Thoughts on WWE Evolution

Thoughts on WWE Evolution

This Sunday, the WWE will hold its first ever all-women's show named "WWE Evolution".

The idea is a neat idea, which has been done before by promotions like TNA and other indies. However, it was really doomed from the start.

The event was announced earlier this summer for the fall. I immediately was skeptical of the idea. Why? Well, there's a few reasons.

The first is that for a show which really should be something special, it was clear the WWE did not have enough time to give it the build it needed. 2-3 months is just not enough for what should be a landmark event. This shouldn't be just any old PPV. This should be an event to remember forever, like AJW Big Egg Wrestling Universe or AJW Dreamslam. If I were going to book this event, I would have set the gears in motion for it back in 2017 or at worst in early 2018. Then I would have time to build some feuds up, protect a few wrestlers and set the stage for a big show.

This didn't happen though, and that goes into the second reason of why I was skeptical of this whole event. WWE's Fall 2018 schedule is one of the most loaded schedules in recent memory. Not only would they have this, along with the usual 5 hours of TV, but they also planned Crown Jewel, the Aussie Supershow and the usual PPV's. For someone like myself, that could easily be a years worth of booking, yet it was all crammed into 3 months. I actually think WWE has handled it as well as they could, but it was obvious something was going to have to get lost in the shuffle.

What is really amusing is that two unforeseen issues ended up doing more to hurt WWE Evolution than the booking and the loaded fall schedule. As I talked about here, the Jamal Khashoggi and Roman Reigns situations caused a lot of controversy and through it, WWE Evolution ended up as only the 3rd most interesting story of the week.

I don't have high hopes for WWE Evolution. While I don't watch that much WWE and may not be the best person to gauge the booking, it doesn't look that enticing. This clearly isn't going to be Dreamslam and the only Big Egg we may see here is the one this show ends up laying.

I don't have much interest in Nikki Bella vs Ronda Rousey, and I don't think anyone seriously expects Bella to win. The more the match moves from a squash, the worse it is going to be.

Trish Stratus and Lita vs Mickie James and Alicia Fox has been strange looking from the outside in. Both Trish and Lita already returned at the Royal Rumble, so their return means a lot less than it should. Then whether it was on purpose or by accident, everyone was expecting Trish Stratus vs Alexa Bliss, which supposedly was never the plan and now can't happen as Alexa is injured and Alicia Fox will be taking her place. And all this would be enough of an issue on its own, but that doesn't even bring up that Trish and Lita weren't that great to begin with and this match is likely to be bad.

We've already seen Flair/Lynch and Sane/Bazler. I expect both matches to be good, but neither is anything to get hyped about, especially since we've seen Flair/Lynch multiple times already.

I don't really need to cover the battle royale or the throwaway trios match, do I?

The match I find to be most interesting - Toni Storm vs Io Shirai also has its issues. Neither girl is a WWE product and will only remind people of how unevolved WWE female wrestlers are. But even worse, anyone who doesn't watch NXT or the Mae Young Classic will have no idea who they are, so even if they do put out a good match, there's a good chance the crowd might be completely silent.

But none of it matters. No matter how good or bad this show is, we are will hear about how big of a moment this was for years to come and the truth of the show will be buried in corporate confabulation.

Thoughts on WWE Crown Jewel and Roman Reigns' Leukemia

I wanted to talk about these two things today.

I'm sure you know this, but WWE is running WWE Crown Jewel in Saudi Arabia. They are getting paid big bucks by the Saudi government to run there to make Saudi Arabia seem more legitimate.
If you also hadn't heard, Saudi Arabia also killed a journalist recently named Jamal Khashoggi, who may or may not have had some American government backing and a questionable history.

We all know what Saudi Arabia is like. We know who is the boss and we know what can happen if you break their rules. This isn't new information.

I'm not really surprised by what happened. Saudi Arabia is one of the last places I would go do journalism work in next to North Korea, other Middle Eastern countries, China and Africa. Why everyone else is so surprised by this is beyond me. This isn't news and Saudi Arabia does this stuff to its enemies everyday.

What is news though is WWE getting patsy'd for doing a show there. There's many companies that do business there and in other questionable places and no one has asked them to stop. There's also a whole list of countries that do questionable things that no one is trying to organize any boycotts over. America may even be one of those countries.

What people need to realize is that WWE is a business and businesses exist solely to make money. Businesses are not your friends and they are not your family. Their lights don't stay on due to good PR or 5 star matches, they stay on with cash. Hopefully this is a reminder to large portions of the population that this will always be the case.

I don't blame WWE for taking the cash. Any good businessman would. I also don't think WWE should be patsy'd here when there's a million other examples of similar things happening and no one caring.

I personally can't wait until this event is over. I'm tired of hearing about it and I'm tired of various non-political media becoming politicized.

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Next, I'd like to discuss Roman Reigns being re-diagnosed with Leukemia.

I don't particularly like Roman as a wrestler. He's a more generic version of John Cena and compared to Cena, Cena looks like an all-time great. He doesn't have much fire, nothing he says ever feels genuine and his matches are just standard WWE fare. As a person, I only know him through what he has said in public interviews, and that person has been a lot like the one that has been on TV all these years. He has blamed the fans for his shortcomings and has done little to fan the flames that people have thrown at him.

With that being said, I obviously don't wish leukemia on him, but I'm not going to miss him and I'm one of the few who has enough guts to say that. I wish him the best and hope he recovers, but I really hope he finds a passion for something else as he recovers.

The IWC however, has not been so honest. I've seen hundreds of posts from people wanting him to go away for years and now that he finally will be going away, these same people are pretending to be his biggest fans. This is dishonest and I know if he turns out to be okay soon, these same people would go back to hating him again.

I'm interested to see where WWE goes from here. They've spent the last 5 years on this guy and they've hurt the careers of people like The Undertaker, Brock Lesnar, Dean Ambrose and Braun Strowman to get him over. To me, the obvious answer would be to push Braun Strowman to the moon. He is every promoter's dream and he's a rare mix of being a Vince favorite and a fan favorite. He may not be the greatest worker, but neither were most of the top draws in wrestling, which shows you how little that means. I hope WWE doesn't go with someone like Drew McIntyre to take his place like rumors have stated. Drew is not only not that interesting of a worker, but he's even less interesting of a worker. I also do not want to see Seth Rollins take the ace role as while he is a decent worker and a good face, he just doesn't have enough character or promo skills to carry the company.

We will have to wait and see what the future holds, but one thing is for sure - WWE is going to be looking a lot different without Roman Reigns and for the first time in over a decade, the IWC does not have someone they hate being pushed down their throats.

W*ING 6/4/1995 Scramble Bunkhouse Death Match - Jason the Terrible vs Boogie Man vs Grave Digger

W*ING 6/4/1995 Scramble Bunkhouse Death Match - Jason the Terrible vs Boogie Man vs Grave Digger

Boogie Man gets eliminated

The finish

Grave Digger beat Jason with a baseball bat choke at around 20 minutes. This was not good at all. No one did much of anything except baseball bat shots for 20 minutes straight. There wasn't even any good punches or anything like that. Just baseball bat shot, a forearm club from behind and more baseball bat shots. Digger also took off Jason's mask for some reason during this. The crowd was completely silent for most of this and for good reason as even I couldn't wait for this one to be over. The only real highlights here were the pre-match skits with each guy, which were really cool, but this just didn't deliver.