The First Week In Wrestling
A Historic Kick-Off to 2022!
Brock Lesnar and Big E. (courtesy of WWE.com)
Deal with the hyperbole, the first week of January in 2022 was the best individual week in wrestling history. If you’re a fan of WWE, NJPW, or AEW, there was something for you to coddle your tribalism and let you think your side was winning. And if you feel it necessary to take the piss out of 2 of the other 3 products, you found your ammunition, too.
In the span of one calendar week, we had a new WWE PPV—fuck, Premier Live Event—WWE Day 1, that shook up the rosters and road to WrestleMania; Wrestle Kingdom 16; NXT New Year’s Evil; AEW Dynamite’s premier on TBS; and the debut of AEW’s Battle of the Belts. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe this was an insignificant blip, but I wasn’t as captivated as I was in a weeks’ worth of content since the infamous week when WWE bought WCW, simulcasted on USA/Turner, and held WrestleMania x-7.
WWE
I wasn’t as into Day 1 as other wrestling fans, but whatever, like what you like. The main event felt too video game-y and like the go-home segment of a better match. Some loved it, and were happy to get a WWE PPV that was good-to-great and didn’t have anything intellectually reprehensible (Pizza Hut product placement, $100 million egg).
The story of the show was Roman Reigns being diagnosed with Covid, thus canceling the match with Brock Lesnar, and subsequently leading to Brock winning Raw’s WWE World Championship. It was a satisfactory switch to make up for the lack of Roman, and to help make this a signature event (it wasn’t and shouldn’t be considered one). Brock is going to the Rumble against Bobby Lashley after they teased that Lashley had Brock in jeopardy during the main event. On the Smackdown side of the aisle, with thinning star-power due to Jeff Hardy’s freakout and Drew McIntyre’s injury, Seth Rollins will challenge Roman at the Rumble. Not a fresh match-up but what could be over there?
The interesting/deflating news of the week was WWE cutting more staff from NXT. William Regal, Road Dogg, Timothy Thatcher, Danny Burch, Hideki Suzuki, Ace Steel, Allison Danger, Dave Kapoor, Gabe Sapolsky, and Samoa Joe, among others. With NXT 2.0 continuing in a new direction, this felt inevitable, and the scuttlebutt invariably turns to this as an act of Nick Khan intentionally obliterating Triple H’s legacy and cleansing the company of Hunter’s people.
None of us fans have a seat at the table in Stamford. The Mr. McMahon character and the crazy stories about his bonkers quirks are so good we want to think there’s a Shakespearean sub-plot behind his every move. Add to it that we don’t know anything really at all about Nick Khan, and instead of that squelching assumptions, it fuels the narrative of a rapine of Hunter’s right to Vince’s throne.
So why would Vince want to cause his son-in-law misery—especially while he’s recuperating from a cardiac event—to teach him a lesson about NXT losing to AEW? I have a hard time thinking Vince is going to allow dozens of people to be separated just to make Hunter eat shit sandwiches publicly a la the curtain call in 1996. I can appreciate WWE deciding to pivot and go in a new direction with NXT, but wouldn’t Vince want to protect Hunter’s reputation and brand as a key executive to his shareholders? And is there really a vicious power struggle between Hunter and Khan? Wouldn’t Hunter like Nick Khan anyways? Hunter reaps the financial rewards of Khan’s superb negotiating and dealmaking. Do we definitively know that Hunter wants to be Chairman of the Board? My armchair, no-access guess is that Hunter merely wants to have the final say on creative. Plus, all these releases Vince knows about and is okay with, so I’m assuming as one of the highest ranking officials, Hunter is also in the know, even if he’s at home “not working.” Again, not at the table, not working at Stanford, but people don’t realize how difficult it is to separate anyone from a position in publicly traded, corporate America. Those decisions aren’t made capriciously, even if someone is an independent contractor or 1099er. Typically, a whole chain of senior leaders have visibility and transparency in it before it’s enacted.
Maybe we’ll know the whole story later, but creating this narrative in the absence of an authoritative one feels off. Let the neat visual of Bron Breakker smashing through the black and gold “x” be just that, a nice visual. Me thinks this ain’t the studio retroactively editing the ending of The Magnificent Ambersons.
…But boy losing Regal seems real shortsighted.
NJPW
Will Osprey vs. Kazuchika Okada (courtesy of NJPW1972.com)
Wrestle Kingdom 16 was pretty good. Just being pretty good is totally fine given the circumstances. I’m not even going to pretend I have a handle on the cultural impact of Covid in Japanese society, so who can say that the low attendance was an abject failure and a shameful indictment of their business (Night 1—12,000; Night 2—6,000[!]). Maybe the show was booked so far in advance plans couldn’t change, but a temporary revert to a single day Wrestle Kingdom could have made the show feel more significant. It’s not as if they had the accessible roster to spread this over two-nights. The tag matches are as skippable as the undercard of a G1, which was what this show felt like to me in a nutshell, Day 4 or so of a pretty good night of the G1.
New Japan can’t get a free pass on everything, though. The matches are undeniably stale. The factions are elastic and utterly pointless. Why does it matter if you’re in Chaos or Bullet Club or sub-factions within the factions? What advantages in kayfabe does one have being aligned to one particular group?
What NJPW did well was putting the title back on Okada and let him carry both nights’ main events. I rated the Night 1 main event vs. Shingo 4.25 stars (downvoted for the no-sell of the DDT on the floor) and the Night 2 main event vs. Osprey 4.5 stars. The standards of these events are so ungodly high, and for Okada in particular, some will see it as a blemish if he doesn’t have an all-time classic amongst his all-time classics on Jan 4th.
Dustin Rhodes vs. Sammy Guevara (courtesy of allelitewrestling.com)
AEW
Dynamite premiered on TBS and came right out of the gate with a match of the year candidate in “Hangman” Adam Page vs. Bryan Danielson. At 4.75 stars it was one of the best matches in AEW’s history and my favorite out of the string of classics Danielson’s put on since his debut (better than Arthur Ashe and the first Broadway vs. Page). The two played off their 60 minute draw and it felt just as epic. An intense, bloodletting and physical battle, with damn near 20 headbutts (which were cringeworthy) gave “Hangman” his signature win on free TV. For all the concern that he hadn’t won a match (they jokingly referenced it on his chyron during his entrance) he came off like a badass, able to have more heart than Danielson who is famously all heart.
It would have been remembered as a one-match show if the main event hadn’t featured a title change in Jurassic Express going over Lucha Bros., and a historically gruesome arm injury where it looked like Fenix’s arm was fucked beyond royally fucked after bending impossibly inward like rubber. Astonishingly, no break. Hopefully he gets time off and rehabs slowly before rushing back.
In another holy shit moment, Cody admitted in an interview with Barstool that he regrets the entire Ogogo storyline and that he was—his words— tone-deaf! He also gave more of a peek into his process and confirmed the suspicions of his critics where he mentioned over-planning and work-shopping to this angle’s detriment. We’ve long-lamented his characters’ arc in 2021 but I’ll take this as a positive that we’ll see him grow artistically. And if he wanted to be a babyface, this interview was his best face work since 2019.
AEW ended its week of free TV with another debut in Battle of the Belts. With Cody getting Covid, the rematch vs. Sammy Guevara was changed to Sammy vs. Dustin Rhodes with an Interim TNT title on the line instead. Dustin is brilliant in making his minutes matter and can look like a star even if he’s not on TV on a regular basis or getting wins. For as much as the wrestling fandom shits on the Rhodes family in general for HOGGING THE SPOTLIGHT (cue Jon Lovitz doing Jay Sherman) Dustin really is the best in the bloodline about outworking everyone. He’s able to put over his opponent and make it seem like the match was about them when really it’s about him and making himself seem like he’s unselfishly doing the honors and keeping his cache with fans and the office. The match was very good, stirring me into wishing Dustin won the interim belt to get another run at Cody, but I suppose that’s another dabble of smart fan projection that everything in Cody’s periphery is a meta work. Some fans have been irked by the whole concept of an interim title in general, as it may set a bad precedent for AEW if more champions invariably catch this strain of the variant and can’t compete, but they promised a TNT title match and Sammy a rematch, so this is seemingly what they felt they had to do to not screw the fans. Subsequently, this event felt like less like a Saturday Night’s Main Event and more like a Shotgun Saturday Night. I’m still a sucker for one-hour live specials so I didn’t care, but after a big Dynamite debut, Rampage, and just a week of crazy wrestling matches and news stories, expectations can only be so high before something has to be a bit of an afterthought. A free show is pretty good. And just being pretty good is totally fine given the circumstances of this historic week.
