wrestling / Columns
The 8-Ball 05.17.12: Top 8 Surprisingly Good Matches
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the 8-Ball. I am your party host, Ryan Byers. Last week, we took a look at the lighter side of sports entertainment, counting down the top eight comedy wrestlers of all time. This week, we’re heading back to the serious side of the game, examining some real, honest-to-goodness traditional wrestling matches as opposed to the bits that are designed to make you chuckle.
The fun begins after the banner.
Everybody loves a pleasant surprise, and, hopefully, everybody reading this likes professional wrestling. So, dear readers, how much better can things get than a pleasant surprise in professional wrestling?
If you’re like me, I’ve been watching the mat game for literally decades. Long-term fans of anything, particularly long-term fans who congregate on the internet, tend to get pretty jaded. After a certain period of time, we start to feel like we’ve seen it all and that we can “call” just about any outcome five moves before it occurs. In fact, I know several wrestling fans who will DVR an episode of Raw or Smackdown and fast forward through 75% of the contents, choosing when to stop based solely upon which wrestlers or personalities are on the screen, as though the presence of a particular person always guarantees that the segment will be of a particular quality.
Here’s the thing, though. We’re not always right. If you follow the example of the DVR know-it-alls, you will occasionally miss an unexpected wrestler knocking it straight out of the ballpark. As a tribute to those unexpected performances, this week we count down the Top 8 Surprisingly Good Matches, bouts that delivered significantly more than anybody ever expected them to when they read the participants’ names on paper.
Manager versus manager matches have been around for a long time, and they’re usually not that great. (In fact, there is a Howard Finkel vs. Harvey Wippleman tuxedo match from Monday Night Raw that still haunts my nightmares.) Intergender matches have only popped up on a regular basis within the past fifteen years or so, but, generally, they too are also usually not that great. So, when you’ve got a battle that pits managers of opposite genders against each other, your natural inclination is to expect it to suck hard. However, when Fonzie and Beulah put it all on the line in ECW, what we got was a match that Paul Heyman himself praised as being one of the greatest moments in company history. What allowed the battle to defy expectations? The first factor is that, despite the difference in sexes, the competitors were comparably sized and Beulah was much younger than Fonz, so it wasn’t that unbelievable that they would have a competitive fight. Also, though many people forget it, Alfonso isn’t just some goofy meth-addict-look-alike who ECW picked up off the street. He had almost twenty years in the wrestling business under his belt at this point, so he knew the tricks necessary to making the battle look good. Finally, reportedly, Alfonso was working his ass off – including bleeding a MASSIVE gusher – to save his job, which was supposedly on the line after he was accused of being a “mole” that allowed ECDub stars to defect to WCW. Granted, the match is just a few minutes long, but all of those factors combine to make it one of the most entertaining and memorable short matches in history.
Bill Goldberg was one of the most popular wrestlers in the world during the period when wrestling was at its most popular. However, if you were on the internet at the height of Goldberg’s popularity, you know that there was a massive “smark” backlash against the guy, with entire websites devoted to bashing the master of the jackhammer, coming up with creative insults like “Greenberg” and calling him a Steve Austin ripoff. (You know, because both guys had goatees . . . so clearly they were trying to do the same gimmick.) The same crowd was generally of the opinion that, though he could be carried to a good match by guys like Benoit, Diamond Dallas Page wasn’t exactly great shakes either. So, the vast majority of the internet was surprised as hell when these two guys trotted out to the ring at the 1998 version of Halloween Havoc and put on a match that, at least by my personal standards, hits the **** mark. Why was the quality surprising in this case? I think that people were SEVERELY underrating Page and what he had learned at this time. Though, at this point, he had great matches against guys who were already proven to be great wrestlers, this was really his coming out party in terms of establishing that he himself was a great wrestler capable of making magic with a less-talented opponent. He would go on to showcase this ability several more times throughout his career.
In 2001, Kane and Albert were two guys who felt like they had plateaued as professional wrestlers. Kane had been on the WWE roster (under that gimmick) since 1997, and he had played “unstoppable monster” the whole time with no real significant changes to his matches or persona. It was getting to feel as though, if you had seen one Kane match, you had seen them all. Albert, meanwhile, felt like a wrestler with no upward mobility. He had been with the company for a couple of years and hadn’t really gone anywhere and the stable of X-Factor, which was presumably going to be a vehicle to get him to the next level, went over about as well as an inattentive Dairy Queen clerk with Jim Cornette. So, when WWE placed them in a feud over the Intercontinental Title, some of us were wishing that DVR’s had been invented so that we could fast forward through it. However, even though it wasn’t the longest match in pro wrestling history, the two went out there and put on a jaw-droppingly good big man match for the time that they were allotted and, a few weeks later, a surprisingly good rematch on a no disqualification bout. The matches featured, among other things, KANE DOING A HURICANRANA, which you will never forget once you’ve seen it. This was the first sign that Albert had something special, which he would eventually take to Japan in order to become one of the best gaijin wrestlers of the last ten years.
Trish Stratus has a reputation as being the best female wrestler of WWE’s modern era. People forget that she didn’t start off as a great in-ring performer, though. In 2000, she made her WWE debut as a manager who periodically set foot into the ring to wrestle. On those rare occasions when she did step into the ring, things got pretty ugly pretty quickly. It wasn’t well into her time as WWE Women’s Champion that she became a competent wrestler, so nobody was expecting a damn thing out of her when she was booked in a match against Stephanie McMahon and the 2001 installment of WWE No Way Out. (Stephanie was a former Women’s Champ at this time, but the whole point of her title reign was that she was a joke of a wrestler.) There was something inexplicable about this match that just made it WORK, though. No, it wasn’t Misawa vs. Kawada, but the two ladies brought a certain intensity to the match that made it ridiculously entertaining when taken in the context of their feud and of the soap opera-esque product that WWE was producing at the time.
Throughout the 2000’s people would “ooo” and “ahhh” every time Ric Flair put on a *** match while in his 50’s. In 2009, Ricky Steamboat received substantial critical acclaim when he had a solid Wrestlemania performance against Chris Jericho at age 56. Virtually everybody forgets, though, that “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes had a performance that was every bit as good as those of his contemporaries in 2003 at the age of 57. In fact, Rhodes’ performance was perhaps even more impressive than those of Steamboat and Flair because, of the three, Big Dust’s opponent would, on paper, appear to be the biggest clash of styles (no pun intended) whereas the Dragon and the Nature Boy had opponents who they would seem to naturally mesh with. Yes, the American Dream went one-on-one with the innovative high flyer AJ Styles when Styles held the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. Despite the fact that Dusty, particularly at this point in his career, was the least flashy in-ring performer on the face of the earth, he and AJ were still able to come together with a brilliant bout that focused on telling a story which was rooted in reality. The story? Dusty was the aging veteran who had one last shot at glory before his in-ring career came to an end, while AJ was the cocky young upstart who wanted to solidify his name by doing in the star from another generation. The match wasn’t exactly X Division style, but both wrestlers played their respective roles to perfection and the result was a rare match from the TNA weekly PPV era that is worth going out of your way to see.
In many ways, this match was the 1980’s version of Goldberg vs. DDP at Halloween Havoc, with Warrior in the Goldberg role and Rude in the Page role. The Warrior was in the process of becoming one of the top stars in the business on the basis of quickly running through everybody who was put in his path, even though there were significant criticisms of his ability to actually, you know, wrestle. Rude, meanwhile, had established himself as a fairly popular (from a heel standpoint) undercard performer based predominantly on his personality. Though people weren’t actually critical of his wrestling as they were with the Warrior’s, they also certainly didn’t think of him as being at a level where he could take somebody like the then-Intercontinental Champion and drag him up to the point where he would be having a solid match. Then, out of nowhere, when the two men locked it up at Wrestlemania for the title belt held by the Warrior, critics were almost amazed by just how well it all went. In fact, their chemistry was so good that Rude would become one of Warrior’s most frequently-used foils over the years. The two would have even better matches at later events, but their bout at WMV was definitely the one with the most surprise factor, since nobody was expecting it to be nearly as good as it turned out to be.
When we talked about being surprised by the quality of Goldberg vs. DDP or the Ultimate Warrior vs. Rick Rude, we were talking about situations in which one wrestler had a reputation for being bad and the other didn’t have much of a reputation one way or the other in terms of whether he would be good enough to carry the other guy to a passable match. However, when it comes to John Cena being paired off with the Great Khali, we’ve got TWO guys who actively have reputations for being clunky and not technically proficient in the ring, particularly Khali, who has to be one of the worst professional wrestlers of the past ten years. (Though, as I’ve said in other columns on this site, there is part of me that always feels bad knocking Khali, because by all reports he’s a genuinely great guy who does a ton of charity work in India, to say nothing of the fact that half the reason he sucks is due to his body structure, which he hardly has any control over.) Yet, when it came time for One Night Stand in 2007, these two not-so-great wrestlers wound up having a hell of a little match in the eight or nine minutes they were allotted. The two had one prior pay per view main event a month earlier at Judgment Day, and, though it was not a train wreck, it was still pretty bad. The managed to turn things around significantly in just one month’s time, though, producing perhaps the greatest match of the Great Khali’s entire career. The match was particularly noteworthy because many people were offended that it was main eventing One Night Stand, which, in prior years, had been AWESOME shows built around ECW nostalgia. Khali/Cena, though it certainly wasn’t as good as even the worst matches on the original ONS shows, still managed to be good enough that it felt like a perfectly acceptable main event for the show, even with the high expectations caused by the event’s legacy.
This is, without exaggeration, my current leader in terms of “match of the year” rankings. One of the things that makes it so special is that nobody, myself included, expected it to be particularly good. For those of you that don’t follow puro, here’s a bit of a backstory: New Japan Pro Wrestling has been building up Tetsuya Naito as one of its next big things for the past couple of years. He’s gotten main events here and there, but he has largely been on the periphery of the title scene, waiting on the outside for his chance to strike. Kazuchika Okada, meanwhile, had been absent from the company for approximately one year before returning on January 4, 2012. Though it would have been completely unexpected a mere month and a half earlier, Okada returned with a rocket strapped to his ass, as he squashed fellow returning wrestler YOSHI-HASHI on 1/4 and then moved on to immediately dethrone long-reigning IWGP Heavyweight Champion Hiroshi Tanahashi. Okada coming out of nowhere and winning the title prior to Naito was, to put it tersely, a total mindfuck. Some people found it pretty hard to swallow, because the YOSHI-HASHI match was fairly underwhelming and, though it was good, the Tanahashi match was nothing special and didn’t quite get the fans to accept Okada as a main eventer. Then, just as rapidly has Okada made his return and ascended to the top of New Japan, he managed to establish himself in one match as an impressive main eventer, as this battle with Naito outpaced every expectation and brought both guys to a new level as in-ring performers and stars. It was a match that just about everybody expected to be a throwaway, but it has wound up being my personal match of the year thusfar. If that’s not a surprisingly good match, I don’t know what is.
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