The Wrestling News Experience: 09.24.12

Monday, September 24th, 2012

From 411Mania’s Canadian offices in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, this is The Wrestling News Experience, with Stephen Randle!

#screwyougaryyouevillittletroll

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Experience. I’m Stephen Randle, and while baseball season’s ending in horrible, terrible disappointment, and my fantasy football team is tanking at record speeds, at least I’ve got hockey season to look forward to.

Oh, right. Goddammit.

Moving on.

On this week’s Raw, just two weeks after he suffered a serious heart attack at ringside, Raw will present a special, exclusive interview with Jerry Lawler, still recovering at home in Memphis. And now on to less important things.

Last week, in a clear display of imcompetent and biased refereeing, CM Punk was pinned by John Cena in a tag match, despite his foot being quite firmly on the bottom rope before the three count was registered. Despite this clearly bad call that Punk is quite justified in being angry about, he remains the heel in this feud because he’s facing John Cena. And since Cena just had surgery on his elbow this past week, it will be interesting to see how this feud continues without any wrestling whatsoever.

Anyway, in other news, thanks to being a part of the losing team both on Raw and another match on Smackdown, it looks like Alberto Del Rio may no longer be a candidate for a World Heavyweight title shot. If that’s true, then who will present themselves as an alternative candidate for Sheamus’ title in time for Hell in a Cell?

But more importantly, the new WWE Tag Team champions continued to work through their deep-seated issues last week, and ended Smackdown by decimating five of their top challengers for the belts, in what seemed like a brief bonding moment. While tension and anger still clearly exists in both Kane and Daniel Bryan, can they continue to hold it together long enough to have a lengthy title reign?

And after successfully retaining his Intercontinental title at Night of Champions, The Miz debuted a new talk show on Raw, but was almost immediately presented with his next challenger: the unstoppable freight train known as Ryback! Can Miz hold onto his title in the face of the man riding the longest current unbeaten streak in WWE?

Plus, after a confrontation with Antonio Cesaro on Raw, Brodus Clay was then attacked by an odd group of Heath Slater, Jinder Mahal, and Drew McIntyre on Smackdown. Could these events be related, or have Clay’s enemies simply aligned against him at an opportune time?

All this, plus we’ll continue pretending Eve isn’t a bad person, tonight on Raw!

From The Ashes, Nothing Rises

The news this week is that Beth Phoenix, probably the best wrestler currently on the active WWE roster (Del Ray doesn’t count, she hasn’t debuted yet), has requested a release from her WWE contract and will finish up with the company sometime in October, after completing her scheduled obligations. And while others might continue to weigh in on the dead-end battle that is “the end of women’s wrestling as we know it”, because they still believe that there’s life in that long-dead corpse, I think the greater issue is not the fact that another Diva who can actually wrestle is leaving WWE, but that yet another good young wrestling talent has requested their release from WWE, a trend that has become all too common in recent years.

I’ve lost track of the amount of potential that has simply decided that WWE isn’t for them in the past few years. Not the ones who get released in semi-annual contract clear-outs. I’m talking about the growing list of wrestlers who have asked for their release, choosing life on the road rather than whatever they were doing in WWE. Some have left the industry altogether, and others apparently think that their future earnings would be better in TNA, or even just touring the larger indy promotions. The fact that, whether it’s true or not, the belief is out there and even prevalent among lower card (and even not-so-low card guys) marks a shocking turn of events. Didn’t WWE used to be the place you strived to get to? Where even if you were a TV jobber, you were still doing at least better than going on the road and scraping through the independent circuit? When did things change? When did wrestlers, not those fly-by-night models and bodybuilders they taught to wrestle, but honest-to-god, dyed-in-the-wool, professional wrestlers, decide that WWE was no longer the goal, but a stopping place, one of many options of equal opportunity?

I talked briefly in my last podcast about how thin the WWE roster is, especially on Smackdown. How there is too much space between the few remaining main eventers and everyone else, in terms of credibility, potential drawing power, and even longevity in the business. The fact of the matter is that there’s nearly an entire generation of wrestlers, who came up after the Attitude Era, that is missing from WWE’s roster. They came, they saw, they left. For half a hundred reasons. Glass ceilings, real or imagined. Lack of upward mobility. Lack of TV time. A perception that those in charge would never give them a fair shake. Watching less talented or less tenured workers shoot past them because of their look (regardless of skill), or who they hung around with backstage, or simply because someone in the front office made them a pet project for that month. The names, the talent that has been through the doors of WWE and decided to seek their fortune elsewhere, in the last decade, is impressive and shocking in its depth and breadth, from main eventers to hot prospects, an entire roster’s worth of talent, most of it straight out of WWE’s formerly vaunted developmental system in OVW (among others), has come and gone, and while many of them are still in the business, very few of them seem interested in ever coming back to what is supposed to be the “big stage” of pro wrestling. It’s not a lack of dedication, a great many of them are still wrestling actively on smaller stages, and not just the ones who went to TNA. I find it hard to believe that the pro wrestlers of the last decade have any less desire to stick in the business for as many years as they can than those who came before. Sure, some of that generation got in for the wrong reasons and left as soon as they found something better, but I’m talking about the guys who are still wrestlers and only wrestlers. They’re in their mid-20’s and 30’s, they could wrestle for years and years yet, barring injury. They clearly have passion, because it’s not a business that you stay in if you don’t want to do it. So, why don’t they want to do it in WWE anymore? Perhaps that’s a question that WWE should be asking themselves. If they truly are the best, why can’t they hold onto their talent? Talent that they developed, that they groomed, that they created, and that they apparently have frustrated so much that they’ve taken their talents to TNA, to Japan, to anywhere but here.

So now we have Alberto Del Rio getting title shot after title shot and a rumour that Big Show will be Sheamus’ next challenger because, quite frankly, there’s nobody else. The Divas division is six women strong, four of which can’t wrestle for longer than five minutes without increasing the potential of killing themselves or their opponent by a huge degree. I predicted Cesaro’s challenger at Night of Champions simply by narrowing it down to “which face jobbers would they most likely feed to him”, and then I flipped a coin between Santino and Ryder. Dolph Ziggler jobs on a bi-weekly basis because there’s simply nothing else for him to do, because the guys he came up with, who would be on the same level as him, have mostly left WWE or been jobbed to the point that they’re only value is in tag teams (hey, Kofi!) or on Superstars (g’day, Drew McIntyre!), so he wrestles main eventers and takes pinfalls because he’s “the low guy”, instead of trading wins with guys like John Morrison and MVP, men who were expected to win World titles and instead left out of frustration.

Sure, there are guys like Damien Sandow making strides now, and the WWE midcard has the potential to strengthen with a whole group of talent that has debuted over the past year or so and which waits in the wings on NXT. But it’s going to take time before they’re truly credible, and in the meantime, we’re stuck with an obvious hole in a roster that could be so very much stronger, if WWE could find the answer to one simple question:

If we’re truly #1, why do so many people want out?

– Rumour is that after the crowd chanted “We Want Nexus” on Monday, WWE might be continuing reviving the faction. Okay, so years of “Cena Sucks” chants, they ignore. But a bunch of jerks killing time during a Barrett squash gets them thinking “Hey, we should bring back one of our least successful factions ever!”

– Speaking of unsuccessful factions, word is that they may be referring to the group of Slater, Mahal, and McIntyre as “Encore”. No word on what remix of “End of Days” they’ll be using as their theme music, but I hear Version #253 is the current front-runner.

– Word is that WWE is very happy with how the three-hour Raws are going so far, considering them a “work in progress”. And because USA is paying them a lot more money to put on three hour shows, they’re planning to stick with them for the indefinite future, or at least until they hit the date they put money on in the “Raw Goes Back To 2 Hours” office pool.

– And in other TV-related news, TNA will be keeping Impact live at least through the rest of 2012, thus ensuring that I will have several fights with my wife about why I need to use up a PVR slot on taping Impact when all her Thursday shows are on. Thanks a lot, TNA. Way to make me want to watch your show by putting on a quality program, you bastards.

1. Oh Hell No! Sure, we know they’re not really serious about rebuilding the tag team division, but essentially devoting Smackdown to the tag team champions and ending with them standing against some of their top competition gave the entire division a shot in the arm that it hasn’t had in a very, very long time. Now, once they’ve nearly worked through their issues, you need to build a strong competitive team to feud with them. May I (among others) humbly suggest either Mysterio/Cara or Rhodes/Sandow? Sorry, PTP, you missed the window.

2. James Storm Since WWE seems intent on trying to work around mixed reactions out of sheer stubbornness, and Austin Aries seems to be working on a heel turn of his own, that would leave Storm as pretty much the undisputed top babyface in North American pro wrestling. And thanks to one intense brawl, count me in with the people who don’t entirely mind that Roode-Storm won’t be for the TNA Title at BFG.

3. WWE Commentary I know this might come as a shock to them, but it turns out that Raw becomes about six hundred times more bearable when Michael Cole is back in his face persona being abused by his heel colour guy and actually calling the action in the ring. Shame JBL had to go climb another mountain, but they get credit for their work last week, which was arguably the best commentary work since…well, since JBL left the Smackdown booth, really.

4. Edge Edge is actually the perfect person they could have brought in to help get the tag champions over further, as he can both talk about the very serious wrestling abilities of Kane and Bryan, and still degenerate into silliness, and remain credible the entire time. After all, his entire career was spent swinging between “highly skilled and dangerously crazy guy” and “offbeat shenanigans”, often in the same segment.

5. Damien Sandow He may seem like a twenty-first century version of The Genius, but there’s clearly a bright future for Sandow. And I’m not just saying that because he recognizes the quality and value of a good Meatball Marinara.

6. Antonio Cesaro Call it addition by subtraction, because Aksana really added nothing to his character in the first place. And if my theory that Slater, Mahal, and McIntyre may be working as his toadies, it might end up being..um..addition by addition? Whatever, Cesaro is clearly better off without his Lithuanian decoration.

7. Cara/Mysterio “Undefeated as a team” doesn’t mean much when they’ve had, what, two matches as a team? Still, it is the exact type of super-team that could go up against the champs, and has the added benefit of putting them both on TV while hiding Mysterio’s injuries and Cara’s tendency to occasionally forget that he’s not in a lucha promotion anymore. Plus, maybe they won’t keep using his stupid lighting when he’s in tag matches.

8. Ryback You know, I’m aware that pro wrestlers are strong, freakishly so. But it’s one thing to know that, and another to watch a guy near-effortlessly dead-lift a couch. Can you do that? I think I hurt my back just thinking about it.

9. Bully Ray Rumours are swirling that the Bully’s hard work over the past year and a bit may result in him getting added to Bound For Glory’s main event, which is something that I don’t think anyone would have considered when Team 3D broke up and went their own ways.

10. Joseph Park You know, given what else Park might have locked up inside his head besides evidence related to Aces and Eights, maybe hitting him with a hammer and shaking some things loose isn’t exactly the smartest plan in the history of the world.

Inactive List as of 09.17.12

WWE Raw

– Evan Bourne, out indefinitely as of March 19th (foot)

WWE SmackDown

– Christian, out indefinitely as of September 1st (elbow)
– Mark Henry, out indefinitely as of May 1st (surgery)
– Ted Dibiase, out indefinitely as of March 7th (ankle)
– The Great Khali, out until November as of July 24th (surgery)

WWE NXT

– Bray Wyatt, out six months as of July 4th (torn pectoral)

TNA

– Chris Sabin, out 6-9 months as of June 14th (ACL)
– Jesse Sorenson, out at least one year as of February 12th (spine)
– The Pope, out 2-3 months as of August 12th (broken collarbone)

Transactions

– Alex Riley, RAW, out indefinitely as of September 20th (knee and elbow surgeries)

– Beth Phoenix, RAW, will leave WWE when contract expires in October

– John Cena, RAW, out 2-3 weeks as of September 18th (elbow)

WWE

WWE Champion: CM Punk
– 309 day reign, defeated Alberto Del Rio on November 20th (Survivor Series PPV)

World Heavyweight Champion: Sheamus
– 176 day reign, defeated Daniel Bryan on April 1st (WrestleMania XXVIII)

WWE Intercontinental Champion: The Miz
– 63 day reign, defeated Christian on July 23rd (Raw 1000)

WWE United States Champion: Antonio Cesaro
– 36 day reign, defeated Santino Marella on August 19th (SummerSlam PPV)

WWE Tag Team Champions: Kane and Daniel Bryan
– 8 day reign, defeated Kofi Kingston and R-Truth on September 16th (Night of Champions PPV)

WWE Divas’ Champion: Eve Torres
– 8 day reign, defeated Layla on September 16th (Night of Champions PPV)

WWE NXT Champion: Seth Rollins
– 26 day reign, defeated Jinder Mahal to become the inaugural Champion

TNA

TNA Heavyweight Champion: Austin Aries
– 78 day reign, defeated Bobby Roode on July 8th (Destination X PPV)
– Next title defense: vs Jeff Hardy, Bound For Glory PPV

TNA World Tag Team Champions of the World: Christopher Daniels and Kazarian
– 88 day reign, defeated Kurt Angle and AJ Styles on June 28th Impact
– Next title defense: vs AJ Styles & Kurt Angle and Chavo Guerrero & Hernandez, Bound For Glory PPV

TNA X-Division Champion: Zema Ion
– 78 day reign, defeated Kenny King, Mason Andrews, and Sonjay Dutt in an Ultimate X Match on July 8th to claim the vacant title (Destination X PPV)

TNA Knockouts Champion: Miss Tessmacher
– 39 day reign, defeated Madison Rayne on August 16th (Impact)

TNA Knockouts Tag Team Champions: ODB and Eric Young
– 200 day reign, defeated Gail Kim and Madison Rayne on March 8th (Impact)

TNA Television Champion: VACANT
– title vacated when Devon’s contract expired, new Champion will be crowned on this Thursday’s Impact

De Marco has The Wrestling 5&1.

Sarnecky has The Piledriver Report.

Byers has The 8-Ball.

Ari returns with a special Column of Honor dedicated to ROH’s recent iPPV problems.

And the newest TWNE After Dark features further explanation of my commentary on John Cena’s anti-cancer shirt and the larger problem it represents for WWE. Plus a look at Ryback’s first real feud and whether Miz was the right choice. Click the banner to have a listen!

Also, don’t forget to join the TWNE After Dark a Facebook group.

411 will have live coverage of Raw tonight starting at 8 pm EDT.

From our promotional department, I’ve been informed that if you really do like 411Mania and all it provides, or even just me (and really, who doesn’t like me), don’t forget to bookmark the site in your browser or make 411 your homepage, and tell all your friends about how awesome 411 is.

And don’t forget, you can follow all of the everyday goings on in 411 on Twitter.

Stephen’s Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/411mania
http://www.twitter.com/411wrestling
http://www.twitter.com/411moviestv
http://www.twitter.com/411music
http://www.twitter.com/411games
http://www.twitter.com/411mma

That’s our show, Marsico is in tomorrow, I will be back next week. Plus, don’t forget to look for Four Player Co-op in the Games Zone on Wednesday, and the TWNE After Dark podcast at 10 pm EDT this Wednesday as well!

Here it is, your Moment of Buddy

Prepare For New TV!

Have a good one, and always be a fan.