MLW Workrate Report
What worked ---
Wrestling that is not the WWE on my television: Good lord, the wife went to bed early because she’s six months pregnant and sick and crazy and hormonal and all sorts of things wrapped up into one, so I got to torment myself with bits and pieces of Raw, and what the fuck? This shit is terrible. Triple H was out dropping balloons and being the worst eleventh grade drama class actor slash star linebacker trying to get an easy B but really pushing even a corrupt teacher’s ability to compromise her morals. I was also “lucky” enough to catch, for the second week in a row, the segment of the show pushing the Jim Ross & Jerry Lawler vs. Jonathan Coachman & Al Snow angle. That alone was enough for me to never give Raw a chance again for three months.
CM Punk vs. Raven: Nosawa is not “straight edge,” yet he comes out wearing an ICP jersey. I know when I think straight edge, I think of the Insane Clown Posse. The straight edge rules for this match are completely awesome – no chairs or tables or any of that shit, no drinking by the crowd, no smoking, not even any cussing, and we have a straight edge referee. The main reason this is completely awesome is because whether they like it or not, now the fans have to motherfuckin’ hate CM Punk. I don’t care how smart and internetty you are, when you’re sitting there and the five degenerates around you are suddenly no longer allowed to drink beer because of CM Punk, you’re gonna keep your little weasel ass quiet for fear of getting your ass kicked, much like how you stop vocally rooting for the visiting team after the seventh inning stretch at a baseball game. They could do so much with this angle, having Punk vs. Raven in the first match with the right for the crowd to even drink beer that whole night on the line; that would be ten fuckin’ thousand times more entertaining than a stupid fake-ass commissionership stipulation. I know you could never allow yourself to lose out on all the concession profits, but damn, how fuckin’ awesome would it be for MLW to have a show in a bar, and CM Punk wins the first match and they have to go dry the rest of the night? You’d have a riot, and when it comes to wrestling, legit riots mean legit heat, which means legit motherfuckin’ angling going on. I don’t necessarily dig Raven as much as I did years ago, but I’ve gotta give it to him – he’s never openly screwed the business. I’ve never heard of him refusing to job, and he had a reputation for caring about ECW when it struggled, and caring about indys nowadays after getting dropped from the WWE. It’s a shame he has to save his hair for Jeff Jarrett on TNA instead of losing it to Punk on some shitty indy show in front of a couple hundred people at best. They seem to love each other, and Punk’s whole straight edge rules is simply the yin to the yang of Raven’s rules style matches in WCW when he bailed out on ECW back in the day. The crowd is actually vocally against Punk and for Raven, because of the non-drinking thing I bet, and that’s great. The working of the crowd’s frustration goes further when Raven is ready to whip Punk into the railing ringside, but your straight edge ref stops him, threatening a disqualification for doing so. The crowd is mega-pissed. After the lengthy face beatdown period, Raven ducks when Nosawa is holding him for the Punk forearm bash, and Raven hits a most proper headlock style bulldog, but the ref does the old sore arm after two. Punk rolls up Raven and wins, and outside the ring exclaims, “I’m going to Disney World.” That’s quality.
The closing montage: Hey, this is some version of “Mountain Song” by Jane’s Addiction. A quality video clip montage is a good way to close out this four week cycle of MLW squeezing shows out of one single card. My hype factor is usually the first week of new shit, I’m stoked because I know what happened and it’s gonna rule to watch it. The second and third week, I’m usually half-hearted into it, because shit, I read who won like two weeks ago, but there’s probably one decent match on each show, so I’ll watch. And by the fourth week, I completely forgot everything about who won and lost and can get into the show a little if there’s a good match scheduled. Jane’s Addiction is a nice touch. These fucks are back together I heard. I guess Perry Farrell’s broke. Jane’s Addiction is absolutely great acid music, especially the first live album they put out. One time, me and this little big-titted Italian bitch I was dating both had a head full of acid, and we spent like five hours naked, rubbing each other, all while Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and the first Jane’s Addiction played, continuously. There wasn’t even anything sexual about it. Sex is terrible on acid anyways – you look down and get to thinking about it and get lost in thinking about it and next thing you know, you’re flaccid and the girl is doing super spiralgraphs in the dark air with a burning stick of incense, and it there’s no climax, just peaks and valleys. This version of “Mountain Song” they used on MLW is not as great as the one from Nothing’s Shocking, but it has an awesome super-psychedelic guitar solo by Dave Navarro at the end, complete with the distorted production levels of any good acid rock, flanging in and out. Quality hallucinogenic music is hard to come by today, just like quality crowd-tweaking wrestling, as most hallucinogens are chemical and industrial, and thus the music made for it is too urban and digital and way too far up the bpm scale for a good time inside your own mind.
What didn’t work ---
Tony Mamaluke vs. Mikey Whipwreck: Okay, Mamaluke comes out to boos and is taking on Whipwreck, who is part of MLW’s second biggest heel faction? This whole cult of personality crap in 21st century wrestling sucks, though mad props to Mikey on the nice red and black goathead pentagram t-shirt. In high school, this older dude I worked with at an appliance store gave me a t-shirt that was a white pentagram on a black shirt, with all these little symbols and shit all over the pentagram. He told me it was some acid he got when he was in high school, called Black Star, and when you bought so many hits, you’d get a t-shirt. That’s quality drug distribution right there. In the beginning of this match, Whipwreck is the goofy, jivish redheaded (by way of Manic Panic) step-child of Dusty Rhodes, shucking his way into knocking Mamaluke down in a comedic way. Basically, this match is a squash, where the heel acts like a face and gets cheered, and the guy getting jobbed is hyped up by Joey Styles as being a key part in the junior heavyweight tournament coming soon; every aspect of that is illogical. At one point, Styles calls a guillotine leg drop, and says that’s the only French reference you’ll get from him, suggesting his political beliefs. The whole anti-France thing since the Iraqi war is fuckin’ ridiculous, and the only thing that could save that poorly planned angle by the Bush administration would be if they knock down the Statue of Liberty because a Frenchy gave it to us and return it to France in dump trucks, scrapped right beneath the Eiffel Tower. I’d vote for George W. Bush three times in 2004 if he did some crazy shit like that. To Joey Styles’ credit, he didn’t say “Oh my God” at all this week, so he still only owes me three dollars. Whipwreck hits a top rope Whippersnapper, and that is that. Crowd cheers for the bad guy.
The CM Punk and Raven promos: I still don’t understand Nosawa as a straight edger, and I still don’t understand why Punk is so frustratingly unenthralling in his MLW promos. Maybe it’s because he’s being so serious, pausing dramatically between every fuckin’ word when he says “take…you…out.” CM Punk was great during his match when he got on the mic, and he’s great on the IWA Mid South tapes I’ve heard him do commentary on, because he’s a cocky little asshole straight edger. That’s heel enough. No one is afraid of straight edgers; they’re idealistic kids from sheltered upbringings. Punk should be the cocky, smarmy asshole he naturally is, and does portray during matches. They’re trying too hard to push this straight edge gimmick as some serious philosophical disagreement between the two. As for Raven’s promo, I have a hard time taking a guy seriously as an ass-kicker when he’s wearing eye shadow and is almost hovering around 40 years old.
The MLW Breaking News segment: It was a nice way to explain why Sabu won’t have his loser-leaves-town match with Christopher Daniels, but the monotone codeine cough syrup addict they got to do the voice-over killed it. Sabu has a torn triceps and has blown off getting surgery done to fix it, probably because he’s broke. I mean, he’s the guy who made putting crazy glue into your wounds en vogue. Regardless of how stupid you think he is, he’s motherfuckin’ tough as shit. So Christopher Daniels will be in yet another eight-man junior heavyweight tournament. These things are really played out, and you’d think they’d try to do something extra to make it special and stand out from the same indy tourneys that happen every other weekend all around the country. By the way, putting a piece of plywood above the top rope to make a diving platform for these guys to do half-gainers onto each other is not the something extra to make it special I speak of.
Steve Williams & The Sandman vs. Simon Diamond & C.W. Anderson: I tend to notice stupid little things, and one such thing was how The Sandman came out with his 12-pack. He was still using the factory handle, had opened one end, and had it tilted so that beers didn’t fall out that open end. It’s tough when you’re in walkabout mode, drinking from a 12. Do you rip a tear by the handle and dig that way, so you don’t have to keep the box on tilt the rest of the night, yet risk ripping the handle apart, causing you to carry it like a football till you get it thinned down to a pocketable amount? Or do you do what The Sandman did and go from one end, drinking four or five quickly enough that when you do have to travel with it by the handle, it’s not so full that cold ones come tumbling out the open end? The Sandman’s entrance is entertaining enough for me – he walks around on chairs and pours beers in people’s mouths. “Enter Sandman” is the only song by Metallica that I can love on post-And Justice For All, which means if you throw out the first four albums, they’re even with The Manhattan Transfer in how much they rock me, as “The Boy From New York City” gets me just as hyped, except instead of slamming a beer and smashing the can on my forehead, I clap my hands haphazardly and shake my head like an epileptic. The Sandman’s tattoo of his own face with a bullethole through the forehead, upside down on the inside of his one arm, is absolutely great because he was sitting there one night, and decided he wanted a tattoo of himself that was best visible while he slammed beers in front of people. My buddy Zach the White Puerto Rican once was holed up in an airport and he went to the bar at like 10 in the morning, and the only person there was The Sandman and his stripper wife. I can appreciate Jim Fullington living his gimmick like that; not many give so much attention to kayfabing their gimmicks anymore. C.W. and Diamond come out, and C.W.’s trunks with his hand sign initial thing on the front are fuckin’ ridiculous. In fact, that’s basically the reason I hate C.W. Anderson. I mean, it’s one thing to think, “Hey, I can do my wrestling name with my hands, dude.” But to go from that to having some airbrush artist at the run-down ghetto mall in town actually put that shit on a pair of singlets for you…goddamn. I do appreciate him and Simon Diamond having color-coordinated trunks though; all tag team champions should do that. Oddly enough, me and Zach the White Puerto Rican used to go to watch ECW at a sports bar in Richmond, which played wrestling prominently in their bar because Simon Diamond was the bartender, and now here’s Diamond and Sandman there in the ring and me here watching it and Zach hiding out from Hurricane Isabel, and all it goes to show life is cycles, not time lines. Motherfuckers thought the World was flat at one point, too, but then realized it was a globe. And if life is cycles, then what goes around comes around. This match was terrible, but it did answer my wondering of what happened to P.J. Friedman, Steve Williams old pupil from early on in MLW. He came running out, did a weak chairshot on Anderson, then ran back to the back, having absolutely no effect on the match itself or his future career. Then the masked guy they’ve been saying was Corino comes out and causes disruption and The Sandman gets spinebustered onto a chair and The Extreme Horsemen hold onto the tag belts again. What a screwy piece of shit match.