Some More WM Thoughts

Since the number of comments on Scott’s rant are getting unwieldy, I’m giving my thoughts on the show here. For those that don’t care, please disregard. For those that do….

It’s funny, last year for Mania I spent like an hour typing up a WAAYYY too wordy comment on one of the threads, that was basically column length. Then just before I was done with it, I got up to hit the bathroom & when I came back, somehow my daughter who was 1 and a half at the time managed to delete the whole thing. Probably for the best. I had a friend in Miami who was there for this show, according to him different sections were popping for different things, and they were only uniformly excited for Rock/Cena.

Daniel Bryan vs. Sheamus was just a complete misfire, of course. Even if the logic was to go for that Honky Tonk/Warrior moment, the problem isn’t just that people like Bryan, it’s that his title reign hasn’t been all that long or all that awful. He’s had a few clean wins and some of his less clean wins have been more due to luck than his proactive cheating. I don’t think this one helped Sheamus as much as they thought it would, either. Bryan looks bad, but not bad like he got his ass handed to him, mostly just bad like he got fooled. Sheamus on the other hand just looked like he stole one. I hope this plays out to a longer feud where Bryan ends up getting the title back because I feel like they wanted now to be the time to run with Sheamus as a top babyface and it just isn’t quite where it should be.

Randy Orton vs. Kane pissed me off for how much time they got when compared to the prior match. I wasn’t expecting anything too grandly exciting, and I wasn’t disappointed, although the chokeslam off the top looked pretty cool.  I’m shocked that Orton did the job, cleanly at that. Still, this didn’t serve anybody. My friend I was watching with who’s a big mark and an even bigger Orton mark said that Orton looks like he’s ready to take a year off and get re-focused. We can only hope.

Cody Rhodes vs. Big Show was also a whole lot of nothing. I don’t, however, think it’s a big a waste for Show to have the IC title. It’s basically just been a prop for Cody for the last few months, to the point that it even blended in with his outfits. Big Show will probably at least defend it a few times against the many heels still bouncing around the midcard. So I actually think the upshot might be a good thing. Show should have done something more embarrassing to Cody to really put a point on the whole angle.

The Divas Tag was most definitely a Divas tag. I was surprised how much Maria Meowmix actually got in there & wrestled. I was also fairly certain that stain on the back of her pants was either shit or period blood. I hadn’t thought of the makeup having rubbed off.

Undertaker vs. HHH I felt like had a lot of the same effect as their match last year: really well written, well booked story to the match, but Taker just wasn’t up to doing more with the actual working. I wanted them to use the Cell more. I’ll go as far as to say it’s kind of bullshit to sell the match in part on Hell in a Cell and then barely even use it. I know they wouldn’t be doing any spots on top of the cell but I at least wanted someone to get bashed through part of the mesh. Also, they should have brought more weapons out to the ring so that it wasn’t just HHH reaching for the sledgehammer over and over. All that said, the structure of the match was brilliant, and really unique. There haven’t been a lot of matches where the guest referee is so integral to the psychology of the match. Some of the near falls still, even now, got me thinking that maybe they’d really end it. I loved the moment at the end with HHH getting carried out, and if all three guys never appeared in a wrestling ring again, it’d be a great visual for their careers to end on. That said, now that we’ve got the big round 20-0, Taker either needs to never wrestle again and let that be his legacy, or he needs to put someone over to end the Streak next year. No more adding to the Streak, though. On balance I’d say I enjoyed this one, but I don’t think it was transcendent.

Team Johnny vs. Team Teddy, I don’t really get the hate for. I thought if they had tried to do any more than they did, it would have been too much and the match would have been a mess. I loved the moment where Miz deflected the Rough Ryder onto Dolph, like he was saying “fuck that, you take it”. The finish with Eve, however, was pretty stupid and didn’t need to be done. There is literally nothing Zack can do to come out of that without looking like a bitch: he takes her back after she plays him and then when she turns on him again, what does he do? If he gets mad he looks like an asshole woman beater. He blows her off then he just looks like he’s trying to put up a front, plus it makes him look bad for queering things for Team Teddy when he supposedly doesn’t even care. I just don’t get what they think they’re doing with his character. Also, Laurinaitis (me & my friends kept calling him Leonidas in our drunken stupor by this point, and we kept imagining how awesome Raw would be if it were run by a Spartan GM) looked like he was raiding Brother Love’s closet.

CM Punk vs. Chris Jericho was my favorite match of the night. I love that they knew the only way to compete with the main event brawl style or the hardcore style of the other two mains was to go out & put on a technical clinic. I haven’t been too impressed by Jericho’s character this time around (it feels like rather than a reinvention, he’s just playing his last heel character in his Fat Elvis period) but I loved the little touches where he was yelling about Punk’s father. I also love that we’ve seen him bust out the old school Liontamer twice in a week. I love even more that we’ve seen Completely Mental Punk twice in a week. He did that once or twice before he got hurt and became a commentator, like when he took out Evan Bourne. It’s an awesome element to his character that he can normally be the wiseass, laid back Pipe Bomber but then turn it up to 11 and really decimate someone. I also also love that he’s giving the Anaconda Vise its time to shine as a backup finish.

People need to give props to Brodus Clay for having one of his first times ever on a live mic on TV be in front of the biggest crowd he’s ever performed for and not choking or flubbing anything. Once they figure out who Brodus’s character really is beyond “fat dancer”, they’ll have something to work with there. The dancing Mommas was a cute Wrestlecrap moment, in a good way.

John Cena vs. The Rock was….wait first I just gotta say: does anything say “Gangsta is dead” moreso than Machine Gun Kelly, who I’ve heard people try to say is the next Eminem, wearing skinny jeans like he’s in a Strokes cover band on the side? Someone needs to get that guy a sandwich, he’s built like an Ethiopian dumpster baby. Anyhow, this match was the kind of Main Event Style epic I was expecting. Rock knew how to use acting to cover for the moments when he couldn’t keep up, cardio wise. Cena seemed like he was aiming for a “serious” approach, by not hamming it up quite as much on his way to the ring, but in the end his spots just aren’t built for it. He shouldn’t have done the 5 Knuckle Shuffle at all, let alone used it as though it was a legitimate move to get a near fall with. I was not honestly expecting Rock to take it clean as a sheet and to just have it end like that. I’m not in the “Cena Heel Turn” camp, necessarily, but I have to wonder: if the whole idea is that he can’t turn heel because he needs to keep selling merchandise and doing Make A Wish visits, how is jobbing him clean to the movie star going to keep him over enough with the marks to do either of those things? Here’s how I saw the build & outcome of this match: Cena was dead serious about hating the Rock for all this time, Rock basically thought of Cena as a joke, and then Rock proved he was right all along. Good if you’re a Rock fan, bad if you are gonna be wrestling in WWE next month and not on a movie set somewhere. I was also a little disappointed at the lack of a Brock appearance but I’ll hold judgement until we see what happens on Raw tonight.

So there you have it. Overall it was a good Wrestlemana and I felt like it lived up to the hype. They really shocked me with a lot of the outcomes, althought not always in a good way. In the end, it will be the kind of Wrestlemania people will still be talking about in a few years, and that’s the best mark of success a Mania can have. So as always, don’t take my word for it, go to WWE.com and…oh…nevermind.