Previously on the vintage Best and Worst of WWE NXT: Bray Wyatt debuted, man! And you don’t understand what he IS, man! He is FEAR, man! Fear of the UNKNOWN. Because you don’t know what fear IS, man! Fear … FEAR, is making the ring look like a SPOOKY SKELETON, man! But not yet, man. Not yet. You see, we got YEARS before that happens, man. YEARS before that happens. So while they look upon us in FEAR, we … watch Prime Time Players matches? I don’t know how this works. RUN. [BLEARP]
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And now, the vintage Best and Worst of WWE NXT for July 18, 2012.
Worst Forever: Tamina Snuka’s Superfly Splash
Up first this week is NXT season 3 winner Kaitlyn against Tamina Snuka, daughter of late WWE Hall of Famer and stressful modern conversation Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka.
No mention of Tamina is complete without mentioning her “homage” to her dad, the Superfly Splash. She has to do it because she’s his daughter, I guess, but she’s never figured out how to do it, and it’s the worst looking regularly-performed move in WWE. It’s insane that she can’t figure out the logistics of, “jump on them.” Jimmy’s splash was always picture-perfect. Watch that, and then compare it to Tamina’s. That shit makes CM Punk’s elbow actually look like Macho Man’s. She’s never figured out you’re supposed to jump OUTWARD and land on them with your torso, so she always jumps feet first. Sometimes she accidentally double-stomps people or knees them in the guts. Sometimes she gets the trajectory right but lands on her feet and just kinda collapses onto them. That’s what she does here. To this day it shocks me that she’s been in the company since 2010 and nobody’s been like, “yeah, nix the splash, it’s fine, just do a running punch.”
Anyway, the opener against Kaitlyn is very much a “this is developmental” match. Both wrestlers are half-heartedly playing heel — Tamina acts dirty when they lock up, and then Kaitlyn spends the early portion of the match hiding behind the ref — and Kaitlyn appears to be trying to out every new move she learned in training that week. And the moves aren’t bad, but she’s clearly taking too long to set them up, and Tamina’s not doing a great job covering for it. It is what it is.
Certainly “an okay match with some bad looking moves” is the worst crime that’ll be committed against the women this week, right?
Oh.
WORST: Riley Does Not Rule
In one of the worst imaginable segments, Alex Riley asks Aksana where catering is — that’s where he’s a VIKING — and gets accused of hitting on her by (Antonio) Cesaro. Riley evokes RILEY’S RULES and says you should “never trust a girl,” like he’s a member of the fucking Little Rascals. Other Riley Rules no doubt include “you can never wear too much AXE body spray” and “why buy the cow when you can get the sex for free.”
Riley takes offense to being accused of Interest In A Woman — the worst thing you can do in WWE other than having bad breath — and challenges Cesaro to a fight. Cesaro says they should fight next week, which Riley notes is “very European.” Before he leaves, he makes fun of Cesaro’s “murse” — his “man purse,” get it — because Cesaro is whipped AND gay AND a girl AND not from here. If he’d told Cesaro he reminded him of another famous white person he’d heard of, we’d have gotten Alex Riley Bingo.
After the segment, Riley presumably goes to catering and gets pissed that the gay homo who ordered the food forgot the donkey sauce.
Worst: 2012 Called, It Wants Its Everything Back
Match number two is future NXT “color” “commentator” Percy Watson versus future number one contender to the WWE Championship (wait, WHAT) Jinder Mahal. As a reminder, this is when Jinder had a regular human body and didn’t look like his white blood cells had sprayed each other with silly string. If you aren’t familiar with Watson’s pre-Crisis work, he was doing a Norbit gimmick, or possibly a Bowfinger gimmick or both, combined with the most dropkicks and chinlocks-ass 2012 WWE wrestling you could shake a rolling cutter at.
Percy won’t stop wandering around aimlessly and showboating between splashes — all he does for the last like, two minutes of the match — and ends up whiffing one. That lets Jinder connect with a running knee and the camel clutch for the victory. That’s the kind of cunning know-how that made him a 2-time Prairie Wrestling Alliance Heavyweight Champion! And what currently makes him a sentient bag of snakes.
Best: AAAAWWWWWWWWWWWW FULL SAIL UNIVERSITY! DON’T YOU DAAAARE, BE SOWAHHHH!
Long before he was a shouting, ice-cream loving, Final Fantasy-shilling and possibly on-drugs prancing unicorn man, Big E (Langston) was a threatening power-lifter who powdered-up before matches to remind his opponents that he had an unbreakable grip. It’s hard to take E seriously as a physical threat after years of listening to him say WHO, WHO, WHO, WHO and condoning suggested trombone sex, but NXT Big E is, like NXT Bray Wyatt, the shit.
I can’t wait until he debuts, and I can preach the value of FIVE, the number the WWE Universe should’ve fallen in love with long before they loved TEN.
Best: Foreshadowing
Leo Kruger gets a cheap win over Richie Steamboat by putting his feet on the ropes at like 2.75, and Richie is distraught. You can tell the acting ability of a white-meat babyface by how long he kneels in the ring pointing and making hand gestures after he’s been unfairly pinned.
I’m Besting this because I know where it goes; namely, to the upcoming NXT Championship tournament, which features the Kruger/Steamboat rematch in round one. Between this and Seth Rollins having an almost-confrontation with Jinder Mahal during his ring entrance, the folks behind NXT did a great job of laying some early groundwork to make the emotional tent-poles of their first tournament stand up.
Best: These Are The Diaz
This week’s most important debut is THE ULTRA DIVA Raquel Diaz, daughter of Eddie and Vickie Guerrero. From last week’s recap:
If that made your eyebrows raise, you’re probably expecting someone with the wrestling ability of Eddie and the intense crowd management and charisma of Vickie. Instead, Raquel Diaz — who is advertised openly as a Guerrero, but not fucking called “Raquel Guerrero” — has the wrestling ability of Vickie, and the mic skills of 1997 Eddie. Which, I mean, is still pretty good, but it’s not the lucha libre Charlotte Flair it should be. And she kinda cuts promos that make her sound like a Pokemon gym leader. She’s even got the laugh.
No, seriously, listen to her talk. She has a Garth Brooks mic on during her entrance so she can promo as she walks. If you can hear anything other than a bad anime dub, you’re doing better than me.
by crag2k8
Fun note: Raquel Diaz’s actual WWE TV debut happened seven years before this, during a heel Eddie Guerrero promo.
Diaz gets a quick victory over still-jobber-but-with-an-entrance-this-week Paige, the first stop in her “Exfoliating Ugliness Tour.” She wins with a Gory Bomb, because if Tamina’s gotta do a Superfly Splash, a Guerrero’s gotta do something with “Gory” in it. Pretty soon she starts drawing on her opponents’ faces with lipstick and gets pretty great, so prepare yourself to get kinda into Raquel Diaz, then disappointed when she randomly stops showing up.
Worst: Justin Gabriel Is Not AJ Styles
For a while, Justin Gabriel was trying to integrate Styles’ quebrada DDT into his moveset, but it didn’t go well. That’s a hard move to hit on anyone, even if you’re AJ Styles, which Justin Gabriel is not. That’s not really an insult. Nobody’s AJ Styles. Gabriel ends this week’s main event against Heath Slater with it, kind of, but doesn’t backflip far enough and Slater has to knee-slide under him to make it work. You’re looking at a picture of it. If he’d tried that with anyone but his Twin Flame Heath Slater, he would’ve just shin’d them in the forearms.
Best: Slabriel Explodes
Gabriel and Slater had a lot (a lot) of matches with and against each other during this time, and this is one of their better efforts. They know each other really well and it shows, even when Slater’s having to put his spine in danger to make one of Gabriel’s moves not look like he pressed the wrong strong strike button in WWE 2K and jumping flip-kicked nothing. The highlight is a spectacularly timed bump where Gabriel goes for a springboard and Slater shoves him from the top to the floor the SECOND dude’s feet hit the rope. It’s gruesome, and one of those things you can only pull off well when you’re this familiar with your opponent.
Gabriel wins, as mentioned, and (eventually) goes on to be the Nexus guy representing season 1 in the NXT Title Tournament. It’d be nice if these early shows were working toward a goal, or if they at least attempted to follow up on big events like the debut of Bray Wyatt, but we’ll get there.
Next Week:
- Alex Riley looks to prove his definite devil-may-care heterosexuality against Antonio Cesaro
- “Aggressively Weird” makes their tag team debut
- Drew McIntyre makes his NXT debut way, way before making his actual NXT debut
