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While they’re taking their sweet, slow time about it, it’s clear WWE is grooming The Great Khali to become a legit giant in the tradition of Andre the Giant. That’s a trick they never quite got right with The Big Show.

The main problem right now with The Great Khali is that he’s so large - a legit 7′2″, 420 pounds - that building him up makes his matches a bit boring, because they’re all squashes. How many times can we see Khali absolutely destroy Super Crazy and Carlito before it becomes a joke that the man’s not a number-one contender for a WWE title?

But at least he’s being promoted the right way, unlike Umaga. Umaga is way heavier than Khali, without being anywhere near seven feet tall. Seriously, Umaga should do a diet comparison and work out with Khali. Drop about 60 pounds and Umaga might just be as fearsome as he’s being promoted as being.

By devoting the entire hour-plus-overrun this past Monday to a “WrestleMania rematch” between John Cena and Shawn Michaels, the WWE has done more to legitimize the feud between the two babyfaces than anything they’ve done to date, including their Wrestlemania 23 main event match.

The Raw rematch, broadcast live from London, England, did not place Cena’s WWE title on the line, but in every other respect, the match was superior to the WM23 Cena-Michaels clash. It was longer, more brutal, more entertaining and took both men more to the limit of their showmanship and physical endurance abilities. Following the match, I’m sure both were interested in hangover cures.

That’s saying something. But not something good. WrestleMania is supposed to be WWE’s biggest annual event, and yet they give away a better match on a RAW broadcast from England than they asked people to pay for as part of WrestleMania? That just doesn’t make sense.

Sure, it played in front of a huge live crowd, but don’t for a second think that WrestleMania 23 was a success on the level of WrestleMania 3, 20 years ago. That memorable 1987 pay-per-view featured Hulk Hogan doing the near-impossible… bodyslamming the un-bodyslammable Andre the Giant. As weak and quick as Hogan’s bodyslam of Andre was, it is still the most memorable moment in WrestleMania’s 23-year history, and no figures produced by modern budgeting software to declare WM23 a bigger moneymaker will change that fact.

Nothing about WrestleMania 23 really measured up, and mostly it was due to poor, run-of-the-mill booking. The main event, John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels, lacked heat for many reasons. First, Michaels is too past his prime to really be a main event threat to the red-hot Cena. Also, both were crowd favorites and wrestling is at its best when there is someone to boo. That lead folks to have to choose between a legend like HBK and the WWE’s hottest champ since Stone Cold and The Rock walked away from the biz.

The “billionaire’s hair match” was too predictable to be interesting, despite some decent story-building. No one believed Donald Trump would agree to be shaved bald for WrestleMania, especially since he’s in the middle of a season of The Apprentice. So the outcome - Vinnie Mac getting shaved bald due to an Umaga loss - was entirely too predictable.

The ECW Originals vs. New Breed match was OK as far as it went. The lumberjill women’s match was nothing special. Undertaker continuing his undefeated streak by becoming the new SmackDown champ was also entirely too predictable, and another example of booking two crowd-favorites against each other with neither playing a true heel.

I liked the Money In the Bank ladder match best of all, but the rest of the card was purely average at best. It’s a shame that wiser minds didn’t prevail. Even though he’s not yet established very well, a far more compelling main event would have been a title match between Cena and The Great Khali… it would have called to mind the classic Hogan/Andre main event of 1987.

Missed opportunities.