That Was Then, Is This Too? 05.04.10: Der Neues Weltorder?

Welcome to yet another installment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. As usual, we have comments:

I want to see Christian be the man who takes the title off Swagger & then goes onto a World Title program with Punk.

Posted By: jbardo (Guest) on April 27, 2010 at 11:50 AM

That would certainly be an interesting way to go about things, and Christian has certainly proven his ability to be the top guy during his TNA run. The only real problem I see here is that CM Punk has no obvious reason to feud with Christian, but I’m sure they can think of something.

Initially I was totally baffled by this year’s draft with the Smackdown main-event basically going to an already clogged up Raw. Moving both Edge and Jericho to Raw seems odd. But then Edge turned heel and it made sense. Raw needs main-event heel and unlike Smackdown just can’t seem to push mid-carders well to the main-eventers – so they bring in Edge and Jericho. Hmm Michaels definitely left a gap there! Raw can now be the ‘A show’ with the main talent, but Smackdown for me seems a lot more free with Kofi and Christian (who get much needed exposure) potentially becoming main-eventers. And I can’t think of a single fan who wouldn’t want to see Swagger vs Christian for the World Title (it practically writes itself). And maye a Punk vs Kofi feud could do what the Orton feud couldn’t?

Even though this year’s draft wasn’t as good as last year’s (with Smackdown feeling like the Smackdown Six era again with Morrison, Hardy, Punk, Rey, Edge, Jericho all having great matches with each other), Smackdown just seems to get on with it, elevate new talent and produce way better TV than Raw (with the exception of 2004).

Posted By: AH (Guest) on April 27, 2010 at 01:18 PM

The draft has certainly provided an interesting challenge for the SmackDown booking team as, more than ever before, the blue brand will be the place where new stars are made.

The Raw writing team focuses only on their main event scene, everything else languishes by the wayside. So if you’re not named Cena, HHH, Orton, Batista, the RAW writing team doesn’t care about you. Even though Sheamus was forcibly thrust down our throats into the main event, The show is still focused on Cena, Orton and Trips. Jericho will go back to languish in the mid card and be buried by Triple H since it’s long overdue. Edge will have to become heel again to balance out the roster and then become another one of Cena’s heel foils. Morrison and Truth will drop from upper midcarders to lower midcards when after a year of spinning their wheels doing jack shit on RAW no one gives a shit about them anymore. True about every talent that goes to RAW who isn’t a big star.

Posted By: Guest#9895 (Guest) on April 28, 2010 at 08:21 AM

Jericho to raw makes no sense at all. What about Punk? Cena has no one new to fight. It;s been there done that with all of them – orton, edge, sheamus, batista, y2j. Sigh. Unless Morisson moves up. Highly doubt it. He;ll prob face Miz

Posted By: Heel (Guest) on April 29, 2010 at 07:15 AM

You both raise a very interesting point in that most of the potential main event feuds on RAw have already been done since Cena’s first run as WWE champion. However, moving Cena back to SmackDown is simply not an option because he’s still the guy that sells the shirts and gets the kids into the arenas. Still, I think that the Batista feud can be kept going for at least two more months, and who knows what the Raw landscape looks like after that.

That takes us to Banner 2.0!

A little over a week ago, at CHIKARA’s annual King of Trios tournament, the Brüderschaft des Kreuzes trio of Claudio Castagnoli, Ares and Tursas proved that they were the most dominant trio of wrestlers in CHIKARA today. In fact, they have already won nearly everything there is to win in the company, with Tim Donst holding the Young Lions Cup, Ares and Castagnoli holding the Campeonates des Parejas and Pinky Sanchez, under the guise of Carpenter Ant, having won last year’s Cibernetico match. In fact, the only thing the white team hasn’t won is the Rey de Voladores tournament, which is little more than a side note anyway.

Of course, this victory didn’t come easy. They had to defeat the Colony, which once again established itself as CHIKARA’s top technico unit. The Colony took it to the BDK from the moment the bell rang, even managing to make the massive Tursas look more vulnerable than even Eddie Kingston did. In the end however, the BDK turned out to have a trick up its collective sleeves in the form of returning referee Derek Sabato, who had made an abrupt departure from the company almost a year and a half ago. With Bryce Remsburg incapacitated by Tursas, Sabato stormed the ring, gave The Colony a false two count, ignored a blatant low blow, then counted the pinfall on Fire Ant, who got planted with the Ragnarok, extremely fast, giving the BDK the win in the biggest CHIKARA event of the year.

At this point, the BDK has checked all the boxes for a dominant heel stable. They have the crooked official (Dieter von Steigerwalt), the crooked referee (Derek Sabato) and the huge enforcer (Tursas). They have been virtually unbeatable so far, with the closest thing they’ve had to a loss being Daizee Haze and Sara Del Rey getting disqualified for excessive violence. Of course while they don’t lose much, they’ve certainly come very close in the past, most notably when Lince Dorado had to resort to loosening his own mask to get Eddie Kingston disqualified. They are doing everything a heel stable is supposed to do.

At this point, it seems that the only question is which heel stable will be the one that ends the BDK’s reign of terror. It could be The Colony, who, in addition to dominating the comments section of 411mania’s Wrestler of the Week columns, have been on a massive roll in the tag division since all the way back at the 2008 Tag World Grand Prix. It could be Incoherence, who seem to have regained their focus after losing Delirious last year. It could be The Future Is Now, who are looking for revenge after Lince Dorado’s betrayal. It could even be the newly rebranded 3.0, who seem to have made a career out of nothing but raw charisma.

But the important thing is that the BDK has to be defeated. That’s just the way wrestling works. The bad guys show up, beat the good guys for a while, until the good guys win out in the end. That’s how money is made. By trying to keep fans watching (and paying) for as long as possible. If you go too far however, if the heels keep winning and winning and there’s no hope for the big babyface victory, you’ll end up turning fans away from the product, as proven by another dominant heel stable that ended up causing a company to go under…

That Was Then…

Endless words have been written on the New World Order, so I’ll keep this as brief as possible. In May of 1996, with the war between World Championship Wrestling and the World Wrestling Federation being in full swing, WCW made two massive acquisitions in Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, the former Diesel and Razor Ramon. While WWF scrambled to keep their departure covered up with a pair of horrible look-alikes, WCW made the most out of their scoops by presenting Hall and Nash as invaders from WWF. While legal action from WWF eventually put an end to the second half of that gimmick, they still managed to capture the wrestling world’s attention and swing the war firmly in favour of WCW for months to come.

A match between The Outsiders and Sting, Randy Savage and Lex Luger was signed, with The Outsiders promising to bring a third man, someone who would stand with them in their war against WCW. It turned out to be none other than Hulk Hogan, the biggest star on the WCW roster and the biggest babyface of the past ten years. With one leg drop to Randy Savage, Hogan instantly became the biggest heel in the industry, cutting a terrific promo while the fans who had made him such a huge star pelted him with garbage.

From there, the New World Order ran wild all over nWo, repeatedly beating down WCW wrestlers and hijacking WCW broadcasts. Eric Bischoff joined them, continuously using his authority to put WCW wrestlers at a disadvantage. They even had their own PPV event in Souled Out. However, hope would eventually dawn in the form of Sting. He had spent months watching from the rafters, emerging occasionally to test the loyalty of wrestlers. For months nobody knew for sure where he stood, until he jumped the nWo at the end of the WCW Uncensored PPV, rapelling down from the rafters and leaving the group lying.

For the following months, everything was done to build up Sting as a challenger for Hulk Hogan, and the match would take place at that year’s Starrcade, the WCW equivalent of WrestleMania. However, for all their building of excitement, they could not have screwed up the execution any more than they had already had. At the end of the match, Sting was pinned clean by Hogan, with former nWo referee Nick Patrick counting the pin. The match was broken up by Bret Hart however, who claimed Patrick had made a fast count and restarted the match with himself as the referee, eventually awarding the title to Sting after Hogan tapped out to the Scorpion Deathlock.

It was just about the worst way they could have gone about things. Sting, the man who for months had been built as the one saviour, the one hope WCW had, ended up getting pinned clean, only winning the title because of Bret Hart inserting himself into the match. If Sting had been the man to defeat Hogan and his nWo, he would have been the greatest babyface in the world, and he would have given WCW incredible momentum heading into 1998. In stead the nWo became the angle that just wouldn’t die, running on almost until the company closed its doors in 2001.

…Is This Too?

With their own authority figure, their own announcer and now their own referee, and the fact that so far they seem to have won nearly everything, it seems very easy to draw the conclusion that BDK is fast going the way of the nWo, becoming so dominant that fans simply refuse to buy any babyface as actually having a chance to beat them. If they go too far in pushing the BDK, fans will simply stop showing up and stop buying DVDs. It took the nWo years to drag WCW down, but CHIKARA, as an independent wrestling company, is in a much more vulnerable position.

But at the same time, I would trust Quackenbush more than I trust any other booker out there today. There’s no booker out there who has Quackenbush’s ability to make everything make sense eventually. Even the strange rant that referee Derek Sabato posted at the end of his first CHIKARA run suddenly makes sense. CHIKARA is booked in seasons, so it would make sense for the climactical battle between the BDK and the rest of the company to take place at the final weekend of the year in November. If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that the first real blow to the BDK comes when they end up losing this year’s Cibernetico tournament, with the whole group disbanding after losing the Campeonates des Parejas at the final show of the year.