The Heel Report 08.16.12: Killer Bully

Each Week there are ten places, with points out of ten awarded based on these positions. These points are then added to a rolling chart that will continue each week to show who is wrestling’s overall top heel.

This is a place where the heels of wrestling can be praised for all the hard work they do trying to get us all to hate them, so without further ado let’s get on with the report…

Weekly Top Ten

1st Place: Bully Ray

For the second time ever, Bully Ray and his fire breathing Twittah Machine have made it all the way to the top of the chart. Bully is getting better and better and TNA are really starting to recognise this, although you might not know it if you just paid attention to the contract dispute that is going on right now. TNA would be foolish to let Bully Ray go at this point as he is arguably their best heel at this point in the company, and no doubt the WWE would snap him back up in a second, and that would be a shame at this point if Devon goes as well as no doubt the WWE would be too tempted to put the team back together and therefore we would have seen the last of Bully Ray. Of course having said that if the WWE also got Chris Saban somehow while he is out on injury then in a year we could potentially see MCMG vs. Team 3D vs. The Kings of Wrestling in the WWE, and if that wouldn’t revive the tag team division then I don’t know what would. As for why the Bully came out on top this week, well he beat James Storm clean in the main event of Impact, and then went on to win the BFG series table match through sheer cunning and opportunism, and this gave him a big leg up in the leader board as we head into the final stretch of the qualifying matches. The Bully is primed and ready for a big title win, and if he actually stays with the company then expect it to happen sooner rather than later.

2nd Place: Madison Rayne

Maybe this ranking seems a little high, even for the new Knockouts champion, but apart from anything else the points this week were so close, after a massive jump between first and second place, and Madison just scraped ahead after having nothing negative occur to her and pinning Miss Tessmacher with the use of the ropes and through the partial influence over her ‘love interest’ Earl Hebner. I’m glad the belt is back round Madison’s rather shapely waist as Brooke to me represented everything that the Knockouts division didn’t want to be; all looks and no personality, sure in-ring talent can be worked on, but with someone as bland as Brooke you weren’t going to find your next Trish Stratus, at best you were going to get a Candice Michelle or Eve, and really they are better in roles outside the ring, leaving the wrestling to the real knockouts. While Madison herself might not be the best technical wrestler, she knows how to tell a good story in the ring and she can represent TNA well as its new women’s champion.

3rd Place: Robert Roode

TNA drew a line in the sand and decided that Roode vs. Storm at Bound For Glory just isn’t happening, at least not for the title anyway. This is an interesting decision as this angle has been building for quite awhile and if this had happened a couple of months ago I would have thought it was the stupidest waste of an obvious storyline payoff ever. However since becoming champion I think Aries has proven that he needs more time to be seen as a champion so as to make sure that he is indeed not seen as a fluke and as a legitimate contender for the title in case he has to drop the belt to the Bound For Glory winner, which he really should seeing as how if the challenger loses two years in a row it will completely diminish the implications of the BFG series. As for the Storm front, he is in quite an interesting predicament with this whole Aces & 8s thing where he is being made up as the apparent leader of the group and I am actually interested in what will come next. Sure the Roode-Storm storyline felt like it was going towards BFG, but things change and as long as what’s going on is interesting and could help the company then who cares about previous plans, perhaps this way Aries and another guy will get their chance in the main event and the men who rose up to the main event last year; Roode and Storm, can prove that they can have a main event level match even without a title involved at this point, and for a year’s worth of work that would be saying something. Of course if TNA then goes back on all this and somehow we do magically get Roode vs. Storm for the title then at this point I think it would devalue everything the company has done with Austin Aries, so I just hope they don’t blink.

4th Place: Brock Lesnar

The Beast is back and for once he really was booked correctly. If you are going to have a guy only appear on a semi-monthly basis and face the ‘best of the best’ in the company then you need him to look like a force to be feared; see The Undertaker. Shawn Michaels did a really great job of selling his apparent fear over being targeted by Lesnar and by all accounts this fear was justified. Lesnar’s attack on Michaels seemed to me to have been filmed in exactly the way that Kane’s character should have been shown upon his return, not a guy ‘lurking’, more like standing, in the background, but a force that comes out of nowhere, plucks you out of your safety zone, and then proceeds to just lay waste to you. I like to see this partially as Lesnar taking revenge for Paul Heyman after he was baited in and embarrassed by Triple H and Stephanie McMahon on the 1000th episode of Raw. But instead of doing the obvious thing of abusing his wife, they chose the smarter option by taking out his best friend, which in some ways damages Triple H’s psyche going into their match and it certainly eliminates some potential help for the Game at Summerslam. Let’s just hope that Lesnar will actually win this time as the only good this match can do is to re-establish Lesnar’s presence so that he can eventually face either the Rock or Undertaker at Wrestlemania, I would love it if the company actually used Lesnar to put over a new guy, but it is pretty unlikely, unless somehow Triple H has enough pull to put on Sheamus vs. Brock at Mania, which could actually work quite well if Sheamus continues to be booked as strongly as he has been since his title win against Daniel Bryan.

5th Place: Zema Ion

Well I was wrong on this one, I betted against the X Division champion on the Hardcore Justice roundtable, thinking that the company would pick King over Ion to take the division forward. In a way you can understand their decision, after all at this point the hype about Kenny King’s jump from ROH to TNA has all but died down and so he is pretty much just another guy in the locker room now. However by giving him the match in the first place they show the guy that he didn’t put his arse on the line for nothing. Of course with Sonjay Dutt out for a little while and Kash locked in a feud with Guerrero you do kind of wonder who else can challenge Ion for the title while he waits patiently for Sorenson’s return, especially since he managed to get the pin over King clean in their match.

6th Place: Alberto Del Rio

Although it might have cost him his title match at Summerslam, Alberto Del Rio showed on Smackdown that he is not a man to be messed with when he baited Sheamus into a trap and then had him beat down to within an inch of his life. There was some nice deceptive acting from Del Rio and I liked that we finally saw him care about something more than the gold. I know that technically the title should be all important and that the WWE seriously needs to put more emphasis on its titles, but part of how you do this is by having it involved in serious rivalries, and part of making a rivalry more personal is sometimes showing that the men involved will sacrifice a shot at the title to get to one another. It is a delicate balance and I’m not sure if the WWE got it right this time, but at least they are trying.

7th Place: Daniels & Kazarian

These two successfully defended their tag team titles on Impact but ended up not being so successful at the PPV, Kaz losing his TV title match and Daniels being thrown around like a rag doll in his BFG Series ladder match. TNA continues to put on good PPV and TV matches despite their lack of storyline development for many of its stars, but is this enough to put the company on top? Well that all depends on what you are watching the show for, me personally I would rather have some decent storytelling for five minutes than a half an hour wrestling display, but many would completely disagree with me.

8th Place: Dolph Ziggler

Not a bad week for Mr. Money in the Bank, managing to score two sneaky Zig Zags on his Summerslam opponent, as well as a briefcase shot and a clean pin to boot. Wrestling logic dictates that Ziggler coming out on top of the last two encounters before a PPV match means that he will most likely lose the match. However in this case with it being Jericho in the first place, and that he will be going on tour soon after the event, you have to think that he will give the nod to Ziggler, and if so then Dolph will be coming off a huge wave of momentum and might even scoop up the big gold belt at Summerslam if Sheamus is not careful.

9th Place: Daniel Bryan

It seems like Bryan is trying to get himself interjected into the wrong title match as it is the world title scene that is lacking a challenger, whereas the WWE championship match is pretty much full up at this point. Still Bryan represented well on Raw and continues to show that the WWE writers and crowd have taken a legitimate interest in his character, and while that may lead to him doing some pretty stupid stuff, it could also eventually lead him to have enough stroke in the company to actually be a full time main eventer, at this point anything is possible!

10th Place: Big Show

Technically the World’s Largest Athlete pulled double duty this week, although his singles match with Punk was cut short and he ended up mostly sitting out in his tag match later on in the night. Show did receive a shot from the WWE title belt, which hopefully isn’t long for this world, that kind of slowed his momentum. It certainly made him look like an afterthought in the developing issues between Punk and Cena, which I hope are built upon just a little bit more before their match at Summerslam, possibly on the PPV itself, but will it be the main event?

(Week 54):

1. Daniel Bryan (244)

2. Robert Roode (218)

3. Cody Rhodes (215)

4. Alberto Del Rio (206)

5. Mark Henry (181)

6. The Miz (141)

7. Bully Ray (140)

8. Dolph Ziggler (136)

9. Chris Jericho (125)

10. Big Show (100)

The Wright View:

Aries’ Music

There isn’t a terrible lot of things to complain about this week, or at least that I haven’t complained about on my other report. Piper was a bit strange this week but it was kind of entertaining, and it’s Piper, so it’s nothing to write home about. What did stand out to me though was the fact that in a great PPV main event for a growing company’s title, the champion came out to his same old non-descript entrance theme. Seriously both Bobby Roode and James Storm got an overhaul on their theme when they started to be in the spotlight more and I would say that Aries is firmly in the spotlight right now so it would have been awesome for him to come out in his first title defence to a killer new theme. I don’t claim to know which type of theme Aries should come out to but it is clear that a great theme can really help a star along, something that sends shockwaves through the crowd every time it hits. I’m not saying that major stars in the industry wouldn’t have been stars without their themes, but I’m sure that it helped them build up their legacy through setting them apart from anyone else. We all know that TNA is a little behind when it comes to its wrestler themes, but Aries seems like he really has the company behind him now, so they need to get on it, and quick.

TNA

A pretty simple one, while they might still be suffering in the ratings the company itself are getting a lot better, at least in terms of their booking and overall match quality. All you have to do to see this is look at the final hour of Hardcore Justice, which had two classic matches for what could essentially be called a throw-away gimmicky PPV. TNA is still having trouble with things like contract negotiations and it seems like some talent are leaving TNA like rats from a sinking ship, but at least they seem to be doing good things with the talent they are retaining. Of course the whole AJ Styles storyline is almost insufferable, but unlike the WWE, when TNA has AJ step into the ring he does so without the commentators having to reference the storyline every five seconds and we don’t have that crazy, crappy actress coming out every five minutes to get involved, especially at their PPVs. Then again you could say that being as TNA seem to know that their terrible storyline doesn’t belong in their excellent matches is argument for why they should just stop the angle. After all I remember when AJ Styles was complaining himself but told us to give the story some room to develop, well that has happened and it has just gotten worse, at this point I’m thinking they need to lance the boil that is Claire Lynch, after all what good can really come of it? Still that aside TNA are doing very well for themselves and to be fair to them the Aces & 8s stuff has been getting better, what with Storm still implicated, yet almost certainly not guilty of being the gang’s leader, which is a perfect way to distract everyone if you are an insurgence group looking to infiltrate and then destroy the company from within. Hell if TNA can somehow pull off a successful Nexus angle that actually introduces more than one or two new stars then they might actually reach that rare point in a promotion where both the general storylines and the PPV matches are both interesting enough to garner a wave of new fans coming over to their promotion. Basically what I’m saying is this is a key time for TNA right now as they have everyone’s attention, but like a highly favoured Olympian poised on the starting blocks it is their performance and ability to succeed that will truly determine whether or not the attention and hype is possibly justified, so there is a lot of pressure and scrutiny and they’d better not mess it up.

Damien Sandow

It was a packed chart this week and Sandow just didn’t make the cut, but he did make an impression on Raw that should be taken notice of. Sandow managed to knock off Christian in what was essentially Raw’s main event match, which admittedly should have gone a lot longer and does make me worry a little about Sandow’s staying power. But even so he did so despite a distraction from Brodus Clay, which is a big deal considering it looked like Sandow was about to be handed his first loss, making sense as he was against a former world heavyweight champion and was distracted by his rival, adding fuel to their match at Summerslam. Instead he overcame the odds and took Captain Charisma down, which you could also claim was the smart thing to do as Christian is known for being a ‘late game player’ so it’s better if you don’t let the match go long, even though that probably would have helped with Raw’s pacing problems this week. Compared to other new guys coming up the ranks like Cesaro, who just lost to Christian on Smackdown, and Brodus himself who met defeat at the hands of the Big Show, or even Ryback who simply hasn’t been allowed to face a competitor the calibre of Christian, Sandow is clearly being pushed far above them and will probably be the break out star of the year if things continue to develop for him in this way. In some respects you have to feel sorry for Christian for being forced to job out so heavily, but hopefully the Instant Classic will recover, hell if Ziggler wins the world title I can’t think of a better opponent down the road than the former CLB.

Lazy Ziggler

Speaking of Dolph I was disappointed on this week’s Smackdown when I saw a completely downed Sheamus and no Ziggler appearing with his briefcase to take down the Great White. Since winning the case Ziggler has shown up at even the slightest opportunity that he might get to take the title away from the Celtic Warrior, even coming down in matches where there was simply the potential for Sheamus to get hurt. Yet now when Sheamus was seemingly helpless he was nowhere to be found, and it’s not like he was incapacitated earlier in the night, in fact he pretty much dominated Chris Jericho and was able to do anything he liked after that performance, hell if for some reason Jericho had to leave early for his tour he could have pulled a fitting tribute and rammed Jericho’s head into the Jeri-tron 5000, taking him out, then cashed in the case and become the new world champion heading into Summerslam to face Sheamus in a rematch, or something along those lines. Or if the WWE had other plans they could have had Ziggler come out to cash in his case and be stopped by; Alberto Del Rio, his security force, or even Chris Jericho himself, taking revenge for the beatdown earlier in the night, all of which would have made sense. Hell Ziggler cashing in and winning would have been even more poignant since Del Rio basically chose revenge on Sheamus over his title match so it would have been even more significant that the revenge he took would have completely removed him from the title picture when Ziggler became champion because of his actions. There were all these scenarios that made sense and would have left things a little more interesting than the blank spot that now rests on the world heavyweight title match under who Sheamus’ opponent is going to be at Summerslam, that is of course unless it is going to be Wade Barrett, then all is forgiven!

Cody Rhodes on Smackdown – Not only did Rhodes mock Sin Cara for his mask, drawing on his own past experiences, but he also attempted to remove said mask throughout their contest. And a personal favourite point in the performance was when Rhodes mocked Cara for his lighting during the match, which has had us all saying ‘wtf?’ for the longest time.

That’s all for this week, I’m not going to be looking at ROH that much anymore seeing as how my method of watching the shows seems to have all but dried up. And since that thing with Steen is clearly a work it isn’t exactly big news. Still we have Summerslam just around the corner and there are some big questions that need to be answered such as who will be Sheamus’ opponent? Will Punk earn respect and continue on to the Rumble to face the Rock? And will Brock Lesnar actually be booked right and go over Triple H to make him look like a legitimate threat going forward? All this and more on the next shining edition of the heel report, for now though this is James Wright signing off.