Idiotic if True: How an Impact Burnout May Have Screwed over the Young Bucks

Were these guys wronged by the competition?

Cageside Seats has a pretty good summary of the scuttlebutt surrounding the Sin Cara hood and the two men who play it, especially the original. It's a good read, but in describing one of the reasons why Mistico has become persona non grata in WWE right now, they brought up this nugget on a recent controversy involving two decidedly non-Sin Cara related wrestlers:

The Young Bucks shouldn't have bothered turning up for their recent WWE tryout, their chances were shot as soon as Rob Van Dam gave them the rep of dodging veteran's handshakes. In a predictable development, RVD's good friends Booker T and Goldust made sure to concur with his assessment via Twitter that they were a couple of disrespectful young punks and thus the Bucks could kiss their WWE chances goodbye.

First, a disclaimer, I don't assume that this is 100% truth here. Dave Meltzer (the source for the Cageside article) may have an element of truth to that slant on how things happened. He may be talking cynically. I don't know.

That being said, if there is any element of truth to this... what the fuck, WWE? Really? Really? I purported not even to want to judge how the WWE backstage culture was, and if the Bucks did "wrong" Booker T, then it's one thing. It's a personal beef, and they handled it the way that they handle those kinds of things backstage. However, if what Meltzer is insinuating is true here, then it's a clear case of a guy who works for another company influencing policy. Regardless of who the guy is, that seems pretty fucked up to me. The guy basically is using his influence to make sure that two guys who might have a future in the industry can't get ahead. Isn't that kind of blackballing considered unethical at the very least?

Furthermore, let's look into the guy who's starting this bullshit. Rob Van Dam. Apparently, if the insinuation is true, he cares about respect and petty bullshit, which is fine and dandy if you're into having your ego stroked, but let's look at some of the things he doesn't care about. He doesn't care about showing respect, since he mouths off about Impact in the media if he's unhappy (and regardless of whether you agree with him or not, you take care of that shit in house). He doesn't care about following drug policy obviously. He also doesn't care about co-worker safety, since his well-documented sloppiness hasn't abated over the years. In fact, I'd say it's gotten worse since his most egregious offense against protecting his fellow workers happened within the last six months, i.e. his amateur dentistry on Abyss with his foot. So now, WWE HR policy is going to be directly impacted by a burnout working for the struggling competition? That is hilarious.

That also isn't to say that RVD and his cronies Booker and Goldust would be totally at fault here. If WWE really is going to not sign the Bucks due to that backstage fracas without further investigation, then what does that say about them? It's one thing to have a guy in the doghouse in Mistico because of behavior that's widely observed, but wouldn't you think it funny that the Bucks, who apparently shook hands with everyone else, had a problem with only two guys, guys who were friends of a habitual drug user with a massive ego? If the reports are true, then doesn't this make WWE look fucking stupid for siding with a guy who ultimately is part of the organization that's most competing with them, whether they know it or not?

But that's the kicker. I keep going back to the disclaimer. There's no way to gauge whether any of these reports that are based on non-primary sources and conjecture are 100% factual. While I have my reasons to believe Meltzer over anyone, including his colleague Bryan Alvarez, wouldn't have an axe to grind, it's entirely possible that he has a journalistic bias against the WWE. It's not that big a negative. It's human nature. There's entirely a chance that this whole post is bluster, and within six months, the Young Bucks will be in WWE, and who knows, maybe Mistico will be Sin Cara once more. That being said, there's too much smoke in the form of wrestler chatter about this kind of thing for there not to be fire. If it was just something internal, then yeah, maybe I wouldn't have wasted any more words on it than I did back when I reacted to it first. But the fact that someone working for Impact may have something to do with the Bucks not signing WWE contracts seems stupid at least, unethical at the midpoint and illegal tampering/collusion at the very worst. It's so mind-bogglingly awful that even the very specter of it doesn't pass the smell test.

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography

Was Mistico a Mistake?

Was Mistico fated from start to fail?
Photo Credit: WWE.com

When Triple H signed Mistico to a contract, most people who knew who he was were excited. He was one of the biggest standout wrestlers South of the Border, worked an exciting style and seemed to be a perfect fit for a company that seemed to take to high flying wrestlers very well. The fans loved him as Sin Cara too. He sold merchandise and got wows from the live audiences for all his acrobatic moves. The botches didn't seem to matter too much either.

The untold story to most fans was that Mistico was a headcase. There was a steady stream of reports from dirtsheets and C&P sites that noted he had a huge ego and brought down the brunt of management and the locker room for everything from those aforementioned botches to claiming that his matches in Mexico were shoot fights. Granted, none of these reports came from primary sources, so it's unclear how much of them were true. Still, the steadiness of said stream was troubling at the very least. That being said, his problems reared a more public head when he was suspended for violating the Wellness Policy.

One would assume that he'd sit out his thirty days, come back and feud with Sheamus, the guy who put him out in storyline with a vicious powerbomb through a ladder at Money in the Bank. That wasn't the case, as again, nebulous reports without primary sources surfaced that Mistico would not be back. More gas was thrown on that fire when the Sin Cara character was brought back two weeks before Mistico's suspension was up, only with masked FCW wrestler Hunico in the rule. A fake/real Sin Cara angle was teased, but ultimately it was dropped when Mistico took over the role again on house shows.

Then, the biggest kicker, Mistico was apparently sent home last Tuesday, with Hunico being placed back in the Sin Cara mask (which, oddly enough, got off to an inauspicious restart when he had to redo a match with Heath Slater twice before it was fit to air). Honestly, I'm not sure what the deal is here. Again, the reports say that he was sent home because of a combination of ego, sloppiness and frustration with the man himself. I'm not going to rule out this being the beginning of that aforementioned dueling Sin Caras angle, but then again, who knows at this point. I'm not sure who's getting the right information, but as of right now, it does seem plausible that the Mistico experiment was poisoned from the start.

The premise behind bringing him up to America was simple. He'd be a guy who'd wow the Anglo audiences, while providing a hometown hero for Mexican fans, a base that is a major growth sector for WWE (growth sector... shit, I feel so dirty for typing that, my apologies). Honestly, the former didn't need to be filled by a Mexican at all. Evan Bourne, for example, is a guy who is massively over with crowds despite being limited to bumping his ass off for bigger guys and doing the Air Bourne for a huge crowd reaction. If they'd turned him loose earlier, maybe he's the guy who'd have made it possible for Rey Mysterio to get his surgery before it became necessary thanks to injuries exacerbated by holding out.

But then again, he didn't fill the other void. You could argue Alberto del Rio did, but at the same time, would Mexican crowds cheer for a rudo in a company of gringos if he was the only one? It's a very good possibility he could have. I mean, WWE may try to keep heels heel in their hometowns through dastardly actions, but money spent on merchandise and tickets is a neutral language. CM Punk proved that at Money in the Bank. Bret Hart proved it in Canada in 1996-97. My guess is the fact that del Rio was crowned Champion so close to their next big tour of Mexico leads me to believe that they didn't necessarily need to have Mistico to have a Mexican draw.

That being said, it'd be nice to be able to have one on the RAW tour and one on the Smackdown tour as well. Again, the WWE could really expand in Mexico, so I guess you can't blame them for wanting to have as many. But why Mistico? Why couldn't they have put Hunico in the Sin Cara mask all along? It would have cost them less from the get go, and he would have been well-adjusted from start having been "broken" by FCW so to speak. It's easy to say that in retrospect, but the truth is, the Sin Cara role was created for Mistico. It wouldn't have existed if the Mexican superstar wasn't signed up in the first place.

The truth is, I really can't blame WWE for trying to sign the guy in the first place. They hit a home run with Dos Caras, Jr. Maybe they thought they could do better by having an established name come in and do business for them. However, what worked for the middling-to-struggling Caras wasn't just his heritage. It was a year in FCW, vignettes heralding his arrival as Alberto del Rio and working a generally less risky style that made him a success.

It's easy to look at this whole ordeal in retrospect and say what a terrible idea it was, but the fact is that it wasn't so much a mistake as it was a gamble. Triple H, in his first move, swung for the fences and yeah, he may have apparently struck out (remember, no one knows Mistico's status now), he's thinking enough outside of the box that his father-in-law has built that he's going to bring in new and eclectic guys. You live, and you learn, but you won't know if Mistico will be the guy for you unless you sign him (and really, if you divorce his ego from his in-ring, he was looking to be really huge).

Going forward, Hunico being in the Sin Cara mask is probably the right call, as long as nights like last Tuesday are aberrations rather than the norm. That being said, even if it didn't turn out as planned for WWE, bringing in Mistico was the right call. Sometimes though, the right call can turn out bad.

Wrestling High School, or Why I Don't Wanna Hear about Who Disrespected Whom

Centers of a firestorm that I wish I'd never known about

There's a reason this is the first time you're going to be reading about the supposed disrespect shown by the Young Bucks towards Booker T. It's the same reason why I don't follow Joey Image on Twitter anymore, or why I bristle at people who retweet his "YOU NEED TO RESPECT THE BUSINESS" BS rhetoric. I hate hearing about treating this mythical thing like the "business" with a fake layer of respect that's been propped up by guys who never fully left high school. I also don't want to hear about how people I generally like - and I like both the Young Bucks and Booker - bristle and act like assholes over feeling entitled over respect or being portrayed as disrespectful, whether right or wrong.

Granted, I haven't come to say that these wrestlers need to grow up and that they need to get out of this mold that respect is earned through tenure, not through deeds and demeanor and whatever other happy horseshit code they abide by. It's as old as wrestling itself, and hey, if that's how they want to conduct their business, then hey, good for them. I don't want Undertaker coming to my office and telling me how to conduct business there. Even if I think how they conduct their locker room code of ethics or respect or whatever is pedantic and childish, it's their business. What they do behind closed doors is what they do behind closed doors, and there's a reason why I'm an engineer and Booker Huffman and the brothers Massie both went into the wrestling business.

But that's the thing. If Booker didn't take to Twitter to put the Bucks on blast, then I wouldn't have known about it. If Rob Van Dam hadn't slammed the Bucks for "disrespect" before they left Impact, I wouldn't have known about it. If the Bucks and their brother Malachi hadn't responded in kind on social media, I wouldn't have known about it. Now, we're inundated with this wave of "he said, he said" accounts to incidents that maybe shouldn't have been big deals in the first place. Furthermore, you get Booker and Malachi carrying on to the point where I unfollowed both of them.

It's bad enough when the dirtsheets report on this kind of thing like it's news, but they can be ignored because hey, unless they have primary, neutral sources who are able to be named transparently, it can be dismissed. But when you have the people themselves taking to Twitter to fight in an attempt to curry favor with the masses, it gets right in your face, and you have to deal with the reality that people you enjoy on television can be assholes, or at the very least, they can be fool enough not to keep their dirty laundry contained within the confines of their locker room.

That's what gets me about people like Image. They want it both ways. They sanctimoniously preach about how we fans need to stop being disrespectful when we refer to wrestlers by their real names or (in what is the most hilariously preachy and wrong example) when we predict how a match is going to go, (and it's not just Image who does this, a lot of mainstream wrestlers do too) but then they carry on in public, either airing dirty laundry or weighing in on dirty laundry. I mean, if referring to a wrestler by his real name is disrespectful and invasive of their privacy, what does it say when they throw those otherwise private issues into my face? I would say that airing your own dirty laundry, or even worse, commenting on someone else's is far more damaging to this imaginary respect than would be if I referred to these men by their real names₁ (which aren't exactly secret anymore). When Shane Helms is posting passive-aggressive blogs piling on the Bucks, detailing why "RESPECT" is so important, that's giving everyone a peek into the backstage world of these people, one that by all accounts, we should not be allowed to see. So, which way should it be?

Personally, I would much rather try to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube and go back to a world where the wrestlers handled their business internally and didn't blab to interviewers or take their fight to Twitter. Especially in the case of the Young Bucks and the people they may or may not have disrespected, I don't know whose side to take, mainly because it's all based on hearsay. When you have disputes between two parties, and no one's really there to witness, that's all it is. I don't know either party in this case personally either, so why should I feel the need to judge like I do? For all I know, RVD and Booker could be onto something. For all I know, RVD and Booker could be full of shit and have really fragile egos, taking something innocent the Bucks did and misconstruing it because they feel like they're owed something. But the thing is I don't know, and I'll probably never know.

And the whole not knowing thing? I think I liked it better that way.

1 - If you take that as an explicit endorsement to refer to guys by their real names, congratulations, you've missed the point completely.

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography

Please Call a Cease Fire: My Plea to Impact Wrestling to Stop with the Shootiness

Pictured, Hogan, Sting and Bischoff doing something I hate
Photo Credit: ImpactWrestling.com

Dear Impact Wrestling,

As you prepare to air another episode on Spike TV tonight, I am coming to you with this plea. Granted, it'll do no good for this week or the week after, given that you've already taped the episodes, but hear me out anyway. There's a reason why I pan the shit out of your program each week. It's not because I'm a hater. Lord knows I want to like your product, and I want to praise it and I want to give your company all the credit in the world. I don't dislike Eric Bischoff and Vince Russo because of some arbitrary reason.

No, over the last 15 years (15 years), I've seen them systematically destroy the art of professional wrestling in ways that outside forces can only dream of doing. Under their watch, one company became so undesirable for the people running it that they sold it to their biggest competitor even though it was still pulling strong ratings₁ on its weekly television program. A big reason for that was because under the tenure of Russo and sometimes Bischoff, the magic of professional wrestling, a magic known to carny folk and to smarky wrestling fans alike as kayfabe, was dealt a critical blow. It was cute when Russo had to answer to Vince McMahon, and it helped draw huge numbers (even though I still maintain that it was more the on-screen charisma of Bret Hart, Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, The Rock, Mick Foley, Triple H and even McMahon himself that had more to do with that than anything Russo ever did or said outside of maybe "Hey, why don't we let these mooks be themselves!"). However, when left to his own devices in WCW, his continual drawing back of the curtain, making everything a "shoot" and continual scatterbrained direction caused WCW to die a grisly death. Add in Bischoff from time to time, a man who never met a legal storyline between two NPCs that he didn't like, and you had someone who helped piss away WCW's lead on the then-WWF when he was on top and then helped accelerate Russo's best unintentional Dr. Kevorkian impersonation when he came back in.

So, it should come as no surprise that your numbers aren't as good as you think they should be. Of course, I'm not interested in your analysis of the numbers or even what numbers you hold important. Ratings can eat my left buttock for all I care. However, if you look at the meaning behind why your ratings suck, that's where you'll find my wheelhouse. Your ratings are terrible because people who think like me, but who don't really feel obligated to watch for purposes of writing a blog, aren't enticed to watch. These people you're not getting to watch your show really want to believe your slogan, but are turned off by every promo Jeff Jarrett cuts on Kurt Angle mentioning that Jarrett, the administrator, signed Angle for ratings, by every time Bully Ray references "the boys in the back" or out-of-character respect when talking on the mic and every time Sting says he needs to keep his title because it gives him "stroke".

While reality TV is still all the rage, the wrestling fan - and believe me, there are still a ton of them left, whether active or in remission - doesn't really subscribe to the theory that wrestling is the original reality programming. Either they're super young and still subscribe to the theory of kayfabe, sweet, lovable kayfabe, or they're our age and watch for the theater, to forget about real life problems and just watch two (or more) guys pretend to wail on each other and then talk about wailing on each other in between wailing on each other. Dragging in legit, real life problems into the fray counteracts that. I mean, you don't go to a Broadway play to see the star talk shit about her costar for stuff that happens off-script. I'm sure if that happened, you'd have a big stink. But hey, it worked in wrestling in the '90s. Okay. Traditional kayfabe? It's worked in wrestling for almost, if not over, a century. I'll take that track record over the track record of something that fizzled out within 5 years of beginning.

Again, you guys have talent on the roster. They're either bogged down by having to put Bischoff over or they're shunted to once-a-month status because God forbid we don't give Hulk Hogan 4 segments to lumber around and say "brother" like it hasn't already gone out of style. The emphasis is all wrong. If your wrestlers weren't forced to act like ZOMG SHOOTZ all the time, maybe some stories would organically get over. Maybe if the emphasis was taken off authority figures and onto real wrestlers, then wrestling might matter. The formula doesn't work.

I don't have high hopes for Impact the next two weeks. Excepting Austin Aries wrestling tonight, I'm not sure there's going to be a whole lot of must see TV for me. Quite frankly, I'm not really excited for the future after next week either, because the same people are still going to be in charge. But if you wake up, smell the coffee and realize that a change will do you good, maybe the future won't be so bleak. Maybe there'll come a time when I look forward to watching Impact, either first-run or on my DVR.

But that'll only happen if you at least pretend you give a shit about restoring the magic. Please, for my sake, for the sake of fans who want you to succeed... give a shit about restoring the magic.

1 - Strong relative to everything else on TNT at that point, not strong compared to WCW's peak or the numbers the WWF was pulling.

Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!