Match A Day 04.16.09: Week 2 – Wrestlers Should Never Retire

One man’s quest to release himself from the ensnarement of the pro-wrestling dictatorship, you know, the culture that starts to influence great men to talk about themselves in the third person. As I watched some of the matches in this final week of weening off of the current continuity, I found myself thinking about retirement, and it all kicked off with this match:

Match # 8 – Sunday, April 12th
Jerry Lynn vs. Brodie Lee
[ROH on HDNET, April 2009]

Is Jerry Lynn too old to still be wrestling? C’mon, let’s not be silly. In the main event of this pivitol ROH TV show that was light on indy star power, Jerry Lynn showed that he is as capable as any twenty or thirty year old of performing a highly physical and psychological professional wrestling main event match. While ‘Mr. JL’ used be known for his high flying, that doesn’t mean his role is any less effective as an older, slower, more cunning wrestler against the powerful and diverse offense Brodie Lee.

Ring of Honor may be trying to pull some sentimental heart strings by dressing up Jerry Lynn as the emotional surrogate of Randy ‘the Ram’ from ‘The Wrestler.’ Lynn, now in his fresh mid-forties, is not as scarred and busted looking as that Mickey Rourke portrayal, but he is definitely being booked smartly like a seasoned veteran in this match. Compared to the large Lee, Lynn was outsized and somewhat outmatched, shown constantly on the defense. The refreshingly passionate commentary by Mike Hogewood did a phenomenal job of promoting Jerry Lynn as a veteran who is sly, yet being constantly overpowered by the devastating maneuvers and tricks of Brodie Lee. Finally, after throwing a few no-sold clotheslines on Lee, Lynn got a flash cradle pin, and then rolled to the floor, symbolically exhausted, face first on the outside mat, a veteran and a gentleman, finishing a star making performance and a satisfying main event.

Wrestlers actually should never retire. Growing old and dying in the ring without ever having to quit should be the dream of all true professional wrestlers. Lynn, while hardly in that situation, certainly seems like a guy capable of another 20 years in the ring. While speed and power may diminish, the assistance from the other wrestler in the ring (as so ‘brilliantly’ portrayed/exposed in ‘The Wrestler’) proves that you do not need to be at full young strength the make a match appear plausible and entertaining. This Lynn/Lee match is a perfect example of the kind of match a 40 year old, or a 60 year old could accomplish with the right tweaks.

It was awesome when Ric Flair went out on RAW and proclaimed, “I will never retire!” And that got a damn fine ‘pop’ too! I mean, really, what is the point of a guy retiring? I think the movie ‘The Wrestler’ gets some weird respect for being a redemption story, but the way I saw the ending, it was a realist fantasy about never having to retire. The ending was a metaphor for assisted suicide if anything, indicating that ‘The Ram’ was going to keep wrestling until he died, not die of old age when ‘his time came’ but on his terms doing what he loved. That’s what I call living your dream until you die, or even better, about dying while living your dream. It’s a bit nihilistic, but completely understandable. If the last thing I ever did was type a word on this keyboard, I’d be a happy dying guy. What’s wrong with wanting to live forever? Ric Flair, Randy ‘The Ram’, Jerry Lynn, I don’t care who you are… Never Retire!

Match # 9 – Monday, April 13th
15-Man, Tri-Branded Battle Royale for 2 Draft Picks
[WWE RAW Draft 2009 Special]

Oh, how I used to love Battle Royales. That moment once the ring filled up and the bell would ring used to flutter the heart of a young Jake Chambers. All those dudes throwing down at the same time in that small space, it was a cool sensory overload. You used to get to see some unique match-ups and most of the time watch one or two smaller stars get the spotlight for a few minutes near the end. These days, Battle Royales have become throw away matches, (except for the great Battle Royale renaissance of 2003) but this Battle Royale had nothing of the excitement that had previously thrilled me about this fun concept and featuring mostly eliminations that are quicker than those in the Royal Rumble matches from the RAW vs. Smackdown 2009 video game.

What is it that has handcuffed the WWE so? Why with 7 hours of television time to fill in this week they can’t even commit to a meaningful tradition like a Battle Royale? Laziness perhaps? Lack of creativity maybe? Plain of not-giving-a-fuck-ness? One of the main things that bothered me was that unlike some of those great Battle Royales from a few years ago, in this instance the entire ring did not team up to eliminate the Big Show. Arguably you could say it was because the combatants were spread into 3 teams, but there could have been more of a combined effort to elimnate the heaviest, most powerful guy (although, there have been examples in the past of just one man eliminating the Big Show, such as Beniot, Rock and Edge this time, so maybe it’s not so important), and that kind of bothered me, but I guess it is acceptable since it never really happened to the king of the Battle Royale in his prime:

The worst part about this match was the ‘back-turned’ eliminations. You know that typical scene, when a wrestler throws one guy out of the ring, stands there for a second admiring his work or celebrating, only to turn around and get ‘surprisingly’ eliminated. It’s not just the alarming number of ‘back-turned’ elminations that made this match so lame, but they seem to happen so much now, it drives me insane. A large percentage of the Royal Rumble and traditional Survivor Series match eliminations occur from these moronic ‘back-turned’ celebrations. I realize this is not new, as it did happen classically, but not in the numbers we’re seeing so commonly these days. This is just a ridiculous occurrence that makes lose all confidence in the intelligence of the characters in the WWE, and puts none of my faith in the ablility or desire by the producers to create compelling, unique pro-wrestling matches featuring any kind of substance or logic.

Genius of the Week: Matt Striker’s always obscure reference laden color commentary provided two gems in this match, in a succession! He compared Edge to both rugged Toronto Maple Leaf great Wendel Clark and then the finesse-fighting, giant monster Mothra. That’s got to be pre-planned, don’t you think? Either way, genius.

Match #10 – Tuesday, April 14th
Triple Threat Elimination Chase to Backlash: Tommy Dreamer vs. Finlay vs. Christian
[ECW TV, April 2009]

This was a pretty good match I thought, hardly the caliber of the Morrison/Bourne match earlier in this episode, but a match that worked well with the 3-Way format. Finlay put on a great display of ring generalship, as he controlled Dreamer with wear-downs in the ring, and kept returning to incapacitate Christian on the floor. I really admired this strategy, since one of my pet peeves about the modern day, multi-man match is that silly trend of having one (or more) guy(s) conveniently ‘out’ on the floor while the others fight in the ring. Finaly’s actions allowed for some plausible wear-downs holds in a 3-Way that I found surprisingly believable. In the end, the near falls and three way interactions were amped up from the previous week, and the mystery of the direction ECW was going to take with this elimination chase remained intact from week one. As I had imagined though, the eventual one-on-one match between Christian and Finaly on Superstars did not have much intrigue, as at that point Christian’s victory seemed inevitable.

What did intrigue me about this match was the apperance of Hornswoggle. Not his actual appearance alongside his ‘father’ Finaly, but his physical appearance, specifically his ‘dirty’ face. What is with those weird smudges?

At first, I’m guessing he was supposed to ‘live’ under the ring, as that was where he used to magically appear from in a bask of green light. Back then his smudges seemed like the ashen charcoal look of a homeless guy or nuclear blast survivor. Now they appear to be just finger smears of black paint that are supposed to represent a dirty look. Hornswoggle no longer lives under the ring, as he now lives in the real world supposedly since he is only ever seen now skipping along in the backstage area with his Dad. Therefore, should he not have a clean face? Or is this face paint more complex than one might think at first? Instead of a legit-looking dirty face, now he paints face to look like he painted his face to look like dirt… understand? To the Hornswoggle character, this would be like a respectful way to signify his past struggles, kind of like the war paint Samoa Joe now sports even though he is obviously not a savage warrior. Regardless, I think they’ve either got to explain those markings or wash that man’s face!

Nonsense of the Week: a commercial for the first post-Draft Smackdown advertises Batista vs. Ted Dibiase, and an Orton/HHH face off. Of course, those are all RAW wrestlers who were not drafted to Smackdown. Wow, great, once I saw that, I knew my time watching the WWE TV shows could come to an end one episode earlier than planned.

Match #11 – Wednesday, April 15th
Chris Benoit vs. Bobby Lashely
[Monday Night RAW, 2007]

Speaking of Draft shows, this one in 2007 doubled as McMahon Appreciation Night, an evening that ended with a mysterious ‘bang’ if you recall. Before all of that, there was a tiny gem of a match between ECW Champion Lashely and soon to be drafted to ECW (among other things) Benoit.

The amateur wrestling style that non-collegiate Benoit some how popularized to start his matches, works as well here on this short TV match as it did back at Wrestlemania X-7. My favorite part was when Benoit gets a front face lock (0:30) and Lashley then hoists him into the air with such fluidity and slams him with a kind of modified spine buster, it’s like an amateur style spinebuster! This kind of exhilarating and intelligent exchange is the perfect example of just why pro-wrestling has the potential to be better than MMA. Here are two guys using all of the strategies of an MMA match, full guard, knee strikes, arm bars, but with the shared reliance of pro-wrestling they can make a prolonged struggle end in a satisfying offensive power plunge. Fans watch UFC in hopes of seeing a spinebuster like that once in a lifetime, but we just got two in a matter of minutes.

All Lashely really needed here was some good striking. While Benoit continued to hit his gum-grinding chops, Lashely throws a few kicks and punches in retatilation at different points and it was almost like I’d put the sound on mute. When Lashely returns to pro-wrestling (and obviously that is soon) let’s hope he’s improved on his silent strikes.

Match #12 – Thursday, April 16th
Undertaker vs. Matt Hardy
[WWE Superstars, April 2009]

WWE starts out a new show with this unique pairing. Undertaker and Matt Hardy in a one-on-one match, at t at first seemed like it was just going to be a glorified squash, but a surprise second act occurred and Hardy started to capitalize on the Undertaker’s injured neck from his fucked up dive at Wrestlemania 25. Hardy even used a pretty unique looking version of the Jimmy Jacobs ‘End Time’ guillotine choke. And then the impossible happened… no, not a Matt Hardy pinfall victory but a count-out victory for ‘taker as Matt Hardy refused to get in the ring after Undertaker’s comeback… I’m sorry, did I say impossible, I meant in possible, as in, possible in this stupid day and age. Looks like the tried and true (for eight months) old school booking policy of one Adam Pearce has reared its head in the WWE, the one that says important matches can have count-out blow-offs, because hey, a count out is in the rules.

Then, just when you thought nothing else could insult your intelligence, Jeff Hardy runs out to attack, and Matt ‘sneaks’ back into the ring to escape his brother, the same ring he just refused to get in 30 seconds earlier because of the presence of the Undertaker. I was angry earlier in the week when the RAW Battle Royale reminded me of the laziest staple of the WWE’s modern booking philosophy, the back-turned elimination, but this was just extra stupid. To think that they spent over ten minutes portraying Hardy as a man intelligent enough to capitalize on a neck injury on the Undertaker from a few weeks ago, yet he’s so stupid that he would walk out on a match after all of that time, and then so moronic that he forgot the Undertaker was still going to be standing in the ring when he rolled back in. They might as well just slap my bare ass, because the WWE is treating me like a stupid child.

I’ve never been so happy to want to give up watching the current wrestling continuity then when I finished watching this match. I mean, this was the best that the WWE could offer as the first glimpse of a new show? If the WWE had to make pilots for their programming, this would never have gotten picked up. Sadly, the way the WWE has trained the fans to fall in line with this continual drivel, they are somehow able to blindly sell a show like this to a ‘network,’ a show that in one fell swoop of a count-out finale, showed that they have no intention of bringing anything special or unique to this program. Somehow I find myself looking back fondly on the first few weeks of ECW on SciFi, or even Heat on MTV, shows I thought were just horrible at the time, but at least there was some attempt to present a unique kind of experience. Of course, if you watch ECW today (much lower rated version than those first few episodes, as should be noted), there is no difference between that show, RAW, Smackdown, of now Superstars. The WWE has captured a safe number of viewers into their sad economic web of bullshit, and they know that they will be able to brand this crap out across the globe and get just enough people to keep their safe and respectable business going. Well, this is one bug who has slipped out of your clutches WWE, so fuck you and your bullshit Superstars show that doesn’t have an ounce of the charm or class of the jobber-filled show of the same name I used to watch loyally every Saturday morning as a boy and a man.

Match #13 – Friday, April 17th
Kurt Angle vs. Christopher Daniels
[TNA Impact!, April 2009]

I figured that I’d have to check out this week’s Impact since I was going to watch Lockdown on the weekend, and there were also a lot of rumors going around that this episode was going to be a good one. Of course, all of those rumors were dead-fucking-wrong!

This match was pretty standard stuff, highlighted (to me) mostly by Daneils whipping of his shirt mid match in a Hardy-esque non-moment that might have made one fifty year old broad in the audience scream, and also by a pitch perfect slingshot moonsault to the floor that Mike Tenay called the obviously closed-leg move as a ‘split-legged moonsault.’ Shit ‘Professor,’ why stop there? Didn’t you see his split-legged clothesline and his split-legged Russian leg sweep? That guy’s got more split-legged moves than a room full of Jeff Hardys in an all girls Hillbilly high school.

The ending of the match, with the double shoulder count / video review / executive pinfall reversal, was just mind-bogglingly stupid. With the echoes of “initiated the offense” bouncing off the inside of my newly numbed dome, I was trying to wrap my head around this new strain of TNA-titis when Samoa Joe ran out to confuse me all the more. Just as he hit the ring to attack, the screen faded to black… huh? Maybe that was justifiable on the old WCW Nitro shows because it was live and it was the end of ‘TV time’ (although, of course it was silly because they had all the leeway they wanted with overruns pretty much whenever) but why, on a taped show of all things would they cut away just as Joe is entering the ring? Wouldn’t the editors of the show, who should know the total taped contents of the work they are cutting into 2 hours, edit out some previous interview segments or something if they knew they had some big Joe involved brawl at the end of the night to show? My head hurts.

While we’re on the topic of headaches, does anyone remember the way the Internet fans were going on about Kurt Angle being on the verge of death when he left WWE and were horrified and angered by TNA giving him a job, and then how it was a foregone conclusion that we were going to see Angle die in the ring in a matter of days? Seems like a bit of hyperbole at this point now, doesn’t it? While I have pledged to give up watching wrestling regularly for the foreseeable future, that task also must be accompanied by a similarly painful omission, quitting the reading of daily ‘news,’ gossip and backstage rumors. While this is a pitiful addiction more debilitating and embarrassing than even my old heroin habit, it will finally be nice to rid myself of some of these irritating commentators and half-assed news sites. It does pain me though to have to stop reading some of the content on the one wrestling news site that I have always loved and respected, this one right here, the best wrestling information site in the world: 411mania! That’s why you should Bookmark the Site on your browser now. While most other websites have made my stomach churn from self righteousness, 411 Wrestling has always been the one location for fresh insight, a bullet proof sense of humor and phenomenal commentary. I’ve been so proud to write for this wrestling site for the past year now, and glad to continue to contribute with this new column. Bookmark 411wrestling.com 411wrestling.com or 411mania Wrestling or even the 411 Jake Chambers Blog, because this site should be your one and only source for pro-wrestling information on the Internet!

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Match #14 – Saturday, April 18th
Cage Match: Jerry Lynn vs. Christopher Daniels
[TNA Lockdown 2007]

This is a fine match, which you can check out below, but damn, I’m in a really bitchy mood I guess this week, because all I can think about are the negatives. First of all, this match takes place in that stupid looking, rope-wire cage that was supposedly needed for ‘electricifying’ the cage for a 3-D vs. LAX match. Being reminded of that one just made my head shake worse than a phony Devon electrifying leg convulsion. More infuriating, was the reminder of that stupid Lockdown camera crane they use every year to sweep over the top of the cage. Don’t tell me that’s not fucking annoying.

Now I’ve got to watch a whole pay-per-view with that stupid swinging camera shot again?

While I think this may have been one of Jerry Lynn’s last TNA matches, I’m happy he did not retire, and will not retire. Pro-wrestling is not MMA or Boxing, or any other real combat sport. There will not be a sad knock-out streak, like the one’s we’ve seen of Chuck Lidell recently, or Tyson in the past, or whatever aged athlete’s failings you want to reference. Pro-wrestlers can keep going until they can’t walk, and even then it should be possible! Just like how Vince McMahon recently stated that he will “never die” I think we should respect older people with this mentality, Vince, Jerry, Randy ‘the Ram’ there is no reason to quit, there is no reason to have a weepy love-fest in the ring, when as long as you can walk, you’ve still got two legs to kick ass.