Falls Count Anywhere

05-25-04

Go ahead. Claw me.

RAW
The show opened with Flair begging Bischoff to reinstate Shawn Michaels so that HHH could get his hands on him. The fact that Bisch and Flair have brawled before should have been played up somehow. Reinstatement was granted and Bischoff made a match between the two at Badd Blood. Afterwards, HHH then chided the rest of Evolution for not coming through in the Battle Royal last week.

Edge and Flair wrestled in a match that had a bunch of problems and showed that Flair should probably be thinking seriously about retirement.

I know I’ll get heat for this, but he missed his flip spot, though he did cover nicely, and after getting hit with the Edge clothesline while he was coming off the top rope, he didn’t kick out of the pin. The ref stopped the count, signaling that Flair had managed to lift a shoulder a smidge off the mat, but everyone noticed. They had a meeting with the refs about things like this and the way they were told to handle it was to make the count and figure a way around it. Edge hasn’t looked great on his own since he came back, but has worked really well in tag matches and against Orton. Orton was about to interfere, but Benjamin came out and stopped him, allowing Edge to hit the spear for the win.

$250,000 buys a lot of Raw.

They made the $250,000 Diva contest official. I’m interested in how they’ll play it. They should be doing it on SmackDown!, since it will likely draw ratings. They presumably will be doing it in a Tough Enough style. My guess is, it’s all a set-up to bring in one of their pre-signed hotties from OVW.

The Lita angle continued. I got a great letter saying that I am a little too hard on Lita. I may in fact be, but it doesn’t help that they give her this material. I will say this: she’s still freakin’ HOT!!! She ran into Matt, who said that he hadn’t seen her. She then said that she loved him and went into her dressing room where Kane was waiting. Lita said she thought it was over, and Kane said it was in a way that said that it wasn’t at all. Lita left with Matt and that was that. I still don’t think this is a good angle for Lita. I would much rather see her in matches so that she can get into the mode they are working in.

HHH and Batista pulled who they thought was Shawn Michaels out of a car and it turned out to be Steven Richards. When they realized their mistake, HHH sent Batista off and then kicked Richards a bit more for good measure.

La Resistance beat Hurricane and Rosie. Rosie is an agile big man. He could have been a Yokozuna type heel if there hadn’t already been a Yokozuna. Hurricane is still my fave gimmick…well, except for Eugene. The match wasn’t much of anything, and the Frenchies won.

The Highlight Reel was next with Orton as the guest. They jawed a bit and Jericho bragged about injuring Christian. Orton grew weary of this world and they brawled. Batista came out and so did Benjamin. Bisch went to the ramp and said that he was sick and/or tired of this and started a tag match between the four of them. The match was pretty good, as three of these guys can go and Batista is at least athletic enough to go along with the moves. Jericho was all in this, hitting hit big spots and doing the middle rope to the floor running plancha that I so love. Benjamin is really coming along, but the fans are slow in buying into him except when he is working against Orton. Ortista both worked a lot of arm submissions that the crowd didn’t seem to get. Nice finish as Jericho tossed Orton into Benjamin who hit a powerslam variation for the pin. Trish, who had been out doing commentary for the last half of the match, then baited Jericho to the ramp and Tomko came out and powerbombed Jericho through Lawler and JR’s table. Nice stuff.

Kane did an interview about going for the title. Kane talks well in his character, but that comes with having been Kane for nearly 7 years…though he did spend two of those years talking with a voice box.

I don’t like Victoria’s new gimmick, though I must admit she’s still hot and is an awesome dancer. They should have kept her old music at least. Her match with Molly wasn’t great, but it worked fine, built well, and ended with Victoria hitting the Widow’s Peak for the pin and then one on Gail Kim. They worked a lot of wear-down and submissions hold, which is what Molly loves to do.

Bischoff talked to the roster backstage, telling that they were all responsible for keeping HHH and Michaels apart. If they didn’t, he’d fire them all. Weird.

Regal and Eugene were talking backstage and Regal seemed to be strongly supporting Eugene. Johnny Nitro came out and said that Regal wasn’t cleared to wrestle and that Eugene would either have to face Coach and Garrison Cade alone or he had three minutes to find a new partner. After the break, Eugene came out and was looking terrified at the thought of facing these two alone, but Chris Benoit came out. They had a little match where Eugene did an old Pepper Gomez Double running the ropes spot and the big chop that Chief Jay Strongbow used to do. Benoit brutalized Coach and then let Eugene do the headbutt off the top, which hurt Eugene so bad that Benoit had to put him on top of Coach for the cover. Fun stuff.

HHH came out to the ring and called on Michaels. He answered that cal, came out and they brawled a bit and then the lockerroom came out to pull them apart, which worked sometimes and others not. Bischoff came out and announced that Michaels and HHH would be meeting in Hell in the Cell, which the crowd chanted along with.

Solid, if not spectacular show. I really wanna see what they do with the Benjamin / Orton feud.

News
Jerry Jarrett underwent a triple by-pass. No word on his condition.

The WWE has been canceling house shows of late. This is no surprise, but they have been putting more emphasis on them, so it’s kinda a bad sign.

FlashBack
There are a ton of moves that we just don’t see anymore. The Short-arm Scissors has all but disappeared, though Orton and Michaels sometimes bust it out. When was the last time you saw a stump-puller? Or a non-Eugene Airplane Spin? Or the Giant Swing? Or the Cradle Suplex? These are almost completely forgotten, but there is one move that I love more than anything and it’s been taken away from me: The Iron Claw.

The last of a proud legacy.

I can’t say for sure when the Claw came into being. I’d guess it was around in the 30s and early 40s, but it came into prominence when the goose-stepping Nazis started running around wrestling in the late 1940s. Fritz Von Erich became the best known for the Claw, as he used it most frequently and with the most gusto. Other Nazi-types, Baron Von Reschke, Herman Von Goering and so on used the Claw and made it a symbol of their movement. They weren’t the only ones, as I seem to remember some Japanese wrestlers using the Claw as well. It was certainly seen as an evil foreigner move.

There were some really funny Claw moments in the old days. Von Erich, while working with Giant Baba in Japan, had Baba in the Claw and Baba went to blade. Unfortunately, he dragged the blade across Von Erich’s fingers and cut them pretty bad. The papers actually covered for them, since this was a big deal on national prime-time, and said that Von Erich had had a nasty hangnail coming into the match. There’s also the classic where Von Erich was working San Antonio and demonstrated the claw on an announcer (it might have been a local talk show, I can’t really remember) and when he really latched it in, the announcer grabbed a hold of what God gave Fritz and squeezed like a divorce lawyer. Fritz broke the Claw and scurried away. The late Pepper Gomez (tap-tap-kiss-point) used to take the claw to the stomach and start laughing before he would flex his abs and break the hold.

The second wave of Clawsters followed in Fritz’s footsteps. Kerry, Kevin, David and Mike Von Erich all used the Claw like their dad, but they were the All-American heroes, so the people went nuts over it in a good way. They were always finding new ways of using it, as I can remember them using it on the head, on the chest of Al Perez, on the Back of Brian Adias, and on the arm of Al Madril. It’s such a simple move that it allows for a world of possibilities. After the fall of the Von Erich Family, we seldom saw the Claw again.

There have been some Claw variants in more modern times. Mankind’s Mandible Claw is certainly derived from the original. The various neck pinches are as well. There is a story that Gene Roddenberry saw one of the Evil Germans on TV from the Olympic in LA and decided to make it Spock’s finisher. I remember his wife (Majel Barrett Roddenberry) talking about it at a Creation Con I was at back in the early 1990s. Weird, I think.

That’s all for this week from me. I’ll be shooting more for Tech TV this Thursday, so no report on Friday. I’ll do a big wrap-up after the Holiday for all my loving fans!

Chris Garcia