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Posts Tagged ‘WrestleMania 23’

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.

As the final RAW before the WWE’s biggest PPV of the year, WrestleMania 23, last night’s show demonstrated just how ill-conceived the main events have been. Michaels taking out John Cena with his Sweet Chin Music move was about as predictable and anticlimactic as it comes.

Truth be told, Cena vs. Michaels just isn’t that interesting. Both Michaels and Cena are too over as faces and neither is getting any genuine heel heat. And Michaels is about 10 years too late in his career to be main eventing WrestleMania against Cena. Far more intriguing would have been to match up Cena against Edge, Orton or The Great Khali, but apparently Vinnie Mac and company decided to play it safe this year. Too safe. And that makes for an uninteresting WrestleMania.

Despite prodigious amounts of promotion, including bringing in Donald Trump to help lend WM23 some outside-of-wrestling star power, the Billionaire’s Hair Match seems to intrigue Vinnie Mac far more than it does the average RAW viewer, and again suffers from utter predictability: does anyone really believe Lashley will lose and that Trump would agree to be shaved bald? Vinnie Mac is a foregone conclusion as the bald billionaire. Yawn.

I could go on, but the rest of the WM23 undercard is just as boring and predictable. And we all know that, whatever happens, the better undercard matches will simply get a RAW, ECW or SmackDown “rematch” next week, anyway, and that Trump will appear for one more video conferencing cameo to gloat over a bald Vinnie Mac on next week’s RAW. What else is new? Certainly nothing coming up at WM23.

About the only way to save WM23 is to throw the fans a curve ball by encouraging Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to come out of “wrestling retirement” to make a surprise guest appearance and grab the WWE title away from Cena after Cena defeats Michaels, as part of what could be perhaps a six-month return that would climax with The Rock as a heel champ surrendering the title back to Cena at SummerSlam so he can go make movies again.

Of course, the likelihood of that is about equal to a “living and dead” reunion of The Beatles at WM23.