wrestling / Columns

The Heel Report: 11.29.13: Bored and Confused

November 29, 2013 | Posted by James Wright

This is the Heel Report. A weekly chart spanning from Tuesday’s NXT to next Monday’s Raw, ranking the heels in professional wrestling based on their actions, wins and losses.

Each Week there are ten places, with points out of ten awarded based on these positions. These points are then added to a rolling chart that will continue each week to show who is wrestling’s overall top heel, after 100 weeks naming the reigning wrestler a ‘Heel Centurion’.

This is a place where the heels of wrestling can be praised for all the hard work they do trying to get us all to hate them (or in other words the smarkiest chart of smarkdom ever to smark), so without further ado let’s get on with the report…

1st Place: Randy Orton

The WWE champion managed to triumph over the Big Show at Survivor Series, with limited help from the Authority. Then the next night on Raw he made sure that his challenger would not get a rematch any time soon by following up on the punt to the head he delivered at the PPV with more shots to the head, causing the Big Show to no longer be able to compete.

Instead Orton finds himself in the dangerous position of being in a match at TLC to unify the titles against John Cena. Now in some ways this is great, after all for years many have been clamouring for there to be only one belt as the World title seems to have become merely a stepping stone to the WWE title at best and at worst a way to grab cheap ratings with ‘shocking’ title changes that haven’t really helped matters in the long run. Also this means that we might not actually have to bear witness to a six-month long feud between Cena and Orton leading to a title unification match at Wrestlemania. Then again many would ask why such a match is indeed not taking place at Mania, as even with the status of the ‘big gold belt’ a unification match should still be a pretty big deal, what’s more didn’t Cena just come back and say that he wanted to restore the world title to its rightful place on the card? How is absorbing it into the WWE title going to achieve that exactly?
I get the feeling that this is just like the Summer of Punk 2 all over again, where the WWE had these plans but then decided to speed things up through fear of fan attention waning. My suggestion would be that the whole idea is flawed in the people that they have holding the belts. Ten years ago if you’d have asked me my two favourite wrestlers I very well might have replied; “John Cena and Randy Orton” but ten years is a long time and now this statement could be no further from the truth. The characters of Cena and Orton just aren’t that compelling any more, neither man has anything left to prove and while both are capable of putting on good matches when the need arises, there is nothing really at stake for either man, even in this case where either is set to become the ‘undisputed’ champion and face of the company, as both moved beyond needing either title long ago.

Orton is doing his best to maintain his image as the number one heel in the company, but with the Authority and in many ways Cena himself, taking away his heat due to their own he is struggling to do so, and even taking out the Big Show hasn’t done much to help this. Maybe, although it would have caused uproar in the IWC, he should have done the same to Daniel Bryan, who was just recently taken out anyway by the Wyatts. But in the end I think his position would be better taken up by someone else, perhaps the newly corporate Kane would have been a more interesting fit. However the Viper is still the WWE champion and technically the face of the company, and so he still gets into the top spot on the chart this week.

2nd Place: Dixie Carter

Heel authority figures, now unlike some I am not wholly against the idea of these figures, they can give the shows they appear on some much needed structure and often justify why the heinous actions of some heels are allowed to take place. The problem is that more often than not these figures end up taking over the show completely and instead of being a means of enabling the heels on the show to shine, they drown them out with their own agendas and storylines. This is what is happening in the WWE with Randy Orton and the Authority, and it is also happening in TNA with Dixie Carter, although I am not actually sure who the main heel in TNA is even supposed to be, what with Bully losing to Anderson and causing the Aces & 8s to disband, and Robert Roode being less of a heel and more a guy who actually wins matches that is just a little unlikable.

A large part of the problem is that most of the time these heel authority figures actually do make most of the booking decisions, and since they see themselves drawing more heat than anyone else they seem to think that this means that this is a good thing and the audience should see more of them. Yet when a heel authority figure is not one of these they almost always appear ineffectual and generally don’t last too long in power. So how about a middle ground? Have a heel authority figure with some control over booking, but with no real presence and no overall control over the direction of the company. Now to be fair this has happened somewhat already in the WWE with the Anonymous General Manager and the celebrity guest hosts, but these had mixed results at best, and seemed to alien to be taken serious, often appearing ludicrous. Instead I suggest that if TNA, or the WWE for that matter, need a heel authority figure to make ‘unlikeable’ decision and let heels get away with murder, they turn to the one entity that they have not thought of before; the audience.
Johnny Ace touched on this with ‘People Power’ but that was a pretence of what he thought the audience wanted, I guarantee that if you actually gave the audience the chance to vote on what should happen, say ‘should John Cena be put into a 3-on-1 handicap match against the Shield’, nine times out of ten people are going to side on the heel option as for the most part it will sound like the more entertaining option. If this was to take place there would still be injustices to right and the chance for heels to get their comeuppances at the hands of faces, but there wouldn’t be anything beyond that, no evil empire to overthrow, no higher power to expose and extinguish, just faces, heels and the chaos of audience stipulations. While this would deprive us of things like Dixie’s crazed rants, such as why she is in second place this week, it would mean that the actual wrestlers on the show would always be the focus, heels could complain about anything that didn’t go their ways and faces could grit their teeth and bare their hardships, all the while giving the audience no one else to blame but themselves, and how likely is that to happen?

3rd Place: The Wyatt Family

Winning in professional wrestling is overrated. The way that you lose, or win, is much more important and despite losing to Punk and Bryan at Survivor Series I would argue that they still managed to get them over in doing so. Looking beyond the appeal of Bray Wyatt’s gimmick and the sheer size of Harper and Rowan, the trio are relatively new to the WWE and they were shown as being more than able to hang with two of the best in the business right now, even managing to take them out on Raw, with a little help from the Shield after the fact.

I am interested in seeing how things with Bryan develop, especially after what happened with Corporate Kane. The only real problem with all this is that one of Bray Wyatt’s slogans, at least on twitter and NXT has been ‘down with the machine’ but now it looks like the group are the ‘machine’s’ recruiters. Now perhaps this is some long game where they are actually setting the authority up for a fall, or more likely the WWE creative team have no real idea where they are going and are just throwing characters against each other week to week in an attempt to create intrigue.

Although to be fair they often do create said intrigue, but intrigue with no follow up is a false economy and eventually nothing is going to mean anything anymore, just like the title unification match at TLC didn’t exactly set the world on fire, because despite what apparent stakes there should be it all feels a little hollow and meaningless, and I’m not really sure what a company still seemingly obsessed with short term ratings boosts can do to change this.

4th Place: The Shield

The Shield have been in the WWE for a year now and what a year it has been! More importantly what a night it was for Roman Reigns at the Survivor Series PPV. He managed to take out four men from the opposing team with spears, including the newly returned Rey Mysterio, and won the match for his team.
Looking back on the event I have to say that it was indeed better that this traditional Survivor Series match did not contain both the Shield and the Wyatts, not only because it would have been too soon to have the groups go into a full on feud, but also because separately it gave members of the two trios time to shine, whereas if they had competed together the story would have revolved around the dynamic between the groups, and I doubt anyone would have stood out, despite it being a good enough story in its own right.

There is still time to tell the story of the Shield vs. the Wyatts, and Reign’s inevitable face turn and breaking away from the group, but now that will mean more as further and further Reigns has gone from the least inspiring muscle of the group to being the one to watch out of all three of them. Will he be able to succeed on his own once he breaks away? Only time will tell, but if that performance is anything to go by he certainly has a fair shot.

5th Place: The Miz

Ah, after a somewhat long absence the Miz has returned to the heel charts, but it has to be said it has been in a pretty confusing manner. It would appear that the Miz is back to being a heel, but really he barely changed throughout his face run, and now all he has really done is refuse to team with Kofi, who in his own right is an unreliable partner given how often he is booked to lose, so maybe Miz was only doing the smart thing.

What’s more in their matches following this the Miz didn’t have to cheat to beat Kofi, and even gave him a handshake twice, the second of which was exchanged for a slap, so who is the heel here? Not to mention his confusing segment with that football/talkshow guy, which was completely reminiscent of the black hole that was the Raw celebrity guest hosts. It’s pretty hard to create compelling storylines that actually make sense on a weekly basis in general, let alone when you have to create pointless segments to indulge former celebrities or flavours of the month.

Then again it could be argued that wrestling is made up of segments for former competitors or flavours of the month with no real thought to the overall tradition of the company, at least in its current form, so who knows how bad these guest hosts actually are.

6th Place: Alberto Del Rio

Finally it looks like Del Rio is out of the title picture, at least for now. He put up a decent effort against Del Rio but the crowd reaction is indicative of what happens when you constantly throw up matches with foregone conclusions.

This is the infuriating thing about the booking of WWE, while TNA seems to be a general shambles, at least in this it comes up with matches where the outcome seems legitimately unknown since no one can really get a real grasp on where they are actually going with anything they do, whereas with the WWE they seem to act like they have a plan, that these predictable matches are necessary to tell the stories they are trying to tell, but then they will swerve everyone with things like this title unification match, seemingly undercutting any claim they might have that they needed to put Cena against Del Rio again to build him and the title up in an effort to return it to prominence. If Cena had become world champion just to then unify the belts a short while later, why didn’t the WWE just stick him and Del Rio in another traditional Survivor Series match up, giving guys like Ziggler and Sandow something to do rather than just giving us this completely predictable title match? The whole thing just doesn’t make sense, either be chaotic and unpredictable, or organised and predictable, both can be criticised, but chaotic and predictable is a seeming logical impossibility, and yet the WWE pull that off, and it’s not a good thing.

7th Place: Robert Roode

While this TNA title tournament might actually not be leading to too much at least it is hard to predict who will actually come out the winner, which creates intrigue if nothing else. And sure the Wheel of Dixie has made these matches a bit overkill in the gimmick department, but for the most part they have been pretty good matches, such as Roode’s match this week against James Storm, two old rivals meeting in a gimmick match that suits their styles and rivalry.

Roode managing to come out on top helps keep the hope alive that there actually is a dominant heel in TNA, although perhaps he should do a little more cheating and a little less winning as he has already established his in-ring credibility as the longest reigning TNA champion.

8th Place: Ryback

He might be on a bit of a losing streak at the moment, but for someone who is supposed to be in the ‘dog house’ he certainly is getting enough TV time, and has a possibly continuing feud with a returning Mark Henry.

I’m still not sure why the WWE turned Ryback heel since he was doing pretty well for himself as a face before they started jobbing him out. I suppose that is the problem with these ‘big men’, they are great while they are winning matches and can get a pretty decent following, but as soon as they lose that momentum they often have very little to fall back on, with the exceptions of the greats like Kane, Big Show and the Undertaker, who are still around for a good reason.

9th Place: AJ & Tamina

The dynamic diva duo didn’t do all that great this week, being on the losing end of not one but two traditional Survivor Series matches. I, like everyone else, am slightly perplexed as to why the WWE would put the exact same match on two nights in a row when the first one pretty much exhausted all potential for the match in the first place. All I can come up with is that it was an open sign of contempt for the divas division, either that or for some reason they really can’t come up with ways to fill the three hour Raws anymore and they are just throwing matches out there to buy time.

Either way this duo got the short end of the stick but also remain the best thing about the divas division by far and AJ is still the champ, with only Natalya and the Bellas being the only challengers the WWE can think to offer up, bring in Paige already!

10th Place: The Authority

While I might have had a tirade about heel authority figures earlier in the report it is true that both HHH and Stephanie McMahon try to present themselves as being very hands-off in terms of their role as evil overlords. But all this sometimes-face, sometimes-heel rubbish just comes off as confusing and whether or not they actually got physically involved in the Orton-Big Show match, wouldn’t it have been better if they either did actually leave Orton to get over on his own, or made their intentions clear so that they presented a united heel front as the authority.

Instead it seems like they are trying to present the type of chaotic and self-sabotaging politics that take place backstage, only as part of a storyline. While I am all in favour of having reality bleed into these fictional storylines, this just looks like a confused mess, which explains why it seems to be such a shambles behind the scenes in terms of the general booking of the company.

(Week 020)

1. Randy Orton (109)

2. Bully Ray (97)

3. HHH (83)

4. Alberto Del Rio (76)

5. AJ Lee (67)

6. Dixie Carter (58)

7. Damien Sandow (51)

8. Dean Ambrose (50)

9. Paul Heymam (46)

10. Ryback (43)

Heel Centurions:

That’s all for this week, we had TNA’s No Surrender and WWE’s Survivor Series and yet somehow it actually seemed to be pretty slim pickings for standout heels on the chart. People have been talking about a non-finish to the title unification match at TLC but I really hope that doesn’t happen since it would either mean that this was incredibly spotty booking, or that the whole title unification thing would go on for several months probably, and I really don’t want that. Hell maybe Cena actually did come back too early and has to go out again, we just saw Orton bring back his punt so maybe he will win the match and put Cena out of commission for a little while longer, which would explain why the WWE were running the angle of bringing back prestige to the world title and then all of a sudden pulling this stunt. Maybe we’ll see in the weeks to come, for now though this is James Wright signing off.

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