89.
Braun Strowman vs. Tyson Fury
Crown Jewel 2019
At some point it was inevitable we’d get to one of these shows. Since expanding their premium live event format into Saudi Arabia, they have been infamous for some of the worst matches of recent years. Our first entry comes from 2019 as one of the most famous boxers in the world takes on Braun Strowman in a match that, at least on paper, sounds interesting and wouldn’t look out of place at a Wrestlemania. After all, WWE has a history of success bringing in stars from the world of boxing into wrestling, most notably with Floyd Mayweather in 2008. There’s a world where this match is a total blast and a true spectacle.
Unfortunately, this is not that world.
Celebrity matches live and die by the celebrity’s commitment to the cause. Guys like Logan Paul, Floyd Mayweather, and Bad Bunny put a noticeable effort and went all in to put on a show and that reflected on their performances. However we should have known this was going to be a bad one with the most awkward press conference in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUb0WXirF4A
Tyson Fury gets an obnoxious amount of pyrotechnics during his entrance. It’s like that Kevin Nash gif from WCW. Or someone going OTT on their create-a-wrestler entrance.
When you get boxers into wrestling, it must be a struggle for them to untrain themselves to throw a worked punch after learning to do the exact opposite for their entire life. Fury and Braun try some routine wrestling sequences that look awful, before we finally get a sign of things to come when Fury “hits” a shoulder block on Braun. Except it’s done with so little velocity you’d be mistaken for thinking it were Jenna Morasca hitting it. To me, this is almost like that Brock Lesnar vs Dean Ambrose match from Wrestlemania 32, but on a worse scale. In that case, Brock had no interest in doing anything intense or risky because of an upcoming UFC fight. Same here with Fury - you have one of the most legitimately scary motherfuckers in the world and he’s wrestling such a tepid match because an injury to him would be devastating. When Floyd Mayweather wrestled Big Show in 2008, it was a full 18 months before his next boxing match, meaning that he could take a few risks and bumps. The timing of this match is horrendous planning because Fury was just four months away from a highly anticipated heavyweight rematch against Deontay Wilder. An injury to Fury in this environment would have been so catastrophic to Fury and boxing as a whole that it’s a wonder why they even agreed to it in the first place (although I could give you 12 million reasons why).
However when you watch this match, you realise that the risk of injury is laughably low.
Braun is in the unenviable role of trying to make Fury’s awful offence look good, while also tuning down his own offence to make it as safe as possible. He also has to account for Fury having no sense of timing or positioning for WWE wrestling. This makes Braun look horrible. Fury wrestles like someone that doesn’t have a great deal of interest in putting on a show, which adds to the perception of this being a quick cash grab. The whole appeal of these two monsters is that they are larger than life ass kicking behemoths. When they have to tone down their offence because they’re petrified of someone getting hurt, it makes the entire spectacle of the match pointless. Instead we get an awkward, mistimed mess. Eventually Fury hits Braun with a right hand, which gives him the win in 9 minutes via count out. After the match, Braun gets his heat back by hitting the running powerslam on Fury, only for Fury to get up immediately and begging Braun to “get back here, pussy!”
In a bizarre twist, this isn’t even the worst match featuring a non-wrestling legitimate fighter on this show, but we’ll get to that later.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the actual controversies of these shows, so allow me to get a little personal about it. However if the politics of the show does not interest you, or you’ve heard it all before and don’t want to relive it, then feel free to skip the remainder of the post as the commentary on the match is now finished. This will be the only time on the blog that I’ll reference the controversies of the Saudi shows, so I figured I’d get it out the way now in this first entry.
I’ve always had difficulty with these shows for many reasons, but on a personal level I struggle with it because I am part of a community that is illegal by law in Saudi Arabia. There is no tolerance for people like me. Me and my fiancé would genuinely be at risk of death if we were there, just because of how we were born to be and our beliefs that adults should be allowed to love other adults regardless of gender. Even looking beyond the journalists, the atrocities in Yemen, the misogyny, the worldwide funding of terrorism, and the environmental aspect, there is a very real part of these shows that offends me on a personal level as an individual that hits me hard. People from the forum or know me outside it may be aware that I gave up supporting my local football team of 30 years, Newcastle United, as a direct result of their takeover by the Saudi Public Investment Fund because I couldn’t in good conscience support a team whose future success will be directly attributed to the funding and governance of the Saudi Royal Family. With the way they’ve dipped their funds into just about every walk of life, it is impossible to truly boycott everything. Does that make me a hypocrite because I consume media from WWE and Disney (to name a couple) knowing full well where they get some of their money? Perhaps, but it is also a consequence of the imperfect world we live. The best we can do is our best, whatever you think that is, and to protest in a way that suits you.
This is all compounded further by one of the men in this match, Tyson Fury, who is a well documented homophobe who has made vile comments towards the LGBT community including likening it to bestiality and paedophilia. It was around 3-4 years before this match took place that he made those comments, and to my knowledge he has never explicitly said that he no longer feels that way. However he did apologise to people he had hurt. Fury is a complicated man, who had a unique upbringing that warped his views on life. By his own admission, he struggled mightily with addiction and mental health issues at the time of those comments, and for that I can sympathise with him. I also recognise that he has done more than most to promote men’s mental health awareness in the UK in recent years. For this I feel he is difficult to evaluate and he is living proof of the grey in people. He’s not a person I would find easy to forgive for his previous comments, and that of course does mean that I went into this match with a less-than-enthusiastic approach even before watching it.
I say all this to say, there are plenty of reasons to hate these shows and what they stand for. The purpose of this blog and future entries is not to shit on the concept of these shows, but the matches that happened to take place on them as it just so happens to be where bad wrestling takes place.
Up Next - As WWE goes through a power struggle off-screen in real life, let’s look back to a time when the McMahons kept their power struggles strictly on-screen.
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