MLW Workrate Report - 09/29/03
What worked ---
Tony Mamaluke vs. Sonjay Dutt: For as long as Dutt’s moveset is new and exciting and not yet played out for the audience, he will be over as a motherfucker. Dutt starts out with a nice weird over-the-ropes rana thing, but then misses a jump outside, and from there Mamaluke goes on the offensive. I love when Tony Mamaluke kills himself for my viewing pleasure, and were I a money mark, and me and Dutch Mantel and Buddy Landell and five sluts were sitting around a table discussing glorified jobbers, I would demand Mamaluke be our man, so that he could be the junior heavyweight champion and have great matches at house shows but get completely destroyed on TV and he’d be believable in both roles and I’d destroy the lightweight class in a more traditional way than the WWE does. It’s all about the high spots with Dutt, and just as he lost momentum with a blown one, he regains it by hitting a top rope neckbreaker on Mamaluke, and following it up with the Hindu splash for the fast duke. It’s odd that the American J-Cup tourney is playing out, yet were you to go to one of the websites advertised during MLW television, you’d see that he’s already won the thing. Forgive me some fantasy booking here, but after Dutt’s run gets boring as the fans become more familiar and eventually bored by his high spots, it seems only natural that he and Sabu work as a team, both being from wrestling derivatives of India. Imagine Fonzie’s toothless ass and Sabu looking bewildered, trying to explain to Dutt’s clean and pretty-boyish getting-pussy-on-dance-night-at-the-club character how to stab people with a ten-penny nail.
The War Games: I thought the backstage coin toss was a nice worked beginning to the obvious way they were gonna run things, with the heel advantage. C.W. Anderson is the first out, and I’m of the belief that in a match like this, or any cage match to settle long-term grudges, dudes should be shaking the cage and checking how solid and dangerous it is, especially when you’re in C.W.’s position and The Sandman is lollygagging around the ring, wasting all that delicious beer for the cheap cheers of the derelict teenagers in the front row. What the fuck was up with that retarded-looking chick with the red, white, and blue wristbands when Sandman was pouring beer down his face? As the match started up, I remembered, as I always do, that C.W. is much better than he used to be in ECW, and whenever he’s not making goofy hand monograms or standing around while Corino and Diamond talk, I can enjoy the fuck out of him. He punishes Sandman with some nice, stiff forearms, a superkick, and some cane shots. Right as Sandman gains the advantage and C.W. takes the face plant into the cage leading to the blood, they cut to commercial. I can dig they might be trying to avoid an obvious blade job, but at the same time I’m brainwashed by that old Sexual Politics of Professional Wrestling article by whatever dude wrote that and now equate the blood of a wrestling match with the orgasm of a porn, so cutting to yet another Girls of Urban Extra Extreme Same Thing Pay-Per-View featuring G.I. Ho and that fat ass chick in the ref’s get-up, and then returning to C.W. already bloody is like if porn was allowed on TV and when a dude was about to finish the deed, you cut to commercial and come back just to see semen splattered on the chick’s face and they’re moving along to the next sex scene, well, it doesn’t seem quite correct. C.W. is awesome at selling The Sandman’s crossface, and Steve Corino is next in, with the barbed wire around the fist gimmick. Two minutes later, in comes Terry Funk, who maniacally throws a chair into the cage like a young hooligan, then hobbles down the stairs towards the ring like the old man he is. They’re all going at it, and Funk tosses a chair at Anderson, which barely grazes him, but he sells it. Funk does the ol’ repeated face ram of Corino, leading to his blade job, and as per your expectations, Corino is quickly a bloody mess. Simon Diamond is in next for heel advantage, and we get an excellent close-up of Anderson rubbing Sandman’s plasmic face into the cage mesh that would make Puerto Rico proud. C.W. headbutts Sandman in the nuts and Sandman does the Curly from the Three Stooges bit of running around on his side in a circle, which was easily the most out-of-place moment of the match. Steve Williams is out next, to some classic Kiss, and he punches Diamond, who falls and reaches into the wristband, and then gets rammed into the cage for the dirty deed. I hate knowing how shit is done, as I might not have noticed all that if I weren’t such a so-called smart. Fuck smart. Sabu is the super-secret fourth man on the side of good, to counter P.J. Walker’s over-hyped ass on the other side, and is gonna climb the cage like an animal until Fonzie leads him to the door. Sabu has passed on surgery of his torn triceps, which is both amazingly stupid and incredibly tough at the same time. I guess if I didn’t have insurance, I might not get it either, but that can’t be good for his already half-crippled body. Barry Windham is out last for the Extreme Horsemen, and is completely awesome, fuck the internet, in his beer-gutted glory and bandana around longhaired head and blue jeans gear. In fact, the only thing that separates Windham from forty-nine guys I’d see drinking beer from little personal coolers when they have bluegrass in the park on a Sunday evening in town is that obvious knee brace worn on the outside of Windham’s Wranglers. Sabu hits an Arabian legdrop onto Walker across a table, just as Bill Alphonso makes himself the fifth member of The Funkin’ Army to even it up, and once in, he gets beat down and does absolutely nothing to sell the beating whatsoever. Pretty quickly after the match beyond has started, Funk lights his branding iron and nails Corino in the back with it as he has Sabu in a Boston crab, then Funk blows fire in Corino’s face and hits the step-over toehold for the submission, to set up the repeat of Funk’s run for the ECW title in ’97. Even after the match is over, Windham is still punching the Sandman, probably over last night’s bar tab, and then Sabu has a weird cops and robbers like stand-off with Windham to allow Funk to hobble out the cage. A good enough match to make me happy, as it took most of the hour and was full of more blood than you usually see on American TV wrestling, and nothing about it was terribly bad. They probably could’ve built up a few more individual feuds within the match other than the obvious Corino vs. Funk one, but what the fuck are you gonna do in a big clusterfuck excuse for violence like this. I think the use of lots of blood and some fire was a good call, sticking to the formula that’s worked so well in the past. (Note: site was down last night, so I couldn’t post this, and today at work I was thinking about a haiku I had written about Terry Funk…
No one quits wrestling;
Shot knees and grand memories
Carry the Funker.
…well, on top of a 32 foot ladder breathing lead paint dust thinking about that, “Desperado” came on the classic rock station we listen to for sanity, and I was tempted to moonsault my boss and throw a fireball at him, as it had to be a sign from above or below or somewhere other than inside trying to force me in proper directions, but it was a beautiful early fall day out, and I got bills to remember, so I ignored the omen.)
What didn’t work ---
The Extreme Horsemen promo to start the show off: I love Corino, but he gets tiresome. The strength of the original Four Horsemen was not only their in-ring work, but also the fact you had Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, and J.J. Dillon, all of whom could cut an effective promo in different ways. The Extreme Horsemen have Corino, and then Diamond will do his bit, which is okay enough, but C.W. adds nothing to the talking department. This puts a lot on Corino, and thus, makes him boring after a while. He says something about they’ll never sell out to the WWE because “we don’t care about sports entertainment, we care about wrestling.” Someone within Major League Wrestling really needs to just be in charge of keeping guys heel or face in everything they fuckin’ do. If we are constantly being barraged with Joey Styles telling us that Vince’s merchandise machine is “the Evil Empire,” then why would you have your number one heel make a point to say how he won’t sell out to Vince because that number one heel loves wrestling. What the fuck? It’s insider nonsense that serves no fuckin’ purpose more than to make Court Bauer believe in his money-spending mind that he’s a righteous renegade doing battle against the evil King of Wrestling. Also, I wouldn’t believe for one minute half the guys in this ring wouldn’t jump at a WWE contract. And P.J. Walker is so bush league it’s ridiculous. It kills me when a bush league, WWE wash-out, indy superstar like Walker holds onto his goofy catch-phrase from his most popular moment (the ECW days of the “not just the best…” crap), as if that was some defining moment in his life. When Barry Windham is brought out, he towers over the other wrestlers, and you realize just how small so many of today’s workers have gotten.
The new production and intro: They’ve been promising they were gonna move away from looking like old ECW, but what they basically did with this new opening, with the same theme song from the old one, is stopped imitating ECW’s syndicated show and started mimicking the ECW on TNN style, were they to still be around and benefit from an extra three years of advancement of computer graphics. Good fuckin’ grief, that’s all they could come up with for a repackaging? They’re doomed. Now, here’s what they did to change up Styles – he now is not wearing his glasses and has traded in his customary suit and tie for a red and black polo shirt with goofy, played out, tribal infused designery on the sleeves. Now, during the course of an hour, I see Styles on camera for maybe two minutes, but I hear his voice the whole time, doing the same schtick he’s always done, including two “Oh my God”s, (which, by the way, puts him to owing me seven dollars for using his tired catch-phrases). Telling him to leave the suit and clotheshanger is not gonna fuckin’ change how I view this show and Styles involvement. For God’s sake, get somebody to do color, and not Joel Gertner, please. On the plus side, nothing was announced for next week, so hopefully it’ll be chock full of more American J-Cup goodness.