Falls Count Anywhere

07-01-05

Gnip. Gnop. Gnort.

SmackDown!
An interesting and strange show opened with our pal Muhammad Hassan coming to the ring and cutting a promo. It wasn’t a bad one, but there wasn’t enough Daivari. He started talking about how the era of the Deadman is over and Hassan is the top of the show. This brought out The Undertaker and he and Hassan faced off for a bit after Muhammad back-peddled on his claims a bit.

Using the distraction, Daivari hit UT with a chair, but it did nothing. Hassan hightailed it out of there, leaving Daivari to get chokeslammed. This was a good segment, made better by the white suit that Daivari wore.

Paul London took on Chavo Guerrero. The match itself was pretty standard, though every time these two lock up, it’s at least fairly good. They worked for a while and then the MexiCools came out riding Juan Deere riding mowers. They attacked and did a little mic work. They were way over as faces with the Anaheim crowd. Juvy returned to being The Juice. I still wish they had brought back the LwO. It seems like they’re going for a sort of Latino Degeneration-X, which could be cool.

Melina did a great little backstage segment where she talked about who all was coming to watch her first match. She mentioned Paris, Perris, Jessica and Nick (though I thought they were on the outs), Katie and Tom and no Ashton because he can’t stand Orange County. It was a funny bit. She left the locker room and the photographers were already on her. By the way, Melina is SMOKING STUPID MASSIVE HOT!

And Garcia passes out right about here.

Melina and Michelle McCool’s (who should be the MexiCools manageress) match which wasn’t classically good, but it was fun. I buy Michelle as a legit wrestler, and she is kinda cute. Melina channeled Luna Vachon with her vicious streak, including doing the camel clutch under the rope. Michelle gave Melina and awesome dropkick while she on her knees. Melina got the pin with her feet on the ropes. After the match, M watched as NM gave Michelle the Snapshot.

In a weird segment that I think will lead us to another Dynasty moment, Eddie did a promo and showed a video of him going to the playground where Rey-rey’s son was playing. Young Dominic must not keep up with the storylines because he was very friendly to Eddie. Eddie said that he was going to tell young Mysterio a bedtime story and a secret. This was a little creepy, but the following segment in the ring, where Rey came out and begged Eddie not to tell his secret, made me think that it was less about kiddie touching and more about Eddie being Rey’s kid’s papi.

I really want to get the Road Warriors DVD. I know they weren’t the best wrestlers ever, but even their serious squashes were entertaining. Plus, it has some of their AWA footage and I just don’t have enough AWA in my collection.

The main event was a long match that started with Theodore R. Long introducing Christian and inserting him in the match. He got a pretty good reaction coming out. Lots of good stuff here, especially with Benoit doing a wonderful reversal of a suplex into a Northern Lights. It took a year-long trip to RAW to make Benoit a star, but he’s one of the best at working Main Event Style now. They started to ramp up the UT-Hassan feud by having Hassan suckerpunch Taker and then taker took it outside and beat on Hassan. He was officially disqualified for using a chair, and when Hassan ran off to save himself, he was counted out. Nice touch.

The best segment was in the middle with Benoit and Booker T. The rules said that any physical contact between a guy in the ring and someone who is on the apron was considered a tag, so as Benoit and Booker were tearing the ring up with great work, JBL kept tagging himself in. Benoit got the crossface on Booker, but JBL tagged himself in. Benoit then returned the favour and tagged himself back in. Benoit managed a Superplex, but JBL tapped Booker, ran in and gave Benoit a DDT for a fast pin. This was a great segment.

Following that, the focus was on Christian and Booker working together, which I liked. Christian and JBL squared off and the crowd was all about Christian. Booker caught JBL with a great powerslam and managed to get the Bookend, though JBL kicked out. JBL gets blind-tagged as Booker set him up for the Scissors Kick, so Christian managed to get the pin. Christian gloated and JBL hit him with the Clothesline from Hell to get the win.

JBL recreates his Tony-nominated role as Oliver!

Teddy Long came out and said that he had good news and bad news. He brought out Batista, who was apparently both the good and the bad news rolled up in one. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this and I’m betting that it’s JBL vs. Batista at The Great American Bash.

NEWS
There were a bunch of “trades” at the wire between the two brands. New to Raw are Mark Jindrak, Rene Dupree, Danny Basham, Kenzo & Hiroko Suzuki and Chavo Guerrero. It’s funny, because I can’t remember the last time I saw Kenzo on SD!. Making the trip in the other direction are William Regal, Candice Michelle, Sylvain Grenier, Steven Richards and Simon Dean. I’ll be very interested to see what they do with my Man Regal.

FlashBack!
Look, I know that you all love DX. You all do, admit it. You are just waiting for the day that Chyna and Road Dogg and Mr. Ass return with Sean Waltman to reform the greatest WWE team of the last decade that doesn’t have at least one dead guy. Oddly, one series of exploits is frequently blown way out of proportion by people in WWE’s power-structure as being the turning point in the whole WCW/WWF war of the 1990s.

April, 1998. The WWF has been in the dumps, losing to WCW quite frequently, though they’ve started to show some signs of life following the WrestleMania turn of Stone Cold. They might have broken the streak of Nitro winning the ratings battle the week before, but I know that WCW was drawing big numbers and most thought that it was still in control. In fact, Goldberg was just starting to take off at this point and we weren’t too far away from the big match with Hogan. RAW was in Memphis (I think) and Nitro was live from the Norfolk Scope. Someone, and from what I’ve always heard it was Vince Russo, suggested that DX should go to war with WCW. They started by having DX, which was HHH, Chyna, The New Age Outlaws and X-Pac, go to the parking lot of the Scope and shoot a segment saying that they were at war. It was a nice segment, well produced and funny.

Much better than looking at the REST of DX...

The following week they showed up to walk around CNN Plaza, where WCW’s headquarters were. They followed that up with a skywriter writing "WCW Sucks" and "DX Says Suck It" over the arena where Nitro is being held. Taking shots at Nitro was a new thing, as it actually acknowledged that there was competition in the world. These were somewhat entertaining, but it is interesting to note that the highest rated episodes of RAW up to that point were April 28th and May 18th, both dates when Austin was doing big stuff and when none of the DX videos showed.

This series was one of the reasons that Vince started to shower Hunter with praise. Though they were supposedly Vince Russo’s idea, Hunter was very vocal that they should be taking potshots at WCW but do it in a way that wasn’t like Bischoff giving away the endings of RAW matches that had been previously taped.

Vince has said publicly that he thought that this was what started to turn the tide and that it showed that the WWF wasn’t going to lie-down and die. I’ve heard more than one person say that it was the DX vignettes that started to turn things around. Apparently, they forgot that Stone Cold was the hottest gimmick in the world at the time and that the feud with Vince McMahon was so huge no one could have overlooked it.

But still, they were good segments.

That’s all for this week. More later!

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Chris Garcia