunity to give Rollins a big match.

Love him or hate him a match against Cena for the top prize in the industry is a big deal and it would have been great for Rollins.

The match-up is relatively fresh, the matches would be good and it would feel like Rollins was a big deal because he was getting in the ring and beating John Cena for the title.

So I had already made my mind up that this all made too much sense for them to do anything else other than have Owens beat Cena for the US Title.

Then they didn’t.

Owens tapped out to the STF.

I was stunned.

I thought at the time and still think now, no longer sleep deprived at 3:15 in the morning, that it was a bad call.

It was the perfect time to pull the trigger on Owens and the creative team fluffed their lines.


It wasn’t just that – the match itself wasn’t any great shakes either.

They didn’t exactly have the same match for a third time but it was very similar and it was the type of match that, had it taken place on the independent’s, people would have crucified for the blatant abuse of finishing move’s and late kick-out’s.

They tried so hard to manufacture drama that there was none and it left the match with a somewhat empty feeling.

The ending and result was merely the cherry on top.
 


It was okay though, there was still time to save this show – the main event was coming and it was sure to be great.

Yeah I knew, having been exposed to The Undertaker spoiler earlier, that it wasn’t going to end cleanly but I knew the match would be good and I hoped Rollins would come out looking relatively strong.

I must say, the reason I was so excited for Brock vs. Seth is it has kind of been a dream match of mine since Seth threatened to cash in his Money in the Bank briefcase on Lesnar at last year’s ‘Night of Champions’ event.

Right then I realised how great a match between those two had the potential to be.

Then I saw the triple threat at the ‘Royal Rumble’ earlier this year between them and John Cena.

That only cemented the idea in my head that this would be something special.

So, despite knowing very little of the build towards this PPV due to my nigh on non-existent following of ‘Monday Night RAW’ over recent months, I was excited.

It came and I started the way I knew it would with Brock dominating and Seth getting the odd shot in.

This wasn’t a problem because Brock has been booked on an almost God-like tier in the past couple of years and I was sure that Seth would use his wits to get in a bit more offense later on.

But he didn’t.

Brock basically squashed the, kayfabe, top guy in the entire wrestling world for nine minutes and then had him beat after thirteen German Suplexes and an F-5 until a gong hit.

The Undertaker appeared and everything went from bad to worse.

Not only had WWE just made their WWE World Heavyweight Champion look like a complete chump but they had done it so that they could protect and build two guys who between them might work four different PPV’s in any given year.

That in itself is mind blowing and indicative of a larger problem the company is currently suffering from.

Not to mention Undertaker’s attack on Lesnar was nonsensical on two other fronts.

From a non-kayfabe point of view The Undertaker is an undisputed legend in the WWE and trying to turn him heel left me with a similar feeling that the ending to ‘WrestleMania X-7’ did.

You could see it in Undertaker’s face too; he knew that the heel turn had already failed.

Secondly, from a kayfabe point of view – why is Undertaker attacking Brock now of all-times?

Yes, Brock beat him at ‘WrestleMania XXX’ but that was almost sixteen months ago.

‘Taker has actually come back and feuded with a different guy since then. Why all of a sudden has he decided to exact his revenge on Brock’s breaking of his streak, now?

So we left ‘Battleground’ in 2015 the same way we did in both 2014 AND 2013.

With tangible disappointment, negativity and a complete bait and switch in the match that the people were most excited for.

Maybe ‘Battleground’ is cursed.