Promoting the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory: Why R-Truth Should NOT Get a Rematch

Little Jimmy gets his revenge and Truf bitching about it would be gold!
Photo Credit: See the watermark to the left

R-Truth got his first-ever shot at the WWE Championship last night at Capitol Punishment. It was an unsuccessful endeavor after a "Little Jimmy" threw soda in his face, the ultimate full-circle moment in the five-week build that allowed John Cena enough of a distraction to put Truf down with an Attitude Adjustment. While the match felt like a blowoff to most who watched last night, (and reading recaps, it read just like a blowoff as well) the trend in WWE is that when you get one PPV title match, you usually get three or four of them, regardless of how many of them in a row you lose. I fully expect Truth to come out and blather on about how he was robbed and expect to get a title shot.

And that's exactly why he shouldn't get one. Because once he gets denied, are you going to doubt that the meltdown will be anything less than epic? I don't. The thing with Truth is that as great a character as he's become in the last month, he really hasn't evolved in the ring to match his character. Yeah, we all loved his Larry Z stall-job to earn said title shot, but at the same time, that was wholly independent of anything he could do in terms of moves, selling, pacing etc. He played cat and mouse, and while it was great theater and awesome storytelling, what would come to pass when he had to actually wrestle?

If you give Truth the title shot at Money in the Bank, that's what you're banking on, Truth carrying a rematch angle on the promise he and Cena can deliver a good match. Even worse, the other scenario would be the GM giving Truth what he wants, and then making it a steel cage match so that the "Little Jimmies" of the world can't get involved. From a traditional storytelling background, that is obviously the best thing to do, but at the same time, this really isn't a traditional character. Well, scratch that, the conspiracy victim IS a traditional character, but it's not a character where this traditional storytelling trope works.

Keeping Truth away from the WWE Championship would create, in my mind, a better opportunity for a very limited WWE Creative team to generate a memorable story. I'd say have Truth beg for his shot because he was done in by a fan who had no business interfering. The GM denies it, citing the numerous shots Christian got on Smackdown as an example of guys who clearly don't deserve it continuing to get shots, and saying he doesn't want to be like Teddy Long because Teddy Long is an awful human being. The ensuing meltdown would be epic, and the next couple of months could see Truth trying like hell to get his shot back, either by legal means or by continually calling the GM to the carpet for trying to screw him out of his rightful second title opportunity. Or better yet, have Truth win Money in the Bank for RAW and every time he goes to cash it in, have some sort of nefarious circumstance prevent him from cashing it in. That would keep the story going and it would give Truth an out to get his title opportunity down the line.

Besides, we all know the money program here is to start prepping Alberto del Rio for his SummerSlam title opportunity. I mean, they already tipped their hand with this Youtube video that WWE Games put on their channel. They told as good a story with as good an ending for the time being in five weeks as they could have, which is more an argument to me for eliminating the number of PPVs and extending time between them than it is continuing the program with Truth for the time being. Let it go for now and start ramping up to SummerSlam.

I know that Truth has gained a lot of fans over the last month. I know, I'm sort of one of them. However, the idea that titles are the only thing that mean importance nowadays is pretty antiquated. A title means something in the right situation. For Truth, the lack of a title in his future is the best story. In the modern day, and really, any time in wrestling history for that matter, the story is always the most important thing. What's the better story that can be told? TO me, it's R-Truth complaining about The Man keeping him from a title opportunity, not him getting the obligatory, warmed-over weaksauce build that tends to happen in the second PPV of a several-PPV-title-feud.

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