If I Can Be Serious For A Moment 11.19.09: The Great World Heavyweight Champion

Posted by Jasper Gerretsen on 11.19.2009

Was The Great Khali really such a horrible excuse for a world heavyweight champion? Not really.

Welcome to this special edition of If I Can Be Serious For A Moment, your weekly dose of intelligent wrestling discourse with me, Jasper Gerretsen, subbing for Chris Landsell. While I don't have a picture of Lance Storm with me in the background marking out, I do have an opinion I'd like to share with you.

The Great Khali is one of those figures that the internet wrestling community just loves to hate. He's slow and awkward, knows only a handful of moves and couldn't cut a promo if his life depended on it. He's the archetype of a monster along the lines of Giant Silva and Kurrgan. He's one of those men that's clearly born twenty years too late, as he would have made a decent opponent for Hogan in the eighties. And yet, he held the world heavyweight championship for nearly two months. The funny part? I think that he was the right choice and made a decent champion in 2007, considering the SmackDown landscape at the time.

The Great Khali won a battle royal on the July 20th to claim the vacant world heavyweight championship. The title had been vacant after Edge was forced to relinquish it due to a torn pectoral muscle. Edge had won the title by cashing in the money in the bank contract he won from Mr. Kennedy, who also suffered from a torn muscle. The switch was made because the reigning world heavyweight champion The Undertaker in turn needed to take time off with a torn biceps. After the blue brand was gutted in the 2007 draft, this left only one credible long term main eventer on SmackDown: Batista. So why put the world championship on a monster heel in stead?

It all boils down to a matter of momentum. After all, Batista was a strong babyface, and overcoming a monster to win the title is a much better story than the same character sneaking in a win in a battle royal. Whenever a monster like Khali enters a battle royal, you know something big is about to happen, and in this case it was no different. The match started off with monster heels Khali and Mark Henry tossing various cruiserweight and tag team wrestlers, followed by the classic spot of babyfaces ganging up on a monster heel to eliminate him.

With each elimination we got closer to a Batista/Khali face off. In the end it boiled down to three giants: Khali, Kane and Batista. While Kane had been Edge's next challenger before his injury, nobody really took him serious as a contender. The same could be said for Khali, so the shock was all the bigger when the Punjabi nightmare actually eliminated Kane and Batista to win the title.

So now the world heavyweight champion was a sloppy, barely mobile giant who has yet to speak a coherent sentence of English. The lack of promo skills was easily fixed by Ranjin Singh, a WWE creative team member who stepped up to the plate as Khali's manager and translator. While the true manager has been on the WWE endangered species list for at least fifteen years now, the addition of Ranjin Singh did at least solve the communication problems Khali had. That doesn't take away the fact that Khali's in ring work embodies all the very worst of the giant monster gimmick. What made him work as a world heavyweight champion however, was some of the most brilliant booking I have ever seen.

As Paul Heyman once said, a good booker accentuates the positives and hides the negatives. Michael Hayes did this in a great way by giving Khali a new finisher: the Khali Vise Grip. As immobile as Khali might be, even he can wrap his hands around a head fairly easily. And while the claw hold seems to be nothing more than a comedy move these days, the huge hands of Khali, big enough to completely wrap around a basketball, combined with his massive size, made it look incredibly dangerous every time he tried to squeeze the life out of one of his opponents.

As a first target for this devastating new hold, Khali went after The Nature Boy himself, Ric Flair, who had not only been on the receiving hold of several wrestlers' claw holds when the move was still a credible finisher, but was also a close personal friend and mentor of Khali's number one contender, Batista. I can't overstate the tremendous job Flair did of selling the Khali Vise Grip every time it was applied.



So while The Great Khali is a truly godawful wrestler, Michael Hayes somehow found a way to make him work as world heavyweight champion. He had a decent enough manager in Ranjin Singh to help him overcome his communication issues, and even to eventually help turn him face. The complete absence of technical skill was remedied by giving him a move that required none, and by going after Flair, Khali had a target that not only sold the claw as murder, but also gave the fans that much more reason to want to see Batista kick Khali's ass.

And that's pretty much the only thing the WWE cares about. While the internet wrestling fans might talk for years about a television match like Evan Bourne vs. Chavo Guerrero, these matches aren't there to make money. Matches like Batista vs. The Great Khali are, and to make that money, they have to give fans a reason to pay money to see that match. By turning Khali into a monster that went after Batista's old friend and mentor, they did just that in a way that played to Khali's limited strengths. That alone makes Khali's reign as world heavyweight champion, in my opinion at least, a lot better than people like to think.