Colette Arrand

Tag: C.M. Punk

  • Wrestling Worth Watching 10/22/12 – 10/28/12

    Wrestling Worth Watching 10/22/12 – 10/28/12

    Welcome to the new, hopefully improved edition of Wrestling Worth Watching. Back when Fear of a Ghost Planet started, this post was a way of looking at everything that happened in the world of televised wrestling that was good, from Chris Jericho trolling the crowd to Brodus Clay debuting as a funk-loving tubbo from outer space to a decent match on some indie fed’s YouTube channel. It was an ambitious project, and one that ultimately failed. In 2012, there is just too much wrestling out there to keep track of it all as it happens. So I’ll be forward and honest from the start of this new project: I don’t watch Impact Wrestling, as they don’t make an honest effort to make their shows available beyond airdate, and Ring of Honor doesn’t air where I live, though I’ll try to catch it whenever possible. These posts may seem like they’re dominated by the WWE, but that’s the reality of nearly every wrestling fan’s situation: the promotion who airs the most free wrestling is the one that gets watched the most. If you’d like to chime in with matches from elsewhere that should be noted, hit me up in the comments section.

    Monday Night Raw (8/22/12)

    Team Rhodes Scholars vs. Rey Mysterio & Sin Cara: For a month now, the WWE has done everything in its power to revitalize its tag team division, waking the dead by calling a time-tested audible in the long-running Daniel Bryan/Kane feud by pairing the two up and giving them the Tag Team Titles, running an angle where a rival team formed as a result of the champions’ dysfunction, then having a month-long tournament featuring several new teams. The only team that’s broken up as a result of not winning the tournament was the one pairing Kofi Kingston and R-Truth, the previous champions. Now there’s a power tag team (Primetime Players), a team of brothers (The Usos), a high-flying tag team (Justin Gabriel and Tyson Kidd) and these two teams, the most popular/hated and established of the bunch. Theirs was the best tag team match of the week, setting up the long-anticipated slight-letdown of a match between the Rhodes Scholars (I think putting “Team” in front of everything has been the worst part of the division’s rebuild. Team is implied!) and Team Hell No (the exception to the rule, as “team” is meant pseudo-ironically, though “Team Friendship” will forever be the better name). The only reason this wasn’t the best match on Raw is because Dolph Ziggler and Daniel Bryan would later take the floor for 15 minutes.

    Daniel Bryan vs. Dolph Ziggler: For a long time, the only person the Money in the Bank briefcase turned into a star was Edge, and really all his surprising title victory over John Cena did was solidify his place as a top-tier talent. The second person to benefit from the odd bump the briefcase provides was C.M. Punk, though it took two tries—and an incredibly good feud against Jeff Hardy—to get it right. Everybody else either wasn’t ready, or wasn’t given something beyond that moment of glory, but in Edge and Punk, the briefcase has found purpose: either a crafty, dickish heel cashes it in and proves himself, or a mawkish good guy cashes it in and quickly turns evil. Dolph Ziggler and Daniel Bryan are the next generation of men who’ve somehow taken that gaudy briefcase and turned it into a platform from which better careers are launched, Ziggler by taking Edge’s role, and Bryan by taking to Punk’s. While both remain a title reign away from true greatness, their match Monday on Raw was a gift from the ghost of WWE’s future, a thrilling contest teasing at the possibilities a full-blown rivalry between the two contain. The point of this was to reestablish the dysfunction between Bryan and his tag team partner Kane, and while that mission was accomplished and the work those two have done together has been very good, matches like this mean I can’t wait much longer to see Bryan on his own again, a mean little man with a nasty beard and a worse submission hold.

    C.M. Punk vs. Sheamus: Though they didn’t mention it, there was a nice synergy to this contest, the 30 or so men around the ring not only serving as flesh-and-blood metaphor for the inescapability of the Hell In a Cell structure, but as closure to the mini-issue between Punk and Sheamus that started at the Raw in Chicago, when Punk bolted on a slated title vs. title match to eat at The Wiener’s Circle and hang with Paul Heyman. I haven’t seen every Lumberjack Match ever, but I feel pretty confident in claiming this as one of the best. The match is a throwback to a time when a sheer mass of humanity was enough to pique a crowd’s interest, and lately has been relegated to the typical blow-off match between Divas, the lumberjill match, if you will. Anymore, they’re confusing affairs, the lumberjacks rarely doing their job—containing the action in the ring—and instead clubbering on any poor bastard who ends up on the floor. So it was a sigh of relief when C.M. Punk landed on the floor, in a sea of humanity, and was merely tossed back into the ring. And it was surprisingly O.K. when Sheamus was thrown out there and got beat up, because he landed amongst a crowd of heels and wound up brawling back. Barroom brawls are an environment Sheamus thrives in, and lumberjack matches are a situation where crafty bad guys have to be their most cunning. C.M. Punk was just that, Sheamus was in his element, and the result was the most satisfying Raw main event in some time. The stuff with Ryback I covered last week, but having 30 men around the ring, overkill in any other match, was worthwhile just to see them split when the dude’s music hit.

    WWE Main Event (8/24/12)

    Dolph Ziggler vs. Ryback: There’s really no better opponent for Ryback than Dolph Ziggler, a wrestler who is, in every aspect, the second coming of “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig. If you’ve ever seen Hennig pinball around the ring for a larger, more muscular opponent, then you know what I’m talking about. Ryback’s an act only the most cynical wrestling fan doesn’t like, a monster in the Goldberg fashion who steamrolls through opponents with a variety of ridiculous power moves and stiff-looking strikes. Ziggler flopped around the ring for Ryback’s routine like a mad-man, putting over the legitimate danger presented by the monster while also showing that there’d be no escape for C.M. Punk on Sunday, even without the presence of a gigantic steal cage. The match did its job very well without tanking Ziggler. Credit for that goes to the length of the match—thus far the longest match of Ryback’s run—and to The Miz’s commentary, which pointed out that, against Ryback, everybody is off their game.

    WWE Hell In A Cell (8/28/12)

    The Miz vs. Kofi Kingston: The third match between these two in as many weeks, and, in many ways, the best of the bunch. Hard to believe that their issue began when Larry King’s wife threw a cup of water in The Miz’s face, but I’ve come away from their series as a fan of both men, when before I was ambivalent towards both of them. The opening two minutes or so were great, Miz and Kingston both fighting and failing to apply their finishing maneuvers, the fact that spots from previous matches evolved and became something else was a very nice touch, and the finishing struggle between the two, with Miz keeping the full nelson he uses in the Skull-Crushing Finale on as the two rolled to the ring and got back up to their feet, was tremendously exciting. Lately, Kofi’s Trouble in Paradise kick has been a devastating-looking, come-from-nowhere move akin to Shawn Michael’s Sweet Chin Music. That’s worked a lot better than the old set-up, where Kofi stands in the corner and tries to pump the crowd for it, much like Michaels did for his kick. And while you wouldn’t know it from the anemic crowd, the last three or four minutes of the match, from when Miz started targeting Kofi’s leg with a weird-looking, over-the-shoulder knee-breaker to the finish, was tremendously compelling stuff. Knee braces and leg casts are things the heel usually removes on an injured opponent, but they took things a step further here, with Miz injuring Kofi’s leg mid-match and stripping his boot and knee pad to further exploit the injury. I loved everything about it, even The Miz’s awkward execution of the half-crab.

    The Big Show vs. Sheamus: For me, this was the match of the week, but I’m a big fan of Hoss vs. Hoss battles, something they featured plenty during the championship run of Mark Henry, and not enough during Sheamus’s time with the belt. Built up as a showdown between two knockout blows—The Big Show’s Knockout Punch and Sheamus’s Brogue Kick—the story of this contest wound up being much more complex, with Sheamus withstanding a number of Big Show’s past and present finishing moves, including the giant punch, and Big Show kicking out of the Brogue Kick, becoming the first man to do so in the process. The crowd—dead most of the evening—came alive when Sheamus picked up The Big Show and dropped him with a perfect-looking White Noise, and for good reason: however good Sheamus’s matches as champion have been (and however much he’s been built as the best champ in 10 years), they’ve lacked effective spectacle. The only other guy on the roster who has picked a guy like Show up on his shoulders is John Cena, but you expect that from him. This was built as blow vs. blow, a straight brawl, but that maneuver, more than Sheamus’ triumph over Daniel Bryan at WrestleMania, will be the defining moment of his championship reign. The finish, which saw Show sidestep a second Brogue Kick while throwing a K.O. Punch the champion’s way, was the best moment of the week, two semi-trucks playing chicken in the rain, only one driving away without jackknifing. This one wasn’t pretty, but boy was it effective.

    C.M. Punk vs. Ryback: The most controversial match of the year, as even anti-Ryback partisans realized the risk of this match: Ryback loses the “wrong way,” and the WWE is out one potential game-changing superstar. Popular wrestling journalist (a three-word oxymoron, if ever there was one) Dave Meltzer says that he read through dozens of bad-to-middling ideas for the finish of this match, and that all of them were better than the one chosen here. Whatever. In 1998, Ryback’s ancestor Bill Goldberg defeated Hulk Hogan in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, ushering in what many felt was a new era in WCW. He was undefeated. He was slightly green. But he was at the apex of his popularity and ready for the championship. At Starrcade that year, he was defeated by Kevin Nash, who was aided by long-time running buddy Scott Hall, who used a taser to put “Da Man” (Bobby Heenan’s spelling, not mine) down for the count. It was an awful finish, an anti-climax that didn’t make a whole lot of sense (Hall and Nash were feuding, Goldberg was on the verge of reaching Hogan-esque levels of global fame), and Goldberg—and WCW—never quite recovered. The finish to the Hell in a Cell match between Punk and Ryback is similar in a way—Ryback was screwed over—but the circumstances are different. It doesn’t matter if the “GOLDBERG” chants that follow Ryback are now affectionate, if the same people who chant that stop to join the rest of the crowd in Ryback’s WWE-mandated “FEED ME MORE” chant, Ryback was not ready for the WWE Championship. To my recollection—hardly a useful tool, but one that probably feeds the WWE machine better than a photographic memory of every Ryback match—the man hadn’t bumped for move one of any opponent he faced before this match, from the jobbers named after presidents to the duet of former champions he faced leading into his main event this week. Here’s what Punk needed in order to win: the most biased official in wrestling history. Brad Maddox, last seen close to a month ago missing C.M. Punk’s foot on the ropes, stopped Ryback while he was marching around the ring with Punk on his shoulders. He low-blowed the man, slipped behind him, and quickly counted to three as soon as Punk pushed him over the ref and made the cover. I don’t want to say that it was brilliant, but it clearly shows that someone in the back learned from the essential mistake of the Nash/Goldberg issue, which was never successfully resolved. This was a FIRST TIME ENCOUNTER. That it happened in one of WWE’s most legendary matches was something of a head-scratcher, a calendar-based necessity, but really, it’s the only place it should have happened. Ryback’s destructive ways aided and got in the way of his goal. The cage provided a place where he could look momentarily weak, but also like the freaking monster he is. It allowed Paul Heyman to be at his panicked best. It meant that Punk and the referee would be unable to escape swiftly into the night. It meant Ryback would get his revenge. And he did so memorably, tossing Maddox into the cage as if he were Bam Bam Bigelow and the poor referee his Spike Dudley before chasing Punk up the cage and delivering Shellshocked 20-feet in the air. The show ended with Ryback nodding his head to his own music, foot planted firmly on Punk’s chest. Those who don’t think Ryback got his due last night, that his star was aborted rather than born, aren’t paying attention. The focus of this match, after all, was Punk establishing his legacy, finally gaining the respect of the WWE Universe. Punk is an asshole. A dick of the highest order. His legacy is that of a great, long-tenured heel champion. He stands in defiance of what the fans want to see. He makes those fans want to see his comeuppance even more. He finds and exploits the loophole and expects you to respect him for it. I’m going to come just short of calling this match brilliant, but it’s another example of why Punk’s run as WWE Champion, of late, has been one of the most effective such runs in memory. You wanted Ryback to win? You’re upset with the finish? That’s exactly how WWE wants you to feel. Tune in tonight on Raw to see that snide jerk get what’s coming to him.

     

  • Gregory Iron: Handicapped Anti-Hero

    Gregory Iron: Handicapped Anti-Hero

    Photo by Wayne Palmer.

    In the year since C.M. Punk—on temporary hiatus from WWE but serving both as the company’s champion and its most talked about figure since the height of the late-90s Attitude Era—christened him as being “fucking awesome,” Gregory Iron has been called an inspiration so many times the words have lost their meaning. Iron, a six-year veteran of professional wrestling, does the same things many men and woman scraping out an existence in independent wrestling do. He trains. He takes brutal road trips for bookings that don’t pay much. He has learned to shoulder nights of physical abuse before a paying crowd. Iron does these things exceptionally well, insisting that he is no different from any other professional wrestler, but he does them with one crucial difference: he suffers from cerebral palsy. His right arm is withered, his range of motion is nowhere near that of your typical wrestler, and he’s had to adapt many of wrestling’s most basic maneuvers to work through his limitations. In short, that Gregory Iron excels at something most able-bodied human beings fail at is incredible.

    But, in an industry that’s been around as long as wrestling, that a skilled competitor would come along with a severe disability isn’t exactly new. In fact, Iron has wrestled against and partnered with perhaps the most famous such individual in wrestling, Zach Gowen, who lost one of his legs at a young age to cancer and went on to an improbable run on WWE television where, every week, he was involved with titans like Hulk Hogan, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Vince McMahon, and Brock Lesnar. Iron has dreams of reaching World Wrestling Entertainment and has tried out for them in the past, always with the same response: “Maybe next time.”

    So Iron continues to grind, sacrificing his weekends and logging endless hours on the road to work for outfits like CHIKARA, Absolute Intense Wrestling, PRIME Wrestling, and Chicago’s AAW. Iron’s moment with C.M. Punk, as described by Colt Cabana on his popular Art of Wrestling podcast, was a mitzvah, a celebration of somebody who’d officially made it. Punk’s speech, the parade he and Cabana gave Iron around the ring, the standing ovation from the crowd, all of it was a gift, a springboard from which Iron could launch a bigger, better career. In short order, the video of Punk, Cabana, and Iron went viral on YouTube. Features on him appeared on ESPN and Sports Illustrated‘s websites. A story about him from a Cleveland television station won an Emmy. He was a guest on FOX News Network’s Fox and Friends.

    For an independent wrestler, this level of coverage was unprecedented. Buoyed by his new-found semi-fame, Iron launched a social media campaign where he lobbied for inclusion in the WWE’s annual Royal Rumble event, a battle royal that typically features anywhere from 30-40 wrestlers, including past favorites who aren’t on the regular WWE roster. Needless to say, Iron didn’t compete in the Royal Rumble, though there’s certainly a possibility that he will. To Iron, signing a WWE developmental contract would be the fulfillment of a life-long dream, something he’s wanted since his grandmother introduced him to the exploits of Hulk Hogan, but in 2011, with the eyes of the wrestling world upon him, it wasn’t meant to be. This, however, is not the story of a dream deferred. It’s the story of a curious side-effect of Iron’s quest, that fans in his hometown of Cleveland would look at Greg and his accomplishments and do the unthinkable: boo him out of the building.

    Wrestling is not without its share of unusual villains. Greg’s hero, Hulk Hogan, lectured his fans on the importance of training, praying, and eating vitamins for a decade before turning his back on a legion of Hulkamaniacs, and many diminutive ex-WWE superstars—Gowen among them—continue to ply their trade in bingo halls and National Guard armories as brash, cocky egomaniacs, indignant that they’ve been “reduced” to wrestling in a high school gymnasium. Iron is unique among wrestling’s unusual heels in that he was forced into his villainy by a fan-base that rejected him and sided with his tormentor, Iron’s teacher-turned-bully, Josh Prohibition.

    To understand fan indifference to Gregory Iron is to understand the atmosphere of your typical Absolute Intense Wrestling event. Here is a crowd that cheers for the high-flying, hard-working exploits of Johnny Gargano, who laugh along with the practiced comedic flow of a Colt Cabana contest, who lust for the blood of hardcore legends like Madman Pondo, but, when given a feel-good, hometown story like Iron’s, are unreceptive to the point that it bears asking if wrestling’s Crippled Crusader personally wronged them. In wrestling terms, Cleveland ranks as a “smart” crowd, but to listen to them debate wheather or not the participants in a no-holds-barred death match employed the use of enough fluorescent light tubes is to wonder if the Cleveland audience is too smart for its own good. Their attitude certainly contributed to the weird atmosphere during Iron’s “Dream Tag Team” match at last year’s Nightmare Before X-Mas 5, where Iron and hand-picked partner Cabana—mere weeks removed from Iron’s christening in Berwin, IL—took on Prohibition and his dream partner, “M-Dogg 20” Matt Cross. The storytelling of that match was exceptionally clear. Prohibition, already a bully, sought to ruin Greg’s good story by calling on his friend Cross, reforming a tag team from pornographer Rob Black’s doomed XPW project. To make matters worse, Cross had just recently attempted to break into WWE by participating in its Tough Enough reality show, getting eliminated early despite a decade of experience because he didn’t show enough flash. No matter. Cross and Prohibition—otherwise known as Youthinazia—are Cleveland-area legends and were cheered as such. Colt Cabana, ever the crowd favorite, was showered with applause. Gregory Iron, in a theme that remained constant for many of his AIW appearances in late 2011 and early 2012, was heckled mercilessly by the crowd. He and Cabana lost the match. What was slated as a Dream Tag Team Match was, for Iron, the beginning of a long, puzzling nightmare.

    Though many experts and insiders point to wrestling as a cyclical business—something that’ll be around regardless of popular favor or the economy—wrestlers live by a singular creed: adapt or die. This applies to all facets of the wrestling business. If an injury robs a high-flying luchador of his speed and agility, he must adapt. If a big company goes out of business, the community must adapt. If the crowd in a certain building doesn’t like you, you either adapt or are swiftly run out of town. Parallel to the case of Gregory Iron is that of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who made his World Wrestling Federation debut in 1996 under the name “Rocky Maivia,” a tribute/cash in on the legacies of his father, “Soul Man” Rocky Johnson, and grandfather, “High Chief” Peter Maivia. Everything about Rocky Maivia screamed “babyface,” from his clean-cut hair to his beaming smile to the tassels adorning his gear. The WWF was on the verge of seismic change, much of which happened on the shoulders of Dwayne Johnson, but in 1995 they were still a few steps behind their audience, who did not take well to the future smiling star of Hollywood blockbusters, mercilessly chanting “Die, Rocky, die!” in arenas across the country. Maivia eventually turned on the crowd, spoke of himself in third person, adopted the nickname “The Rock,” and spurred the Attitude Era, becoming arguably the most popular wrestler of all-time. On May 11th this year, taking the microphone after losing to a wrestler named Ophidian in the first round of the J.T. Lightning Invitational Tournament, Greg was looking to do something much smaller, but no less noble, than The Rock: he was looking to turn fan attitude against him into a positive. He was looking to stick in Absolute Intense Wrestling.

     

    Iron’s tirade that evening was a classic bad guy promo, its vitriol towards the audience couched in truth, much like the classic heel lectures of Cactus Jack in ECW, Steve Austin in 2001, and the C.M. Punk currently on television every week. As Cactus Jack, Mick Foley once intoned that “wrestling will never be respected,” the obvious offshoot of that being that professional wrestlers, too, would never see the respect they deserved. Foley’s revelation came to him in a hospital room in Germany, where a nurse threw a piece of his ear into a garbage can while laughing about wrestling’s public image as a theatre of the fake and bizarre, never mind the lump of disembodied flesh in her hand. Iron’s was much more public—a group of like-minded people who previously cheered him screaming “Fuck you, Greg!” and worse during his every appearance—but the common thread linking Iron to Foley, Austin, and Punk—respect—is no less powerful because an odd subsection of wrestling fans congregating in one city have chosen unilaterally to hate his guts. Iron’s a man who got the crap kicked out of him by J.T. Lightning, Prohibition, and others far beyond the point when most members in the audience would have quit. He’s suffered debilitating injuries, nearly died for the sport that he loved and participated in, often for no money. In short, Iron’s a man whose dues, cerebral palsy or not, were paid long ago; who are you to tell him otherwise?

    Before that evening, had you voiced your doubts about the ability of a crippled wrestler to turn full-blown megalomaniac, you wouldn’t be alone. In wrestling, everything’s a gimmick: a cocked eyebrow, a blown knee, a punishing disease. On The Art of Wrestling, Iron acknowledges that cerebral palsy, like the t-shirts he sells at shows, is something that he’s used to get noticed. Considering Punk, considering his bookings in Chicago, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, it’s worked. Sure, Iron has talent, but cerebral palsy’s a kicker, something most people haven’t seen in wrestling before. When Iron says that he doesn’t want his affliction to be a crutch, he means it. One only needs to witness his springboard somersault splash—a move he uses utilizing his shins, rather than his feet, as is customary—or the way he’s been suplexed, kicked, and piledriven by much larger men to realize that Iron is very much a wrestler’s wrestler. There are no easy paydays for him. But his disability has been the fous of Iron’s run in CHIKARA, the point of his feud against Zach Gowen in PRIME, his good humor and determination in the face of such an ailment engendering sympathy where an otherwise healthy wrestler of his size and skill is perhaps looked over by a shrewd promoter or tired crowd. It’s something Iron realizes has a limited shelf-life—both in the independents and should the WWE come calling—something he’d eventually need to shed or use differently to truly succeed.

    In Absolute Intense Wrestling, Iron is using his cerebral palsy as a tool to further provoke an already incensed crowd. He’s also using the notoriety gained from Punk and Cabana to stoke the AIW audience’s hatred of him. Referring to the pair as “Phil and Scott,” Iron makes a show of the things he’s accomplished without the use of his right arm. He’s smashed the glasses of a contest winner, assaulted a fan, and has turned to the legal advice of fellow wrestler, Veda Scott. Scott’s another wrestler who has achieved tremendous success despite the obstacles placed before her.  She completed her training at the prestigious Ring of Honor wrestling academy and began touring the United States while pursuing a law degree, taking on an unfathomably busy schedule despite the rather limited set of opportunities given to women wrestlers at both the national and independent level. (Recently,  a number of  articles have questioned if there are too many promotions featuring mostly or exclusively women’s wrestling, something that’s never been asked its male counterpart.) On Ring of Honor television, she’s merely the promotion’s interviewer. In most promotions, she’s a snide hipster chick whose disdain for the crowd is palpable. In Absolute Intense Wrestling, she is Gregory Iron’s legal adviser, a concerned citizen with a Juris doctorate who believes that Iron is discriminated against by the company and its fans due to his disability. Not only has Scott won her client regular time on the microphone, but headed into AIW’s last show, she arranged stipulations unprecedented in the history of professional wrestling: by rule, opponents seeking to beat Gregory Iron by pinfall must keep his shoulders to the mat for a four count, a world of difference from the traditional three.

    The result of this new rule couldn’t have played out any better for Iron, who took to the microphone at Point Break to challenge Josh Prohibition to one last match to settle their long-standing issue. Despite being jumped, despite the distraction of Veda Scott, Prohibition took control of the contest, obliterating Iron with his Drunken Driver double-underhook piledriver. With Prohibition covering the former Handicapped Hero, the referee counted to three and called for the bell, only to be told by Scott that he had to adhere to the Gregory Iron Rule and count to four. Prohibition, arguing with Scott over the referee’s shoulder, was in perfect position for Iron to pick him off and roll him up for the traditional three count, the AIW fans justifiably upset.

    As unlikely as it sounds, he and Scott are the hottest act in the company. Currently without a match at Absolute Intense Wrestling’s Hell on Earth 8, their appearance, along with the promise of a statement by the two, has been advertised, the speculation being that Scott will argue for a title match on behalf of her client. Given their success, the way they’ve steamrolled through AIW’s management figures thus far, it’s hard to see a scenario where Iron or Scott lose their argument, where a crowd that has come to hate Iron goes home happy. Backstage at Point Break, Gregory Iron explains his recent actions to the camera by sarcastically reciting the lyrics to “Real American,” the song that played Hulk Hogan to the ring countless thousands of times. “When it comes crashing down and it hurts to hide,” Iron sneers, “I’ve got to be a man, it don’t help to hide.” The message is clear: Gregory Iron will go on being an inspiration, whether you like it or not.