Falls Count Anywhere

01-17-08

My people call it "Amiga."

Booking. It’s the hardest thing about wrestling. Whenever they strayed from legit athletic contest into the world of wrestling as we know it, they discovered that things could be heightened with smart booking. They discovered they could make heroes bigger and villains more evil with the right combination of deeds. It also must have become very apparent that bad booking can kill even very good wrestling.

TNA has proved that latter statement many times, including this last pay-per-view where the Angle vs. Christian match was marred with a terribly booked finish. The WWE isn’t immune to that either, as several of the main events over the last year have shown. Heck, even Ring of Honor can fall into the trap as they did with Danielson vs. Morishima. Booking is everything.

Now, smart booking can turn crappy wrestling into great stuff. ECW was the classic example of that. Many of the matches wrestled by folks like The Pitbulls and Gangstas were actually awful, but the booking made them more than watchable. The WWE has had some good booking and some terrible booking, but recently, they’ve had less than perfect booking.

For example the recent RAW Roulette show’s opening match. They had Michaels and Kennedy come to the ring and we thought that they were going to be wrestling each other. That would make sense as that’s a storyline that could give Michaels something to do and would make Kennedy look good. If they’d booked it right, they could have given Kennedy a win and that might have made Kennedy into a better competitor for Michaels in the future. It’s all a complex algorithm.

Instead, Vince came out and said that it was RAW Roulette (which they tend to do whenever they’re at Las Vegas) and said that it was a Strange Bedfellows match (or as they call them in Mexico, Parejas Incredible) and they’d be facing Charlie Haas and Trevor Murdoch. Haas came out in a mask like Mil Mascaras, which is weird. You see, they’ve never booked Haas as anything special so no one reacts to him anymore, so t hey have to try and give him gimmicks to make him into something.

The match was nothing special, which is a bad thing. It didn’t help anyone with any storyline. While they could have done something like had Michaels come within an eyelash of victory and had Kennedy block it, they didn’t do that. That just had a regular match. That’s not a good thing.

So, what does RAW need right now? They need to book strong heels and strong faces.

Too often, faces are made to look really dumb. Dumb faces are seldom draws. Kurt Angle was made into a goofy heel and later a dumb face, and that was a terrible thing. He was constantly made a fool by plans from various heels. John Cena had the same problem.

If you trick a face, you weaken them, but if you do the same thing to a heel, it can be brilliant. Look at the classic angle from Mid-South in the early 1980s. Michael Hayes was the color commentator (and doing a better job than Jesse Ventura would do a year or two later) and the Freebirds were the big heels in the territory. They had Hayes say that he was going to be showing a video of Junkyard Dog getting his just deserts, since they were feuding with JYD at the time. Instead of it being a video of JYD getting beat up, it was one of the Freebirds being beaten on. It was a good video package, but the classic moment was when they cut back to Hayes in the studio and the look on his face was classic. It was so well done.

What RAW needs to do is make one guy into the top heel. THey did it beautifully with Edge in 2005. He was a star and he acted like a heel. Not like a cocky cool kid like HHH in recent years, but like a bloodthirsty heel who cheated and got booed for it. That sort of heel went out of fashion with Stone Cold and the NwO. Edge won the World Title for that short reign and what happened? He managed to draw big ratings and a good buyrate for the match where he dropped the belt.

It was no coincidence that it was Edge’s true heel run and title win that made him a true draw. He’s done well since he came back from his injury. They shouldn’t bring Edge to take over on RAW, but they should build Kennedy into that heel.

They can do that by having Kennedy beat faces clean. The WWE has never liked to have Faces job clean, but when they’ve had that happen, it’s led to great things for the heels who have gotten the win. Part of the reason that there were so many strong heels in the Attitude era is that The Rock was so willing to do jobs, even clean jobs, for any heel out there. Having Kennedy pin Michaels clean, or HHH (as if that’d ever happen) would be a great way to get him more over. To have him brutally beat a jobber up would be another way, but that’s not worked of late.

Now, if they had him do something simple like getting DQed for choking Jeff Hardy, that could make him a real big deal. Having him get DQed a few times in a row for over violent action could make him into the next HHH. In fact, the way HHH became the Cerebral Assassin was just that way.

So, they need to start booking better to get a strong heel over, but a strong face is much harder. They did a beautiful job getting John Cena over as a mega-face, but in these days that was also enough to annoy a fair portion of the audience leading to his problem of being both hated and loved at the same time by different audiences.

If they took Jeff Hardy, just as he is, and gave him big wins over HHH (well, he’s got that one) and Shawn Michaels, and put the belt on him, but may well start him on the road to being that face. They need to make him look like he’s doing something stupid, like agreeing to appear on one of the promo segments with a heel, and when the sudden but inevitable betrayal will happen, he needs to have something up his sleeve.

The thing they're doing with Jeff Hardy right now is kinda working. They're having him be the big spot superstar and that's a good thing, because it does make him stand out, but it's also a good way to get him hurt. This week's RAW featured Jeff giving Randy the Swanton from the scaffolding, probably fifteen, maybe twenty feet up, and he hit it. Last week, it was Jeff and Umaga having a great match in the cage leading to the giant spot where Jeff gave Umaga the Whisper in the Wind off the top of the cage. The solidness of the match helped, but they were obviously building the spot as the memorable moment. That's their way of getting Jeff over as a strong face. I'm hoping it works, but it's better than they've given almost any new main eventer in years.

So, if they can manage that, RAW can be a big show again. I’m hoping that building to the Royal Rumble and on towards Mania the WWE realizes that they’ve got precious few people ready for the big show and they need to build solid faces and heels again. it worked for a hundred years until Stone Cold came about; it could work again!

Notes on this week's RAW
I saw some of this week's RAW and I liked it. The Hardy-Randy Orton stuff was great, and they're really working on getting Jeff to the top. Shawn Michaels and Trevor Murdoch had a match that ended with Shawn using the Inverted Figure Four for the win, and Kennedy getting some mic time. HHH went nuts after getting DQed against Snitsky, tearing up the TitanTron. It looked really weird the way the thing kept exploding when he was nowhere near the explosion areas.

The JBL stuff has been golden and they've always given him far more of a push than his wrestling deserves, but he's a great character. JBL's promo saying that Chris Jericho was a coward was great. They gave him tons of fireworks as he was leaving the ring. I mean it was WrestleMania level fireworks. So many fireworks that the air for the mini rumble afterwards was all smoky.

They also managed to turn Beth Phoenix into a monster and she has the feeling of a legitimate wrestler, something that most of the women are missing.

A decent show, though the Ric Flair retirement run hasn't taken off like it should have, but I'd still watch it.

And that’s this week’s look at wrestling. More next week!

Chris Garcia