The 411 Wrestling Year-End Awards: Part Two – The Best Promo Person of 2014

Welcome back to the Wrestling Top 5, year-end awards edition! What we are going to is take a topic, and all the writers here on 411 will have the ability to give us their Top 5 on said topic, and the end, based on where all of these topics rank on people’s list, we will create an overall Top 5 list. It looks a little like this…

1st – 5
2nd – 4
3rd – 3
4th – 2
5th – 1

It’s similar to how we do the WOTW voting. At the end we tally the scores and get our overall top 5! It’s highly non-official and final, like WWE’s old power rankings. From some of the best and worst, the 411 staff is ready to break down the awards! Thanks for joining us, and lets get down to work.

(Changed from “best promo” of the year to “best promo person” of the year)

1. Paul Heyman – Whether he was putting over Brock Lesnar as a threat to The Undertaker’s streak or basking in the glory of The Beast ending it in the months to follow; whether he was legitimizing Cesaro or serving as Lesnar’s proxy in his program with John Cena, Heyman proved himself again and again in 2014 as the best talker in the wrestling world. Heyman earned himself more points the longer Lesnar was gone, hanging around for Raw promos and PPV panels, and going so far as to put over talents and storylines that had nothing to do with him, as a voice of experience and gravitas, and as a manager of champions.

1. Paul Heyman – Easy pick for me on this one. Heyman’s “I told you so” promo after WrestleMania was brilliant. He started riffing, developed ideas throughout the promo and jack hammered the audience with quotable lines. He stuck a few million people in the palm of his hand and played with them. No one else in the business can do that. His “suplex repeat” promo after SummerSlam also was a gem. Yet I think we saw his true brilliance at work during the TLC pre-show. Renee Young asked him about the Ryback-Kane match, which we all knew was going to be a leaky garbage bag full of shit … and Heyman sold it. He put Ryback over as a dangerous guy in the ring (referring subtly to the CM Punk podcast), stating other folks are afraid to work with him. Then he made the same point about Kane, after all we haven’t seen Daniel Bryan in the ring since he fought Kane. Two dangerous guys colliding, plus they get to hit each other with chairs! He didn’t raise his voice or resort to hyperbole. He just concocted an airtight reason for why you had to see that match. Of course the match itself was still awful, but damned if Heyman didn’t sell it. Whatever the WWE pays him, they should triple it.

1. Paul Heyman – I’m probably alone in this thought, but I found this year to be a weak promo year. No one really stood out on the mic this year. I will admit my favorite promo of the year was Brock Lesnar in the Summerslam promo. Nonetheless, with overall work the obvious answer is Paul Heyman. We all already expect Heyman to be awesome and he continued that trend this year. Heyman was awesome putting over the 1 in 21 and talking for Lesnar who was rarely there. I also loved his “my client” gag during promos. Heyman was the most outstanding mic worker this year by far. I don’t think anyone was close to his level. A few others did decent work but that is all.

1. Stephanie McMahon – There are probably not going to be too many people who agree with me here, but Stephanie McMahon was on absolute fire all year long. Paul Heyman was outstanding, but a lot of what he said was just “My client Brock Lesnar…” you know the rest. Stephanie killed it on the microphone opposite Daniel Bryan and made the feud with the Bellas watchable. Without her carrying that program, it would have been dreadful. This is also the woman who was so good at drawing heat that she got Vickie Guerrero cheered.

1. Paul Heyman – The distance between Paul Heyman and everyone else this year is laughable. I mean, it’s not even close. It’s probably telling that the best promo guy in the business right now was someone that was brought up doing promo’s the old fashioned way. In a product where most promo’s are delivered almost in a black hole of charisma and believability, Heyman comes across as purposeful, believable and completely unread. He is a dying breed of wrestling performer and his work behind the microphone has managed to keep a man that’s barely seen on TV (Brock Lesnar) at the forefront of the promotion.

1. Paul Heyman – Guys who just missed the cut were Triple H, Brock Lesnar (for his one interview before Summerslam), Seth Rollins, and even Daniel Bryan surprisingly. In the end, Paul Heyman was a constant during 2014. When Brock Lesnar was not around, it was all about Heyman hyping him up as The Beast. When WWE decided (for whatever reason?) to make Cesaro a “Heyman Guy” after Mania, it was still…all about Paul Heyman on the microphone. Right or wrong, he was exceptional and recently has managed to make pay-per-view pre-shows worth watching with his unique insight. Not a strong year for promos admittedly. However, that is not a knock on Paul Heyman. He deserves the nod 100% folks.

1. Paul Heyman – As I submit my ballot, Paul Heyman is already running away with this category in the voting and it seems doubtful that he’s going to lose it unless 411mania doubles the size of its wrestling staff and all of the new guys have serious crushes on Stephanie McMahon. Thus, I feel like there’s not a heck of a lot that I could add to the conversation. Heyman is obviously great, and he’s great in part because of natural talent and in part because he’s got thirty years of experience doing this, coming out of a system that no longer exists and was unarguably a thousand times better for producing great talkers than anything that exists – or even really could exist – today. This is a man who studied at the feet of Classy Freddie Blassie, The Grand Wizard Ernie Roth, and Captain Lou Albano in New York before making swings through Memphis, the AWA, and many more territories packed with top-flight talkers. There is no substitute for that, even if you were to load the WWE Performance Center with a half dozen acting coaches. (And, if you want proof, just look at Roman Reigns.) There is nobody going today who can rival Heyman and, sadly, I don’t think we will find that person anytime soon unless an individual with freakish, Rock-like levels of charisma falls into WWE’s lap by dumb luck or unless the company takes a cue from Lucha Underground and hires professional actors to fill some of its non-wrestling roles.

1. Paul Heyman – He may not have been around as much this year as he was last year, but his body of work this year was still terrific. Part of the great idea of giving Brock Lesnar the built and the push this year was that we get more Paul Heyman, the man who puts the Jew in Jew-Jitsu! Not only Heyman done a stupendous job in the right with microphone, but his appearances on the pre-show panels this year have made them must-watch, especially if you are a Paul Heyman fan. While the wrestlers he managed may not have always been the center of rhetoric (see Cesaro earlier this year), there is a little doubt that nobody in wrestling can touch Paul Heyman’s gilded tongue.

1. Paul Heyman – The art of talking in pro wrestling is slowly dying, and 2014 was proof of that. Wrestling commentary is at an all time worst, and for the most part promos are a chore to sit through anymore. They are either too contrived, have way too much comedy or lack any form of actually communication. Once of the few men that actually still get it, time in and time out, is Paul Heyman. The man knows what a promo is supposed to do, he knows what he role is, and executes it to perfection. There is no one even close to Heyman, which is both impressive and sad when you think about it.

1. Stephanie McMahon – Paul Heyman is excellent, obviously, but at times I feel he strays dangerously close to self parody with the repetitiveness and verbosity of his promos, so I’m going to go for Stephanie McMahon this year, who was on blistering form from the first show in January right through to her dramatic departure at Survivor Series. Smug, privileged, and prone to bouts of pure evil, McMahon became one of the most uniquely loathsome authority figures in recent memory, and countless times turned routine, show opening in ring promos and half baked soap opera nonsense into something infinitely better than it had any right to be. Throughout the year, Steph was embroiled in rivalries against people that were clearly not as good as her on the microphone- Daniel Bryan was perfectly fine but had moments of hesitation and iffy delivery, while The Bella Twins were, depressingly, the Bella Twins. It’s a testament to how darn great McMahon is and was on the microphone that she was able, in these situations, to make everyone involved look good, even briefly turning Brie Bella into a genuinely sympathetic character. Gone from our screens for now, it still seems likely that one day Stephanie will be able to turn Raw into some kind of Queendom, where the kings bow down, and I can’t think of a nightmarish monarchistic state I would rather observe on television from a safe distance.

1. Paul Heyman – To cut a promo in professional wrestling is to talk fans into buying tickets or purchasing pay per views for an event. No one on the planet even came close to doing the job Paul Heyman did all year to do so. What the black belt master in JEW-Jitsu does better than pretty much everyone on the planet is sell the urgency of an event. Whether it is the dire warnings towards The Undertaker or John Cena, or scheming with The Authority to get his way, or trolling the fans about CM Punk and Lesnar breaking Taker’s streak, Heyman out of sheer will gets people to listen to him. When Heyman cuts loose, he can be gleefully over the top, or gleefully nuanced. Every performance from him is a master class to his fellow WWE peers on how to use words to craft a larger than life character and sell an event. Hopefully WWE takes from his example to create more unique characters, because in one year Heyman has displayed more plays on different archetypes and shown more growth than 95% of the WWE roster combined.

1. Paul Heyman – Paul Heyman is the only person that I would put the remote down when he would show up on the screen. He was great at putting over every aspect of a match, angle, or feud. He was masterful with build to Taker vs. Lesnar and was as glorious as one would expect in his gloating over the fact that Brock ended The Streak. Simply put there is nobody else in the business right now I would want out there to cut a promo to get an angle over.

5. Lana – 12 points

4. Dean Ambrose – 19 points

3. Bray Wyatt – 20 points

2. Stephanie McMahon – 31 points

1. Paul Heyman – 58 points

THE 2014 411 WRESTLING AWARDS:
* The Biggest Disappointments of The Year: Daniel Bryan Achieves His Dream – Then Has to Miss The Rest of The Year – 40 points
* The Best Promo Person of The Year: Paul Heyman – 58 points
* The Best Tag Team of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 7th)
* The Worst PPV/Major Show of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 8th)
* The Best Female of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 9th)
* The Best PPV/Major Show of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 12th)
* The Best Promotion of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 13th)
* The Best Match of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 14th)
* The Best Wrestler of The Year: TO BE DETERMINED (January 15th)