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And now, here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for July 27, 2015.
Worst: A Night Of Firsts!
The Authority starts off Raw with a promo, a WWE pay-per-view will be about an hour too long, John Cena shows up insulting a lame duck champion and demanding a title match and Big Show is wrestling. A night of firsts, ladies and gentlemen. Later on, somebody will fall to the outside during a match and Michael Cole will send it to commercial. The Sonic lovers will bicker at each other about which milkshakes they’ve ordered. A NIGHT OF FIRSTS.
Like always, Cena’s motivations barely make sense. He’s became United States Champion because The Authority wasn’t giving people a fair shot at the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, so now he’s obsessed with the idea that Seth Rollins is a “joke” and “not a man,” and demands his title. The Authority’s all, “no, but you can defend YOUR title,” and Cena appears to have no problem with them whatsoever. Doesn’t he hate THEM? Is the WWE Champion being a woman or whatever more immediately pressing than the systematic oppression of employees? Is Cena’s motivation just “I WANT WHATEVER I JUST DECIDED I WANT AND I WANT IT NOW” like f*cking Veruca Salt, and the rest is just cosmetic?
The scariest thing about the awesome John Cena U.S. title run is that it can’t last forever. As problematic as him beating everybody still kinda is, he’s created this world where everyone can compete with John Cena and even sometimes have him “beaten.” A guy like Kevin Owens can pin him, once, when the title’s not on the line. There’s possibility. There’s drama, because the point of a series of open challenges is that eventually someone challenges him and wins. The ending can come at any time. We’ve grown to believe that Cena is this giving, everyman team-player, and that he’s gonna selflessly put over someone we like before he drifts back up to the main event and becomes Selfish Awful Unstoppable Superman John Cena. The reality is that maybe that was never the case, and he’s just gonna keep winning everything, and specifically beating the people we wish had futures. Isn’t that depressing?
Not saying that’s how it is or how it’s gonna be, just saying it’s looking more and more like a possibility. I’ve never been sure why almost 15 years into his career, billion-time champion John Cena still has to stand in front of every living wrestler and tell them they aren’t good enough and don’t have enough penis to earn his approval.
Best: Dean Ambrose Is Helpless And Can’t Win Anything
If that’s your character, you might as well tell a compelling story with it.
Big Show faces Dean Ambrose one-on-one in a “first time ever” match. The “first time ever” theme is weird, because it’s a bunch of stuff nobody specifically asked for — Show vs. Ambrose, Neville vs. Fandango, Lucha Dragons vs. Los Matadores — without a lot of fanfare or reason, and even less advertisement. If you’re gonna do that with Raw, why not make it a thing? Get us excited about it in a broader sense than, “we follow Triple H on Twitter and he started tweeting about something this afternoon.”
Anyway, maybe I’m crazy, but this was the best Big Show match in ages. It’s one of those matches that’d be better if we didn’t have years of history dulling it, but Big Show as a true, unstoppable beast who will just punch you in your ribs with his ham fists and maybe throw you at the ground by your neck is the best. He’s BIG SHOW, you know? That guy should never, ever lose. He should have like, two losses under his belt since his debut. Brock should’ve beaten him, of course, and maybe Undertaker at WrestleMania, without the Nathan Jones chaser.
The story of the match is that Ambrose is terrible at wrestling and severely outmatched, but he’s CRAZY, so that loosely translates to “heart.” “More guts than brains” is how Jim Ross would’ve phrased it. Ambrose keeps getting killed and abandoned outside the ring, and he keeps finding the will to pull himself up and roll back in. Show eventually counters a dive with a knockout punch that makes me go HAHA SHIIIIT out-loud in my living room, and shambly, shuffly Ambrose gets to look noble in a count-out loss. It’s great in the same way the Mark Henry/Sheamus count-out from SummerSlam was; one guy got to look like a monster, and the other got to look scrappy-as-f*ck hanging with the monster.
I could’ve done without Ambrose immediately getting his heat back after the match by dodging Show’s OMG Moment, but still, good stuff. A pleasant surprise.
Worst: Fandango Is The Only Person In The Arena Fandango’ing
Lie Bot’s got a new answer for, “what is the saddest thing?”
Best: Neville
Real quick, my favorite part of the match was the Stardust promo, specifically Neville’s reactions to it. He sold it like he was Dewey Cox listening to Elvis Presley talk about the Chinese knowing karate. I know the eventual Stardust/Neville blowoff could be really good, but I want them to drag it out until science figures out how to bring people back from the dead so Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara can guest host Raw.
Best: The 3 NXT Women’s Champions In The Same Scene
In a related note, so happy that “eyeballs, Sasha” has joined “take it home, Seth” on my Raw bingo card.
Worst: WWE Audio
Two complaints:
1. Turn up Sasha Banks’ entrance music, would you? In Raw arenas (and on TV) you can barely hear it. A lot of the NXT themes seem muted. I’m not a sound engineer or whatever so I don’t know if they just recorded them at a lower volume so they wouldn’t deafen people at Full Sail, but I do know how much I want that intro blaring, so do me a favor.
2. While you’re at it, turn DOWN the ring mics. You can hear everything the wrestlers say, especially the louder ones like Cena and Paige. My only real problem with Sasha vs. Paige on Raw is that I could hear them working it out. I know Maffew needs an easy five minutes in the middle of Botchamania, but you guys are running HD Everything. Turn down the ring mic a little and get the camera out of their faces for a second. I could see Paige’s tonsils.
Best: Paige Vs. Sasha Banks, Though
Now that that’s out of the way, hallelujah and praise saint Stephanie McMahon for graciously allowing women’s wrestling to happen on WWE’s main roster. That sounds sarcastic — it’s supposed to — but I also super mean it.
Paige vs. Sasha wasn’t the best women’s wrestling match I’ve ever seen, or even the best Sasha Banks match I’ve seen this month, but it’s a damn good place to start. The pessimist in me keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop on the Divas Revolution, but we’re a couple of weeks into it and the NXT Women’s Champion’s tapping out the first Women’s Champ clean in the middle of the ring on Raw. Am I supposed to complain about that? It feels like I’m on vacation.
Sasha’s just got it, man. If you don’t know that from the first second you see her, I don’t know what to tell you. Aside from having a personality and being good at wrestling, she’s got a TV presence. Her body language, the way she interacts with the crowd, the way she plays her character even in moments of inactivity, all of it. She talks all the time on Twitter about how she was “born to do this,” but she’s right. She was absolutely born to do this, and I’m glad she gets to do it on this level in front of this many people and wasn’t accidentally born into literally any other era of pro wrestling. In another lifetime she was a heavyset Japanese lady with nunchucks.
I’m hoping that after this initial Versus Battle run and the Whatever They Do at SummerSlam that the women can really settle in and get characters and motivations. The wrestling can be good, but what makes NXT fans have such a strong connection to people like Sasha and Paige isn’t “they had good matches,” it’s that they had matches for reasons, and they were who they were when those matches happened. It’s the difference in Bayley and Davina Rose. Davina Rose was great. She had good matches. Bayley is this fully-formed person we’ve seen a few times a month for the past couple of years … we’ve seen her grow and develop and get new gear and new music and inflatable tube men, and we cried when she lost to Charlotte, and we beg her — beg her — to be strong. I love good matches. They’re #1 on my list of things I want from wrestling shows. But honestly, what good is a good match if you don’t give a shit about the people in it?
The Divas on Raw haven’t had enough time to make that connection, yet, but I hope the Divas Revolution makes time for it. The Sasha Banks video package was nice. Maybe we’ll even get to find out what the hell Becky’s going for.
Best: RUSEV CRUSH MICROPHONE
There is nothing I like more about wrestling right now than Rusev on the microphone. Dude cracks me up every time he talks, whether he’s calling Kevin Owens a “stupid French-American or whatever you are” or suggesting they name a puppy “Dog Ziggler” because it’s ugly and neutered and pisses on itself. Also: “It’s a fish. Here. Take it. Take it. Take the fish.”
Worst: Hating-Ass Lana
As David D. has pointed out a few times, the Lana/Rusev breakup is the most realistic TV breakup of all time. “This is really like watching my friends break up and watching one person turn into a horrible human.”
Rusev managed to explain “women should be subservient to me” as a babyface point of view. I swear to God. He explains that it’s a woman’s pleasure to be obedient, and that it’s a man’s pleasure to shower her with gifts. Instead of “I should be in charge because I’m a man and she’s a woman,” it’s “men and women have historically held these roles in relationships, and there’s something good to be said for it.” I’m not saying he’s right or that I even agree, but it’s f*cking reasoned, and a wrestling character with a reasoned anything gets my stamp of approval. He’s just a conservative dude who found a woman who likes life the way he likes it. He had that with Lana (with great success, too) but she got poisoned by America and our, “I’m the only important person in the world, pay attention to me” thing. Dolph Ziggler might as well be wrestling in an Uncle Sam costume.
So he’s out here minding his business, giving his woman gifts, and Lana comes stomping out to show how much she doesn’t care by physically attacking them. Let me put it to you this way: one of these people started a physical fight over a breakup. The other gave his girlfriend a puppy with a WWE Superstar pun name. Which one deserves your cheers? You can say Rusev is the heel because he was making fun of her and Dolph, but
1. he SHOULD be making fun of her and Dolph, because seriously, have you seen them together?
2. when Rusev was trying to handle his business personally, Dolph kept rubbing their relationship in his face
3. ruthlessly making fun of people is the most important part of being a WWE Babyface, unless you suddenly don’t feel like cheering The Rock or Chris Jericho or Triple H or Shawn Michaels or John Cena
I want Rusev and Summer to be happy. I also want this angle to end with Dolph coming back with no interest in Lana, bagging on her for being hung up on her ex and dumping her. Then (if we’re fantasy booking, and we are) we pair her with Awful Boyfriend Fandango and let them dance the night away.
Best: This Stuff Following Sasha vs. Paige
A lot of people were upset that they followed a great women’s match with a goofy segment about upset girlfriends attacking each other with decapitated fish, but I liked it. The idea that women belong in wrestling means that women belong in ALL of it. The good stuff, the great characters, the exciting matches, but also the stupid, awful stuff. The same way guys can be Brock Lesnar or The Undertaker or Big Dick Johnson. The problem arises when there’s only one thing, and women are that. You don’t want them to be talentless models who can’t hit the ropes, but you also don’t want them to uniformly be these personality-free technical wizards. If there’s a true acceptance and a regular, sustained dedication to making sure the better parts of the sport are represented, the ignorant shit you do for a laugh will more often than not come across as “fun and irreverent” even if it’s terrible, and not “awful, because this is all we know.”
Best: Also, Rusev Threw A Fish
Rusev is my favorite wrestler.
Worst: Throw Bray Wyatt Down A Well
Super tired of this, even with the firefly font. Bray actually gave a good promo out in the middle of the ring this week, but I just … can’t do it anymore. It’s like eating breakfast tacos. They’re good as hell, but if you eat them every day for six months you get to the point where no matter how good they are, you don’t want to eat goddamn breakfast tacos. You’d rather have a plain piece of toast. Just a plain-ass piece of toast, Jesus Christ.
Anyway, Luke Harper’s back in the Wyatt Family, which is cool because aside from him not running teleportation interference in every Bray Wyatt match, he never left. He basically stayed the same, aside from those few weeks where he tried to get a corporate job. Haha remember when Erick Rowan tried to do a 3-D and the strength of doing an actual wrestling move was too much, and he exploded?
Best: Titus Should Already Be A Permanent Color Commentator
Listen to that man put over lucha libre. Titus O’Neil, the guy who once said “if you want to win, make it a win,” is the most entertaining and adept color man on the roster. This guy put over himself and Darren Young, the teams in the match, the style of the match, their feud with The New Day and LUCHA LIBRE for God’s sake, all while burying announcing tropes, arguing with JBL about whether or not Puerto Rican bullfighters are a thing and burying Byron Saxton for being so expendable. It was glorious.
Best: Hey, The Match Was Pretty Good, Too
I have to give credit to the Lucha Dragons and Los Matadores, as well. Nobody was paying attention, I guess, but they put on a fun little match that was the best-ever non-bull-related use of Los Matadores. It’s hard to remember sometimes, but almost everyone at the WWE level is a great wrestler, they just aren’t usually being asked to do it. They fill roles, and usually that’s “do some chinlocks and fall out of the ring once so we can go to commercial, then do finishing moves.” Or “then get distracted and rolled up.” Something like that.
Anyway, WWE could be the best thing in the world if they just put some value in making the most of the time they have, and using the few minutes they’ve been given for a tag team match to break out and really show something, rather than carefully following the rules to preserve employment. Staying employed in the WWE undercard is all about gaming the system. As long as they don’t notice you, they can’t remember you, and if they can’t remember you, they won’t fire you. How do you think JTG stayed employed for so long? Because they had plans for him? Rosa Mendes probably hangs out backstage dressed like a kuroko.
Best: New, Day Claps
1. From now on, Kofi Kingston will be known as “Mega Dad” Kofi Kingston.
2. At first you think Kofi’s Little Lord Fauntleroy clap is the best part, but nope, it’s Big E’s gentle flower girl skip. Watch it, then try to watch and enjoy anything else.
Best: Becky Lynch, Innovator
The Divas got two matches (hooray) and they were both good (HOORAY), but the highlight was definitely Becky Lynch blowing the mind of every tenured Diva by turning a surprise schoolboy rollup into the Disarmer. She’s like, “I like to sit on peoples’ shoulders and pull their arm back. Oh, you’re sliding your shoulder up under my butt and putting your arm through my legs? DON’T MIND IF I DO.”
After years of Divas being instantly Critical’d by rollups, this is a real game-changer. I like to imagine Natalya backstage staring at a monitor and watching it like she’s being sucked into a monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Worst: Everything But Cesaro
Best: Cesaro
I was looking forward to Kevin Owens vs. Randy Orton, but it was a whole lot of nothing. Sheamus being there probably didn’t help. Sheamus is one of those guys who’s so ice cold to me that if he comes within 100 feet of something interesting, I assume the worst. If he hadn’t been out there I might’ve gotten into it, but there he is, waiting for the right moment to kick a guy and cause the DQ finish we saw coming from the moment we saw him. Dude carries around frozen peas in his Money in the Bank briefcase. He should start wearing a fur coat and blasting people with a f*cking freeze ray.
The best part (by far) was Cesaro, who rushed down to the ring between sets and just started WRECKING SHOP in workout clothes. He made diving over the top rope onto a guy look organic and purposeful, and landed into a damn headlock takeover. It was so good. This Cesaro/Owens feud is going to be incredibly important for both of them, because they’re both right on the brink of becoming something else. Owens showed up as the hottest thing in the world and beat John Cena, but the last couple of months have been a lot of bailing on matches and losing. He doesn’t seem important anymore, even if he’s lingering at the top of cards. Cesaro’s that guy who should’ve been on top like three years ago but has never gotten the chance, and now here he is with an injured tag partner and a WWE in desperate need of someone who can make crowds go RAAAAAH with minimal effort. He’s the dude. They can be that bump for each other.
Assuming Sheamus doesn’t wander out and Action Figure all over them.
Best/Worst: The Assassination Of John Cena’s Nose By The Coward Seth Rollins
In case you’ve been checking wrestling results via landline phone for the past 24 hours and missed it, Seth Rollins threw a Tiger Knee at John Cena’s nose and broke The Face That Runs The Place’s Face. Cena had to tough it out and wrestle the last half of the match with a grotesque, swollen, jagged nose, and it was the best thing that could’ve happened.
John Cena is one of the best wrestlers of all time, but one thing he does not do well is believably show pain. If you give him a piledriver or whatever he’s gonna lie on the ground blinking real hard for a few seconds, maybe shake out his arm, then he’s gonna get right the hell back up and do his moves. If you German suplex him 16 times and F-5 him twice, he’s still gonna have that moment where he pops up and Attitude Adjusts you like nothing happened. That’s John Cena. He gets wrestling on a level few people do, but he whiffs the “this is supposed to really be hurting” parts.
When Cena actually gets hurt, he gets motivated to tough it out and finish, because he’s that kind of guy. What happens, though, is that he’s actually feeling pain, so the selling becomes realistic. I know that sounds stupid, but it fixes John Cena. If he has to play hurt, he’s the greatest f*cking wrestler that ever lived. If he doesn’t and he’s just going through the motions and nothing’s really wrong, he’s frustrating as hell. Remember that Cesaro match where Owens jumped him afterwards, and instead of popping up and posing he just kinda came up to a knee with a fist raised? That was awesome, right? Watch him here. Watch him fight out of Rollins’ biggest moves despite looking like he wants to die, and locking on a great REVENGE STF because he’s pissed and wants to win. That’s my motherf*cker. That’s the wrestler we always want to see, and that Cena only occasionally ever is.
He should just break one of his fingers before every match, is what I’m saying.
Supplemental Best to Seth Rollins for his gameplan of F*CK YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOUR FACE, I’M GOING TO THROW YOU, F*CK EVERYTHING and whipping out stuff like a Davey Richards/Eddie Edwards superplex/Falcon arrow combo by himself. That was incredible. Supplemental Worst to WWE for having the WWE World Heavyweight Champion get called a loser joke who can’t win on his own, then prove it by being a loser joke who can’t win on his own, all to build to a SummerSlam match between the same two guys. I love you guys, but I will probably never understand you.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night
Mtn Dewplex
“WWE 2k16! Now with one less wrestler!”
Mr. Royal Rumble, TheCensoredMSol
If Rusev has kayfabe had sex with both of these women, then kayfabe Rusev is winning no matter how this storyline turns out.
troi
That fish should still be good.
ccxxii
Hulk Hogan is starting up a new company, New World Order Research & Development – because when you’re nWoRD, you’re nWoRD 4 life!
HighEnergyForever
I hope that Luke Harper and Bray Wyatt’s commitment ceremony involves braiding their beards into a unity beard.
AddMayne
Wyatt Family rumspringa is now WWE canon.
Drewfus
At Mania, I hope Becky Lynch comes to the ring on an airship flanked by rare Chocobos.
HighEnergyForever
Kevin Owens’ music was specifically written to be sung by Beavis and Butt Head.
Poor Barrett
With Cena hogging the U.S. Title, Cesaro and Owens can feud over who’s more dedicated to their Kidd.
Taylor Swish
Nikki Bella: Great match hun. Oh, but your nose…
John Cena: You can look, but you can’t touch.
Thanks, everybody. See you next week!
