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Survivor Series 2004, emanating from Cleveland, Ohio…well, there’s really no way of dancing around it, this was a horrible show that is the kind of thing non-fans will watch and then ask you why you watch wrestling, and after a show like this, you really don’t have an answer for them. The Undercard
The show opened with a Fatal Four Way for the Cruiserweight Title, as champion Spike Dudley defended against Rey Mysterio, Chavo Guerrero, and Billy Kidman. This was during the period when Spike had turned heel and become the “boss†of the Dudley Clan, a storyline twist which flatly contradicted years of Bubba and D-Von smacking Spike around and treating him like a punk. This was after Bubba and D-Von were “injured†and put on the sidelines while they negotiated their contractual status. In the meantime, there was a subplot here centering around Kidman and Chavo, as Kidman had legitimately botched a shooting star press and landed awkwardly on Chavo’s head, putting him out of action for a couple of months. I think they missed the boat on that situation, as the legit injury Chavo suffered immediately established the shooting star press as a dangerous move, but they never followed up on it. Rey was busting his butt here, pulling out highspots we rarely saw out of him since he had been in WWE while also bumping like a pinball for the other three guys. Chavo hit the Gory Bomb on Spike, but Kidman came over the top rope and hit Chavo with a legdrop, allowing Spike to roll Chavo up and get the win to retain.
At this point I would be remiss in not making mention of the perversely amusing backstage segment where Heidenreich and Gene Snitsky got up in each other’s face, breathing heavily at one another, and then Snitsky tells Heidenreich that he likes his poetry, and then Heidenreich told Snitksy he likes what he does to babies. It was totally stupid and pointless, yet strangely entertaining. I guess you had to be there.
Up next, Shelton Benjamin defended the Intercontinental Title againt Christian. Benjamin got a huge push in 2004, getting a clean win over Triple H on Raw and did almost no jobs for the rest of the year. He was a shooting star for the rest of the 2004, picking up the IC Title with a win over Chris Jericho along the way. He ended up getting mysteriously depushed the following year and never really recovered, and I honestly believe that if it weren’t for his 2004 push, nobody would have lost much sleep over the lack of push since, but he did get that push and for my money, he showed that he has what it takes in the ring if not on the microphone as well as anyone, including guys like AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels who were tearing it up in TNA around the same time. Shelton was just outclassing everyone, and Christian made him look like a million bucks here and did the clean job after Shelton reversed the Unprettier into the T-Bone suplex.
The next match was the Smackdown tag team elimination match pitting Big Show, Eddy Guerrero, Rob Van Dam, and John Cena against Kurt Angle, Luther Reigns, Mark Jindrak, and Carlito. The angle here (no pun intended) was that Kurt Angle had been severely injured after being thrown off a balcony by the Big Show, and while he was out of action he was made GM of Smackdown. Although it would eventually be revealed that he had been faking the injury (in storylines, he was sitting out because he really was injured again), he spent months making all four of his opponents’ lives miserable, and once his deception was discovered and he was forced back into action, he put together the latest incarnation of Team Angle in Mark Jindrak and his bodyguard Luther Reigns. Carlito, in the meantime, came to the WWF about a month earlier and beat John Cena to win the US Title in his first night in the company. From there, they did an angle where Carlito hired Jesus (Aaron Aguilera, not the prophet) to attack John Cena at a nightclub and stab him in the kidney. Cena spent a month or so on the sidelines to sell the injury, but while he was out, Carlito suffered a legit injury to his shoulder and got pulled out of action as well. By that point, though, he was already booked into this match, so to get him out of the way they did an angle at the beginning of the match where Cena attacked Carlito and Jesus before the match and chased them into the back and to the parking garage, where Carlito and Jesus stole a car and escaped.
So with Carlito effectively eliminating himself, Cena rejoined his teammates in the ring as they got off to a 4-on-3 advantage right off the bat. Team Angle got a heat segment and managed to eliminate Rob Van Dam, but the babyfaces went through Jindrak and Reigns quickly to leave Angle 3-on-1, and Angle tried walking out, but was forced back into the ring by Van Dam, who came from the back to block Angle’s exit. Big Show threw Angle into the ring where Angle ate an FU and a Frog Splash and that was all she wrote for Angle.
Up next was the Undertaker taking on his latest monster challenger, Jon Heidenreich. Heidenreich was not only both evil and insane, but he would also write these poems about hurting his opponents which were about as well written as anything you’d expect out of your average third grader with mental problems. The feud sprang out of an incident where Heidenreich attacked the Undertaker and threw him in the back of a hearse, then drove a truck into it. I’m not sure what to make of so many vehicular assaults being a regular part of the Survivor Series, but whatever, it’s their company. Anyway, Heidenreich was a bit of a stiff, but luckily the Undertaker was in full on stiff carrying mode here so the match wasn’t too bad, but nobody ever took Heidenreich seriously as a legit threat to the Undertaker and assumed he was just killing time (no pun intended) until they figured out who Undertaker’s Wrestlemania program would be, so there wasn’t exactly a whole lot of suspense. I will give Heidenreich this, he has a really scary look in the same kind of vein as a Sid Vicious and he certainly looked like he could beat the hell out of anyone, but he just never really got over, no matter how much poetry he wrote. Undertaker got the chokeslam and Tombstone to pick up the win.
After that we got our next example of classic storytelling as Trish Stratus defended the Women’s Title against Lita. Where to begin with this one…okay, Lita and Matt Hardy were an item on camera early in 2004 as they had been behind the scenes, but then they did an angle where Kane basically blackmailed Lita to have sex with him so he wouldn’t beat the crap out of Matt Hardy. Lita got pregnant from this encounter, but Matt didn’t know about it and thought it was his kid, and this led to a match between Hardy and Kane where the winner would earn the hand of Lita in marriage. Kane won the match and put Hardy out of action in the process (Hardy really had a knee injury and would need months off for the surgery and recovery), and Kane and Lita had an unholy marriage on Raw. A few weeks after this, Kane was wrestling Gene Snitsky on an episode of Raw and Snitsky shoved Kane into Lita and Kane fell on top of her, causing her to go into labor early and, to make a long story short, she lost the baby.
This whole time, Trish had been mocking Lita and calling her a slut every chance she got and Lita, being pregnant and all, couldn’t knock Trish out to shut her up, but now that the baby was gone, she was finally able to get in the ring and face Trish after months of abuse. So we got this match, which basically was a minute long of Lita beating the crap out of Trish before she got herself disqualified for hitting Trish with a chair. Can we say bait and switch? Thankfully, when we finally got the match on Raw about a month later, Lita finally got the big win over Trish in the main event of the last Raw of 2004 to claim the Women’s Title.
Following that, JBL defended the WWE Title against Booker T. This was in the midst of JBL’s nearly year long reign as the WWE Champion that a lot of people thought he didn’t deserve and a lot of people thought went on way too long. In defense of JBL, I thought he was as good in the ring as any big man champions over the years, and his promo skills were, and still are, vastly underrated. I think the main problem with the perception of him as WWE Champion was that he was one half of a midcard tag team a month before he won the title, but I thought he more than proved himself with the string of title defenses he had on PPV against some marquee talent.
Meanwhile, they mentioned that Booker is a five time former WCW World Champion about a million times here just like every time he got a World Title shot, and I honestly believe those five titles worked against Booker T more than anything in WWE, because what WWE saw when they looked at him was a neverending opportunity to continue to prove WWE’s superiority to WCW by having him job to prove that even one of the best WCW Champions ever was inferior to the WWE superstars. This was a slow, methodical brawl that spilled out to the floor, where Booker T spent as much time beating up JBL’s Chief Of Staff Orlando Jordan as much as he was beating up JBL. The match eventually found its way back into the ring where the ref got bumped and Orlando liberally interfered until JBL was able to bash Booker in the head with the WWE Title belt and pick up the cheap win.
The Main Event
The top match on this show was World Champion Triple H and Batista of Evolution teaming with Edge and Gene Snitsky (you read that right, Snitsky main evented Survivor Series) taking on Randy Orton, Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, and Maven in a classic Survivor Series elimination match. The angle here was that Raw GM Eric Bischoff decided to take a month off, and the members of the winning team in this match would each get a week as guest GM with all the powers contained therein. Earlier in the evening, Snitsky jumped Maven backstage and beat him to a bloody pulp, and Bischoff decreed that if Maven were unable to compete in the match, no substitutions would be allowed.
This was just a couple of months after Orton had defeated Chris Benoit at Summerslam to become the youngest World Champion in WWE history (a move which many suspect was done to erase Brock Lesnar’s prior record from the books), only to then be defeated for the title a month later by his former mentor Triple H, in a move that has been forever christened as Ortoning somebody because a lot of people felt that taking the title off of Orton so quickly cut his legs out from under him and caused damage that it’s taken years longer than it needed to for him to recover. Following this, they tried getting Orton over asa fan-friendly cool babyface, and I’m sure given Orton’s natural ability to portray such a character, you can imagine how well that worked out. In case you can’t, he was a heel again by Wrestlemania. Edge, in the meantime, had just recentl;y turned heel after his frustration over his inability to get into the World Title picture finally pushed him over the edge and he attacked Shawn Michaels and walked out on Chris Benoit during the match when they won the World Tag Team Title, effectively leaving Benoit to win and then defend the title by himself. This was also the period when Chris Benoit was “now residing in Atlanta, Georgia†and Chris Jericho was “originally from Manhattan, New York†while Edge didn’t even have an announced hometown because for about a year WWE decided that Canadians weren’t allowed to be from Canada anymore. I’m sure that since WWE doesn’t have any Canadian viewers, they figured it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Can you smell the sarcasm, folks?
So with all that in mind, here we go with YOUR main event of Survivor Series 2004. Benoit, who earlier in the year set the record for the longest run ever in the Royal Rumble by coming in at #1 and winning the whole thing, then went on to win the World Title in the main event of Wrestlemania 20, then beat Triple H about 30 more times over the spring and summer, then won the World Tag Team Title by himself, was eliminated first. Fortunately for the babyface team, Ric Flair got himself ejected from ringside for blatantly interfering in the match, and Orton took advantage of the distraction by hitting Batista in the head with Triple H’s World Title belt and set Jericho up to hit him with an enziguiri to eliminate Batista. Maven finally made it to the ring and cleaned house after tagging in, but Snitsky came in and whacked both Maven and Jericho with a chair, and though Snitsky got himself disqualified for this, Triple H was able to crawl over and cover Maven to eliminate him.
So now we’re down to Orton and Jericho against Triple H and Edge, but almost right away Triple H went for the Pedigree on Jericho and Jericho backdropped his way out of it, but turned around right into a spear from Edge, and that was enough to put Jericho out and leave Orton at a 2-on-1 disadvantage. However, heel miscommunication led to Edge accidentally hitting a spear on Triple H, allowing Orton to catch a surprised Edge out of nowhere with the RKO to eliminate him and even the match up, and then Triple H hit a low blow and then went for the Pedigree, but Orton reversed to the RKO to eliminate Triple H and win the match, giving his team control over Raw for the next four weeks.
Final Analysis
I really wish I had something to say about this show other than the fact that it wasn’t very good, but I really don’t have that much more. Very pedestrian show and nothing really seemed to matter other than the main event, and even that main event was a bit puzzling to try and put together. I mean, what business did Maven or Snitsky have in the main event of one of the big four PPVs of the year? Why was Chris Benoit, who was booked to be the greatest thing since sliced bread early in 2004, eliminated first? Did they really expect the fans to accept Orton as a top babyface?
And once you go down the card from there, the show flat out became insulting to the intelligence, what with the Trish/Lita/Kane/Snitsky angle, Carlito hiring Jesus to stab John Cena, and so on. Avoid this show at all costs unless you’re a huge Randy Orton fan, and if you are, you have my sympathy.
But now we put this behind us and next time we’ll move on to (hopefully) something better at Survivor Series 2005, but for now it’s time for me to get going, so I thank you all as always for reading, and as always all feedback can be sent to stupwinsider@yahoo.com and you can catch me on Myspace at www.myspace.com/stupwinsider. Until next time, take care and see you soon.
