The Road to Wrestlemanina beg

Tonight is the beginning. The road to Wrestlemania starts tonight! Tonight is the Royal Rumble.

The Rumble is a very unique pay per view in the WWE. It is a match where wrestlers enter the ring, and try to throw their opponent out, and have both of their feet hit the ground. The winner of this match gets to challenge for a championship at Wrestlemania.


The Royal Rumble event has always been very unpredictable. Even in the 1st match, which dates back to 1988. Back then, the match was not on pay per view, only had 20 participants, and did not reward the winner with an automatic title shot at Wrestlemania.


Now the event will have 40 participants and the winner will, most likely, go on to head line Wrestlemania. I have heard a few rumors about some people coming back to the WWE for the Rumble event, but since I know that some of you may read this before the event (since I am going to post it before the event), I will not spoil it for anyone.


I have been watching WWE for a while now, looking to see how everything is setting up for mania. Looking at the champions, and the contenders to see who is going to be the guy to step up, and be on the main stage at mania. And with all of that said I have a few predictions.


1. I know this one is very far fetched, because I just read this his return was being delayed some more, but here goes: Sheamus will run through most of the field in the rumble, then somewhere around 30-35, we here the guitar strum, and you heard the voice say “IT’S TIME TO PLAY THE GAME”! That’s right, Triple H makes his long awaited 2011 debuted, and he takes out Sheamus.


2. Sheamus will run wild through the field, and it will come down to him and John Morrison. Since Morrison is the face, he will win the Rumble. The Miz will defend the WWE Championship, and that will set up a Miz and Morrison title match at mania. I am sure with more than 2 months to promote it, WWE will come up with really big storylines between 2 young, charismatic superstars, who were tag-team champs. And this will be almost 2 years to the day, when on the Raw draft special, the Miz turned out his partner and started Morrison’s face turn.


3. Christian will win the Rumble match, and who will he face? You guessed it Edge. Captain Charisma, will take on his best friend, and his former tag team partner, on the Grandest Stage of them All. And if this is the case, I believe these two will tear the house down at Mania. Now I know this is a long shot, because I believe Christian is hurt and I don’t think he will be in the match tonight.


4. This one is a long shot, but I could also see Edge losing the World Heavyweight Championship tonight, early, and then see him later on tonight in the Rumble match, and watch him win it and go back to Mania. Like I said in the beginning of this paragraph, this is a long shot, but I know Edge is a face now, but he made a big name for himself as the ultimate opportunist.


These are just a few of the things I think may happen. Now I will be honest with you, since 1999, I am 6-6 in my Royal Rumble predictions. WWE has done a great job lately setting up big drama before these matches. I am sure they will surprise us all tonight. Enjoy the Match!

Hello All

I am sorry for not writing a blog last week. I had some personal things going on and I didn’t have a chance to come up with a blog. Don’t worry though, I am refreshed, have watched all of my shows, and am ready for this blog.

I want to send a shout out to the “Score Atlanta Scoreboard Show”. From time to time, I go on that show, discuss some wrestling, and this blog. The main guy on that show is a wrestling fan, and he likes to ask me question, and we discuss what is going on in wrestling. So with that said, I am going to take a topic from when that show a few weeks ago. What is happening with all of the black wrestlers?

Now I know that when you bring up the topic of race, people always tense up. They don’t want to ask the serious questions, especially when it comes to sports. We like to think sports is a level playing field and if you are good, the cream will always rise to the top, and you will find a way to be successful. But I hope we all know that that is not the case.

Back in the early days (70’s and 80’s) of pro wrestling, there were a lot of black pro wrestlers. Junkyard Dog, Koko Bee Ware, Butch Reed, Rocky Johnson, Bad News Brown. These guys achieved some success, but not to the same degree as their counterparts, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Dusty Rhodes, Magnum TA. These men were all contemporaries, but the last set of wrestlers I named had multiple championship reigns, whereas the 1st group of men, never won more than tag team championships, and some didn’t even win that.

By the time the 90’s rolled around, we thought things were going to change. In 1992 the very 1st black heavyweight champion was crowned when Ron Simmons defeated Big Van Vader, to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. This was a huge deal, because we thought it was the start of a new era. An era where young black kids would be getting started in pro wrestling, because they had someone to look up to. But that never happened. Simmons held the title for 5 months, before dropping it to Vader, but after that he was never a contender for the title. He never got another shot.

At the end of the 90s, there was a little bit of hope. There a young man who was so electrifying, that he could not be stopped. I am talking about the Rock. The Rock went on to become one of the most entertaining performers of all time. Rock won his 1st title in 1999, and was a fixture in the title scene till he left the WWE to become a movie star, in 2003.

The decade of the 2000s started with more progress. Booker T won the WCW Title 4 times before the company closed in 2001. Now I know there were monkeys running that company in the end of it, but still, he was their champion, and that can never be taken away from him. And just to show that he was a great wrestler, he won the World Title, in the WWE in 2006.

But since then there have been no Black Champions in a major promotion that can be seen on TV. I know some of you are saying, “Didn’t R-Truth wins the Title in TNA”? Yes he did, but the last time he held that belt was 2004. TNA was not on TV then. Main stream America probably doesn’t even know he was champion.

And with the lack of push that Shelton Benjamin has gotten from WWE, it does not seem like there will be a Black Champion coming anytime soon.

With the rich heritage of Black Wrestling in this great business, I hope there will continue to be black wrestlers becoming champion in major wrestling organizations.

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Multiply and Conquer

With all of the success that “The Nexus” is having right now, I wanted to discuss factions. Factions are small groups within bigger organizations.

There have been a lot of factions to come along since the 80s. But today I am going to go in depth about what makes a good faction by using some of the best, and showing their strengths and weakness.

The wrestling faction has been around for years. But they did not become big until the mid-80s. That was when the 4-horsemen debuted.

Throughout the 80s, the biggest wrestler in the land was Ric Flair, who was a multi time World Champion. He was traveling all over the world defending the NWA world title, back when the champ would do that. He was a very accomplished wrestler, being able to keep the title all on his own. But when he and Ole and Arn Anderson, started working together in tag team matches, you could see the chemistry was developing between them. After befriending Telly Blanchard, the group was up and running. All they needed was a name. So one night on WCW (not the company, but the name of the show, back in the 80s) Arn said that they were the 4-horsemen of pro wrestling. What made the horsemen work was the fact that all four were great wrestlers. They had the champ as their anchor and they did everything needed to keep that title. It made fans hate them, which made them seem greater. You always watched to see if someone could beat them, and put them out of commission. What did not work for them, was when Ole, and Telly left, and they had to get other members in the group who did not fit the mold of the originals. That is one way a faction will runs its course.

There were a few other factions to come by after the horsemen. The Dangerous Alliance, the York Foundation, The Dudes with Attitudes, The Fabulous Free birds, The Heenan Family, all factions in the late 80s and early 90s. But none of them were able to stick around and make a name for themselves. That is until this one group came around called the NWO.

The NWO was a group that was started by Eric Bischoff, back when he was going toe to toe with the WWE. He needed to do something to change wrestling, and to make the WWE fans, come over to WCW. So he signed 3 major WWE former wrestlers. 1st he signed Hulk Hogan, who “retired” from wrestling. Then he signed Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash. Hall and Nash came in as heels (bad guys), and kept saying they were working with someone else. Later on the wrestling world was shocked to find out that it was Hulk Hogan, who was the biggest face (good guy) of the entire 80s and much of the 90s. Hulk Hogan said in his 1st interview that they were the New World Order of professional wrestling. The NWO did a lot of good things. Every week you had to watch to see what they would do, and who they would convert to their side. The down side was maybe they went on too long. They went on so long, in fact that their faction broke into two sub-factions. One was face, and the other was heel. They had many incarnations from their beginning in 96 to the end of WCW in 2001. And even behind the scenes this faction was not good for the business. Hogan and Nash at the forefront of this faction was no good. Both men have been notorious for playing back stage politics to get themselves the main event push. Nash was even the booker (the person who decides the outcome) for WCW when he won his 1st title. And in doing so, he ended Bill Goldberg’s historic title run. To make matters worse, Nash booked the ending where he dropped the title to Hogan, after a finger poke (yes you read that correctly).

Of course after the beginning of the NWO, WWE came back with D-generation X, which basically was 2 real life best friends (Shawn Michaels and Triple H) hanging out with each other on screen instead of just back stage. WWE also had the Nation of Domination, The Corporation, the Ministry of Darkness (the latter 2 became one later on), and a few others sprinkled here and there throughout the 90s and 2000s. Now we get to a faction I really think worked. In TNA in 2008 Kurt Angle gathered Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, Booker T, and Sting, and formed a group called the Main Event Mafia. The whole purpose of the group was that they were all Champions at one point or another, and they did not feel they were getting the respect of the younger guys in the business, and they were going to join together and show the young guys how it was done. Again this faction started around the world title. And, although the fans never turned against Sting, the rest of the guys were heels. They fought to keep the title in their grasp, and they upset the wrestlers and fans when they cheated for each other. Their down fall came from the fact that these guys are all older. Most of them are not even in TNA anymore. But when they were around, they were great for wrestling.

So Nexus you have a lot to learn if you want to be like these legendary factions I have focused on. You are on the right track. Keep up the good work, and maybe you will be there.


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Predictions!

First off let me start by saying, I hope you all had a happy, health, and safe holiday season. No matter what you celebrate, I hope you all enjoyed it!

Since it is the beginning of the year, I am going to do one of those typical kinds of blogs: Predictions. But I am not going to do predictions for the whole year. There are a few reasons why. #1, Injuries: I could have a very good idea about a guy who is ready for super stardom, but you can not predict injuries. #2, I could have a good read on a guy; think that he is ready to be the man, and WWE might put him on the back burner. For every Miz, I was right about (see my blog from 3 months ago), there is a Shelton Benjamin, who was one of the greatest workers in the WWE at this time, but never got a world title shot.

I could have done a year end last week, but I think it is easy to say “this happened, and that happened”. “And I knew that would happen”. But instead of saying all of this at the end of the year, I am going to start this year off with my predictions for the first quarter.

January: We will have one of the major pay per views, The Royal Rumble, in January. I am thinking that if we have not seen Triple H beforehand, he will be back for the Rumble. I’m hoping he won’t win, but as I wrote in a previous blog, the creative writing team for WWE isn’t very creative when it comes to the main event. So I will go with him as the winner. And I will say the Miz and John Morrison will fight for the WWE title for this month. I know they are going to have a match this week on RAW (which Morrison will not win, because the WWE title rarely changes hands on TV anymore), but I think Miz keeps his belt, but the two of them generate so much heat, that they will be the RAW headline for the Rumble. On Smackdown, I believe Edge and Kane will fight for the rest of this month culminating in a match at Rumble, where Edge will come out on top.

February: The month will start with guys fighting for an opportunity to get a shot at their respective championship at the Elimination Chamber Pay per View. At the Chamber, I say the Miz keeps the belt. As a heel champion he can do so much to hold on to that belt, and although champs don’t do well going into the Chamber, I think this will be a great time to change that. Over on Smackdown, with the Rumble winner being from RAW, I will say Edge, will fight with Kane for first few weeks of the month. Kane and others will make the Chamber, but I believe at the pay per view, the Undertaker will make his return, and take Kane out, maybe even helping Edge retain the title, a la Shawn Michaels of last year.

March: With there being no Pay per view this month, I believe everyone is going to build up storylines for Wrestlemania. I think Dolph Ziggler, and Kofi Kingston, who have been have fantastic matches on Smackdown, will have a great build up to an intercontinental championship match at mania. Maybe an iron man match, maybe 2 out of 3 falls, I’m not sure, but they will have an epic match. I think the tag titles will be on the line, maybe in the beginning of the show, and Kane and Taker will meet in a grudge match. Think 3rd time will be the charm for Kane vs. his brother at Wrestlemania? Me neither, but I do think they will face each other. So now we are down to the main events. I say Triple H will face the Miz for the title (which will do nothing but help the Miz, going toe to toe with a hall of famer). And last but not least, I believe that Edge will face………….Christian in the Smackdown main event. I think this will be a great storyline for these two. 2 best friends, former tag champions, former world champions (though Christian won in TNA). I believe these two can build a match especially with a month. And Christian has earned a shot at the title.
Stay tuned, we will do more predictions in a month or so.

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