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It's been a few weeks, but I'm back with the Wrestlemania weekend edition of The pROHfile as ROH is in the middle of running its first events in the home of the Evil Empire of Disney in Orlando, Florida. We're going to start off with my thoughts on Nigel Mcguinness and his two part interview on the ROH Video Wire. It was pretty hyped up as being an amazing sit down, and while it was more kayfabed than I would have liked, he did touch on some interesting topics.
One thing he said which I believe to be true is that he hasn't changed, but the fans' perception of him has. It's true, Nigel hadn't changed anything about his ring style or interviews, but after he got the title, the fans suddenly seemed to give up on him. I credit part of that to the injuries, but I think it's the same problem Homicide had in that there is more interest in the babyface chasing the title than actually holding it. Homicide won the title and it was a huge moment, but after that his heat was totally gone. I was at all of his title defenses, and other than the one where Morishima destroyed him and won the title, the crowds sat on their hands, totally dead for all of them. It might not come across that way on the DVD, but take it from someone who was there, that's the power of post-production. Same deal with Nigel, we couldn't wait to see him lariat Morishima's head off and win the title, but now what? ROH isn't a promotion where you can have a successful, long term babyface champion. The ROH Champion can be at most a neutral character taking on challengers from both sides.
The big thing that Nigel was dead on about, that we might not like to believe, is that fans really are largely ignorant when it comes to being successful in the business. For example, the lariats. In responding to the charge that he uses too many lariats, he says that he was getting nowhere doing the technical wrestling, and the lariats started getting him somewhere, so he uses them. It's true that the fans can't say whether he can carry the company or not because people were crapping on both Danielson and Morishima, yet they both went on to have successful reigns. He also says that the fans sit there ripping on a lot of what they see and hear, yet don't have anything better in mind, and a truer statement has never been made. When's the last time you heard any constructive criticism from marks on the internet? Nobody ever has anything good to say other than “Wrestler X sucks, they should push Wrestler Y instead.” This is why customers never run any business, because they just want the payoff without any concept of what else goes into getting there.
As for the injuries, of course nobody likes getting hurt, but when he did he took the time off so that he'd heal up instead of working hurt and making it worse. I think people got a little spoiled by Danielson, who tore ligaments in his shoulder in August and should have dropped the title right away, but instead worked for four more months before dropping the title to Homicide at Final Battle 2006 as planned. So now when Nigel does the smart thing by healing up, the fans look at it as him being weak instead of being smart, and I don't blame Nigel for doing it because, as he said in the interview, he's willing to take that abuse from the fans in order to prolong his career. In a business where people's careers often don't last into their 40s, you can't blame a guy for not wanting to ruin his body and impact his post-wrestling life by being dumb and only thinking about the short term.
The one thing I think was done wrong with this interview was the way Nigel was ripping on the other wrestlers. Jim Cornette has said that if your opponent has a really glaring deficiency, you shouldn't point it out because it makes the fans take that person less seriously. While it might not seem that serious, people will say “Yeah...now that Nigel mentions it, Kevin Steen is really fat and has bad acne, he looks like this loser kid I went to high school with. And Claudio is getting a bald spot. You know, they really don't look like guys who can be champions.” If you start pointing out the things that are wrong with Steen, Claudio, or whoever, fans won't take the fat guy with acne or the balding guy seriously as contenders and certainly won't take them seriously as World Champion if they do get the title.
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On another topic, I enjoy women's wrestling in its purest form as much as the next smark mark and am a big fan of SHIMMER and no fan of the Divas, but I think I'm suffering from a bit of Daizee Haze overload. Don't misunderstand, I think she's a great athlete and all, but I feel like she's just a tad overpushed. For one, I have the same complaint about her that I have about Rey Mysterio, Jr: she's too small to be taken seriously as competitive against the other ladies, much less as one of the top female wrestlers in the country. There's no way she could realistically physically compete with a lot of the women she wrestles, and much like Mysterio, she's a good example of somebody who has been crammed down people's throats until they accept them as a main eventer contrary to common sense.
I don't think I'd have so much of a problem with her if her routine weren't so repetitive. For one, she wrestles Sara Del Rey on what seems like every other ROH show, and you know that 99 times out of a hundred, Daizee's losing. There's no intrigue to the feud anymore, and as good as Sara makes Daizee look, you know that barring some fluke, Sara's going over. I think they should take a cue from Bryan Danielson and Austin Aries and be kept apart for a while. As good as the matches between Aries and Danielson are, if they wrestled each other as often as Daizee and Sara do, the matches wouldn't mean anything anymore. There's a lesson to be learned there.
This also applies to Daizee's neverending feud with Lacey. This feud is where I think Daizee draws a lot of her crowd reaction from, because I believe that a lot of the cheers she gets are cheers derived from her hanging out with babyfaces like Whitmer, Cabana, and the Briscoes who are feuding with Lacey's charges, and the reaction she gets may not necessarily be due to anything she herself is doing. While that sort of thing is a smart booking maneuver, she's sort of turning into a heat whore of sorts in that whoever Lacey's wrestlers are feuding with, she's going to piggyback off of them.
If the SHIMMER Title were featured more prominently in ROH and other women besides Daizee, Lacey, and Sara were brought in on a regular basis, I might not complain, but since ROH's women's division has basically consisted of three women for a couple of years now, there's no drama or intrigue, and no matter how great a promotion as a whole is, sometimes things need to be shaken up every now and then, and I think it's time we get some movement in the women's division.
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To close this edition, I have a few words I'd like to say about Mitsuharu Misawa. I finally got around to watching the Glory By Honor VI weekend DVDs, and to say I was underwhelmed by Misawa's performance would be an understatement. I was at both shows live and thought his performances were subpar, but wanted to at least give myself a chance to see the matches again on DVD before passing harsh judgment. After seeing the DVDs though, I feel totally justified in my line of thinking.
I don't follow Japanese wrestling at all outside of the guys who come over to work in the US, but I've heard about how great Misawa is and the string of unforgettable ***** matches he's had with Kobashi, Kawada, Taue, and others, and had this image in my mind of the greatest worker of all time who doesn't have it in him to have a crappy match. That may have been the way he was, but I think I caught my first Misawa match about 15 years too late. Misawa looked horrible. He has this giant gut, spent half the match stretching and shaking out aches and pains he couldn't possibly have suffered during his incredibly loose matches (so loose, in fact, that he could have given Baba a run for his money), and spent the entire weekend doing as little work as possible. First in Philadelphia when he teamed with KENTA against Marufuji and Morishima, he spent 95% of the match camping out on the apron, and when KENTA finally made the hot tag, Misawa's big babyface comeback lasted all of about 15 seconds before the time limit expired. It could be argued that he was saving everything for the following night against KENTA in New York, but he didn't exactly break his ass there either, letting KENTA do all the work. In fact, KENTA did all the work for him both nights, spending the weekend bouncing around like a pinball so that Misawa wouldn't have to exert himself to any great degree.
I just can't express strongly enough how badly I was disappointed by Misawa. The guy moved like a dinosaur, and made Kobashi look like the Roadrunner. After everything I had heard about Misawa, I was expecting the show of a lifetime when he made his ROH appearances, but the name value of Misawa which, make no doubt, was what the shows were sold on, did not work out to be enough because of how badly broken down he was, and his work was not anywhere near up to what I expected out of him after all the build up.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand and appreciate what it meant having a name like Misawa wrestle in ROH, but at the same time I have to point out that ROH is a promotion that people, myself included, have expectations of in terms of match quality and there's no way of beating around the bush, Misawa didn't deliver. People got way overworked up for Misawa based on the name alone and didn't seem to care that they were match an old man who was way past his prime. Either that or they did, but were willing to ignore it because it was Misawa. I'm sorry, but I felt like I was watching Roddy Piper circa 2008 because of how far past his prime Misawa was, and for a promotion whose fans are so smart and so hardcore about people like Hogan and Nash overstaying their welcome, it's funny how quickly a double standard is formed for someone like Misawa. Like, I loved watching Harley Race wrestle back in the early 80s, but would I want to watch him wrestle now? No, absolutely not, he doesn't have it in him anymore, and neither did Misawa. This is the guy who was Tiger Mask II and had great matches with Bret Hart? Not for a couple decades, he hasn't been.
And maybe it works differently in the Japanese wrestling world, but to me as an American wrestling fan, I think having KENTA, Marufuji, and Morishima sell their ass off for a largely immobile fossil like Misawa made them all look terrible. You're telling me Morishima can decimate everyone on the ROH roster, but can't handle an old man who takes 20 seconds to climb through the ropes?
So, ROH fans got their wish, Misawa made his big appearance in ROH. Now with that out of the way, let's hope that from now on, we'll get NOAH talent under Social Security age who can keep up with the rest of the ROH roster. And by the way, I had no idea that Depends came in green.
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That's it for me, I'll be back after this weekend with thoughts on ROH's part of Wrestlemania weekend and more. In the meantime, all feedback can be sent to stuwrestling@hotmail.com. Thanks for reading!
