If I Can Be Serious For A Moment 12.24.09 - Seriously Bad

Posted by Chris Lansdell on 12.24.2009

Looking at the worst of 2009 across North American pro wrestling

As we come to the end of another year, my colleagues here at 411mania are starting to think about their year-end awards. Many of them participated in the collaborative awards which will be making their appearance shortly, while others choose to do their own. I fall firmly into the second group, for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that I want to do my own categories. Very rarely will you see a tag match win Match of the Year, for example, so I break MOTY down into singles, tag and gimmick MOTY. I also wanted to split my awards into the best and the worst of the year. My mother always says "Good news is spoiled by bad; bad news is softened by good", so we'll start off with the worst of 2009, according to me.

A couple of notes: I am only including matches/storylines/wrestlers I have personally seen as of December 23. That means everything up to Raw on December 21 (since I don't get ECW). I'm also not doing a ton of research on this, because I feel something that is the best or worst of the year should stand out in your memory and come readily to mind. If you have to work hard to think of it, it's probably not that bad/good. Finally, these are not meant to be definitive picks, they are more along the lines of discussion pieces. Bring on the first category!

Worst Comeback of the Year

It seems like every year some old retired wrestlers come out of the woodwork and wrestle a few matches to see if they still have it. More often than not, they don't. This year we saw a few legends get back in the ring for one reason or another. One of the saddest stories has been Roddy Piper. I won't dwell too long on his in-ring performance, as he has not attempted a full-time comeback in the ring, but suffice it to say that he was painful to watch on the occasions he did get physical. The worst part for me was his seeming lack of coherence, particularly when he was the Raw guest host at the Madison Square Garden show. Piper was always considered one of the best talkers in the business, and always managed to entertain me on the mic. On Raw this year, he just rambled. A lot. The Raw guest hosts who have wrestling backgrounds, like Batista and the Million Dollar Man, had by and large been given larger roles than the celebrity ones (especially if the celebs weren't fans), but Piper's role was really limited to pulling a worked shoot on Vince McMahon...and didn't exactly do a great job of that. The worst part of that? I was glad.



Worst Promotion of the Year

Can we count the Hulkamania tour as a promotion? I mean they had a roster, they toured, they did house shows...and they were largely crap from what I've heard. With the exception of Shannon Moore and the former M-Dogg Matt Cross, most matches were fairly routine and did nothing to excite. If you won't allow me to pick that as a proper fed, and I can understand that opinion, then I have to go with a tie. In fact I don't know if it really qualifies as a tie, since I'm not convinced the two "winners" are actually different promotions.

Both CZW and IWA-MS are pale imitations of Japanese deathmatch feds. Both have put on some pretty intense cards and both have been responsible for almost ending careers. If I had to choose one over the other for 2009, it would have to be IWA. Ian Rotten, who owns IWA-MS, is a piece of work to say the least. When he announced in August of this year that his promotion would cease operations, very few people bought it. Why? Because it was far from the first time he'd mentioned shutting down or having money issues. When that was rescinded in November, the surprise was, well, non-existent. Neither company really contributes to the wrestling world overall and they serve a very small (as in, "runs in someone's back yard") niche market, with the exception of IWA's Ted Petty Invitational which is well-respected. If you're a fan of this style of wrestling then I'm sorry I've pissed you off, but light tubes and plate glass windows are not wrestling.

Worst Attempt At Comedy

Comedy is a part of wrestling, more so now than ever before. When it's done well it can be a good thing, but when it's not it's REALLY not. For almost the whole year there was only one contender in this category: Dolph Ziggler's woeful attempt at insult comedy at Breaking Point, when he tried to cut Pat Patterson to ribbons. All he did was kill his own heat and look really frigging stupid in the process.



That all changed this past Monday with the most excruciatingly painful segment I can remember seeing on Raw. Ever. I don't know any dwarfs, but I wonder if they would have found the Little People's Court to be offensive. As a wrestling fan, and one who is able to tolerate a lot of silliness in the name of entertainment, it offended me. Unfortunately the live crowd ate it up, so there's a fair chance we'll keep seeing hilarious leprechaun skits for a while. The entire thing had absolutely nothing to do with wrestling, and scarily that is exactly what Vince has said he'd like to do for years.

Regression of the Year

Stars breaking out are a source of much discussion in the wrestling community, and who gets what push is even more hotly discussed. What often gets overlooked is that people sometimes go the other way and regress. We have some very good examples of that this year.

The most obvious would be CM Punk, who went from mid-carder to world champion to losing to R-Truth in the same year. Punk continues to get strong reactions and have good matches, but is allegedly being punished for backtalking The Undertaker on a road trip. However, he is being given an inportant role, in that he's supposed to be getting over R-Truth and Luke Gallows. He may have regressed in terms of his position on the card, but he is still in a key position.

Over in RoH, poor Brent Albright is on a treadmill: no matter how hard he works he's not getting ahead, and if he slows down he'll fall back in a hurry. The former Hired Gun has gone from title shots and upper card feuds to a series of poor matches with Claudio Castagnoli and a seemingly endless feud with the Embassy. He's been palling around with Grizzly Redwood and Colt Cabana, two comedy acts, but instead of letting him play the straight man à la CM Punk in the Second City Saints, they tried to make him a joker too. That went down like a lead balloon and he's now a heat vacuum. He's lost a lot of matches too, which is never a good sign.

The worst regression of the year belongs to Samoa Joe. Although he is showing signs of snapping out of it (fortunately for the purposes of this column, it won't matter) but the fact remains that Joe finished 2008 as a recent TNA champion and one of the leaders of The Frontline. 2009 saw him do nothing and go nowhere until November. He won the X-Division title and lost it, had an intense feud with Bobby Lashley cut short and was involved in Taz's popless debut with TNA. His ring work seemed to have lost a step and he had been booked to lose a lot more than we'd come to expect. All told, not a good year for the Submission Machine.



Facepalm Moment of the Year

The opposite of markout moments, the facepalm moments are the ones that made you shake your head in despair as they happened, seemingly with no good explanation. Things like Undertaker continuing to hold the world title on Smackdown, despite clearly being a step off in the ring and allegedly being in poor health overall. Despite having the option of giving Batista, Jericho or even Rey Misterio a run, the decision was made to keep the belt on Taker for some reason. Yes he still draws and is still over, but he's nowhere near what he was even a year ago.

You could also point to Mick Foley beating Sting to win the TNA title...in 2009. Yes, a 43-year-old beat a 50-year-old for the world title of the second-biggest promotion in North America, despite looking like a Weeble and wrestling like one too. Although in hindsight the title had to be kept away from any of the younger members of the roster until the Main Event Mafia story was ready to end, was Foley really the only choice?



The out-and-out biggest facepalm moment of the year has to be the continued domination of a quality wrestler like Chavo Guerrero by a leprechaun. Yes yes, I know the angle has kept Chavo employed and on TV in recent months, but it doesn't mean this is a good idea or a good use of his talents. Even if you wanted to do the program, there really is no need to have it last so long.

Worst PPV of the Year

You know what surprised me when looking into this category? WrestleMania was probably the worst WWE PPV this year. What didn't surprise me is that TNA Victory Road wins this one hands down. Nothing else even comes close to the outstanding craptacularity of this event. In a year full of standout PPV matches, this show's best match (Angle vs Foley) barely cracked three stars, while two of the matches (Jenna-Sharmell and Love-Tara) were ass. Honestly, there's nothing else to say here. Move along.

Worst Storyline of the Year

Buckle your seatbelts, you're about to see more mentions of our favourite Irish diminutice person. Two of my three choices in this section involve Hornswaggle, the first of which being his domination of Chavo Guerrero. When these two first locked horns, I thought "Meh, whatever, a one-off". It continued. I thought "Well Chavo's beef with Horny kinda makes sense, and he'll crush him soon". He didn't, and it continued. Then Mark henry and Evan Bourne were inserted in the feud, and I thought "Well at least they will transition it off into a real feud now, and let Horny pop up randomly with guest hosts." It continued. By the time he moved on to DX, I had forgotten the original issue, Chris Masters had been put into the program twice on opposite sides of it, and Chavo didn't even have a moral victory to claim over Hornswaggle. What purpose did this serve again? Bourne and Henry didn't get pushed as a result of their involvement, and surely elevating Hornswaggle wasn't the goal?

But eleveated he was, to the level of DX. Yes, two of the best wrestlers in the company and one of the hottest and most over teams in the past 15 years are working a program involving a midget as their mascot. And it has nothing to do with in-ring action. This is my pick for the worst storyline of the year, simply because it doesn't even tie back to a match. It all takes place outside the ring, and wrestling just shouldn't do that.

The only other storyline I violently disliked this year was the nonsense with Mick Foley being off his rocker and singing about tweaking matches. Folehy plays a good lunatic and it can be entertaining, but if it's the focus of your show it tends to make things a little awkward to watch. Inserting this story into the MEM storyline made for even more confusion, and eventually it was hard to figure out just who was running TNA.

Worst Story of the Year

Unfortunately there's a lot to choose from here. We lost a lot of celebrities this year, and pro wrestling eas not exempt. Two of the biggest losses were Umaga and Japanese legend Mitsuharu Misawa. Although many people, myself included, have blamed Umaga for his own death, is it really fair to exonerate Misawa? Umaga made choices to decline therapy and keep doing whatever he was doing that caused him to get fired (to be fair, he may have decided to quit on his own, but whatever the case he did turn down help). Misawa made choices to keep taking the head bumps that eventually killed him. Why should we draw a distinction? Sure one is legal and one isn't, but both are stupid and unnecessary and both can cost you your life. Again I ask, is it worth it just to hear the crowd cheer?



Another person who's made some bad choices is Jeff Hardy. Jeff left a huge offer ont he table from WWE to take some time off, only to get busted for drug possession a few days later. As it turns out he did not have nearly as much on him as was initially released by police, with the vast majority revealed to have been a plant in order to facilitate the arrest and search. The fact remains that this would have looked horrible for Jeff had he still been with WWE, and even the small amount he did have on him would have been news. Hardy is an example to many young kids and I think he let them down.

The last item for consideration is the mess between Kurt Angle, Rhaka Khan, Karen A gle and Jeff Jarrett. This sort of drama is only supposed to exist on soaps, not man-soaps. Kurt and Karen breaking up is one thing. Jarrett hooking up with her was bad, but it was made worse by the presence of Kurt's children. To this mix, add Rhaka Khan and her false and unfounded assault charges against Kurt Angle. The whole thing cast a pall over a TNA PPV weekend and again made you question where the line is between work and shoot. I think shoot, and I think the system that let this get so far is a dangerous one.

Worst Gimmick Match of the Year
Lacey vs Velvet Sky - Mud bowl, Claudio vs Albright - European Rules, Vickie vs Santina – Hogpen

Ahh now we're getting to the major awards. In a year that saw Lacey and Velvet Sky "wrestle" in "mud" for the gratification of 1.3 million perverts and Vickie Guerrero team up with Chavo to "wrestle" Santina in a hogpen match, neither of these matches will win.

That dubious honour goes to a match I was unfortunate enough to see live: Claudio Castagnoli vs Brent Albright in a European Rules match at Death Before Dishonor VII, Night 2. It was horrible. Split into rounds, so there was no flow to the match. Closed fists were illegal, which would be fine on its own, but they chose to have the story of the match revolve around that stiuplation. It was weird and it didn't work at all. Since dropping the Pure title, RoH have tried a few different gimmick matches to see if the style is still popular. I don't think this was a fair representation of the answer, however. It sucked.

Worst Singles Match of the Year

I think pretty much everyone will guess the number one here: nothing even came close to Jenna Morasca vs Sharmell this year. Two untrained women fighting for 6+ minutes ON PPV has got to be the dumbest idea I've heard since giving Danny Bonaduce a match on a PPV card. Oh wait

I did consider a couple other matches for this: HHH vs Randy Orton from Mania 25 just because it was an absolutely horrible main event for WrestleMania and a long way short of what we want from our WM matches, and Kane vs Khali for being ass and to make Small happy. At least he didn't win, Small!

I polled a few of my colleagues to see what they thought for their worst match of the year, and aside from Jenna vs Sharmell people had a hard time coming up with something. Yet when I asked the same people to name off a few MOTY contenders, they all rattled off 5+ names in a few seconds. See? Wrestling writers are not biased at all!

An honorable mention goes to this classic match:



Moment over. TWITTER BREAK!

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And that's the lot boys and girls! Next week's column should be no surprise, but it's the BEST of 2009. Until then Stay Cool, Rock Hard.
Lansdellicious - Out