Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, “a week in politics is a long time”. If that’s true, then a year in the WWE is an eternity. At Wrestlemania XX the focus was very much placed on ‘where it all begins again’, mostly as a precursor to the then impending draft lottery. On paper, Wrestlemania last year should have been a resounding success. The two World title matches had good heat and contained five of the best wrestlers the WWE had and has to offer. The under-card was full of interesting match ups with a mixture of appeal to suit most tastes so it should have captured the imagination of the live crowd and the tv audience watching at home. Unfortunately, the typically mercurial New York crowd had seen enough disappointment for one night and never gave the headline matches a fair chance. A PPV will ultimately be judged by its main events and the job of the under-card is to take the viewer from coats off and sit down to main event pending without either boring the crap out of everyone or overshadowing the lead talent on display. Much to most people’s surprise, almost every match on the card in the build up to the two title contests was a let down in some way and the main event players didn’t stand a chance.
So what went wrong and have the WWE learned any lessons from twelve months ago?
It was a wise move to open with John Cena winning the US title from Big Show. Cena was nowhere near as over as he is now but the fans still found him an easy character to like and the ‘David and Goliath’ idea always works to some degree, even with bad performers. Cena FU’ing the five hundred pound Show was always going to be an impressive feat and set the crowd up nicely for the successful three count that took place just after. No match containing the Big Show is ever going to be accused of being a wrestling classic but Wrestlemania XX was underway and all seemed okay.
The ‘Fatal four way’ match for the World tag titles was standard Wrestlemania under-card fare and the popular team of RVD and Booker T won giving the fans the second chance to pop in a row.
The newly face Chris Jericho was up next in his ‘love triangle’ encounter with the despicable Christian, overshadowed by the romantic leanings of Trish Stratus. This match was taking place at the end of an overly long preparation and most viewers had lost interest in the storyline quite a while before the match at Wrestlemania. Equally destructive to its success was Trish’s inability to act the innocent belle (especially now we know what a great slut she makes) and Christian’s subdued performance playing it very much for drama and not for entertainment. The wrestling was solid but it was almost an afterthought to the betrayal by Trish and it was a match that would have been better suited to television.
Mick Foley and the Rock then set up their handicap clash with Evolution with an energetic interview backstage but the initial novelty of the reunited Rock ‘n’ Sock Connection wore off after the opening exchanges of the match. The best business during the contest was between Flair and Rock and Mick received some decent pops for a few typically reckless Foley moves including his trademark elbow-drop off the apron. It was a good match and the performances were such that you would normally expect an enthusiastic crowd reaction but the fans fell quiet between cheers and the portents were not promising for the rest of the night.
Now, New York arenas aren’t normally renowned for their love of all things soft and fluffy so unless Torrie, Stacey, Jackie and Sable were going to stop prancing around in their overly fancy undies and start giving eachother mouth to mouth as a way of reviving the crowd, this was not going to succeed. As expected, the action was as fake and vapid as Torrie and Sable’s Playboy photos but thanks to men being men, this contest could only go so wrong.
The gauntlet match gimmick was mutated into the Cruiserweight Open contest and the smaller men had their chance to shine. Jamie Noble and Ultimo Dragon were the stars of the first few falls until Kidman paled everything else into comparison with his insane asai shooting star press that surely was fairly close to attempted suicide. By the end only Mysterio and Chavo remained and the crowd were seemingly begging for a Rey victory which was denied to them and only added to their frustration.
The first sign of real trouble was when Goldberg faced Brock Lesnar for the title of ‘Least interested in wrestling’ and the fans blew a lot of their vociferous wad on hassling the departing Lesnar at every opportunity. I wonder who’d have received the more hostile reception of the two if they’d known how much of an ungrateful hypocrite Goldberg was about to become. Still, we all got to call them some names and Austin stunnered them both so it worked out okay, right? Wrong. Despite the fun the crowd were having this match should either never have happened or been booked differently so as not to make a mockery of what so many wrestlers give their bodies for. The harm this match served was to take the mind of the fans away from wrestling and into some sort of reality show contest mentality where they cared very little for storylines or angles and were only interested in ‘registering their vote’ of disapproval. Once this happens it affects the rest of the card and makes the ‘pro’ aspect of wrestling seem quite trivial.
The second eight-person tag match was next, this time for the WWE titles. The Bashams and, especially, Haas and Benjamin were the only teams who used good tag team manoeuvres, the APA seemed out of their depth and presumably were only their to set up Bradshaw’s subsequent heel turn into JBL and Rikishi was mostly dead-weight on the apron while Scotty 2 Hotty bizarrely took up the majority of the action. Thankfully it was fought under one-fall rules but it still was a waste of valuable PPV time.
Molly Holly did her best to beat JBL to resembling a Nazi sympathiser and got a skinhead live on the stage at the hands of Victoria. Whilst I commend Molly for going through with a stipulation that most male performers would find a way round, it was still a cheap tactic to draw interest where there was very little. Plus, I kind of fancied Molly Holly back then and, even though I knew she wasn’t going to retain the ‘egg’ look forever, she’s never got her image back the way it was then and she looks older and stuffier now than ever before.
The first of two World title matches was fought between Kurt Angle and Eddie Guerrero for the WWE belt and it opened as a purist wrestling encounter expanding into a more heated contest as the match progressed. Unfortunately the wear down holds came to quickly and the action became sporadic. With both men noticeably breathing deeply after ten minutes it never really exploded into the all out war the build up had suggested and even the multiple pinfalls and finishing move trades towards the end failed to form a positive crescendo. Eddie retained his title with a less than sneaky bit of lying and cheating which was partly wasted on the audience and it felt like the match had finished without ever reaching its true potential.
The Undertaker’s return and subsequent squashing of Kane seemed an unusual move. As expected from the Dead Man, most of the build up to this match had been done in his on-screen absence and Kane had been left to feud with a mixture of faulty lights, blue smoke and chiming bells (sounds to me like he needed an electrician and a decent keyboard player rather than a match against the most selfish man at Wrestlemania). I suppose we should just be grateful that he bothered to turn up to claim his victory, Christ knows he didn’t ‘wrestle’ for it.
So to the main event, a triple threat World Heavyweight Championship match between HHH, HBK Shawn Michaels and ‘The Crippler’ Chris Benoit. Possibly due to feeling like a tag along on someone else’s date, HBK hit his spots during the match in auto-pilot and always seemed just on the outside of the action. Benoit, boosted by the impending recognition of his peers entered a good performance and HHH appeared up for the task of putting over a fellow wrestler the right way, with the same passion he felt when he was winning the title himself for the first time. Realising the importance of what they were witnessing, the fans in attendance paid Benoit the compliment he deserved and popped big for his title win and the Benoit/Guerrero celebration was a fitting tribute to two formerly unsung heroes of mainstream wrestling.
But the damage had long been done and Wrestlemania XX could only be described as a critical failure as the confetti stopped falling from the roof of Madison Square Garden. How can you save a PPV that offers so much in preparation that it can’t possibly deliver to the high expectations of fans? How can you stop a crowd from going cold during an indifferent under-card when all they ultimately want to see are the matches that matter? Sadly, I’ve no idea. Honestly, I don’t. But I do know what you DON’T do. You don’t fill Wrestlemania 21 with matches that have mostly been booked in the last two months. You don’t throw together competitors for the flimsiest of reasons with such little build up that there seems no reason for them to fight at all. You take your time, build solid, believable storylines with interest and passion and take the audience on a journey that has a satisfactory conclusion. The sort of thing experienced bookers who don’t feel the need to pander to modern disposable culture have been doing for decades.
Seeing as I started with a quote from a former British Prime Minister, I’ll finish with one too. Benjamin Disraeli once said, “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics”. Of the sixty-two active superstars who appeared at Wrestlemania XX; only eighteen are advertised (at the time of writing this column) to appear at Wrestlemania 21, fifteen are no longer contracted to WWE, four are injured and a massive twenty-five are still in WWE but are not currently promoted to attend the show. Does that prove that Vince and his team are not using their available talent to its fullest potential? I’d say it does.
It’s also interesting to note that only one of the World title contestants from Wrestlemania XX will be in a similar spot this year. You can insert your own reasons why here.
Lee
