wrestling / Columns
Friendly Competition 2.03.07
Thank Bob for Wrestling Society X. Even though I already saw the episode last week, it singlehandedly saved the Friendly Competition landscape this week. Yikes and gadzooks, ECW and TNA sucked this week. So much for staying positive.
ECW On Sci Fi Results 1/30/2007
-Matt Striker defeated CM Punk when Punk went for a sunset flip, but Striker sat down on him and grabbed the ropes for the win.
-Vince McMahon is backstage and, after getting a long hug from Rebecca, makes fun of Tommy Dreamer’s name, saying he doesn’t deal in dreams, but reality. I wonder if Tommy’s starting to regret giving up that office job yet?
-Hardcore Holly beat Rob Van Dam in a long, boring match where they seemed to keep forgetting their spots.
-Racially sensitive Vince meets up with the newest member of the Taliban, Sabu. After commercial, he continues his racially-charged rampage by questioning Balls Mahoney’s Irish heritage, then says that we’ll see how big his balls really are.
-Hardcore Hobags (or whatever they call themselves) come out to do their crappy dance, but it’s VINCE TO THE RESCUE!! He kicks everyone out of the ring and then tears down the ECW originals and the old ECW. He says the old ECW sucks and instead of the drunken misfits of the original ECW, he felt ECW needs finely honed athletes, and brings out Elijah Burke as an example. Elijah babbles and stops for a photo op with Vince, but Sandman, Tommy Dreamer, Balls Mahoney, and Sabu rush the ring and beat the shit out of Elijah, cane him, and finally put him through a table. Vince stand in the aisle and gets pissed.
-“Greenhorn” Bobby Lashley squashed Test, putting him away clean with the PCPowerslam, but his celebration is soon cut short when the Undertaker appears in the ring and stares Lashley down, only taking a brief break to chokeslam Test. Does anybody in their right mind honestly believe that the Undertaker is going to challenge Lashley for the ECW Title…at WRESTLEMANIA??
TNA Impact Results 2/1/2007
-The show opens with a clip of after the show went off the air last week as Abyss rips Sting’s poor baseball bal out of the ambulance and tosses it around. I heard it’ll be out of action indefinitely.
-Jeremy Borash is backstage outside Jim Cornette’s office, and he runs into Chris Sabin, who is on a walker to make fun of Jerry Lynn’s age. Coincidentally, Jerry Lynn is wrestling next in a five way match, a match Lynn loses to Austin Starr when Sabin, Depends adult diapers and all, trips up Lynn as he goes for the Cradle Piledriver. Senshi runs out to the aid of his fellow X-Division pioneer.
-Christian Cage gets Tomko to take one for the team. He’s wearing a shirt that says PUMP, so I’m not sure I want to know WHAT Tomko is taking for the team.
-LAX gets Alex Shelley and Paparazzi Productions to film them beating up…some old guy who must mean something to Team 3D. Hey, remember when the Outsiders filmed themselves running the Steiner Brothers off the road in 1997? Well, it is past Jim Cornette’s statue of limitations of gimmick theft.
-Joe comes out to once again deny his involvement with Christian Cage, but Christian comes on screen and says that he feels really good, and we’re going to get a third clue tonight.
-Borash is backstage and pimps the text service where you can vote for anyone but Scott Steiner to be Christian’s consultant, then James Storm and Miss Tennessee come out and say they’re going to beat Petey Williams and Gail Kim at Against All Odds, then Eric Young comes out to make sure James Storm didn’t tell anyone he was buying rubbers last week, then Storm tells him that everybody saw it because it was on TV, stupid, and then Kip James chases Christy Hemme into Jim Cornette’s office. Whew!
-Jim Mitchell sends Abyss to find Sting and bring Sting to him.
-A little black kid doesn’t smoke weed, he smokes turkeys like me on the basketball court because it was the best he could come up with.
-In a battle of two former Canadians, Robert Roode defeats Petey Williams when James Storm runs in and superkicks Petey. In the meantime, Gail Kim brawls with Trac(y/i) Brooks and Miss Tennessee on the outside. They all wind up in the ring, and Eric Young runs in and clears the ring of all aggressive men, beats up Miss Tennessee, and then is about to hit Trac(y/i), but instead makes up with her. Robert Roode doesn’t like this and yanks Trac(y/i) out and smacks the bitch around, but Eric rolls out of the ring and shoves Roode. Trac(y/i) gladly leave with Eric, since he would surely never beat up a woman despite the fact that he did it like thirty seconds ago.
-In Jim Cornette’s office, Cornette is in the middle of an argument between Kip James and Christy Hemme. He gets off the line of the week by telling Hemme to marry Kip if she wants to get even with him, then announces that she will have a match at Against All Odds, opponent TBA.
-Ron Killings is the most ghetto Marine ever and tells us as much.
-Jim Mitchell comes out and condemns Sting for revealing Abyss’s secret and making him even worse off than he was. He challenges Sting to face Abyss in a Prison Yard Match at Against All Odds, implying that Abyss is going to assrape him. Sting answers by…standing in the rafters wearing an Abyss mask while his music plays.
-Christopher Daniels realizes that if he goes after the X-Division Title again, he’ll just be standing in place, and he wants something more. I hope he gets it.
-Lance Hoyt calls out AJ Pierzynski and Dale Torborg since they disrespected him in his line of work. Speaking of disrespect, Brother Devon says that next week, Team 3D is going to fuck LAX up for beating up the unidentified old guy earlier in the show.
-Samoa Joe vs AJ Styles goes to a no contest when Rhino runs in and attacks Styles. After the match, Joe totally blows the match off and says that he’s going to do a sit-in in the ring until Christian comes out and clears his name. Instead, Kurt Angle comes out and calls him a liar, leading to another brawl. Christian runs out and swings a chair, Joe ducks, and Christian nails Angle. Christian tries to shake Joe’s hand, but Joe double birds him, beats him up, and puts him in the choke. Styles comes back out and they double team Joe and then Angle and shake hands as the show goes off the air. They probably would have had an even easier time if they brought Scott Steiner with them.
Wrestling Society X Results 1/30/2007
Wow, same episode as last week! Easy for me! Cut-n-paste, cut-n-paste…
-Jack Evans defeated Matt Sydal in a match that immediately blew away anything seen on the entire run of ECW On Sci-Fi.
-A look at the tag teams that will be appearing in WSX in the coming weeks.
-6-Pac and Vampiro were co-winners of a Royal Rumble-style match to advance to a match for the WSX Title next week.
Overall Top Ten Ranking
As voted by me. This ranking includes wrestlers from all three groups and is entirely subjective.
ECW World Champion: Bobby Lashley (Champion Since 12/3/2006)
NWA World Champion: Christian Cage (Champion Since 1/14/2007)
WSX Champion: Title Vacant
1)Kurt Angle
2)Samoa Joe
3)Marcus Cor Von
4)Hardcore Holly
5)AJ Styles
6)Austin Starr
7)Matt Striker
8)6-Pac
9)Vampiro
10)Jack Evans
Dickhead Of The Week: Vince McMahon
I really have to question the sanity of Vince McMahon at this point. I assume that he’s in the Sports Entertainment business to make money. However, it doesn’t seem to me that the best way to make money is to continually go out of your way to alienate your entire audience as much as possible. Is he trying to drive people away from his product? I honestly can’t think of any other reason he would do the things he does. This is the second time in the last few weeks that he’s gone on TV and basically said “Fuck you, I don’t care what you want, I’m going to do what I want. In fact, I’m going to specifically go out of my way to NOT give you what you want just to spite you.” I really hope this leads to some kind of angle where somebody comes along, knocks Vince down a peg, and turns WWE in a more fan-friendly direction, because if that doesn’t happen then I can’t think of any upshot to him doing this. In fact, it’s at the point now where I’m afraid to say I like anything in WWE because I’m worried somebody’s going to read it and it’ll get killed. I’m not saying that I think that I personally have that kind of stroke, but it seems like anytime anyone says “Hey, I like this!” it gets killed immediately. Like seriously, what the hell can he be thinking?
Vital Social Issues N’ Stuff With Stuart
I think it speaks volumes about the major problems with ECW right now that Hardcore Holly is the best guy they can come up with to challenge Lashley at Wrestlemania. No, that’s not set in stone yet and we might yet be pleasantly surprised with Lashley vs Marcus Cor Von, but right now it’s looking like Holly. I’ve been saying for months now that their biggest problem is they aren’t getting enough people over as superstars and, short of transplanting people from Raw or Smackdown (who would likely be only midcarders anyway), they’re going to run into a real problem after the inevitable Cor Von program. But for right now, it’s sad that I agree that Holly is the best choice. Think about this for a second, Bob Holly is challenging for a fucking WORLD TITLE at WRESTLEMANIA. Does anybody else see anything wrong with this? Furthermore, was there anybody, anybody at all watching ECW On Sci-Fi and truly believing that there was a chance in hell that Undertaker was going to pick Lashley to challenge at Wrestlemania?
But again, this is a constraint of the TV time they’re alloted. They only have time to get the same six people over (and alternately job them out), so unless they’re going to get Heat as well as a second hour, I think there’s a real chance that ECW’s going to be put out of it’s misery after this December. Better chance than there is of Undertaker challenging Lashley, anyway. You want to know what the positive out of all this is? When’s the last time you heard anyone say “Vince doesn’t care about Smackdown, it’s the bastard child of WWE”?
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Speaking of Vince, his method of trying to break down the competition on MTV is an interesting one. While I am glad that they actually seem to be putting the ECW Originals into a storyline instead of just straight up jobbing them out, I don’t think that going on TV and coming right out and telling your audience that you’re not going to give them what they want is a good way to keep them watching. I mean, it’s like going on Star Trek: Voyager and saying “I just want all you viewers to know that no matter how much you want to see it, Voyager is never going to get home because *I* don’t want it to happen.” What possible motivation is there for people to keep watching something they know is going to be specifically tailored to be what you DON’T want to watch? That problem is then amplified by the fact that if you were one of the smart ones who were watching WSX instead of Vince babbling, then you would have seen Jack Evans and Matt Sydal putting on a match that was right up the alley of all those disenchanted ECW fans that were completely driven away by WWE last June. In fact, WSX seems in large part designed to pick up a large chunk of that audience. If it wasn’t for the fact that I saw the first episode already, I would have been watching WSX last night and taping ECW because it was that much better. Here’s a little something for you: I thought that Jack Evans vs Matt Sydal was better than anything in the entire run of ECW On Sci-Fi, with the possible exception of Flair vs Big Show. I even told Jack this when I saw him in Edison for the ROH show this past weekend. But I guess that’s what happens when some dumbass booker does something stupid like booking things he thinks his fanbase wants to see.
The Rob Van Dam Contract Watch
With the knowledge that the ECW Revival wouldn’t be faithful to the original, Rob Van Dam has been open about the fact that he’ll be exploring his options when his contract comes up in late 2007/early 2008. Each week, I will give expert analysis on Van Dam’s activity in WWE/ECW in what may be his final year with the company.
Well, so much for that big win last week, huh? Rob Van Dam took a BIG plunge this week, doing a job to Hardcore Holly. Granted, they’re trying to build Holly up because he’s the working plan for the ECW Title challenger at Wrestlemania, but RVD did a clean job. TO HARDCORE HOLLY. What’s worse, every time these two guys wrestle, it becomes painfully obvious that they’re never going to recreate the match in which the Back Gash Incident occured. Van Dam seems to have settled into the role of “Guy who jobs to the PPV title challenger”, but where does that leave him at Wrestlemania? It doesn’t appear that he’s even a lock to appear on the card at this point.
Links To Stuff You Can Read
Jordan brings us Matt Hardy vs Austin Aries in the latest WWE vs TNA.
Samuel Berman takes me back to a show I attended live, the ROH Fourth Anniversary Show in Edison, NJ for Bryan Danielson vs Jimmy Rave in The Independent Mid-Card then comes back with another old episode of Raw in The Box In The Attic.
In a column that would have gotten him burnt alive four years ago, Julian tells us about his favorite Triple H matches in The Top Ten.
Ryan Byers has the CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION! of Ask 411 Wrestling.
Michael Melchor and The Creator go at it in week ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN of Fact Or Fiction.
Larry (aka THE FUCKING GOD OF 411) hits us with his Wrestling Society X Report.
Michael Bauer, in the meantime, has our weekly ECW On Sci-Fi Report.
Bayani examines the merits of WSX in Truth B Told.
What Did We Learn This Week?
In all things, there is at least one lesson to be learned. Here I will impart upon you what I took away from the weekly television of ECW, TNA, and WSX. You too can learn important life lessons from Kevin Thorn and Maverick Matt, and are encouraged to send in your own revalations.
This week on ECW On Sci-Fi, I learned that…
-Vince McMahon will call out any terrorist he finds, whether they be Muslim or Irish.
-You bury the competition by insulting your viewers and teasing a match which won’t happen.
-Hardcore Holly is seriously the best contender they could find to be the Wrestlemania challenger for the ECW *WORLD* Title.
This week on TNA Impact, I learned that…
-It only takes Jim Cornette thirty seconds to instantly become the most entertaining guy on the show.
-When wrestling promotions have call-in polls, the results never amount to anything meaningful.
-Given a choice between two woman beaters, a chick will always stick with the one who uses protection.
This week on Wrestling Society X, I learned that…
-The debut episode was so good, they ran it twice!
-I’ll never get tired of watching Jack Evans and Matt Sydal go at it.
-Watching Teddy Hart no-sell the same moves two weeks in a row doesn’t make it any less painful.
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Yeesh, what a rough week. Let’s hope it gets better next week, for sure. I’m back tomorrow with the news. Later.
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