Matt Dawgs
Random Thoughts from Matt Dawgs: Kharma Catches Up, Chris Jericho's Return, Bait and Switch In ECW, Britney Spears Isn't a Great Mom, TNA Is 2 Hours of The Same, Damn Yankees, No Mercy Booking and More
By Matt Dawgs
Oct 6, 2007 - 11:52 AM

Random Thoughts, Opinions, Questions and Observations.

Greetings from under the New Blue Black Yankee cap I received for my birthday.

JAMES GUTTMAN NOTE: the following opinions and thoughts are the thoughts of Matt Dawgs and Matt Dawgs alone. They in no way represent the thoughts and opinions of World Wrestling Insanity.com, their staff or their friends and families. They……….Ah, who am I kidding, I agree with a lot of what Matt has to say, especially about TNA.

(JG Note:  Matt wrote that)

Call it karma, call it bad luck, and call it what you want but the total eclipse of the sun has finally come over World Wrestling Entertainment. Their “golden goose” has finally been shut down. The money train needs repairs as WWE Champion and 3 year main event main stay, the man who the entire company has been built around, Mr. John Cena is injured. What’s worse is that the injury is worse than originally diagnosed. World renowned orthopedic surgeon, Dr. James Andrews stated that they didn’t know the severity of the injury until they got inside and saw it. The expected timetable for Cena’s return is 8 months minimum but possibly a year. That means Cena is gone for an entire calendar period (Andrew’s said the same thing about HHH’s first quad tear and he was gone for the back end of the diagnosis). I don’t expect Cena back until September the earliest. That’s BAD NEWS for WWE. Real Bad.

It could get worse for the WWE unless the creative team gets their ducks in a row and lays things out. While this is a good opportunity for the Kennedy’s, Carlito’s and Orton’s of RAW, it could also mean a return to the WWE title picture for HHH. While I fully expected him to return for the title sooner rather than later (did you realize he hasn’t had a WWE title shot since he lost to John Cena at Wrestlemania 22?), I don’t want him winning by default. Randy Orton should have a serious heel run with the title before being dethroned. Unless……………………………

WWE decides to move Chris Jericho into the slot that Cena had and give him the title. If that happens, you solve several problems at once. By not announcing Jericho ahead of time, you force people who didn’t by the pay per view on Monday morning to kick themselves in the head for missing it. If I were WWE and I chose this route, I would make sure to hold off on showing any footage of Jericho winning the title other than “still photos” just to rub it in further. That will show fans who didn’t buy the pay per view that they missed out on something special. This situation also causes fans to get excited as having Jericho back (and I am sure some casual fans don’t know he is coming back) will be a “holy sh*t” moment that will capture the excitement and surprise missing from WWE programming as of late. It also shakes up the main event picture and gives us some fresh matches as Jericho has been gone for sometime and with some people returning from injury soon (Lashley, Edge), new people in main event slots on all three brands (Edge, Punk, Kennedy, King Booker) it is a new top guy to get in the mix.

Should be an interesting time to be in the WWE and I am curious to see how they react to this situation they are involved in. I was discussing it with my cousin the other day and we came to realize that while some people around the net are blaming Kennedy for the injury (even though you can’t blame him as it was an accident, even if he did sandbag Cena, I am sure he didn’t expect Cena to get hurt), I put blame on the WWE. They worked Cena into the ground over the past few years. The non stop travel, the movie making, the multiple matches on RAW (he would work a match and then a dark match almost every single TV taping). With his schedule (most people report that while the WWE schedule isn’t as bad as it used to be, Cena was the one guy who worked almost 300 days a year due to appearances, charity events, autograph signings, interviews, etc), it was bound to happen. The human body can only take so much before starting to break down. While it sucks, maybe it is for the better. He can rest and get some time to recharge his batteries. Hopefully he doesn’t volunteer to come back and do promotional work while he recovers. That would just be nuts.

Got to give credit where credit is due. After hearing what his injury was, I watched the match again and boy did Cena bust his ass with a torn pectoral to try and get a good match out of Kennedy. You actually have to give props to both of them as they held it together and did what they could with their limitations of the injury to scrape together a decent match. After a few minutes though, you could tell Cena couldn’t take it anymore and they rushed to the finish. I am sure they would have had a better match if Cena wasn’t hurt but they were decent for what it was. Major kudos to Cena for doing the post match angle afterwards too. That table spot must have been BRUTAL with a torn muscle in his chest.

The other big news is the complete lack of faith WWE has in anyone who remotely gets close to being over who is not “their guy”. This was evidenced on ECW when the race to get a shot at CM Punk was totally sabotaged by creative when Tommy Dreamer vs. Elijah Burke match. The winner was to face Punk at No Mercy. Surprisingly Tommy Dreamer won the match (I am sure no one expected him to go over Burke, clean no less) and the crowd actually popped. I know I did as I think Punk and Tommy could have pulled off a good title match. But it was all for naught as Big Daddy V came out for an impromptu match against Dreamer and managed to get the title shot by beating him within seconds. I don’t understand why WWE couldn’t let Dreamer get the title shot. Giving him a chance wouldn’t have killed anyone nor would it had affected the buy rate for the pay per view. No one, and I mean no one, was buying No Mercy for Punk vs. Dreamer just like no one is rushing to call their pay per view carrier to order it for Punk vs. Big Daddy V. A Punk/Dreamer match would have cost viewers one way or another. Instead, they hot shot an angle with no back-story by giving away what would have and could have been a money making match down the road with a proper build up. The lack of logic in this is mind boggling. At least we can be happy with the fact that they didn’t manage to hot shot John Morrison’s return into this angle and pretend that the past month without him didn’t take place.

MVP/Matt Hardy vs. Taker/Kane aka the Brothers of Destruction at No Mercy has me VERY, VERY tempted to buy this pay per view. I really enjoy Taker and Kane as a team and I fully support this entire Matt Hardy/MVP feud so far. It is my version of the feud of the year and has me intrigued by where the feud is going. (Although I fully expect Matt Hardy to win the US title down the road). WWE has been amazing with the slow build in this feud and the bickering between the two is GOLD.

I am also digging the Hornswaggle McMahon/Melina story. I don’t know why, I find it entertaining.

Britney Spears has lost her kids. K-Fed won full custody over their kids due to Britney failing to take mandatory, court ordered drug tests. She also drove around California without a valid driver’s license with her kids in the car. So what did she do when she found out she was losing her kids? She did what any self respecting mother in her situation would do. She went to the tanning salon and got a tan. Yes. Instead of going to rehab, filing an appeal, going to church, she went to get a tan and followed it up with some shopping. A few days later, there was an emergency hearing. She was asked to return to court, she didn’t. Instead her lawyer went while she was at a Starbucks and gas station getting her picture taken. K-Fed showed up in court and the ruling stood. The judge also stated that while he was giving Britney visitation, she MUST be monitored at all times when with them. This story is so amazing on so many levels. How can a multi million dollar pop icon fall so far, so fast and in the public eye no less? We are all watching the unraveling of a sick girl who has tons of obvious problems. What is even more amazing is that NO ONE, not her family, not her friends, not even the court is lifting a finger to stop it. No one is trying to get a court order to force her to get help. No one seems to be telling her to stop her ways and the paparazzi is eating it up. If everyone just stopped taking photos of her, maybe she would stop “playing” to the camera. According to TMZ, she checked in and out of 3 California hotels in 3 days. Yet she owns 2 homes in California. What the f*ck is that about? She just wants attention and she is getting it. As for attention, here is her new video . Enjoy.

MATT EDITOR NOTE: As this was ready to be posted, I have just read that Britney Spears has……drum roll please…….MISSED HER FIRST VISITATION WITH HER KIDS. Boy you sure can tell she loves them!!!

Total Nonstop Angle. What more can I say about it? They had their big 2 hour debut this week and it was……..exactly what I expected and predicted it to be in this very column. A 2 hour long edition of the same f*cking show we’ve seen all year. Pointless angles, tons of run ins, lack of logic, clusterf*ck matches and plenty of talking. I was right!!! Instead of giving more time to the matches (which they only did for the main event), everything was rushed as usual and most of it made no sense. Why would you start the show with Rhino vs. Black Reign instead of an X-Division match? They should have opened with Senshi vs. Christopher Daniels vs. AJ Styles. Give them 15 minutes and show the elusive “new viewers” an alternative to WWE. Instead we got a 5 minutes match between two former WWE stars that had run ins from Raven, Havok, Jim Mitchell and Abyss. It appeared to me that they wanted to make sure every single person on the roster (including Petey Williams who has been AWOL for a while now) some face time so that people can see them. The problem with that is that after watching for 30 minutes, you forget what you saw earlier since so much is going on and there is so much to remember. Throw in some gauntlet match with 10 people and complicated rules and your brain cells continue to die. Give me one day to sit with TNA bookers and give me two shows to put together and I GUARANTEE that I can put together a better show than they have been doing for months now. To add an extra bonus, I will even continue to book Kurt Angle and Karen Angle in more segments than they should be in.

Speaking of Kurt Angle, boy is TNA making some headlines now. They always want to make headlines and get noticed, well Kurt Angle being arrested for DUI is a way to do it. Luckily it coincided with their two hour debut. Too bad TNA didn’t put out a press release stating that he was arrested for DUI but you can catch him on the two hour Spike TV iMPACT on Thursday. That would have been smart advertising. Instead they missed the boat on that one. Oh well, there is always next week.

Adam “Pacman” Jones has to be the best tag team champion in the history of the sport. He is undefeated, he is a champion and he doesn’t wrestle. Who has it better than Pacman? No one, that’s who, if they really wanted to get him over, they’d have him beat Samoa Joe. That would show the smart net fans who still want to get behind him even though he has been made to look like a buffoon since Kurt Angle debuted. (I would have written Angle but I didn’t want to confuse Kurt with Karen. Because quite frankly, Joe has looked like an even bigger buffoon since Karen debuted. I just wanted to specify that for you.)

*Sigh* Damn Yankees. Game 1 of the ALDS against Cleveland. C.C. Sabathia on the mound, a man who we haven’t faced since 2004. A man who is a legitimate CY Young front runner. So much so that fellow team mates are calling him Cy Cy Sabathia. He kills left-handed batters and only allows 1 walk per game over 9 innings. So against the Yankees, they walk 6 times against him, he struggles to throw strikes since the Yankee hitters are so patient, he loads the bases twice and what happens? WE GET B*TCHSLAPPED 12-3. Chien-Ming Wang gets totally PWNED by the Indians who forget to swing at his sinker and force him to throw high fastballs which they then consume like tic tacs and bash the hell out of anything else he threw which wasn’t a sinker.

Jennifer Lopez is preggo. Good for her. I don’t like her very much anymore because she seems stuck up and from what I read, she doesn’t get along with her mother much anymore. Little known fact, her mother, Guadalupe Lopez, was my gym teacher in elementary school for 8 years. She is/was such a nice woman. I met J-Lo once when she was one of the fly girls on “In Living Color”. She looked completely different than she does now. She was a bit chubby, very much lighter skinned (she must tan now) and obviously more approachable. Back then, if you saw her in the Bronx, I am sure you were able to go up to her and say hello. Nowadays, she isn’t in the Bronx unless it is to promote something.

This week marks the 10^th anniversary of the death of Brian Pillman. I cannot stress enough for those of you younger fans who did not get to see Brian in his wresting prime (in the early 90’s) to his character prime (in the mid 90’s until his death), do yourself a favor and find old tapes and definitely by the “Loose Cannon” DVD available through WWE. This man was a much larger factor in the “Attitude Era” than people give him credit for and had he not died, I fully believe he would have had a long main event run against “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Austin and he had such a chemistry together and Pillman would have had an awesome feud with him for the WWE title had he lived. He definitely would have been a longtime main event player until he retired. Such a shame as he was someone to remember.

 Lindsey Lohan has taken some days off from rehab (where she’s been since August nonstop) to spend some time with her dad. Now while I normally would think this is a good idea since her and her father had some bad news going on with their relationship, isn’t this a bad idea? Wasn’t her dad a notorious coke user? Isn’t this something rehab people should be looking in on? I’m just saying.

If TNA weren’t so f*cking confusing and unorganized, I would order the next pay per view. I am so interested in seeing Shelly Martinez debut. I love her. Really, I do.

Question, I know ECW has a light roster but A) wouldn’t it make sense to try to move people who aren’t featured on RAW or Smackdown to it and B) why do they only get one match per pay per view? How about a Balls Mahoney/Miz match on a PPV?

Snitsky was suspended for a Wellness violation. Sucks for him. I don’t understand how people are still failing tests with all this heat on them. Amazing.

Olympic Gold Medalist Marion Jones has revealed that she competed in the 2000 Olympics while on steroids. It is expected that she is going to be stripped of her medals and possibly spend some time in jail since she lied to Federal Investigators in regards to the BALCO investigation a few years back. Such a shame.

I am very curious, very concerned and honestly, shocked at the Chris Benoit story. No major wrestling reporter or news outlet has picked up on this but Jim Ross has mentioned it several times in his blog when referring to Benoit that there is some MAJOR information that has not been released by the police suggesting that there is A LOT more to the story than has been revealed. I am not sure if this is on purpose or by accident but he is insinuating that we haven’t heard the “whole” story and that some of the missing details would shed a lot more light on what actually happened that day. I am also curious as to where those missing diary entries that his father Michael released came from. If they were in the Benoit home, I am sure police would have searched the garbage for them. If they were found in a neighbor’s garbage (as originally reported and is the story Michael is using), then why would the neighbor look in his garbage for them? Even if they were on top of the garbage, the chances are slim that someone would notice them. Also, wouldn’t the neighbor call the police instead of handing them to Chris’ father? Finally, where is the rest of that diary? I doubt Benoit had the time to get rid of it. If he burned it in the fire place or something similar, forensics would be able to find traces of it and know that something was burned in the house. Especially since it was the summer and it would be odd to use the fireplace. That diary is somewhere waiting to be released.

Why is Hardcore Holly continuing to beat Cody Rhodes? Why is Cody being pushed like a jabroni? He was getting over with the fans during the Orton feud and seems to have lost all momentum he had going for him.

Victoria is hot.

Anyone seen ROH’s second pay per view yet? I have it on DVR but haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. Looks great on paper though.

Bionic Woman on NBC is a good show so far. I’ve only sent he first episode but I enjoyed it. Have to watch Episode 2 this weekend.

I know I have said it before but it is definitely worth repeating, The Briscoe Brothers in Ring of Honor are the best tag team IN ALL OF WRESTLING. That means in WWE, TNA, ROH, NOAH, AJPW, ETC. ALL of Wrestling.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s “The Game Plan” was the number one movie in America this past week. It surprisingly defeated Jamie Foxx’s “The Kingdom” for the number one spot. Since it is a Disney flick, this surprise hit has opened several doors for him in the acting world. I appreciate that he has the ability to make fun of himself and put himself in the place this movie put him in. Problem is though; there is no valid reason for him to NOT be the number one action star in the world. That position is still vacant and his for the taking. If he wanted to, studios would be backing Brinks trucks to his front door to throw money at him for action movies. He could and should be the Arnold Schwarzenegger of this generation.

Did anyone see Johnny Fairplay get his face broken by Danny Bonaduce? I would link the clip here but that is exactly what Johnny wants, more publicity. I am sure you can find it if you wanted to so I will refrain from linking to it here. Sorry.

One last note, while it would be an awesome way to make someone return to a company by having Chris Jericho beat Randy Orton at No Mercy on Sunday to win the WWE title, how much more of an awesome moment would it be if Ric Flair was the one to win it on Sunday to beat Orton? They have a history to build on for the match, have had solid matches against each other and Flair winning one last title before he retires in April would be GOLDEN. I am not sure if WWE brass has thought of this but it definitely would be a feel good moment and surprising way to end a pay per view. Orton will eventually beat Flair for it, maybe even on RAW the following night, it wouldn’t be the first time where someone won a title at a pay per view only to lose it on RAW (see Kane losing the title back to Austin, Triple H’s first title win over Mick Foley for examples). I think it would be damn good booking to have it happen this way. Just my opinion.

Ok kiddies, classes are over for now. See you all next week.

Feel free to discuss whatever you’d like in the “ Anger Management” section of the message board or whichever section you see fit.

~Matt Dawgs  

World Wrestling Insanity writer Matt Dawgs is the bread and butter of the World Wrestling Insanity family. His future is bright and once James Guttman comes into a large sum of money, you can expect Matt will be getting tons of it thrown at him, at least half of it. Matt also moonlights as a professional wrestler/manager in the NY/NJ Indy scene. He is legit afraid of getting on Homicide’s bad side but thinks he is a cool dude in general. He also is a funny guy. If you have any questions, corrections, feedback, comments and ideas, he can be reached at Dawgs@worldwrestlinginsanity.com . If the feedback is negative, you can e-mail Matt at insanity @ worldwrestlinginsanity .com .

P.S. – In case you didn’t know, there is a WRESTLING BOOK that is out titled “World Wrestling Insanity”. It is a damn fun read so I suggest you run out and get it today. If you already have your copy, read it. If you already read your copy, read it again. It is funny; Like me.

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