The Contentious Ten 04.16.12: Top 10 Thrown-Together Tag Teams

Welcome back to the Contentious Ten! I am your still relatively new host, Michael Ornelas. In a pretty decisive landslide, Top Thrown-Together Tag Teams was the vote-winner for this week’s topic. Throughout wrestling history, a pre-determined industry, success has been found in unexpected places. Oftentimes when the bookers simply don’t have immediate plans for a wrestler, they’ll throw him into a tag team just to tread water. But sometimes, those teams take off and find great success and popularity with the fans. This list honors those teams. Here is my criteria for what constitutes a thrown-together tag team so that we’re all on the same page:

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Cactus Jack & Mikey Whipwreck (ECW)size=6>

This right here defines the “thrown-together” tag team. August 27th, 1994 at ECW’s NWA World Title Tournament, Terry Funk pulled out of his scheduled ECW Tag Team Championship match leaving his partner Cactus Jack high and dry. Mikey Whipwreck, a guy who the company viewed as untapped potential, was slotted in for Funk and they won the tag straps on their first night in the company. While their first run only lasted five weeks, Mikey Whipwreck and Cactus Jack as champs did a great lot for Whipwreck’s career. It was very much a “take you under my wing” situation between Jack and Mikey, and when Mikey won the tag belts at the end of ’95 in a singles match, the only logical partner for him was Cactus. They held the titles for almost twice as long this time and gave us some fun matches, more fun promos, and tag team chemistry. That chemistry is why these guys make the list at number 10.

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Kane & The Big Show (WWE)size=6>

Sure, the WWE’s tag team division over the past decade or so hasn’t been much to write home about (with a few notable exceptions), but these two monsters dominated it for half a year. We don’t get many reigns that last that long these days, but Kane and the Big Show destroyed everyone in their paths. This is one team that, despite not having much competition while they were champs, you could transplant to pretty much any era in wrestling and buy into them finding success as champions. That’s saying a lot about a couple of guys who were literally paired up just because they both had that “former world champion ages ago but now they’re so entrenched in the midcard that we have nothing better to do with them than team them up” stench all over them. Not bad, not bad at all.

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Miracle Violence Connection – Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW)size=6>

Gordy and Dr. Death Steve Williams were booked to team together in Japan mostly because they were both from America, and that’s about it. What we got was one of the most badass, hard-hitting teams in Japanese history. Pretty much all of their AJPW Tag Team Championship runs were in the three to four month range, but they proved to be pretty dominant by holding them five times. They didn’t have too large a presence in the United States, but managed to hold the NWA/WCW Tag Team Championships once as well. If you’ve never seen these guys wrestle, do yourself a favor and look them up because they were the stiff 80s/90s Japanese style personified – absolute bruisers.

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Jeri-Show – Chris Jericho & The Big Show (WWE)size=6>

This team was thrown together because Edge injured his Achilles tendon while he was a tag team champion with Chris Jericho and Chris chose to have the world’s largest athlete fill in for him. Jericho and The Big Show were the classic mouthpiece/enforcer tandem that we see quite often in wrestling, but these two owned the tag division for the second half of 2009. It was around this time in my opinion that The Big Show started reinventing himself and has had the best few years of his career since this time. Jeri-Show had a great two-month feud with D-X that gave us a tag-team TLC match that didn’t disappoint. This team had me more interested in WWE’s tag division than I have been in a long time.

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Beer Money – James Storm & Robert Roode (TNA)size=6>

Even the team name is thrown together. James Storm drank beer and Robert Roode essentially had a rich business guy gimmick. I honestly thought the team would break up a lot sooner than it did, but they kept on trucking. They had chemistry almost immediately and provided many TNA shows with the match of the night. They were randomly paired up a few times, which I’m counting as their “formation”, but they didn’t pick up momentum until later when they started a feud with the Latin American Xchange. Once they won their first TNA tag team gold, they went on to surpass Storm’s previous TNA team “America’s Most Wanted” as one of the best tag teams in TNA history.

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The Miz & John Morrison (WWE)size=6>

These two guys were feuding before they formed, but it was as contenders for CM Punk’s ECW Championship, so they didn’t exactly have their sights set on one another. They were paired together and won the WWE Tag Team Championship from MVP and Matt Hardy. What resulted was arguably the biggest modern tag team in WWE. The Miz and John Morrison are the only team formed in the past ten years in WWE that have a case as one of the top 25 WWE tag teams of all time. Their attitudes and personalities made them fun to watch, and they were guys that the audiences loved to hate. They were also guys who you could always expect to have a decent match when they were on the card, and this team was right in the midst of Miz’s rapid in-ring improvement, so they were motivated all the time. Despite not holding the titles as much, I view Miz and Morrison as John Hennigan’s best tag team (by only a small margin over MNM).

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Motor City Machine Guns – Chris Sabin & Alex Shelley (TNA)size=6>

The Motor City Machine Guns first teamed together in ZERO1, but that doesn’t mean they still weren’t thrown together when they started tagging together in TNA. Sabin and Shelley are two of the most exciting, and fast-paced wrestlers on television, and their teaming only seemed natural, but it came at a time when they didn’t really have much going on. They teamed for a long time before they were finally given the opportunity to run with the TNA Tag Team Championship, but they made it count, as their reign is the second longest reign in the title’s history. They were only two days short of the first-longest reign. If you want to see just how fast these two can be, check out their world x-cup tag match against Speed Muscle (Naruki Doi and Masato Yoshino) – a very exciting match.

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The Kings of Wrestling – Chris Hero & Claudio Castagnoli (CHIKARA, PWG, & Ring of Honor)size=6>

On the indies, it’s hard to be a big deal everywhere you go. The Kings of Wrestling made it look easy. At one point, they held the CZW, RoH, and CHIKARA tag team titles simultaneously. They formed in CHIKARA and quickly made the rounds taking on all comers. When they reformed for their second run in RoH, they were polished and probably the best team in all of professional wrestling at the time. Hero and Castagnoli had good matches with everyone and proved that they were bound for greatness. Both men are currently in WWE’s developmental system working to be called up to the main roster and I have no doubt that both men will do well for themselves once that happens.

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The Hollywood Blonds – Steve Austin & Brian Pillman (WCW/NWA)size=6>

Steve Austin was doing jack shit in WCW when these guys were teamed up. Barry Windham and Brian Pillman were teaming together, but Austin replaced Windham because there were no real plans for him and Windham was set for a singles run on top. What resulted was one of the best tag teams in history. They feuded with Ricky Steamboat and Shane Douglas and various incarnations of the Four Horsemen. The team has always been highly regarded and was over as hell, but it could have been one of the best teams of all time had WCW gotten behind it. They didn’t really want the team to succeed, and when they lost the titles, they split up immediately. Even the feud between Pillman and Austin wasn’t taken too seriously by the booking team. What matters though as that the team left its mark and is one of the best thrown-together, sleeper success tag teams of all time.

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The New Age Outlaws – Road Dogg & Billy Gunn (WWF)size=6>

Oh you didn’t know? Well you probably should have because The New Age Outlaws dominated the WWF Tag Team division as one of the most popular acts during wrestling’s most popular period. The team saw two guys who were relegated to WWF Shotgun Saturday Night the time pair up because there was literally nothing going on in the careers of “Rock-a-Billy” and “The Real Double J” Jesse James. They got over quickly by attacking random teams and berating them over the PA system because they didn’t have entrance music. As they started to get over as heels, they won their first WWF Tag Team Championship from the Legion of Doom and the rest was history. They were dubbed outlaws that night and went on to join D-X, which is when they started becoming the bad guys for whom it was cool to cheer. Their careers have been linked ever since they were paired together and have teamed on the indies not that long ago. There is no doubt in my mind that this team is the best thrown-together tag team of all time.

So there you go: ten happy accidents in tag team wrestling – twenty guys who didn’t really have any reason to team or much to do beforehand, so they were paired together and struck gold. If there were any omissions, feel free to make your lists below. These lists are always subjective and I love reading other people’s reasoning for certain entries they feel should be higher or lower. Also, please vote below for the topic you’d like me to do next week. Next week’s theme is types of submissions, so here are your options: