Falls Count Anywhere

04-02-04

I've got a burninatin' sensation.

Welcome to Falls Count Anywhere! My name is Chris and I'm about to go burninating the countryside!

SmackDown!
Kurt Angle opened the show with a nice heel reaction. He announced that there would be a tourney for the Kurt Angle Great American Award Trophy. It's basically a cute way of saying that whoever wins gets to be number one contender. Kurt is a great talker and I think he's going to get into this role nicely.

The first match featured The Big Show taking on Rikishi in a Great American Award Nomination match. The Big Show actually got a decent reaction coming out, which may speak to the work they did with him as a monster during the Royal Rumble. The match was exactly what you expected, but Rikishi couldn't get up very high for the chokeslam.

They showed Bradshaw's limo coming into the arena. I love the horns on the limo. Texas-style is all the rage with the kids today. Great line by Bradshaw: "Where the hell did you learn to drive? Tiajuana? Nuevo Loredo?" I've driven in both of those cities. As he managed to avoid making a left hand turn from the right hand lane, likely he learned in the US. He ran down the Mexican driver for not being an American. They are really trying to get him over, and they have a run coming up through Texas, where Eddy is a God. Let's see how this will work for the next PPV main event.

Rey Misterio teamed with Spike Dudley against Los Chavos. Spike has been wrestling without his shirt, which isn't great, but it will do. Chavo Jr. and Rey opened up and did some nice work until Chavo Sr. tagged in and slowed it down. Chavo Sr. did some 1970s Lucha Rudos work that really clicked with the style of Rey and Dudley. The mix of styles here, with Chavo Sr. working a Lucha heavyweight style, Rey and Chavo doing the flying Lucha, and Spike working his brawling techniques really worked. Spike got to pin Chavo Jr, setting up a challenge to the belt. Bradshaw came out and beat on Rey and Spike. He got some nice heat, which is a good thing.

Help me get this boot off in your ass, would you?

We got to see RVD in another Great American Award Nomination match, taking on Charlie Haas. If I were Charlie, I would be very unhappy having lost Benjamin and the World's Greatest Tag Team gimmick, because he lost a lot of charisma out of it. People seem to be into RVD just as much on SmackDown! as they were on RAW, which means he's mid-card for life. Haas has developed into a good worker, and RVD was really on. Rob's selling has begun to move more towards body part selling, the type that guys like Jimmy Garvin and Dean Malenko were always experts at.

Haas got a lot of offense, and it worked for me. RVD worked hard, got his big moves in and made it a good match. It got declared a draw, then Kurt came out and said that the winner was the one who was ahead on points was going forward towards the Great American Award Nomination. Angle declared Haas as the winner, which was a nice heel move. They could do worse than having Haas as Angle's boy.

They reviewed Bradshaw's interview from last week and his attack on Eddy. It's the way you build a new challenger. The tough part is that Bradshaw has been mid-card for so long, it's going to need a lot to make him a real main eventer.

Booker and Angle had a little talk backstage where The Book said that he was being under-appreciated. Angle said that he was in the Great American Award Nomination pool. Booker makes a nice heel. This could be his big WWE break.

They showed the USO award again. See Tuesday's Falls for my opinion on this segment.

They set up the match between Booker T and Hardcore Holly last week, and they gave us the match this week. A solid match, as they started with the two of them facing off and doing a stare down, which I always think adds to the legitimacy. The guys worked stiff, as Holly always does, and they built it right. This is what every TV show should have, a hard-hitting match that goes long. Good stuff, very late 1980s. The fans seemed to get more into it as they went.

Akio and Sokuda took on the Dudleys. It wasn't great, but they proved that the Dudleys coming to SmackDown! was a nice idea.

Teddy Long came out to talk with the Dudleys. He was great. I really think that he's got a chance to be a really solid manager in the WWE. He gave The Dudleys his Players' Card. He didn't have one for Spike, though.

They reviewed RAW, which is a good way to get over the promotion as a whole. If one show is hot, they should be showing it. The review of the Shelton vs. HHH match was fantastic. It looked like a really important victory.

Eddy drove up and parked next top Bradshaw's limo and chatted with the driver that Bradshaw had been belittling.

Is the poodle really gay, or just sensitive?

The French Phenom, Renee Dupree, came out with the gayest poodle of all to do some commentary while the FBI took on John Cena. Cena got a really good pop. He's ready to explode! They chanted before he started his raps for the night. He referred to Booker T as a Busta Rhymes wanna-be. Quite. The match was pretty good considering the premise of a handicap match seldom works. It was a fun piece of work. Cena got the win to a HUGE ovation.

Angle came out to talk to Eddy. They had a little tete-a-tete and everything went well. Bradshaw came out and Angle declared him in the running for the Great American Award. Eddy stole Bradshaw's hat and passed it around the crowd. Nice touch. They may make him work yet.

A fairly good episode, if it didn't knock it out of the park.

NEWS
The WWE, Ric Flair, Dustin Runnels and Scott Hall are all in hot water over The Flight from Hell, back in 2002, where several of the guys apparently groped flight attendants and various other nasty businesses during a flight back from the UK. The cause? Demon liquor! The numbers are fairly serious, but the odds are a settlement will make it go away for the WWE. But the guys are likely in much more serious danger of losing a lot of cash.

Steve Austin will be in the next issue of the National Enquirer, mostly to expose his troubles with the ladies over the past couple of years. It's not supposed to be very positive.

The Shelton Benjamin thing is having a fairly wide quake effect on the WWE, both on RAW and SmackDown!. There has been a significant spike in the morale, as a lot of folks are seeing that the guys who either were standing in the way (HHH) or might have been standing in the way (Brock, Goldberg) are now gone. Shelton is said to be on the short list of guys that just about everybody thinks deserves a shot, despite his run-ins over the last few months. Though, all the negative pub that has been going around has folks worried that all the good they did with Mania may be lost. Ratings are up on RAW, though, and that's helping.

According to the Observer, the WWE has delayed a few DVDs. The Rise and Fall of ECW DVD will be out in November. Eddy Guerrero's DVD will be out in Sept. December will see a Bret Hart DVD set, which might be fantastic.

NWA-TNA has been in contact with Hogan, Nash and Hall about doing their BIG PPV. It's a long shot, as these guys don't really need the money. The WWE won't be calling anytime soon, so maybe they should get into the public eye.

FlashBack!
There is a long tradition of guys getting a sudden and miraculous push. Sometimes, a guy doing a job seems like a great way to elevate someone. HHH has done it in the past, giving a big win to Jeff Hardy for example, only to bury him the next week. Seldomly has that one big win gone all the way to making someone a real star. Unless you count Ric Flair and Sting's match at the first Clash of the Champions.

Allowed to be a star... but still not allowed to play drums for KISS.

1987 had been a strong year for Flair. Though he had dropped the title for a few months to Ronnie Garvin, he won it back at Starrcade and had been on a roll. Sting was the young upstart, having come from the UWF in the Crockett purchase. Sting was gaining a serious following, and in the opener of Starrcade 1987, he actually did a through the ropes dive which was the first time a lot of folks had seen a tope done live. Sting set out a bunch of challenges to Flair, and here was their first big match.

The match itself was one of those matches that really felt like the 1980s meeting the 1990s. Sting did the power moves and added a new level of athleticism. Flair worked like the solid 1980s worker that he was. They used all the traditional moves in these types of matches: armbars, headlocks, hiptosses, and Sting no sold some chops, and hit a few dropkicks. The match had a Japanese flavor, since no one thought that Sting would last the distance against Flair, and therefore as the match got closer to the finish, the crowd got hotter and hotter and the rating just kept going up. In the end, Sting had Flair in the Scorpion Deathlock as time ran out. They had added three judges, and they still ruled the match a draw.

More important than how good the match was, and it was excellent, it established Sting for good. Overnight, his pops got bigger, he started to pull in viewers whenever he was on the shows. He probably passed Nikita Koloff, and came close to Dusty Rhodes, as far as general popularity went. He was pretty much the top contender face for years after the match. While Sting's style of work and his call gathered a lot of attention, it was Flair's willingness to make him a star by selling big and giving him the finish that would launch him that put Sting up to where he would eventually inhabit. The fact that Flair didn't go out and squash Sting the next week also helped.

That's all for this week. Next Week: More fun from the mind of me.

Chris Garcia