Falls Count Anywhere

06-25-04

I'm a restraining order just waiting to happen.

SmackDown!
I thought SmackDown! was better than RAW, but I also thought that it was not the type of show you put on right before a PPV.

Opening with John Cena is a good idea, as he always riles a crowd up. He actually did a backstage bit with Angle that tried to take away from his bad boy image and make him seem like a determined, fearless baby face. Haas and Jacky ‘Good God, whadda I gots to do to get her for the night?’ Gayda try and convince Cena that going to the ring to mock Angle is career suicide. He’s great in this role and I can really see that the WWE sees him as a future world champ. He’s got a very "Guerrero late last year" thing going on right now. They are in the ring and Angle comes out and does a funny little rap, dropping Tracy McGrady’s name for the Orlando crowd. Angle makes the match between Cena and Undertaker. At this point, I was not pleased that I was going to have another UT main event.

The Battle Royal to determine who would face Rey Mysterio at The Great American Bash was pretty fun. There was a lot going on and it was smartly booked. Needless to say, there are some great spots and they played variations on the ‘Can’t let go, must not hit the ground!’ theme that one or two wrestlers seem to have during the Royal Rumble. One of my favorite spots was Shannon Moore working with Akio. Akio kicked the hell out of Shannon, which knocked him to the apron. One foot touched outside, but he recovered enough to get a hurrancanrana on Akio, which eliminated them both. Beautiful touch! The whole thing ends with Chavo giving Kidman the Gori Especial to send him over the top. Good stuff.

Heyman talks with a certified, Union contractor (read into that what you will) and is making certain that the designs he has for the Glass Crypt are followed to the letter. The Dudleys come out and talk to Paul. After a bit, Mordecai comes through the scene brawling with Hardcore Holly. The beating Holly took was really solid. Mordecai may be able to come through for SD! after all.

Kenzo took on Billy Gunn, who actually got a decent reaction. Kenzo looked better than he did the last couple of weeks, but still, I found myself thinking that they should have gone after Marafuchi and KENTA from PW-NOAH. Those two rock! Kenzo got DQ’d when Kenzo’s wife/Geisha threw the powder in the Ass Man’s face. She’s been reading The Complete Guide to Japanese Manager Trickery by Mr. Fuji.

36? I'm okay with it.

Torrie and Sable continued their feud. The two of them exchanged words. Sable said that Torrie’s outfit made her look fat. Torrie retorted that Sable’s outfit made her look easy. Sable jumped Torrie and they brawled a bit. According to the Observer, Sable is only 36. That’s a bit of a stretch for my mind.

We see Eddie Guerrero and Luther Reigns come to the ring, but we go to commercial before the start.

We returned as the match was going. Luther looked decent, but it may have been because he was in with Eddie. The match flowed pretty well, and Luther busted out the Butterfly Suplex, a personal fave.

There was a very confusing segment for the finish. Kurt came into the ring, a miracle that he was able to walk again. He does the spot where he looks like he got hit with the belt by Angle, but has recovered enough to hit the Frog Splash. John Bradshaw Layfield then attacked. He beat on Eddie with the cowbell on the bullrope and starts to hang him. Eddie uses the rope to pull JBL throat-first onto the top rope. This was a very good match, but it didn’t further the Eddie/JBL match enough. They needed a long beatdown to do that.

RVD took on Rene Dupree with Booker T on commentary. That entire sentence had some weird internal rhyme thing goin’ on. The Five Year Old didn’t like this match much, though I thought it was OK, and she let it be known by insisting that I dig up her Spirograph. Anyone who knows me knows full well that I am nothing if not a Spirograph whore and thus, I missed a fair deal of this match. What I saw was OK, and Booker was fun on the stick. Dupree did the French Tickler after the match, which is The Five Year Old’s favorite thing, and she imitated it immediately after he did it.

John Cena vs. the Undertaker was a match that I dreaded that turned out to be pretty damn good. It was slow, but it built and ‘taker had his workin’ boots on. They traded some nice offense at the beginning, which is more than UT usually gives to his opponents. They did a great old school UT spot where UT went for a backdrop and Cena kicked him. UT no-sold it and got the pissed look on his face. I used to love that spot.

Undertaker auditions to be Venom.

They went to commercial and when they came back, Cena was on offense. The crowd seemed split 50-50 as to who the face was. Cena sent UT outside, but ‘taker got a reversal and started working on Cena. He did the elbow drop off the apron with Cena’s head hangin’ over. That’s a move that is far more dangerous that you’d think. Undertaker works a nice armbar variation. They work some more with Cena eventually hitting a pretty good spinebuster on UT. Cena hits the FU, but there’s no ref to count it. Eventually UT gets the Tombstone on Cena to win the match.

The main event was really good, and the rest of the show was good enough for me to say that I liked it a lot.

NEWS
Linda Miles looks to be on very shaky ground. She had a terrible match while she was down in Ohio Valley Wrestling and she and Jim Cornette had some rather strong words. She’s still under contract, but they are seriously looking at her as a failure waiting to be written off.

Interesting note from the Observer. Steve Austin has moved in with DDP in LA so he can work on getting Hollywood projects. DDP also recently split with his Diamond Doll, Kim Page, meaning that she’s on the market. As such, I have officially called dibs.

Tough Enough is supposedly coming back as a segment on RAW this fall. I’m interested, but I really think it would expose the business less if they did it as a separate show.

FlashBack!
Fire is more difficult to work with than Geena Davis. Wrestling has a history of using fire as a part of various angles. From old Memphis fireballs thrown by Eddie Gilbert or Jerry Lawler, to the Puerto Rico matches that Carlos Colon made famous. Sometimes fire can get out of hand, and one such match took place in Japan on Halloween 1993.

FMW had made the garbage match a big deal in Japan. In many ways, FMW was what led to ECW. As a solid, money-making company, many other groups came to the front to try and make money using the same style. IWA Japan and Big Japan were the two best known of these companies, though they came later. The first real imitator was W*ing; Wrestling (Star) New Generation. Yeah, I think that’s a lame name too.

W*ing prided itself on having wild matches and using all sorts of gimmicks. From barbed wire to scaffold matches, once FMW started having fire matches, W*ing decided to do the craziest fire match of all. They had Yukihiro Kanemura & Shoji Nakamaki take on Jado & Gedo, the best heel team in Japan at the time. The idea was they would use a lot of fire and do things that guys like the Sheik and Atsushi Onita would never do.

Kanemura was one of the best of the brawler types that started to pop up in the early 1990s. He used to take serious bumps and would take unbelievable punishment. He went to Smokey Mountain Wrestling and had a deal with Kevin Sullivan where he was carved up something fierce. SMW, the most violent US fed with TV at the time, actually censored the event because there was so much blood. Kanemura was the guy chosen to take the most damage.

This didn't end well.

They did a bunch of great spots, like having Jado and Gedo hit Kanemura and Nakamaki with flaming stick and take bumps into the fire. The ring was starting to get seriously flamey and the heat was supposedly incredible for the folks in the first rows, who were starting to move back. After about 10 minutes, it was set up for the finish. I believe it was Jado that took a baseball bat covered with a rag soaked in kerosene and lit it on fire. It was burning pretty good and then they stuff powerbombed Kanemura onto it.

Holy Mother of God, it looked like they killed him.

You can see that the fire is going pretty good right until he is dropped on it. Then the Kerosene is scattered and engulfs about half the ring. Kanemura is writhing in pain and screaming. Even though the tape I saw was from the middle of the Jingu baseball stadium, you could hear him even over the crowd. He rolled and everyone tried to put him out, even Jado and Gedo. They get him put out pretty quick, but the damage had been done.

Kanemura lost, by most accounts, about 75% of the skin on his back. He was forced out of wrestling for several months, which helped lead W*ing to fold. He did eventually come back, work with FMW and a few other groups, and he has been a legend ever since. He did another fire match and got injured in that as well.

The WWF fire matches of the late 1990s were safe affairs that had tremendous visuals. The US has really been off fire since Terry Funk almost set the ECW arena on fire with Cactus Jack. This should be shown to every backyard wrestler to show what can happen when you play wrestle with fire.

That’s all for this week. Next week, another look at how wrestling proves that Fire BAD!!!

Chris Garcia