Greeting pilgrims and welcome to this weeks Wrestling Sandwich!

Yes, I have made it to another Saturday as your regular writer but only just.

I’ve actually written the majority of the piece late on Wednesday night after finding out that my very pregnant wife will be induced on Friday and I will likely be holding my new baby daughter in my arms by the time you are reading this. It’s also likely she will go into labor anytime between Wednesday and Friday. So rather than ask for a fill-in I decided I was going to do a themed column.

The big thing about what you are going to read below is that it pretty much is stream of conscious ranting. I had the general idea of what I was going to write about this week after the WWE’s Extreme Rules PPV. It has incited more than a little passion in the wrestling die-hards and I’m included in that. Because of the time constraints on me this week I got the family to bed, turned out the lights, strapped on the headphones and listened to Danko Jones and just wrote for two hours straight.

Below may be the rantings of a true wrestling geek but it does go to the heart of what I dislike about wrestling these days.

I hope you enjoy this diversion from the usual Sandwich concept and I encourage you to voice your opinions on the question that I ask towards the end.

It used to be the conventional wisdom to most in war situations that you would want to take out the leader(s). Kill them. I mean, how will a legion of troops survive without the person they are following? A few decades ago, when the psychology of war became more prominent that this line of thinking took a sharp 180 degree turn dependant on the type of leader there was.

Seems if you have a major control freak who’s a bit unhinged, they can often do more damage from within if kept alive than if someone else comes to power who’s more logical and grounded. History now show’s that if you close in around someone they become increasingly more irrational and make increasingly bigger errors in judgment while madly trying to keep their power. You can actually reduce the time in conflict as the put upon leader will likely implode and likely all fighting will stop.

After watching the WWE’s Extreme Rules PPV from this past weekend I am convinced that the only person that can truly kill the WWE is Vince McMahon himself and the longer he grips onto his power the more irrational he is becoming and the greater damage he’s causing the company he turned into a billion dollar, global juggernaut.

Nothing I’m about to say is a surprise to anyone. Really, we all know Vince went off the reservation a long time ago but the glacial pace that this downward spiral has been moving really doesn’t have the same impact as say, the sudden collapse of WCW that took around 24 months. While we have noticed each slipping of the cog, we usually have taken it as a singular event but if you pull back to the bigger picture you will see the whole machine is grinded gears and running itself down.

Vince has always had peculiar quirks but thanks to his vision, business acumen, cutthroat mentality and sheer stubbornness to succeed has always earned him a begrudging success. When he took control of the WWF from his father he knew the only way to go was to expand. He saw the writing on the wall for the territories and that to survive and thrive he had to take the company national and then global. He flagged well in advance that he was going to go into markets where traditionally you wouldn’t go and if you didn’t want to play ball with him, he’d just take what was yours and use it all to himself.

This earned him as many detractors as admirers however Vince didn’t really care which side of the fence you sat. If you could make him money he was your friend and if you couldn’t, then good luck to you. He used up and spit out many people as a way to get noticed, something Dave Schultz would attest to. Asked to protect the business from John Stossel who was doing a 20/20 piece on wrestling and the WWF, he made the mistake of telling Schultz that wrestling is fake. Schultz slapped him twice and chased him down the hall. This incident garnered Vince McMahon major mainstream publicity. Schultz, who was something a loose cannon who went after Mr. T whom he thought had taken his spot at the inaugural WrestleMania, found himself effectively blackballed from North American wrestling.

The decades since have been littered with stories on the brilliance of Vince and his dark side. Luckily for most involved with the WWE those two entities were separated and the business kept on growing and making him more money. There was the blip that was WCW and their ratings dominance for nearly two years but after Vince and the WWE clawed back that ascendancy they never turned back. I also believed this was the moment that Vince believed that no matter what, no matter how batshit crazy he acts and what he does, people will still pay to see the WWE.

While I have felt this way for a while now the two really key moments that screamed I was right happened this very week. Once was John Cena beating Brock Lesnar. The second was the conference call where Vince talked about WWE business matters. The thing about this call was Vince came right and said that ratings and house show numbers were up. What? Really?

Usually when you make claims you either have the numbers to back it up or you at least refer to staff that is next to impossible to verify. With this stuff all you had to do is look at ratings, crowds and buyrates from this time last year and compare to this years.

Guess what?

Vince was lying.

Shocked?

I’m not.

The real question is why? I know that the WWE is a publically traded company and that Vince has to answer to share holders. He needs to make them money or else his shares will bottom out. Lying about some of the most easily checked facts you can find is not the way to endear yourself to your shareholders.

The fact is Vince is a carny and was raised by carny’s. He’s always going to sell the show and his desire to keep people guessing is probably more than he can handle on occasion. I also wouldn’t put it past Vince that he could be deliberately trying to devalue this stock of the company so he can buy it call back. I could totally see in Vince’s mind that rather than keeping the company strong and buying higher price stocks he makes the WWE into a joke, devalues the prices, buys it back for peanuts and then rehabs the brand.

It’s the exact batshit, crazy reasoning that would explain Vince and his actions since 1998.

It would also explain the crazy business practices, the latest is the signing of Brock Lesnar to a 40 date, $5,000,000 contract and then have him use up nearly 1/8 of those dates in the first month and have him lose his first match. He may as well have taking that five million in one dollar bills and burnt it.

All sane and informed wrestling pundits will tell you the money is always in the chase. The most effective use of Lesnar was having him destroy your roster and remain undefeated for the length of his contract and then have him be beaten at WM in a massive payday. Having Lesnar getting pinned clean first time is the single most stupid thing you could do.

Brock Lesnar is a once in a millennia wrestler and that may be underselling it. Hogan, Rock and Austin are once in a generation. In Brock you have a legit amateur champion with a freakish physique, towering physical presence and menacing charisma. He was also a legit MMA world champion and biggest draw in the history of both sports. He just jumped from UFC to the WWE and generated intense buzz and hype in the matter of weeks and was well on his way to helping the WWE avoid the traditional post-WrestleMania slump. His kind will likely be never seen again.

Then he gets beat. Clean. Beaten clean by John Cena. Cena being the guy most fans have long gotten sick of seeing. Then Cena does the fighting babyface promo at the end. This wasn’t just burning money, it was setting the fire and then pouring every flammable substance you could find over the top.

Most think this outcome was a last minute decision but the plan was that Lesnar was always going to be fed to Cena. In Vince’s mind it was worthwhile spending $5,000,000 on someone to help get a wrestler a stronger babyface reaction than to get a return ten time over by just pushing the heck out of Brock. It’s the craziest thinking you can imagine. Doubly so when there is no way you can get people thinking any different about John Cena these days.

Well actually I’m wrong. I saw this comment by Scott Keith on his blog and I think he sums up the match and the fall-out from the outcome quite accurately…

You know what really grinds my gears about the finish to the Brock-Cena match? I’m watching this near-***** match, and I’m having the exact reaction as a jaded anti-Cena smark that WWE wanted. Lesnar is kicking the fucking shit out of Cena and I’m like “Yes! Kick the fucking shit out of this poser!” because although I like Cena as a worker I hate him as a character and sometimes it’s fun to mark out like that. So the match goes on, Cena is taking a vicious beating and bleeding all over, but gets the hope spots and I’m like “OK, Cena is taking a vicious beating but he keeps fighting, that’s pretty awesome of him if he’s losing”. And by the end, I’m WITH CENA. I’m sympathetic for him, and I’m ready to give him props and cheer for him once Brock finishes him off because he fought the good fight and lost like a man. And then he won as I was like “Well, fuck John Cena.” and everything was back to the way it was when we started. That’s what makes me so angry about the finish. They could have rehabbed Cena in exactly the way they’ve been desperate to do for years now and they FUCKED IT UP AGAIN. Never mind all the super-smarky armchair booking stuff that people will say motivating the anger and blah blah blah, but as a FAN I was going nuts for this thing and that ending just totally deflated me. I can only imagine what people who aren’t super-hardcore fans but wanted to see Cena beaten would have been thinking. Great job, WWE.

Just to lay the boots in some more to Vince and his ass backwards thinking, when the RAW rating dropped it showed that viewership was up sharply in the first hour and once the announcers stated that Lesnar was escorted out of the building, rating dropped off. Imagine if they had Lesnar win and not driven off those curious by Lesnar’s jump back to the WWE.

Which leads me to my next point. Why does Vince actively ruin every hot angle they have?

The strange thing about the current state of the WWE is that Vince knows what you need to do to make money and draw people to watch wrestling. He forgot for a while during the mid-90’s but once he remembered he launched straight into the biggest money making period the business ever saw. So why does Vince go out of his way to defy what the business was built on and almost sabotage the way they do business?

Two previous examples were the emergence of The Nexus and C.M Punk “I Respect You John” promo from last year. Both were very different buzz getters and created insane amounts of interest and hype. Within weeks they were just any other angle. But that’s like anything that have touched since the end of the Attitude Era.

First cab off the rank was The Invasion. Trillions of words have been written about The Invasion with Vince’s ego being firmly in the middle of almost every opinion on why it didn’t work. Even something simple as having Stephanie being revealed as the owner of ECW, while being blinding stupid, also came out of nowhere and burned through months of potential storylines in a matter of moments.

There is truly no need for me to list off every single botched angle they WWE have done but I would like to mention one more that many may not have even realized was botched this past weekend.

For a while now it was planned for Kharma to return and destroy whoever was the women’s champion to help set up a feud with Beth Phoenix. When work leaked, and by leaked I mean to only a few “in-the-know” people that didn’t even report it was going to happen, Vince flipped and changed the match. So out of the 4-5 million regular fans of the WWE, about a couple hundred heard of this plan and because of that, Vince changed his mind.

I could not think of a better way for the WWE to get buzz on Kharma by having her suddenly return and win the title on one of the most talked about PPV’s in recent memory. It would perfectly set her up to feud with Beth and if booked right, money will be made. Lalya winning the title is zero buys.

Zero.

That’s more money up in smoke.

This all goes back to my “Crazy Vince” claim. You could excuse one or two booking snafu’s but to consistently sabotage almost every angle you do in 10 years is more than crazy, it’s insane.

But we all know Vince is off his rocker. For the past couple of months he has facilitated on the issue of wrestler weights. One week he wants everyone announced at their actual weight and then the next he wants weights kayfabed because announcing anyone under 200lbs would look bad. Oh it gets better/worse…you flip flop so much that you deliberately forget to tell Jim Ross that wrestler weights are legit this week and you produce Michael Cole to mock J.R about getting them wrong.

Because humiliating J.R is more important than most anything else. Or why would you have the greatest wrestling play-by-play announcer actually announce your product when you can have Michael Cole go so over the top and piss people off to the point that they turn off the channel than having someone actually sell them on the stories you are seeing and getting them to buy PPV’s.

But I forgot, PPV is a dying business (just don’t tell UFC who make $25 million a year from them) so instead of using television to build up to your cash-cow PPV events every month, you barely mention or put any though into PPV altogether and get yourself to the point that you sell barely 100,000 of these domestically. To put that in perspective, ECW in the 90’s had a TV viewership less than that of TNA and their WORST PPV came in at around 40,000.

ECW….jeez don’t mention ECW to Vince. Rumor has it that he brought back the ECW brand because he was sick of the ECW chants. So rather than embrace the brand that was started by someone else that could make him money, he hired and then fired the original ECW crew then turned the ECW show into something wholly forgettable. By the time they closed the ECW brand down, no one gave a shit about ECW.

That is systemic of a greater issue…in no uncertain terms can anyone or anything that wasn’t solely thought up by Vince or his team get over or else face the consequence. Management makes all the noises about people reaching for the brass ring and doing it by taking initiative and making your own chances…just don’t tell that to Zac Ryder who was going no where fast and decided to take to youtube and have some fun. All of a sudden you have an internet wrestling sensation that actually translates to live crowds and gets himself over. The problem for Zac is that he got over without the WWE machines help so that machine spends the last year tearing him down and making him nothing but a jobber geek.

Jobber geek…interesting term that. When you make someone World or WWE champion conventional wisdom says you keep them strong. Not on Vince’s watch. It has been staggering in the last 10 years how many men have gotten the title and then spent the majority of their title reign losing. Chris Jericho was the first to taste this particular type of push and played bit parter in the main event of WM19 even though he was the first Unified Word Champion. Jack Swagger, The Mix, Rey Mysterio, C.M Punk all tasted this type of title run.

But really, who cares about titles. Certainly the WWE doesn’t. Word has it Vince only keeps them around because the wrestlers themselves to take meaning from it. If he had it his way that would never be kept around. Vince is so against the idea of titles that you can’t actually use the word title or strap. They are championships.

Oh, don’t even mention the word wrestling. You see, Vince owns an entertainment company…just don’t tell the WRESTLERS he employs. Men are Superstars and women are Diva’s and any word that means wrestling like grapple or catch are strictly forbidden.

Speaking of forbidden did you know that Vince bans all wrestlers from acknowledging the crowd during a match? Did you get that? A wrestler cannot look into the crowd. Next time you see a tag match notice how the babyface on the apron during the heat segment tries to get the crowd involved by stomping his feet or clapping…also notice that they do it while looking at the guys in the ring.

Just make sure that ring isn’t in anything but a major city as Vince decrees that to mention a small town makes the WWE look like a bush league promotion. Heaven forbid anyone outside of New York gets to be part of the WWE UNIVERSE.

I’m only scratching the surface here. This man has so many hang-ups that I wonder how anyone can function like that and still run a million dollar company.

Last week I wrote a segment in defense of Rey Mysterio and his drug test failure and after hearing more over the last week I only have firmed my opinion…all thanks to Vince.

For some reason in mid-February Vince got irrationally angry about all thing Rey Mysterio and rumors started to fly about WWE management souring on Rey. Turns out that Rey was actually tested on Feb 13th while visiting backstage at a RAW show. Most in attendance thought that was pretty cold since Rey was out rehabbing an injury and damn skippy you know The Undertaker would have NEVER been tested if he showed.

So do the math here. Rey tested positive in mid February and nearly 10 weeks later the WWE finally announce the positive result. What happened between the positive test and now? Would that be WrestleMania?

Vince was pissed because he was pushing Rey to get back in the ring to wrestle Sin Cara as they were going to attempt a mass-mask wearing world record. So rather than just suspend Rey outright he kept it all to himself in the hopes that Rey could make it to the event to complete. He didn’t. Vince stayed angry. So the positive match was for trace amounts of an amphetamine that was likely in a weight loss supplement he was taking. Rey provided information on all things he was taking but Vince didn’t care and dropped the ban hammer on Rey for the second time.

Just for the record many substances that are legally prescribed can cause false positive drug tests. There was a guy at my old work that was taking Wilburton and Zoloft, which caused an incorrect amphetamine positive and was tested again straight away and he passed with flying colours. Damn, Mythbusters did an episode years ago that if you ate a couple of pieces of orange of poppy seed cake you can test positive for opiates. It’s not that hard.

Rey’s original violation was not having a prescription for medication while rehabbing an arm and leg injury. The reality was he had that prescription and was not given any time to provide it. When Rey came out to defend himself he was not looked upon favourably.

I covered off on why I think Rey is having issues with Vince last week but wanted to reiterate part of that here since I’m panning the fuck out of Vince this week.

Seriously, I have always been a WWE fan. Since I was 9 when I watched my first ever-wrestling match I was hooked. Vince has been responsible for some of the best childhood memories. I stayed up to 3am to watch Hulk Hogan slam Andre The Giant. I cheered wildly when Randy Savage won the WWF title. I was devastated when The British Bulldogs were cheated out of the tag team titles. I was dumbfounded when Paul Orndorff turned his back on Hulk. The list is endless and even today as a father of three (soon to be four!!!!!) I hope to watch the TV shows and PPV’s with them and get the same visceral thrill as I got when my father took me to the old Festival Hall in Brisbane in 1985 and watched Andre The Giant beat Big John Studd in the main event.

I want to see the WWE thrive and be the continued #1 promotion in the world. I just cannot for the life of me figure out why Vince is so hell bent on destroying what he created.

This circles me back to Brock Lesnar and a question I ask you the reader…

Do you think Vince re-signed Brock for whatever money he could just to have him be beaten so cleanly by his top star as a way for Brock to be punished for leaving Vince in the first place?

Do you think Vince would actually spend $5,000,000 just to get such a public payback?

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