411 Fact or Fiction 01.27.11: Royal Rumble, Kevin Nash/TNA, The Corre, More

Welcome one and all to 411’s Wrestling Fact or Fiction of the third week of January! Jeremy Thomas here, hosting as always and the Royal Rumble is right around the corner! Plus, the WWE has debuted an interesting name for Wade Barrett’s Nexus spin-off stable, Kimbo Slice is in the wrestling business, Kevin Nash is back in negotiations with TNA and more! Joining us on the panel this week we have Andy Critchell,, our official appreciator of Divas, taking on the one, the only, the master of Wrestling Fact or Fiction…yep, that’s right, me! Andy’s ready and so am I, so let’s do this thing!

Questions were sent out Monday.

Participants were told to expect WWE & TNA-related questions.

1. The Royal Rumble looks to be a good show on paper for WWE.

Andy Critchell: FACT. Good but not great. The Royal Rumble PPV should be built around the Royal Rumble match, which is what WWE has been doing, but I don’t think they have done an outstanding job of building the match. Aside from the fact that there will be 40 guys instead of the usual 30 there really isn’t anything they’ve done to gin up anticipation for the match. That being said, the most important part of the Rumble is WHO wins it, not necessarily the build towards the match so I don’t think the milquetoast build is a huge negative. Also, the fact that there isn’t a clear cut favorite is a big plus as it gives an air of unpredictability. Aside from the Rumble match itself, we also have two compelling championship matches and both have challengers who have been effectively built up. I don’t even think you could call the recently added Divas match a negative (unless you REALLY hate LayCool) so really the show looks very solid on paper.

Jeremy Thomas: FACT. I think that the show is a little light on matches and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something added at the last-minute because even if the Royal Rumble is longer with the ten extra men, three matches is not enough for the rest of the show. That being said, we have a good, solid card based on what we do have so far. Miz vs. Orton should be a good, solid effort while I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how Edge and Ziggler shake out in a match. This is Dolph’s chance to show he’s main-event level talent and I think he’ll do well. We’ll get into the Diva match, but it should at least be entertaining and the extra ten men for the Rumble should add some drama and action to that. They have the opportunity to really but the stamp of approval on a lot of guys here, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.

Score: 1 for 1

2. The Kurt Angle/Jeff Jarrett saga dominated way too much time on Impact this last week.

Andy Critchell: FICTION. It’s the best angle that TNA has going, so it should dominate the show. Look at the alternatives; the “THEY” storyline is terrible because anyone they bring in won’t be a big name of note and the Bully Ray/Devon storyline is way too basic to take up more time than it does. The Angle/Jarrett storyline hits two big points that fans are into; it is a real life situation brought to TV and it gives fans a peek behind the curtain. Plus it involves characters that people have always cared about which is never a bad thing. Logic holes aside (Isn’t Kurt fired? How did he evade the cops? Why didn’t Fortune just call the cops on him again?) this is an angle that TNA has done a decent job with and it deserves the spotlight.

Jeremy Thomas: FACT. The problem with this whole thing was that they tried to do in three main segments and a bunch of quick backstage transitional shots what they could have accomplished in two segments and no transitional shots. Listen, I like TNA. Anyone who reads the R’s know that I give them a fair amount of credit. But we really didn’t need to know that the police couldn’t figure out how to get Kurt Angle out of the building, which is basically what they did with all those transitional segments before Kurt and Karen came down. I will give Karen some credit for carrying through her part of the promo well; in fact, everyone who performed in the segments performed well. It just went on longer than it could have and it threw the whole thing off because of it; it was poorly paced and the ending with Angle that segued into the THEY storyline was very awkwardly placed on the show. I like the effort that these guys are making but it just didn’t work last week.

Score: 1 for 2

3. The Corre is, hands down, an atrocious name for Wade Barrett’s stable.

Andy Critchell: FICTION. I like it. It’s not like they are called the Sparkle Pants Brigade or the Skank Patrol, they’re just the Corre. They are at the center of Smackdown and everything else should be built around them. Core and nexus are synonyms so the name ties into the history of Barrett, Slater, and Gabriel. Plus it sounds cool when Barrett says it. Are people really upset about this?

Jeremy Thomas: FACT. I like “The Core.” It speaks just right for what Wade and his group are; not only does it say that they are similar to the Nexus, but it professes that the first Corre members—Barrett, Gabriel and Slater—were the core of the original Nexus. I wouldn’t disagree. But the spelling is really retarded. I am aware that you cannot trademark a phrase as generic as “The Core.” I get that, and that’s fine. But did these guys get their respelling skills from Syfy? What’s wrong with “The Kore?” It doesn’t look nearly as dumb as the extra R in there, which makes it sound like Sheamus or Paul Burchill the pirate are saying it. If they couldn’t figure out how to spell Core in a way that looked good, they should have gone back to Thesaurus.com and picked something else out.

Score: 1 for 3

4. It was poor booking to spend the last month building up Rob Terry, only to have Matt Morgan bury him in seven seconds.

Andy Critchell: FICTION. Rob Terry at this point is not bringing a whole lot to the table other than a huge body so building him up serves the purpose of making Matt Morgan look like a bad ass, or at least like a guy who is more than just a big body. TNA must see more money in Morgan than in Terry, and I can’t blame them for that, so I have no problem with TNA doing what they did.

Jeremy Thomas: FICTION. When I first saw this, it was my initial thought that they wasted the time that they’d built up Terry just to give Morgan someone to run over. And I still think that they could have made it an actual match and it would have been more effective. But looking back at it, this did build up Morgan a bit and give him some solid momentum. They really need something for Morgan to do, so having him run his way through Immortal one man at a time is fine. I think that was my bigger problem with that whole segment was that it seemed just like the one they’d done the week before that involved Terry coming down, which was what led to this match. If we see them do the same thing with Abyss this week, we’ll know they’re just in lather-rinse-repeat mode.

Score: 2 for 4

SWITCH!

5. Assuming he sticks with it, Kimbo Slice will be in WWE or TNA by this time next year.

Jeremy Thomas: FICTION. Kimbo has the look and the name value, but outside of Brock Lesnar or Bobby Lashley and some of the more or less iconic names like Tito Ortiz and Randy Couture, I don’t see either of the big two showing any interest in MMA guys. The two businesses seem split off from each other enough that there’s not a lot of value in bringing a guy like that in, especially considering the money he may be asking for. Kimbo’s got some name value to be sure, but MMA name value does not equate to success in the ring. Tank Abbott is proof of that. I have a feeling that Kimbo will have some success in Japan and stay there until he gets another shot at MMA, at which point he’ll go back. With that in mind, the Big Two won’t want to invest the time and money needed to develop him.

Andy Critchell: FICTION. I see him staying in Japan because he can make good money there without being seen by the majority of the US MMA audience. I don’t think his MMA career is done and I’m sure at some point a desperate promoter will sign him as an attraction Slice or his management knows this and don’t want to “sully” his MMA rep by letting people see him in pro wrestling.

Score: 3 for 5

6. Pitting LayCool against Natalya at the Royal Rumble is a dumb move when they have several other Divas who could get the shot for a fresh feud.

Jeremy Thomas: FACT. Sorry, but there are two ways to look at this. The first is that you assume that people care about women’s wrestling, at least enough to see who’s wrestling each other in the title feuds. If that’s the case, then you know that Team LayCool have been involved in the title picture for way too damned long and that the company has a lot of Divas who could take the spot. There are Beth Phoenix, Alicia Fox, one of the Bellas, Tamina, Kaitlyn (remember her?) and so on. The other way to look at this is that the Divas match will be the piss break match. In that case, you don’t care. If you don’t care, then why not throw someone else in there for a shot? At least it gives someone new a chance to get on the show. Either way you see it, the only reason LayCool is getting this shot is because they don’t have anything better to do but fall back on the same old shit.

Andy Critchell: FICTION. The only other Diva they’ve built up at all the past few months is Beth Phoenix and she and Natalya have no heat at all. And it’s not like people are really clamoring for fresh match ups in the Diva ranks anyway. The Divas are there to look good and be an attraction whenever necessary so building compelling storylines and big time feuds is not going to happen. There isn’t really any money in women’s wrestling anyway so another Natalya/LayCool match is pretty much a non-issue.

Score: 3 for 6

7. Bringing Kevin Nash back into TNA as part of Immortal’s opposition stable would be a good move, assuming he doesn’t wrestle.

Jeremy Thomas: FICTION. I don’t see any way that Nash can add here. Yes, he can talk, but when he talks, he puts the focus on himself, pretty much always. I’m a Big Kev fan; always have been. I know he’s well past the point of wrestling and that’s fine with me; he could still work the mic as a GM or something like that if he so desired. But he’s never worked as the mouthpiece of a group that he needs to put over, and this would be no exception. And like I said, he’s well past the point of wrestling so we certainly don’t need him coming back for that. No, as much as it saddens me to say, I think it’s time for Nash to leave TNA alone for the time being. Didn’t he say he was happy to spend more time with his family anyway?

Andy Critchell: FACT. Sure, why not? There are few guys in the business today who are better talkers than Big Kev and he definitely still has value. As long as he is motivated and willing to go along with whatever Russo and Co come up with then I would welcome the inclusion of Nash.

Score: 3 for 7

8. The main event segment on Raw was pointless and went poorly-done.

Jeremy Thomas: FICTION. Was it poorly-done? I think so. The whole thing just came off as goofy and you were left wondering “okay, what was the point of that?” However, while the storyline reasons seemed pointless, the business reasons made sense. You have the Nexus and the Corre who should and do have storyline heat between them, and Cena who hates them both. The easiest way to build a stable up is to pit it against Cena. Make all the cracks you want about Cena squashing the Nexus, they still have legitimacy in the eyes of the casual fan (and many smarks as well) because it’s not a demotion to lose to Cena, even for a stable. So now that the Nexus has become the Nexii, it’s a good move to pit them against Cena, and better yet they did it in a non-direct way that didn’t involve him beating multiple members of the stables. Plus it put the Royal Rumble sharply in focus, which needed doing. So while I don’t think it carried as well as it was intended by any stretch, it was far from pointless.

Andy Critchell: FICTION. Basically that segment’s goals were to build heat between two heel factions, build heat between those two heel factions and Cena, and build up the Royal Rumble match. In my mind it accomplished all those goals and thus by definition cannot be pointless. Whether it was poorly done, well it wasn’t exactly what I would have done but I didn’t find it offensive. I liked seeing those kids at ringside lose their minds when Cena started signing stuff and it made sense for him to try and goad Punk and Barrett into getting themselves DQ’d. The double DQ I didn’t really like but I did like the result of both Nexus and Corre getting to be in the Rumble. And I enjoyed the big Battle Royale type fight at the end of the show, those are always fun. I don’t think you can fairly call the segment poorly-done either.

Final Score: 4 for 8

And there you have it…Andy and I split the difference and end up going 4 for 8! I’d like to thank Andy for his answers, and you the readers for seeing what they had to say! For Andy Critchell, this is Jeremy Thomas saying join us next week for more Wrestling Fact or Fiction!

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