The Custom Made News Report 04.06.08

Yes, I know. Wrestlemania was a week ago. You’ve already read everybody else’s thoughts on the show, and I’m sure that several of you are outright sick of hearing about it. However, I’ve had several requests from people wanting to hear my side of the story, and, if I’m writing it up for one person, I may as well write it up for the world to see.

First of all, I should note that I almost never watch wrestling PPVs as they take place. That comes as a shock to many of you, I’m sure. However, the fact of the matter is that I have a hard time justifying the price to myself. I usually skip the live airing of the pay per view, wait around for a few reviews, and then pick up the DVD if it sounds like there are matches that I’d like to check out. At half the price and usually only a month’s delay, doing things that way just makes more financial sense to me. I generally don’t even make an exception to this rule for the biggest show of the year. The last Wrestlemania that I actually ordered was number twenty back in 2004, with the big allure there being the potential title win of Chris Benoit, who I’d been a big fan of ever since his debut match on Monday Nitro.

Four years later, there was finally something big enough to get me to shell out the $50 for ‘Mania one more time. It was, of course, the final match of Ric Flair, who I had watched – nay, idolized – for a much longer period than the last guy who got me to buy WM. We’ll get to the Nature Boy in more detail later, though.

Before we get to that, we’ve got general thoughts about the show to address. Overall, I would rate Wrestlemania XXIV as being a better than average WWE pay per view. However, simply being “better than average” is not what I expect from Wrestlemania. I expect a show that is 100% knocked out of the ballpark from start to finish, with several matches that I’ll remember for years to come. The best ‘Manias have all provided that. ‘Mania XXIV, though a good pay per view, did not provide meet the heightened expectations that I have for WM, and that’s why I have to rate it as probably the weakest Wrestlemania of the last decade.

Part of the problem may have been that I built certain matches up too much in my own head. That’s certainly how it felt during the opener. I love me some Fit Finlay, and, though I’ve probably hated more JBL matches than I’ve enjoyed, good ole’ Bradshaw is usually entertaining in situations in which he’s allowed to brutalize people. Thus, when the match was announced, I figured that I’d get to see a fun ten minutes of these two guys just pounding the holy hell out of each other with snug clotheslines, forearms, and boots. That wasn’t what I got. Instead, I watched them have, with the exception of a couple of fun spots, every WWF Hardcore Title match that took place between 1998 and 2001. Was it a bad match? No, not really. Was it something that I had much higher expectations of? Yup. (By the way, the “fun spots” were the finish – I thought the legsweep with the kendo stick to setup the lariat was brilliant – and, of course, FLYIN FIT~!)

I could take or leave Money in the Bank. I’ve seen a lot of reviews that have called this a **** or greater match, and I guess that this is a style of wrestling that I just don’t get. Yeah, the guys are working hard and putting their bodies on the line for my entertainment, and I can definitely appreciate that. However, it’s gotten to the point that, when I watch these ladder matches, I spend more time feeling concerned for the wrestlers involved than I do being excited by the big spots. It was one thing when, several years ago, a ladder match would consist of guys teasing and building up the use of the ladder only two do one or two really scary spots towards the end. It’s an entirely different thing when you’ve got Johnny Nitro doing a moonsault to the floor while holding a ladder before the match is even two minutes old. If you can enjoy it, more power to you. It’s just not my thing.

Finlay versus JBL may have been a moderate disappointment, but Batista versus Umaga was a MASSIVE disappointment. I think that everybody agrees this match was not good. Most people seem to be willing to shrug their shoulders and move on. I, on the other hand, am still amazed by how bad this was compared to how could it could have been. After Big Dave’s ‘Mania performance last year and his continued streak of surprisingly good matches against the Undertaker and Edge, I thought for sure that he’d pull out all of the stops and give us a great performance against the Samoan Bulldozer. Umaga, meanwhile, is one of the most consistently great performers on the roster, even though there seem to be a lot of fans out there who try to claim that he’s a lousy wrestler just because he looks like one of the monsters who would’ve been thrown in front of Hulk Hogan twenty years ago. Well, at ‘Mania XXIV he certainly wrestled like one of the monsters that would have been thrown in front of the Hulkster twenty years ago. Seriously, if not for the powerbomb at the finish, this could have been the Hulk Hogan taking on King Kong Bundy, which came as quite the shock to the guy who expected this match to hit the twelve minute and *** marks.

Kane pinned Chavo Guerrero. Yup. They should now rename the ECW Title the You’re A Good Hand and Have Been Around for a While but You’re Not Really Over so We’ll Give You This Belt as a Consolation Prize Instead of Wasting an Important Title on You Championship. It’s lengthy yet accurate.

So that’s roughly an hour and a half of the show down with nothing having really caught my fancy yet.

The women’s match was just about what you would expect from the four individuals involved. Beth Phoenix looked great when she was doing spots when she had 100% control over how the move looked, but otherwise she was really dragged down by her opponents. I’m amazed that I haven’t heard anything about an injury coming out of this match, because one of the generic lumberjacks (I honestly could not tell ANY of them apart), looked like she really screwed up her leg when Ashley did the dive off of the apron. Also, if you want an indication of how poorly WWE wrestlers are trained to work on the fly these days, you need to look no further than what happened when the venue’s power cut off during this match. How did the women react? They kept on running through their pre-scripted highspots. Why even bother at that point? Nobody can see you. Just grab a chinlock and hold it until the lights come back on. Oh well, I guess what they did is better than simply stopping and standing there.

I know that this has already been said many times, but the finish to the Raw Title match RULED THE WORLD. I’m not one of these guys who was begging for Orton to retain and/or for Cena to get pinned, because I’m secure enough in my heterosexuality to admit that Cena is a fine professional wrestler. Thus, I’m not talking about the result that was chosen when I say that the finish was awesome. I’m talking about the actual method that the company chose in getting to its desired end. Orton’s running kick of death has been built up so well and for so long that everybody immediately bought it as a finisher, and the fact that he flew in out of nowhere with it shows that he may be a bit more intelligent than the babyfaces but that he’s not necessarily the better fighter. In that regard, everybody comes out of the match looking strong, and Triple H looks great in defeat because he took this brutal kick that has put numerous people on the shelf and was up and moving around within ten seconds. Aside from the great finish, I have to say that this match was absolutely nothing special. Don’t get me wrong, it was good. However, it doesn’t live up to the personal standard that I have for Wrestlemania title matches, and there was nothing in this aside from the final few seconds that I will remember a month from now. I suppose that we older fans are just going to have to accept the fact that, in the post-roster split era with two “world titles,” there are going to be championship matches on major shows which are nothing more than glorified midcard bouts.

Oh, and that marching band entrance probably looked a lot cooler on paper than it did live.

Big Show versus Floyd Mayweather had, in my opinion, the second best build of any match on the card, but I had absolutely no clue how the in-ring portion of it was going to wind up. Fortunately, things turned out just fine. Would two trained wrestlers have put on a better ‘Mania semi-final? Yes, in most cases. However, I don’t think that anybody expects matches of this nature to be good. To the contrary, I think they’re often remembered more for how “not bad” they are than how affirmatively good they are. This match was very “not bad.” I don’t know for certain who exactly was in charge of structuring the bout (though I would put money on it being Pat Patterson), but that person deserves a Wrestlemania payoff bigger than Mayweather, because it was BRILLIANT in terms of working around all of Floyd’s limitations and playing up to all of his strengths. He at no point went toe to toe with the Big Show and never really attempted any wrestling moves against him. Yet, at the end of the night, it was perfectly believable that Floyd was able to get the upper hand at the times and in the manners that he did, and even the knockout finish made perfect sense. In addition to Mayweather, Show, and the guy in charge of the booking, the bit players deserve a lot of respect here too. Developmental wrestler Charles “The Hammer” Evans was the Pretty Boy posse member who did the most bumping, and I think that he undoubtedly earned himself a spot on the main roster. And, though I have no clue who he was, the gentleman in Mayweather’s corner who kept yelling “HE CAN’T BE DOING THAT!” every time that Show did ANYTHING to Floyd is now my new favorite manager. He made the situation in the ring seem all the more dire for his man, which in turn mad it more understandable that Mayweather would resort to desperate measures despite having been so confident in his natural athletic ability in the buildup to the fight. As celebrity matches go, this definitely has to be in the top three, though I don’t know if it was quite as good as Bam Bam Bigelow versus Lawrence Taylor, as Bammer and LT managed to get through things with less smoke and fewer mirrors.

Then we got ourselves the final match of the evening, the Undertaker against Edge for the Smackdown Title. I do have to give these two guys credit. Watching the show on television, it was pretty clear that the Citrus Bowl, though a great looking venue, absolutely sucked in terms holding in crowd noise and making audience reactions sound impressive. Stuff that was massively over according to live reports sounded like nobody gave a damn about it on pay per view, and the crowd sounded especially weak during the opening minutes of this contest. Yet, by the end of the bout, the two wrestlers managed to get the live viewers so in to this match that it sounded like it was getting the biggest reactions of the evening. Yes, bigger than virtually all of Flair/Michaels and definitely bigger than Mayweather/Show. This is particularly impressive when you consider the fact that the fans had been through three and a half hours of professional wrestling at this point, which is oftentimes enough to burn out even the most ardent of the sport’s supporters. And, quite frankly, it burned me out. No matter how hard or how smart Taker and Edge worked and no matter how fast Charles Robinson’s little legs pumped to get him down to the ring, I was not going to get in to this match. I feel bad for that in a way, because folks with more stamina than I have been saying that this one was great. Maybe I’ll feel that way too if I get the DVD and watch it in isolation, but, on that night and in that position, I had seen far too much on this particular evening to think of the battle as anything more than average. Though, now that I think about it, the fact that I was burnt out and thought that the match was average stands as a testament to what the wrestlers were doing, because usually when I get burnt out and don’t particularly want to watch a match, I’m far more harsh on it.

So that was Wrestlemania. Was it a fun show? Yes. Were there memorable moments? Yes. Were there a couple of great matches? Yes. Could the build have been better? Oh yes. Was it too long? Yes. Were there some matches that failed to deliver? Yes. The show was a complete mixed bag. If you could somehow cut out the two bland hours of the show and retain the two awesome hours, it probably would have been one of the best pay per views of all time. However, between the filler matches and the disappointing matches, it was dragged down quite a ways in my opinion. Thumbs solidly in the middle for the sh . . .

Oh, wait.

I skipped something, didn’t I?

Let’s talk about Shawn Michaels and Ric Flair.

I see a lot of fans online these days misusing the term “main event.” Many people have adopted the incorrect belief that, if a match goes on last at a particular show, it’s appropriate to refer to it as the main event. That’s not the case. Main event status is something that is determined before the show happens, not afterwards. Saying something is the main event is basically saying that it’s the main attraction, the one thing that, more than anything else on the card, is drawing in viewers. That’s true whether it’s the last match on the card or whether it’s the third match on the card.

Shawn Michaels versus Ric Flair, at least in my mind, was the main event of this show. If it hadn’t taken place, I wouldn’t have paid for this show. Period. In fact, even though I’ve known for months that Flair’s final match would be taking place at WM, that alone wasn’t going to get me to order Wrestlemania. I figured that, as the angle heading up to the retirement bout had been lackluster, the match itself probably would be too. Then Michaels and Flair started cutting promos on each other. With every awesome interview segment between the two men, my stance on ordering ‘Mania weakened, first going from “No way” to “It might be cool to see that” to “Maybe I’ll get it if I’ve got nothing better going on that night” to “Okay, if I’m not busy with work that weekend, I’ll buy it.” Finally, when Shawn Michaels talked about putting Ric Flair down like Old Yeller, got slapped, and then gave the Nature Boy a look like, “You’re not even worth it anymore,” I knew that, work and social obligations be damned, I was going to be watching this show live and as it happened, no matter how much it cost. I fully admit that I was worked in the old school sense of the word, as two professional wrestlers made me believe through their words and their actions that I was going to be seeing something special on this particular evening. That almost never happens to me anymore, and I don’t think that I’m all that different from many modern WWE fans, who purchase shows more for the spectacle or the brand name than for any feelings they have about individual personalities.

There was a bit of a detour on the road to the Flair/Michaels match, though. Before we got there, we had to go through the Hall of Fame. I had initially been slotted to recap that show for this very website, but a couple of major, last minute projects came through at work and resulted in yours truly having to back out of that commitment. (Unfortunately, no replacement could be found in time . . . sorry about that one, Larry.) I worked all day that Saturday and in to the night, but I promised myself that I would, no matter what, find some way to get out of there in time to at the very least catch Flair’s speech. Fortunately, that worked out, and I walked through my front door just as the induction of Peter Maivia was wrapping up. I sat down on my couch to watch Flair speak, and it was readily apparent that the whole thing was heavily edited, though I wouldn’t learn just how edited until I read live reports indicating that Flair talked for hours. Granted, we only got around ten minutes on television, but even that ten minutes was an emotional roller coaster. It’s a testament to WWE’s editing team that they were able to cull the speech in such a short period of time and capture moments that encompassed so many of the sentiments that we fans associate with the end of the Nature Boy’s career. We were simultaneously happy to celebrate him, sad to see him go, excited to see what he would do for his final bow, respectful of the sacrifices that he and especially his family had made during his career, and even a little bit angry to see the promotion rushing him offstage. (Though, realistically, they had no choice in the matter.) If no match had been promised to us beforehand, this speech on its own would have been a fitting end to the Nature Boy’s career . . . a perfect moment to go out on.

In fact, the speech made me more excited for the subsequent match than any of the angles on Raw or Smackdown ever did. It was so clear from watching the Hall of Fame ceremony that every wrestler and piece of WWE talent in the building had the utmost respect for Flair, and, as a result, any doubt in my mind about the company not trying its hardest to give this man the best sendoff in professional wrestling history was immediately eliminated. Of course, there were still a few x-factors that I was worried about going in to the match. What if it rained? What if the crowd was full of young fans who didn’t care about Naitch? What if Ric Flair had one of those now all-too-familiar evenings on which he looked like he was sixty an wrestled like he was eighty? What if Shawn Michaels on this particular evening had what would seem like the one “off night” of his entire career? I went in to the match with my fingers crossed, knowing that we would more than likely get something special but hoping that no unforeseen contingency would rob us of that magical night.

Fortunately, none of those fears were realized. The match was, for lack of a better description, exactly what I said it was going to be on 411’s Podcast. It wasn’t a triumph of pro wrestling’s more over-the-top athletic aspects, but it was two men who know more about professional wrestling than the rest of the industry put together going out there and using every little trick, tactic, and shortcut that they know in order to compensate for their weaknesses and produce a contest that will never, ever be forgotten by those of us who viewed it. Michaels, knowing that he would have to, provided the spectacular highspots. Flair, knowing that they would be easy to pull off and generate good reactions, busted out the old low blow, the delayed suplex, and the rare Nature Boy cross body.

More important than any “move” that the two men did, though, were their facials, their body language, their ring positioning, and, believe it or not, their words. Every action in every one of these categories felt like it was designed to generate the greatest amount of emotion possible from the crowd. Of course, it only looked that way. I know that Michaels and Flair weren’t staying up late the week of the show with notebooks and floating out ideas like, “Well, if I squint ever so slightly at the 7:53 mark and cock my head to the side, they’ll go nuts.” The fact of the matter is that, even though you probably couldn’t design a better match for this purpose if you tried, the Nature Boy and the Heartbreak Kid didn’t arrive at it by design. The arrived at it by virtue of being two of the best performers in the entire history of this wacky hybrid of sport and theater.

And what can I say about the finish that hasn’t already been said at this point? It was exactly what needed to be done. Michaels, after already having given Flair multiple openings on which he could not fully capitalize, knew that he was in a position in which he was going to have no choice but to put the legend away. Flair, realizing the same, resigned himself to his fate and told HBK to bring it one. Michaels, perhaps only because he had his hero’s consent, pulled the trigger . . . but not before uttering the two brief sentences that will forever be associated with this show. “I’m sorry. I love you.” And, with that, the mother of all superkicks was delivered, and Ric Flair was pinned for the last time. The two opponents immediately embraced on the mat, after which Michaels kissed Flair on the forehead as though he were a dear family member and then rolled out of the ring to let the thirty-five year veteran have his time with the fans. There was no post-match celebration, no stream of proud wrestlers pouring out from the locker room, no confetti, and not even one last refrain of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Niatch made his walk, waived goodbye, and, in an uncharacteristically low key manner, it appeared that Ric Flair the wrestler was gone . . . forever. A perfect moment to go out on.

I know that this is going to sound overly melodramatic, but I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s the truth. The second that Ric Flair walked out of the view of the camera, I felt something change. Yes, I was still watching the biggest professional wrestling show of the year, and, yes, there were still things that held my attention. However, with the Flair match coming to an end, it was though I was at a rock concert and the volume level had immediately dropped from a Spinal Tap-esque eleven all the way down to a two. It felt like nothing else on the show actually mattered, and there was a four or five minute period beginning during Todd Grisham’s interview with Edge in which I seriously considered just shutting the show off and going to bed. After all, I had seen what I paid to see, and I was fairly confident that nothing else on the card was going to be anywhere near as good. Ultimately, I convinced myself that I’d feel like an idiot if I paid almost sixty dollars for a show and then only watched half of it. I kept watching, though I have a strong suspicion that the main reason that my opinion of the two title matches is so low compared to almost everybody else’s is that I just didn’t care anymore. Nothing Triple H did prior to this show got me excited for his match. The same could be said for Edge, the Undertaker, Randy Orton, and John Cena. They were fun matches, but, in the wake of something as monumental as Flair walking away from the industry, they felt completely insignificant.

In fact, I felt the same way about Raw the following night. I was in a situation in which I could either work late and get ahead on some projects or go home and watch the show, and, at the end of the day, I felt like there would be nothing worth catching. Even if they did a Flair tribute, I thought to myself, there’s no way that it could equal what we saw at the Hall of Fame or what we saw at Wrestlemania itself. So, in a very unusual move, I skipped Monday Night Raw outright, not even bothering to tape it. It was only after I got online and began reading reports about the show that I realized that their tribute to Flair eclipsed anything that I imagined would take place. Fortunately, we now live in a world with YouTube.

I watched the segment via the magic of the world wide web, and it was phenomenal. Granted, things would have been a little bit better if Roddy Piper could have showed up or if Dusty Rhodes could have been there live, but those of us who live in the real world realize how hard it can be to assemble very busy people in the same place at the same time, even if it is for something as momentous as this show. Again, the genuine emotion that poured out of every individual involved transformed it from “just another angle” in to something that I will remember on my deathbed . . . a perfect moment to go out on.

I was an individual who was critical of the Ric Flair “keep winning or retire” storyline. I knew that it had the potential to be so much more, and I’m still a little bit disappointed that it didn’t deliver. However, there’s not a single bad thing that I can say about the events surrounding the retirement itself. Generally, in professional wrestling, guys don’t get dignified sendoffs. Most of them never officially retire, and the sad fact remains that many of them die before they get a chance to do so. The fact that Ric Flair got three “perfect moments” on which to go out when so few wrestlers get one makes this a wrestling retirement the likes of which we’re never going to see again. Period. Also, with wrestlers’ popularity seemingly burning out more quickly than ever thanks to the twenty-first century’s insanely short attention spans, we’re probably never again going to see anybody who warrants this level of celebration.

. . . and that’s one of the things that has me in about a bit of a crisis when it comes to my status as a wrestling fan. I mentioned earlier that, while watching Wrestlemania, the “volume” turned down immediately after Michaels versus Flair. Nothing on the show seemed anywhere near as important as it otherwise would have. I figured that would end at the close of the evening. It hasn’t. I watched Impact on Thursday night to review it for this website, and getting through the show felt like more of a chore than it ever has. (Which is saying a lot.) I didn’t even bother to turn on Smackdown or ECW. I’ve got a half wanted CHIKARA King of Trios DVD set sitting next to me. I was very excited about watching it prior to Wrestlemania, but now I lack the desire to pop it in. I’ve got a ticket to SHIMMER DVD taping at the end of the month, and, though I’m sure that I’ll still go, but I fear that the special feeling will be gone.

Really, anything that I’ve tried to do anything related to professional wrestling after that match has not been the same. It’s not necessarily that I’m bummed out because we’re now in a post-Flair world. The issue is a different one altogether. You see, I had a strong reaction to last weekend’s festivities. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire Flair Hall of Fame speech. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire Flair/Michaels match. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time I peered at that tiny YouTube screen for the Raw farewell party. In a three day span, professional wrestling made me cry more frequently than it had done in the preceding fifteen years, which is quite the accomplishment given all of industry’s premature deaths and other tragedies. I feel that, no matter what I watch in professional wrestling, I will never experience this sort of emotional reaction again. At least for me, it feels like professional wrestling has peaked. As such, I have a hard time trying to figure out what the point of watching it again would be. I mean why bother wasting my time when I know that nothing I see will come near the level of the most memorable and emotional weekend that I have ever had as a fan? Is it really worth my time?