Friendly Competition 7.07.07
Posted by Sam Caplan on 07.07.2007
The IWGP Heavyweight Title makes its debut in this column! Plus, more awesome wrestling on both shows, and why nobody gives a damn about women's wrestling!
Hello folks, and welcome to another scintillating edition of Friendly Competition. I'm your host, Stuart Carapola. Thank you, thank you. So without further ado, let's jump right into this week's shows, both of which saw some great in-ring work.
ECW On Sci Fi Results 7/3/2007
This week's show was all about setting up the ECW World Title match at the Great American Bash, as both participants in the match, CM Punk and ECW World Champion Johnny Nitro, picked the other's opponent tonight. Punk picked Tommy Dreamer to face Nitro and Nitro picked Kevin Thorn to face Punk. Both Nitro and Punk emerged victorious, and continue on their collision course at the Great American Bash.
TNA Impact Results 7/5/2007
The final piece of the main event of Victory Road was set this week as Team 3D defeated LAX and the team of AJ Styles & Christopher Daniels to retain the TNA World Tag Team Title, and they will now head to Victory Road to defend against TNA World Champion Kurt Angle and TNA X-Division Champion Samoa Joe. Angle, in the meantime, came to the ring for Kurt Angle Celebration Night with not just the TNA World Title, but also the IWGP Heavyweight Title he had defeated Brock Lesnar for the prior weekend. He claimed that he was the man who made TNA, but was interrupted by Team 3D, who said it was not Angle, but the entire locker room and the fans that made TNA what it was. This leads to a 2-on-1 brawl with Team 3D beating down Angle, but Samoa Joe makes the save and chases off Team 3D to save Angle, who he had earlier called a puppet in his quest to win all the gold in TNA. Angle thanks Joe by giving him an Angle Slam through a table.
Elsewhere on the show, Gail Kim won a three way match against Miss Brooks and Jackie Moore, leading to a postmatch brawl between Robert Roode and Eric Young, Lance Hoyt said that while he was with VKM, he was secretly working for Christy Hemme the whole time and having hot sex with her while he was at it, Christian Cage confronted Jim Cornette about putting him in a match against Chris Harris, saying he was going to make him a star like he had with everyone else he had faced since coming to TNA, Rhino told the story about his father's alcoholism leading to an addiction of his own and how, after breaking that addiction, James Storm spitting beer in his face took him to a place he didn't want to be, and Sting told us that next week Abyss would speak, and brings us down to the bowels of the Impact Zone where we see a maskless Abyss with his face painted like Sting.
We Are The Champions
ECW World Champion: Johnny Nitro (Champion Since 6/24/2007)
TNA World Champion: Kurt Angle (Champion Since 6/17/2007)
TNA World Tag Team Champions: Team 3D (Champions Since 5/13/2007)
TNA X-Division Champion: Samoa Joe (Champion Since 6/21/2007)
People Who Impressed Me This Week
AJ Styles & Christopher Daniels: These guys need to team more often. For a couple guys who haven't been a regular team in some time, they looked really smooth this week in the three way.
Rhino: This guy can seriously cut awesome promos, and how he doesn't get to do it more often is beyond me.
Kurt Angle: In addition to continuing to restore my faith in him as a worker, he showed that he can still cut really funny promos when need be.
Tommy Dreamer: He shows that despite his age, injuries, and not generally being considered a great technician, he can still put together a good match, and he even surprised me by pulling out a guillotine on Nitro!
Johnny Nitro: This guy has improved so much since he was the junior member of MNM. I still have a hard time thinking of him as a World Champion, but he's developing into one hell of a worker.
Dickhead Of The Week: Kevin Thorn
Thorn's been getting a pretty big push for weeks now, so it seems strange to me to have it come to such a sudden stop, and a clean one at that. I can't say that I would have had him lose like that with no real build or anything.
Vital Social Issues N' Stuff With Stuart
You know what occured to me during the Gail Kim/Miss Brooks/Jackie Moore match on Impact? I really don't give a shit about women's wrestling. Let's face facts, nobody does. It's funny, even though TNA presents their women as more than just second-rate strippers like WWE does, that's all people see them as. All three women can work (or at least I've been told that Brooks can), but while their match was going on, I was inside making a cup of coffee and just made a note of the result of the match and the extracurricular activities afterward for this column. Granted, it's not like they have a deep roster of female wrestlers to build interest in, and there's only so much you can do with the same 3-4 chicks over and over, but the fact remains that I wasn't even the slightest bit interested. I didn't even glance at the screen once to see if what they were doing in the ring even remotely resembled wrestling because I have this automatic mental block against women's wrestling because I just consider it by its nature to be inferior to men's wrestling. I don't know why, but whenever I watch women's wrestling, even involving the "best" women in the major leagues like Gail Kim, Jackie, Victoria, Mickie James, or whoever, the matches always look like they just got done with their third week of training and are desperately trying to remember the sequence of spots they planned and god forbid somebody forget what they were supposed to do because they'll repeat it 80 times until they get it right. I think of it the same way some repressed person might have a built-in aversion to bars. They think that all the guys who hang out in bars are drunk assholes and all the women are hookup sluts. Deep down, they know that this is a real broad brush to be painting with and they know that there are decent people who go to bars every now and then, but their opinion has been so heavily colored by the vast majority that they're not even willing to consider that they might meet some nice friends or girls or whatever there. This is how I feel about women's wrestling, because every women's match I've ever seen has come off as such an Amateur Night production that I find it hard to take any women's wrestling seriously, even including the top workers in SHIMMER. As happy as I am to admit that SHIMMER has the cream of the crop when it comes to women's wrestling in the US, it's always my piss break match at ROH shows. I really hate to sound sexist, and I don't mean all this in the sense of "women have no place in the ring" because I don't believe that at all, but I just find it so hard to think of any female wrestler as being on the level of any man as a worker.
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So has the wrestling on Impact the last few weeks been fucking awesome, or what? I'll admit I had my doubts going into last week's TNA World Title match because of the hype it had been getting as "the greatest match in the history of Impact", but once I actually saw the match I found it hard to disagree. Then they follow it up this week with another great three way match where the action didn't stop once. Now, I'm not going to go way over the edge and suggest that every episode of Impact center around one really long match, but I do think that if they have one match of a healthy length, one short squash, and all the little storyline segments in between, they would be using their hour a lot more effectively than they have in months. I'll be the first to say that I've been way down on TNA for several months now, but if they keep up the shows like they've had since Slammiversary, I think I'd have a whole lot less to complain about.
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One thing I feel TNA should be cautioned against is humanizing Abyss too much. I'm mainly thinking about how badly Kane was mishandled when he was unmasked, and I'm worried that they're going to do the same thing with Abyss. This week was, as far as I know, the first time Abyss has appeared on TV without his mask, and I think it's something that could have been made a bigger moment than it was. One of the reasons I've always heard for the mask is that Abyss doesn't have the most intimidating face in the world, and though I think putting paint on it (if that's what they're going to continue to do) would be an interesting alternate avenue to explore, although if you're going to do that you might as well leave the mask on him. Now next week Abyss is going to speak, and having heard him talk before (saying "excuse me" when stepping past me on his way into an ROH show back in late 2005) he doesn't have the baddest sounding voice in town, either. I understand the need for continued character development to prevent stagnation and retreading past material, but they should be careful with what steps they take with Abyss, because the last thing I want to see two months from now is Abyss hookin up Sting's nuts to a car battery.
Links To Stuff You Can Read
Bauer and Byers have Impact covered, while Bauer and Dunn have ECW On Sci-Fi.
Bayani talks character development in Truth B Told.
Rob Halden has some opinions on the media and is more than happy to share them with us in You're An Idiot And Here's Why.
Larry gets all up in our area with the latest edition of Wrestling's 4R's.
Finally, a little bit of self-pimping as I cover the career of Scott Hall in That Was Then.
What Did We Learn This Week?
In all things, there is at least one lesson to be learned. Here I will impart upon you what I took away from the weekly television of ECW and TNA. You too can learn important life lessons from Kevin Thorn and Maverick Matt, and are encouraged to send in your own revalations.
This week on ECW On Sci-Fi, I learned that...
-Replaying PPV matches instead of fresh matches featuring the other talent is good business.
-Tommy Dreamer knows wrestling holds.
-Winning streaks mean nothing anymore.
This week on TNA Impact, I learned that...
-The IWGP Title still exists.
-ANGLE'S HARDCORE!
-Even LAX thought Konnan was a dick.
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That's it for me, I'll be back on Friday with another edition of That Was Then, and then right back here for another SCINTILLATING edition of Friendly Competition! Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week.
