Falls Count Anywhere

02-02-07

More cowbell.

RAW
I liked RAW. I did. I thought it was a completely thought-out show and had a lot of strong action. There was some weirdness, but not enough to mar the good stuff.

Things opened with Michaels out saying that he was up against the Great Beyond and he came out on the losing end. It was a powerful promo, actually. Cena came out and said that he liked the idea of Cena vs. Michaels at Mania, but the choice of who he’d face was first in the hands of the Undertaker. That led to Edge and Orton coming out. Vince came on the screen and made a tag match with the four of them.

The World’s Greatest Tag Team beat Cryme Tyme. Shad got his leg worked over in an attempt to get Ricky Morton face in peril heat. It didn’t really work. JTG got a hot tag and they worked a while. Shelton got tossed over the top, but in true Ricky Steamboat fashion, he skinned the cat and took Shad over with the headscissors. That was fantastic. Shelton got the win after a Haas DDT. Not great, but it made TWGTT look really good.

Maria. Poor Maria. She’s way out of her depth when she gets in a wrestling ring. She had a terrible match with Melina. Other than getting to give Melina a Broncobuster, she was squashed by Miss MNM. At least Melina got a little bit of heat. Melina’s now the Number One Contender to the Woman’s Belt.

Umaga squashed Val Venis. You don’t often have straight up squashes on WWE TV, but here you got one and it made Umaga look really good.

We love Big Brother.

Here’s a fun segment. Vince came out and gave a female plant (and a hot one) a copy of his Muscle & Fitness cover. Donald Trump showed up on the screen. It’s weird that Trump, who is a big star in the mainstream, got no reaction. That led to Trump saying that Vince didn’t know what he was doing and money started raining from the ceiling. Vince said that it was only play money, but it was real. I’m told they put 20,000 in the rafters, mostly 1s and 5s, but a few 100s were mixed in as well.

This hasn’t been done often and I’m told that there was a near-riot of people trying to get the cash. Weird stuff, but I thought it was a smart angle, maybe even too smart for their audience.

Carlito and SuperCrazy had a match with Kenny Dykstra and Chris Masters. Crazy and Carlito did tandem planchas! Carlito is really good and if they had kept him in the mix with the Trump thing he could have gotten a big benefit from the push. Sadly, they’re backing away from that. Carlito hit the BackPack (copyright: Lon Lopez) for the pin on Masters.

The Great Khali beat up Jeff Hardy, the carrier of the Intercontinental title, and won via count-out. That’s a great way to devalue your titles. Khali moved more than he usually does, but was still less agile than Andre was at the end of his run.

Cena and Michaels beat Edge and Randy Orton to win the Tag Titles. This was a good match, though they’ve really taken the starch out of Rated RKO. Cena got worked over most of the match. About a year ago, when Shawn Michaels was catching crap for not being able to perform at his peak level, this would have been unacceptable to people. Now that Cena’s proven himself to a degree, it’s OK. Cena made the hot tag to Michaels who simply cleaned house on everybody. Cena even bled, which is probably more of a result of the beating and blade job he did on Sunday.

Orton went for the RKO, but Michaels got out of Dodge and tagged Cena. Cena managed to get the FU on Orton. Michaels was about to give Cena Sweet Chin Music after the match, but Cena caught it. They had a stare down until Undertaker’s pyro hit. Really good dynamic stuff goin’ on!

Thoughts on ECW and Wrestle Society X
OK, even though I’d seen it, I had to watch the WSX show on MTV again and skipped the last half of ECW. While I was watching the two of them, I realised just how out of touch Vince and how successful WSX is going to be…in a limited way.

You see, WSX is everything that ECW should have been. It has a different look than the sterile arena that WWE plays to. They even play up that there are no pads on the floor. They present a distinct kind of work that you can’t find in the WWE. There’s incredible high flying mixed with violent brawling. While old timers might find the new style weak with poor selling and little in the way of psychology or storyline, young fans who are tired of the same-old WWE work will find a lot to like.

And that’s what ECW was back when Heyman ran it in the 1990s. You could watch an ECW show and know you were seeing something different because they had a much different look about everything. There was the way guys entered and the building itself. There was the crowd, which wasn’t hand-picked like the WSX’s crowd was, but it did attract the same kind of people. The in-ring work was so very different that you knew you weren’t going to see any of that in Vince’s ring any time soon. Watching WSX made me think of the nights I’d stay up until 2 to see ECW on the Spanish channel in Boston.

Plus they've got bands...

The WSX may not do huge numbers (comparison to WWE’s numbers will be moot), but if they can survive and gain a following, they’ll make WWE notice that they can bring folks back with the style that they’ve purposely withheld from their fans to lessen injuries.

There are also stars to be made. Teddy Hart and Jack Evans are both nearly ready for the WWE (and with Harry Smith under contract, and Nattie Neidhart coming in, a Hart Foundation II could be close at hand) and Vampiro’s going to get over with the viewers. The debut of WSX on Friday did a .4 rating, which is about triple what MTV does in that slot, but they also didn’t promote it enough to make a big difference.

I’m excited because this is the first attempt to start a TV fed that has something that makes it different and still manages to feel hip. The AWF didn’t feel hip, nor does TNA. The positioning of WSX puts it in a strong category.

That’s all for this week. More on Monday!

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Chris Garcia