Thoughts from the Top Rope 12.02.10: Seasons Greetings

You know that you’re all grown up when the site of snow doesn’t excite you anymore. As a child living in England, snow used to mean school closure and day-long snowball fights with friends. As an adult, it’s just a huge fucking inconvenience. Christmas, as a whole, isn’t particularly exciting anymore either. Working in retail, it just means my days drag on that much longer as people clamor for this season’s must-have Christmas gifts. Another sign of my impending old age is that my own Christmas list isn’t particularly long – in fact it’s non-existent. I remember being infuriated as a child when I’d ask my family what they wanted for Christmas and they’d reply with a lazy “I don’t know,” or “nothing.” Now I realize that they weren’t being lazy at all, they genuinely didn’t particularly want anything that holiday season. Of course, what that means is that the days and weeks immediately following December 25th will be spent returning the crap people have gotten me that I never fucking wanted in the first place.

Of course the oncoming holiday season also signifies my approaching four-year anniversary here at 411Mania.com. I can’t remember the exact I posted my first article, though I could look it up, nor do I plan on doing a “celebratory” column, but it’s just another little thing that makes me feel a lot older than I am. Still, nearly a thousand columns into my tenure here and I still have the motivation to write something for you, my loyal readers, on a weekly basis. And I think that sums up nicely just how depressing and unfulfilled my life is becoming.

This holiday season, don’t buy your loved ones shit they don’t want, don’t brave the cold temperatures to visit relatives you never really liked, and most importantly of all, when receiving gifts, ensure you get the receipt or proof of purchase from the gift-giver.

So in honor of this, the most depressing of holiday seasons, here’s a list of things I don’t want from the wrestling world over the next few months.

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Dear Santa Claus Vince McMahon,
as much as I have enjoyed elements of your weekly television shows Raw and SmackDown this year, as well as your unholy number of pay-per-view offerings, there are a number of things I have no interest in seeing over the next few months over the Christmas period and Road to WrestleMania. I would much obliged if you could exclude the following from your current creative plans;

1. A Prolonged Triple H/Sheamus Feud
I say this because the Internet has me believing The Game is scheduled to make his return “at any time now” and with Sheamus being crowned the new King of the Ring this week, it seems fitting that the King of Kings would have a thing or two to say about this. And while it’s inevitable that these two will collide upon The Game’s return, the outcome here is even more inevitable. Triple H is going to get revenge on the man that put him on the shelf. If we could get this program wrapped up in a month in order to give both guys fresh programs in time for WrestleMania, that would be simply fantastic.

And although I despise fantasy booking (that eventually tends to happen to all former hosts of “The Fink’s Payload,”) I’m going to tell you the best way to do this. The blow-off needs to come at the Royal Rumble, in some form of gimmick match that builds from their match at Over the Limit. I believe they had some form of Street Fight, so a Last Man Standing Match would make the most sense. Add the stipulation that the winner goes on to the Rumble – when Triple H wins this, it then gives him a valid excuse for not winning the Rumble as he’s already badly beat up. But prior to this, perhaps as the main event on one of your extra special three-hour episodes of Raw, have Sheamus go over Triple H in order to instill belief in the more naïve of your viewers that perhaps, just maybe, Triple H came back too soon and just can’t beat Sheamus. The kids will lap it up.

2. A New Season of NXT
If you were to ask me whether I thought the NXT experiment has worked and has been worthwhile, I would unquestionably say that it has. While some of the actual shows have been pretty damn awful, you have to look at the talent that it has produced because the show’s premise was to create new stars, not to produce great matches and TV. The Nexus have been a breath of fresh and still haven’t outstayed their welcome. Daniel Bryan is the United States Champion and tremendously over, and Kaval has been a good addition to SmackDown’s mid-card. Hell, the current season even managed to get Goldust into an interesting storyline. But while there are all of these positives that have come from the show, I still think it needs work and I think that we need time in between seasons in order to truly establish the new stars on the main roster.

With the show now an online-only product domestically, the Superstars and Divas it produces are going to be relatively new and unknown to the WWE Universe. This means despite exposure online, it’s going to take time for them to develop a personality and character that the audience can connect with. This only becomes harder when the show is producing new characters every three or four months when a season ends. I am totally in favour of reusing the show, but we’re about to start the fourth series and we’re less than a year since the birth of the concept. So Vince, let’s take a break, give the show a few months off and bring it back in the summer.

3. Triple H/John Cena/Randy Orton Winning Royal Rumble 2011
Randy Orton is the current favorite to win this year’s Royal Rumble, if you believe everything you read online. John Cena, despite currently being “fired” as a WWE employee, is also an obvious choice to win the match, as is Triple H who, as previously established, is set for a return within the next few weeks. The Game showing up and winning the Rumble would surprise absolutely nobody, nor would it generate immediate interest in WrestleMania 27. John Cena and Randy Orton have both won the Rumble in recent years and do not need the win because we know they’re all going to be involved in major angles if not world titles matches by the time Mania rolls around anyway. The Undertaker is another guy you can add to the list of people who don’t need the win. By all means, if he’s fit, have him make his return there to exact some revenge on his brother, but another Rumble win and Mania title shot is unnecessary.

That said, I suppose I should offer up some alternatives and truth be told, all I want is someone a bit surprising to pull it out of the bag this year. While a guy like Santino Marella or Primo would be a bit too far out of left field, there’s no reason a guy like John Morrison shouldn’t win, or even an established heel like CM Punk. Punk would be an awesome choice actually. Hell, I won’t even insist the Rumble winner even keeps his title shot – they could put it on the line and lose it prior to Mania or something – though I know traditionalists would argue that this would jeopardize the history and integrity of the Rumble. I don’t ask for miracles, just to be surprised. I wonder if Fozzy have late-January free from touring?

4. More 3-Hour Episodes of the Longest-Running Weekly Episodic Television Show, Monday Night Raw
This one comes with a bit of an asterix because the last two three-hour shows, this week’s King of the Ring and the Old School Raw, have actually been quite fun and enjoyable. Usually, however, these shows tend to drag on and on unrelentingly. I am holding out hope that the upcoming Slammy Awards show is the last three-hour show for some time to come because 180 minutes of this TV show often feels like watching five minutes of TNA Impact – never-ending and torturous. This is especially the case when Csonka wants to watch Monday Night Football and I have to recap the shows.

5. The Continued Implosion of What Few Tag Teams You Have Left
Honest to God, outside of the guys in the Nexus and the Usos, who seem to be stuck in Superstars purgatory, I can’t even name any other regular tag teams on either brand, unless you count the comedy pairing of Santino and Kozlov, who wrestle as a duo about once every six weeks. Mark Henry has had about four different tag partners in six months. Rhodes and McIntyre, although they never should have been stuck together to begin with, made a decent team but broke up after a month. And you spent weeks building up to the break up of the Hart Dynasty only to have their big one-on-one match to be viewed by the twelve people who watch Superstars on a Thursday night? Genius. I’m not naïve enough to asks for a full-blown resurrection of the tag division with you signing the likes of Beer Money and the MCMG, nor am I going to waste any more time or words on a lost cause, but just stop the pretence and kill off the tag titles altogether if you’re not going to actually have any teams on the shows.

6. Any More Guest Stars
I actually couldn’t name any of the guest stars you’ve had over the last few months. I don’t think many of them have even been promoting anything. I just don’t get what the point is anymore. If you can find some interesting celebrities to do the gig, by all means carry on. But evidence suggests that you can’t, so stop.

7. The End of PG WWE
Oh, controversy. The idea that WWE going PG has weakened the product is one of the biggest and most rampant fabrications in modern Internet Wrestling Community history. Outside of the lack of bloodshed and chair shots, I can’t think of a single thing that has been different about WWE in recent years.

PG critics say we have watered-down and childlike storylines that appeal to young kids? I don’t think you can get more childlike or fantasy-based than some of the stuff we were given during the Attitude Era, like two guys feuding over a cup of coffee or an elderly woman giving birth to a hand. Wade Barrett and John Cena aren’t feuding because Wade borrowed John’s crayons and never returned them.

The lack of blood has had minimal effect on the quality of matches and no effect whatsoever on the weekly TV product.

The fact that we no longer have Divas scantily clad and wrestling in pools of gravy, chocolate or mud is something that PG critics would have loved if you’d have suggested it to them pre-PG, because they just took up valuable time on pay-per-views where we could’ve been seeing real technical wrestling.

Truth be told if we didn’t all keep talking about it and Internet reporters didn’t keep reporting it, none of us would’ve even noticed that WWE went PG. Changing the rating isn’t going to suddenly make the creative team more creative, nor is it going to make the in-ring talent more talented. Improving the product isn’t something that can be done by simply increasing the sex and violence, it’s a gradual process and one that takes a lot of time and thought, more than you or I can dedicate to the idea. The WWE does not cater to children, it caters to families. WWE is like a catch-all company in that it wants to appeal to as wide an audience as it possibly can and non-stop bloodshed, tits and ass and needless cussing would be counterproductive to their ultimate aim of becoming an even bigger global phenomenon than it already is. If its meaningless violence, bloodshed and sex appeal you’re after, all roads lead to Orlando, I’m afraid.