wrestling / Columns

The Wrestling Sandwich 02.25.12

February 25, 2012 | Posted by Scott Rutherford

Welcome all to the new Wrestling Sandwich. No doubt some of you are rejoicing that Wes Kirk is no longer part of 411 and some of you will cry. Wes decided to leave the 411 family during the week ending one of the more interesting periods of any writer here. He was always someone that put his hand up to chip in on anything that came up and got his shiz in on time. Sincerely, all the best Wes!

So who am I? I’m the lucky dip of 411. I started out doing 411Movie news and was editor thereafter of the great Inside Pulse/411 split. I’ve done music, wrestling and sporting news and mainly produce features these days while popping up for the odd Top 5 when time allows. For now, I’m going to give a weekly wrestling column a go.

As you will see, I will change the format going forward and hardly ever talk about anything other than wrestling. I will offer thoughts on current happenings, memories from my fandom dating back to watching my first event (WrestleMania I BTW) and random asides about wrestling in general. As always opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and judging by the size of my ass, I may have the loudest and stinkiest opinions of them all.

Let’s go…

Although it’s nearly a week old I wanted to touch on last Sundays Elimination Chamber PPV. Specifically the curious case of Santino Marella. Santino in my mind has turned into the poster boy for all that’s right and wrong about the current product.

Thanks to a shallow roster and a slew of injuries Santino was shoehorned into the Smackdown chamber match almost to unanimous groans from most ‘net savvy fans. I whole-heartedly agree that Santino is nothing more than a JTTS and getting into one of the big matches on the WWE calendar rang all manner of alarm bells. However, the one big thing you cannot say is that Santino wasn’t a highlight of the match itself.

On last week’s Smackdown it proved that fans were behind Santino and the pop he received after winning the match was surely a surprise to most. He energized the chamber match itself when he entered and the way he was booked was perfect. He offered no real dangerous offense and the pinfalls he gained were stolen after someone else did all the hard work. The crowd reaction when he almost broke the LaBelle Lock was one of the loudest of the night and according to crowd reports, fans were pissed that he didn’t win.

By why is Santino so over when he is nothing more than a comedy jobber?

Simple…a three dimensional personality.

Marella has never been portrayed as anything other than a loveable loser. He lucks into wins and most often gets his ass handed to him. However, since the man himself puts so much effort into his gimmick the fans react to him. I love his little “moments” in a match like crossing himself before throwing a big punch, the slide trombone and his actually selling of a win is just fantastic. He looks like someone that wants to wrestle and is just happy doing something that he loves.

So when he gets thrown into the E.C match with the one-dimensional wonders Great Khali and Wade Barrett plus the predictable Big Show he suddenly became a star attraction of the match thanks to Santino and his hugely over character. Did the overall match quality improve? Oh heck no. Did he suddenly add interest and an underdog character to get behind? Absolutely.

Santino is so different in a roster full of clones. I know that he was squashed to high heaven on the RAW following the PPV but he’s almost bullet proof these days because that’s what people expect. I would LOVE to have him be a surprise winner at next year’s Royal Rumble. The vignettes of him training leading up to his title match would be gold and the set-up would be perfect for a heel champion to just obliterate him at ‘Mania. All you would have to do is let Santino kick out of one finisher and get his comeback spot in to get the fans to suspend their disbelief, hit to Cobra and have the heel kick out at one, and then just destroy him. The heat would be awesome.

I’m no worker, hell I’ve never set foot in a wrestling ring. However, common sense is something I have a skerrick of but after watching R-Truth and Zema Ion crash and burn with their respective dives over the past couple of weeks, I wonder if anyone wrestler these days have any common sense themselves.

For starters, the talk about Zema Ion being blameless for Jesse Sorensen’s broken neck is way off base. For some reason toady, whenever someone does a dive they never give their catcher an easy target to grab. Never has this been obvious than Zema and his attempted Asai moonsault at Against All Odds. Check out the snippet here…

This is a great angle to see how this was squarely the fault of Ion. Imagine Jesse looking up and all that he has coming down to catch is knees and head. Sorensen is not a big guy and there was no way in hell he was every going to get a clean take. For some unknown reason Zema rotates around as if he wants to land on his feet. Why? The only thing you are doing is putting your fellow wrestling in peril and fucking up your knees by doing those landings on the floor. Furthermore, Zema looks like he lands on his head and is damn lucky Sorensen took his duty seriously and still got underneath or else Ion would have been the one on his way to hospital.

I’ve heard some people give the opinion that you can’t always trust the guy you’re in the ring with to catch you properly. If that’s the case then don’t do it. It’s such an easy equation. It would be much easier for all involved if the person doing the dive did it right in the first place. It would actually be safer if their feet are almost vertically above their heads on the rotation to give the catcher a clean grab at their whole body with no feet or knees coming down dangerously.

But hey, don’t take it from me. Look at the inventor of the move to show you himself and another from one of the greatest workers of all time…

Compare those to Ion and his dangerous attempt and you’ll see why I’m ranting. If you can’t do the move properly, don’t do it at all. If you can’t properly catch someone, don’t allow the guy to perform it on you.

The R-Truth one is a little more interesting. In no way am I defending The Miz. For whatever reason he wasn’t there to take the catch and put Truth directly in dangers path. However, did anyone notice that Truth did the halo all wrong? He rotated much too far meaning that his tailbone was going to be the main point of contact. Because his ass hit the ground first he fell back and completely smashed the back of his head. FAIL. R-Truth should have been rotating just enough to take a flatback bump on the floor outside. This way he would have protected himself to the highest degree possible, given Miz essentially his whole back as a catching target rather than the ass and feet he presented last week. Sure a floor landing would have sucked but with the mats used by the WWE these days on the outside, it would have been no better or worse than taken a big backdrop bump on some indie fed ring.

Truth be told both bumps were nothing in the context of each match, especially the Zema Ion dive. It was just another move with no build and the crowd pretty much cold fished it in terms of reaction. It should have been one of the last things done in the match. When a high spot becomes a transition move you just know the guy in the ring has no idea how to work a match.

To illustrate my point further, Kofi Kingston does a simple high cross body from the top of a pod during the RAW Elimination Chamber match. He gives his catchers a massive big target, in the safest way possible, in spot that was built up to and got the crowd to react EXACTLY the same as if he did a 450 dive.

Common sense.

I recently did the Classic Wrestling Buy or Sell and pretty much broke the comments section when I said I believed Demolition was better than The Road Warriors.

One comment caught my attention…

Demolition still are the longest tag title holders ever. Don’t think 16 months is ever gonna get topped

Posted By: SMYK (Guest) on February 18, 2012 at 11:43 PM

Ok, think before you type some idiotic comment, buddy. They were in the WWF with WHOM as competition? As opposed to RW/LoD having a ton more of KNOWN tag teams to compete with.

Posted By: Guest#4843 (Guest) on February 19, 2012 at 01:33 AM

For starters, the obvious thing most people say is the Demo ripped off the LOD. If anyone thinks that the LOD is an original gimmick needs to look at the history books. There have been a gaggle of big guy teams in wrestling for decades previous and least we not forget that the LOD started out in biker garb coming off like some dwellers of the Blue Oyster Bar. It’s only when they put on the spikes and they no sold their opponents offence did they really gain career traction. Really, anyone will get over back in that day and age when you are that big and you no sell everything.

Sure, Demolition was the WWF version of something Vince couldn’t have but Ax and Smash were far better workers than Animal and Hawk. Don’t forget Ax (aka Bill Eadie) was a massive singles star better known as Masked Superstar who enjoyed tremendous success under that mask and was a top draw for most of the late 70’s early 80’s. However, to directly answer the second comment made…

In that era of WWF tag teams you had…

Demolition
The Hart Foundation
The Rockers
The Brain Busters
The British Bulldogs
The Killer Bees
Strike Force
The Rougeau Brothers
The Islanders
The Powers of Pain

…and that’s just the top line guys. Remember the LOD came in at the tail end of their run as well. These teams hold up against same-era NWA teams and anything the AWA had when the Warriors were there.

The Demo’s had better matches and The Road Warriors didn’t. It’s sorta like asking who was better “Superstar” Billy Graham or Hulk Hogan. Graham came first and blazed the trail; Hogan stole pretty much his whole act from Superstar. You ask anyone who is better and most will say Hogan.

Bring back the jobber match!

Reality dictates that we will never turn a major wrestling show into a jobber fest. However, because top-line guys are wrestling each other all the time little details are getting lost in matches. Back in the days of Superstars during the 1980’s you would watch a 2 minute match where your talent would fire off all their big moves, get themselves over and everyone is happy. This still works. Brodus Clay showed us so!

Well all know what the main eventers are going to do and when to pop, however your next level guys never truly get the chance to shine and educate the audience to their style or moves. Giving us two squash matches per show would be an ideal way to make that happen. And for Christ sakes don’t use your roster as jobber fodder. Bring in some local worker and have him go splat. No one will care who the loser is/was but they will remember Brodus destroying someone with some cool looking moves and dancing at the end.

It is also the way to protect your midcard from working against each other on TV. With the proliferation of 50/50 booking these guys will forever be doomed to be colorless, bland guys that can never consistently win without some sort of help. Pick ten guys from each brand and hand down the edict that they are never to lose on TV for 6 months but still be featured weekly in matches. Avoid them wrestling straight singles matches against each other at all costs and use tag and 6 man matches to help with the entertainment quota of wrestling.

By doing this you will have to force writers and bookers to better utilize talent so when you have your next Royal Rumble, all of a suddenly over half of your participants have a legit shot at winning.


I would like to point out that the reason “tomatoes” is spelt with a small t is because I don’t really like it and it deserve it’s lower billing.

I only had a chance to catch part of Impact and on the whole I’ve been enjoying that show more and more. However I was a little perplexed at Sting and what he said in his show closing promo about not being mediocre any more.

Excuse me?

I have been under the impression that Sting as TNA’s main babyface that he was always out giving his best. I have no desire to order TNA PPV’s but if I’m one of those 6000 diehards that still shell out their hard earned for these and I hear that Sting is been giving only a mediocre effort, I would be pretty annoyed.

Mind you, this is endemic to wrestling as a whole these days. For some unknown reason writers seem hell bent on picking out weaknesses rather than building up the positive. Wrestling has always been about self-promotion and Sting standing in the ring burying himself is not the stuff I want to hear. He could easily have turned that promo into something about stepping up to a crazier level since him at normal speed is not getting it done. That would indicate the Sting has been pushed to find something in himself he never knew he had.

John Cena did the same thing this past Monday on RAW. Half his promo was raging against Rocky and that was fine but he was bitching about how certain things he did didn’t measure up against Rock and his achievements. Really? John is basically saying he’s hating on Rock because Cena and his own successes or lack there of. LOSER!

The master lately has been Chris Jericho. His rants about how people have been stealing his stuff have been great on two levels. Firstly he comes of like a whiney heel out of his mind because people dared to do stuff he had done before, even though he was hardly the first person to do them. Second he’s building up the positives of other wrestlers, which surely helps everyone.

Because really, do you want to buy a PPV match from two people that are losers that give mediocre effort?

To quote a news item from the 411Mania wrestling news…

During today’s WWE investor’s conference call, Vince McMahon spoke about the launch of the WWE Network. While he would not commit to a launch date, he did state that the network would, “launch sometime this year. No specific date.” McMahon also noted that they are still negotiating with cable TV companies and they “want to get it right” when they launch.

Did anyone notice the sudden outbreak of long term thinking from Vince? While I’m fairly certain that Vince has been pounded with opinions that it was impossible to start a network in the time frame he wanted, Vince will always want to prove you can do things his way. This time, he seems to be heeding outside advice.

The talk about negotiating with cable companies is the key point. In no way does the WWE Network want to be on anything less than a major cable provider as part of a normal cable package. The failure of 24/7 On Demand has proven that people will not shell out extra for their wrestling TV. The chance of this happening…not that great but it’s worth a try.

Allegedly Vince is mostly concerned about getting dropped from his TV deals and being left dead in the water. If he owns his own network he will ever have to beg or borrow to have TV time for any programming again. He however needs the revenue from his TV deals and having lack of access to homes means less advertising revenue from RAW and Smackdown, which massively hits the bottom line. If the WWE can piggyback onto the right cable provider basic package, the money the WWE will earn will far outstrip anything they have right now. They can pull PPV’s from the schedule and give them away for free on TV and rake in the money.

Mick Foley Wants A WrestleMania Payday:…by wanting to work as special ref for the Undertaker/HHH HITC match. No. Just no. **cough**Shawn Michaels**cough**

++++

Undertaker To Be Bald at WM!: The primary reason for cutting his hair was he found it difficult to maintain the longer locks. Does anyone else find it amusing that a badass like UT has hair maintenance issues?

++++

The Rock/John Cena Twitter War: Rocky is spot on in saying that those who are complaining the most about him being back are the ones that will never main event. Cena is correct when he’s says that Rocky has forever stated that he will never leave…and then does.

We can all agree that twitter wars are retarded

#badpromotionaldevice

Leave it to Lance Storm to add some levity (ironically via Twitter)…

I got bumped off Mania 19 for Miller Light Girls anyone bitching about getting bumped down the card 4 THE ROCK needs to Shut up.

++++

Austin Aries Proves My Twitter Point: So Aries goes nuts after Impact and complains about not being anywhere near the main event. Then he pulls it down perhaps realising that his complaints about not sniffing the main event may cause him to sniff other things for a while.

Aries tweet about removing his original comment?

Apparently this straw over-stirred the drink…

That’ll do donkey, that’ll do.

++++

Natayla Bitch Slaps Beth: With recent reports that people want no ladies match at WrestleMania, Nattie steps and claims Beth is a copycat (in a matter of speaking). I’m pretty sure if given 6-7 minutes at WM with a decent little build, people will care about this match.

++++

IMPACT starts making an…erm, impact: From The Torch…

Last night’s episode of Impact Wrestling garnered a 1.19 rating with 1.58 million viewers, up from last week’s year-low 1.06 and 1.51 million viewers. The episode was the second-highest rated Impact of the year. The show saw a 20% increase in the male 18 – 49 demographic from two weeks ago and a 36% increase among males 18 – 34. The 18 – 34 demo rating was the highest since Bound for Glory in October.

Three highest rated segments were the Gail Kim/ODB match, Jesse Sorensen interview and the AJ/Robbie E. match with the Sting/Rhoode finale coming in fourth. All of those segments rated above 1.21. Seriously, no smarmy comments here, this is all good news. Roode is catching on as champion and every segment he was in rated well. He desperately needs a super strong win over Sting at the PPV and a strong follow up after that to cement this momentum. He also needs to hold the title for an extended period of time.

This also has nothing to do with Vince Russo leaving as he only wrote the TV, Bruce Pritchard is the actual booker. Since he took on that role the less rushed and more deliberate direction of IMPACT has been noticeable and ratings are certainly starting to reflect that.

Wrestling needs TNA to be strong and vital and this is good sign of that happening.

++++

Trish & Lita Want To Make A Movie: From the mainpage…

Trish Stratus says that she and Lita may be teaming up for a film. Trish told Diva Dirt, “We had gotten together about doing a remake of a movie called ‘Doctor Doom Versus the Wrestling Women’, and it’s [one of those] old school lucha [wrestling] films that are very campy. We’ve been chatting about that and we’ve had some interest for us to pursue that.”

Not much to say really but I was the least surprised person here that 12 out of the first 16 comments mention porn, dyking, lesbian or HLA. If that ain’t an indicator of what the public wants, then whoever makes this movie is clueless. Catch 22…all the guys hoping for this and if it actually happens, will download it illegally and no one will make money.

++++

Rey…Welcome To The Dog House!: From the Oberserver…

Mention of Rey Mysterio backstage to WWE management after his visit at last week’s Raw has reportedly resulted in negative comments. Management is said to be frustrated about the way contract negotiations are going with him, plus the fact that he hasn’t returned from injury as quickly as they want. Some think that his small status means he’s lucky to be employed by the company.

Usually I will leave the side order section for small news grabs and silly comments but I came across this late in writing this column and just wanted to say WHAT A LOAD OF HORSE HOCKEY! This originally got reported in The Observer Newsletter and Dave Meltzer tends to be pretty spot on so I have no real reason to doubt it but it feels all kinds of wrong.
For starters, Rey earns the WWE buckets of money in merchandise every year regardless of whether he is active or not. I just did a quick search on WWE Shop and he had 9 masked all at US$50 a pop. One mask and pants set was going for US$89.99! He’s a license to print money and of course he will sell more while active but come on!

Second, Rey is a little dude. Not just wrestling little but real life small. With the style he works his body is going downhill. Still he continues to work to insanely high levels whenever in the ring. It was this very work ethic that found him in the ring with Alberto Del Rio with a screwed up knee doing the right thing at the WWE’s request. Turns out Rey Rey did too much of a right thing and mangled his bad knee even more. His reward? Earning the ire from the WWE office about being on the shelf for too long.

Rey is an interesting case all round. He’s one of the few guys that doesn’t need the WWE. He owns his own name and can make piles of cash working Mexico, Puerto Rico and Japan. Even without the mask in Mexico he will be a massive star making big dollars. The WWE needs a kid friend Hispanic star more than the kid friendly Hispanic star needs the WWE. The utter failure so far of Sin Cara just drives that further home.

Other Tasty Treats

The Four R’s with Larry C and others talking SD, RAW, NXT and ROH

The 8-Ball with Ryan Byers gives his look on the next 8 ready to go to the next level.

Fact or Fiction with Andy Critchell and Porfirio Diaz

Shining a Spotlight with Michael Myers examines all that you leave behind.

Ask 411Wrestling with Matthew Sforcina answers all your questions about wrestling in general

411 TWITTER

http://twitter.com/#!/411mma
http://twitter.com/#!/411games
http://twitter.com/#!/411music
http://twitter.com/#!/411moviestv
http://twitter.com/#!/411wrestling

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Scott Rutherford

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