In my most recent project, I'm hunting down, reviewing and ranking the 100 Worst WWE Matches in history. For this week's blog post, I thought I would start with a teaser by reviewing a match that is in consideration.
When the project is ready to start, I'll go into more detail about the criteria when ranking these. But in short, I took into account the importance of the match, the stage the match is on, the expectations going into the match, and of course the actual quality of it. That is to save me going on cagematch, finding 100 matches of The Great Khali (more on him shortly) and chucking them on a list.
Without further delay, I present to you the first teaser of what's to come.
The Big Show vs The Undertaker - WWE Great American Bash 2006
Punjabi Prison Match
Ah the 2006 Great American Bash. Never before had I heard the phrase "elevated liver enzymes" before. But if you played a drinking game with that phrase, you'd find yourself passed out half way between a Wetherspoons and a dodgy kebab shop before the show was over. Lashley, Super Crazy, and - importantly for this match - the Great Khali all found themselves off the show for this mysterious reason. The disruption to the show didn't stop there, as Mark Henry - who was set to face the man he injured eight months prior, Batista - tore his knee eight days prior to the show. What that led to was a disjointed show held together with blu-tak, and WWE scrambling to fill up the card.
Going into the Great American Bash, WWE had advertised Undertaker vs Great Khali in a Punjabi Prison match. Khali had crushed Undertaker in a way that pretty much no wrestler in history ever did at Judgment Day - a match that still feels shocking to this day. This was to be the return contest. WWE, however, never once made it clear what a Punjabi Prison match entailed - everyone was in the dark going into the show. Expectations were already low due to Khali's, shall we say, less than stellar performances. However, with "elevated liver enzymes", Khali was out and in his place was the quintessential 2006 "quick, we need a replacement guy", The Big Show. Now, putting my tinfoil hat on, it was no secret that WWE did not want Khali on live TV after Judgment Day. There were reports in the immediate aftermath that WWE wanted him on SmackDown solely to provide the safety net of editing. In fact it would be his final live televised match until early 2007. So did he truly have elevated liver enzymes, or was that a convenient excuse to get him off the card.
There's three key problems with this match that I'll address in turn:
- The Punjabi Prison match is a stupid concept.
- It's 21 minutes long.
- Undertaker and Big Show did not have great chemistry.
Let's start with the Punjabi Prison match rules. Seems straight forward enough - escape both cages, get out and you win. Kennel from Hell but less dogs, and more "razor sharp spikes" (if you like Michael Cole-isms, this is the match for you). However, there's a convoluted rule of 4 doors on the interior structure. The door will open for 60 seconds at the request of a wrestler, then permanently close after the time has expired. The problem? There's no advantage to getting out, because when you get out the other person can just open another door and get out themselves. Even in a worst case scenario where all the doors are shut, you can climb the inner cage and just step across to the top of the second cage. That means the entire first portion of the match where they're trying to build drama, is completely empty. All these flaws are highlighted in this very first debut match of the stipulation. Not ideal. That's not to say the fans didn't bite into the drama, because as soon as a countdown clock was on the screen, they popped. After all, wrestling fans love a count down.
Visually, the match sucks too. It's an ugly garish design and the "reinforced steel bamboo" was too thick to see through properly when factoring in two cages.
Secondly, the length. If you've ever seen Big Show in 2006, you'll know the sort of shape he was in. He was struggling every night, and looked bloated and out of shape. It wasn't too bad in the first half of the year when he was stuck in tag matches, but as he turned back to singles matches it was downhill. I'll always think back to the Cyber Sunday 2006 triple threat where he basically lay on the outside while Booker T and John Cena wrestled essentially a singles match because Show couldn't physically manage it. Similar thing with the Hell in a Cell at Unforgiven. So why would you give these two 21 minutes? Are we to believe that this is the allotted time that, hypothetically, the Great Khali would have received? If so, I'm very sad that this hypothetical 21 minute epic never came to be. Why give 21 minutes to two men that surely only knew they were wrestling less than 48 hours ago? I would assume this is a consequence of the shaken card - give the two veterans a long time to pad out the show, they'll figure it out.
Undertaker by this point was starting to become a more consistent wrestler. That may seem like an odd thing to say about a wrestler who had been around for over 15 years at this point, but it wasn't until the mid 2000s that the quality of his wrestling became much more solid. However the Khali, and by extension Big Show, series brought Undertaker right back to shades of his early career they lumped with a useless wrestler and asked to make something happen. As a result, you have a slow and plodding match with Big Show stumbling around and Undertaker doing the work of multiple people to make this somewhat watchable. This is tedious. These two never had much chemistry until after Big Show's return in 2008.
I do sympathise with the wrestlers because I think they were put in an unwinnable position - the stipulation sucks, the booking sucks, and both are being asked to go far longer than would be reasonably expected of them. I'm not going to fault the effort, they tried to pull out some decent spots, both men bleed. It's par the course for Big Show in 2006 - blood, weapons, go out and ruin your already fucked body for the fans to put on something at least watchable. Thank god he would leave the company for a couple years and come back in incredible shape.
Eventually Big Show gets out of the first cage and even manages to trap Undertaker in the interior cage, much to the chagrin of Michael Cole who can't work out how Undertaker has a chance now. Undertaker, not being a complete fucking moron, realises he can climb the interior cage to get out. While I've ragged on the rules, at the very least there's some strategy employed - even if the strategy sucked. While fighting between the cages, both men end up going through a Punjabi table - which is of course a regular WWE table but with a cloth on top. On a similar note, I despise when wrestling has weapons that can't believably be used. Why put spears and stuff on the outside? I did appreciate the hanging rope, which allowed Undertaker to practice his Tarzan impersonation.
Poor Big Show struggles so much to climb the outside cage, there's no feasible way they could have made believable "near falls" (for want of a better word), so appreciate them not even trying. But the finish of this match is an absolute mess. First of all, Khali and Daivari come out through the crowd. Unfortunately they have all the timing of Papa Shango because by the time they actually reach the cage to tease interference, Big Show and Undertaker have already finished the match. Undertaker jumps off the interior cage with a cross body. Big Show is supposed to catch him, fall away slam, and Undertaker geos through. Instead, it just looks like Undertaker hits him and Big Show takes a bump where both guys fall through the cage. What is it with Big Show and accidentally putting people through cages? The referees, for seemingly no reason outside of it being in the script, decide that's enough for Undertaker to be declared the winner.
This match is a disaster, and yet is probably an upgrade from what we could have had if WWE had gone ahead with a planned 21 minute Khali match. I find ragging on Big Show 2006 matches to be low hanging fruit because it's clear he was physically a mess. They weren't in a position to succeed, but at the same time I can only review what's put in front of me. This sucked, and if it doesn't make the top 100, it will be very very close. And yet, I don't even think it's the worst match of this stipulation, because at the very least Undertaker and Big Show have enough presence to make stuff sort of interesting even when it's not.
No comments:
Post a Comment