With 2011 having recently drawn to a close, one question has
been on the tip of every snarky Internet wrestling commentator's tongue: what
was the best match of the year? Putting aside voices in the wilderness crying
out for their favorite puroresu bout
or Chikara quirkfest, the general consensus seems to be that the best wrestling
match of 2011 was John Cena vs. CM Punk at WWE's Money in the Bank, with wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer even having
awarded it one of his rare and coveted five-star ratings. From my viewpoint,
however, the best match of the year went down much earlier, when Triple H faced
the Undertaker at WrestleMania XXVII.
I wouldn't dare claim that Cena vs. Punk wasn't a
tremendous, memorable match worth revisiting - in fact, it's definitely,
without a doubt, my favorite match of the year, hands down, no argument. But
people's love for the match seems to be blinding them, causing them to forget
how absolutely balls-out awesome Undertaker vs. Triple H was. There are a lot
of reasons for it: Resentment toward Triple H, the desire for new top-tier
talent, the perception of CM Punk as an underdog and perhaps most importantly,
the absolute bomb-ass storyline leading up to Money in the Bank that briefly made WWE more interesting than it
had been in a decade - maybe longer. All of those are important and clearly
colored my enjoyment of both contests, but when you're discussing the actual
quality of a match they're only tangential concerns.
Now that's not to say that Cena/Punk wasn't a well-wrestled
match. Despite what the vast majority of Internet commenters say about him,
Cena is one of the best all-around talents in WWE - maybe anywhere - and Punk,
while a very different type of wrestler, is an incredible showman and
storyteller. While Taker/HHH went about exactly as everyone thought it would,
with thirty minutes of almost immediate and wall-to-wall high-risk brawls and
finishers, Cena/Punk was an entirely different breed of animal. It was a style of
match we aren't used to seeing in WWE, with a chain wrestling-heavy slow build
that culminated in a legitimately shocking ending, and honestly, it was a treat
to watch. But taken out of the electric context of this past summer and held up
side-by-side to a couple crusty old veterans, Cena/Punk just can't compare to
Taker/HHH.
Botches
The night of Money in
the Bank, we were all too busy freaking out about Punk leaving with the WWE
Title (as well as wins by Daniel Bryan, Mark Henry and Christian in what was a
veritable smorgasbord of smark-delights) to notice it, but looking back at the
show, one of Cena/Punk's biggest, most obvious problems was all those botched
moves. Sure, if you look hard enough you can find botched spots and mistakes in
pretty much every match, and doing so is a surefire way to ensure that you stop
enjoying wrestling toot sweet. During high-pressure, painful 30-minute periods
of physical and psychological exertion, mistakes tend to happen, and wrestling
fans tend to be pretty forgiving about them...just as long as an effort is made
to cover them up.
Around three or four times (possibly more) during their
match at Money in the Bank, Cena and
Punk blew spots in incredibly obvious ways: An awkward crossbody to Cena's
hips, a sunset flip saved with a roll-up, Punk falling instead of landing on
his feet following an Attitude Adjustment, not catching Cena properly while
countering his leg drop and even a sloppy Go-To-Sleep to Cena's ribs, which, to
be fair, may or may not have been intentional. What makes them even worse,
however, is that after every single one of these, there was an awkward moment
of scrambling trying to recover from the flub. These weren't glitches that were
quickly glossed over - they were major, momentum-destroying botches.
If you didn't watch wrestling and only read about it on the
internet, you wouldn't be shocked to find out that there were mistakes in a
John Cena match. After all, the internet's most vocal fans love to loudly
proclaim their love of "technical" wrestling while deriding Cena, talking about
his "five moves of doom," and calling him "Supercena," all while speaking
disparagingly about his "workrate." All of the bitching about Cena begins to
look pretty ridiculous, however, when you consider one simple fact that as a
card-carrying internet smark, I absolutely hate to admit: The bulk of the
match's mistakes can be directly attributed to CM Punk.
While even a half-drunk, half-distracted non-wrestling fan
can easily spot botches in Cena/Punk, I couldn't find a single mistake while
rewatching Taker/HHH bone-sober and fully-focused. They might not be in their
prime anymore, Triple H is severely limited in his moveset when compared to his
glory days and Taker is by many accounts near crippled from years of working
through injuries, but at WrestleMania
XXVII, these old warhorses were absolute pros. Like a lot of fans, I'd love
to subscribe to the idea that the problem with WWE is old dudes holding down
younger guys that can outperform them, but in this case it couldn't be further
from the truth. From the perspective of a hit-to-miss ratio, Cena/Punk can't
touch Taker/HHH.
"Workrate"
At this point in the discussion, you'd be right to bring up
"workrate" and "technical wrestling" as an issue - if you haven't already
blasted me in the comments section about it that is. A possible argument might
go something like, "Yes, there were more mistakes in Cena/Punk, but their match
was much more technical, as they used actual holds and wrestling moves instead
of throwing one another through the 'Cole Mine' less than two minutes into the
match." There are a couple sizable problems with that argument, however, the
main one being this: "Workrate" and "technical wrestling" are concepts
conceived, developed and promoted almost exclusively by "smart mark" wrestling
fans.
"Workrate" and "technical wrestling" are definitely useful
terms and concepts, and a great way to distinguish between say, the technical,
high-workrate performances of Chris Benoit and the more shallow in-ring work of
Hulk Hogan. When it comes to actually casting judgment on a match, however, the
terms become less useful, as they are success metrics of a somewhat arbitrary
nature that only appeal to a certain subset of the fanbase. Even if you're
willing to grant that Cena/Punk was a better technical performance, or had a
higher workrate than Taker/HHH, what is that claim really worth? The other
issue, however, is that I am, in fact, not willing to grant that claim.
Generally, workrate is defined as how well a performer can
use his in-ring performance to tell a coherent story between the ropes. While
it's often implied that more and varied moves give a certain bonus to a
workrate, the real barometer of success is whether the two performers can effectively
pull in the audience. I think it's hard to argue that Triple H and Undertaker
did exactly that in their match at WrestleMania
XXVII. The crowd might not have been as riotous as for Cena/Punk, but the
bulk of the crowd's reaction at Money in
the Bank was due to pre-existing storyline matters, not the actual
wrestling on display. This might seem like a tough assertion to back up, but
it's a fair conclusion to draw once you consider that the fans at Money in the Bank were loudest before
and after the match, while the WrestleMania
XXVII audience did most of their cheering between the bells, when actual
wrestling was going on.
"Technical" wrestling
But what if you're the type of wrestling fan who is less
interested in what the hoi polloi think about a match, preferring to look at it from a more "technical"
perspective? Even by those standards, however, Cena/Punk doesn't really deliver
the way that people want it to (and frequently claim that it does). Outside of
a few memorable moments such as the phenomenal STF-reversal into an Anaconda
Vice, it's a huge stretch to call Cena and Punk's series of wristlocks,
snapmares and headlocks a "technical" affair. Besides, is wrestling truly
technical when someone just does a suplex, or when they do a suplex that makes
sense?
While the chain wrestling in Cena/Punk sometimes looked like
two guys trying to kill time, every single move in Taker/HHH was loaded to the
brim with meaning. Sure, both matches had their fair share of burly dudes lying
around, but when Undertaker and Triple H were down, they were writhing on the ground
in pain, selling the intensity of the bout. By comparison, when Punk and Cena hit
the mat, it was usually because they were locked up in a resthold. Superficially,
both circumstances accomplished the same goal - giving the performers a moment
to catch their breath and/or plan an upcoming spot - but the difference is that
Undertaker and Triple H used their downtime to heighten drama, not stall it. As
a thought experiment, would Cena/Punk have been any worse if its numerous
restholds were simply edited out of the match?
Slow build
A reasonable defense to the above argument would be that the
slow build of Cena/Punk was intentional, and perhaps even necessary to whip the
crowd up to the fever pitch it reached by the time Punk left triumphantly with
the WWE Title. There's a certain amount of truth to that, and as a fan, I
really dug the deliberate, carefully paced nature of the match. First, Punk
tried the Wrestling with a capital-W route, but Cena matched him hold for hold.
Then Cena went to his fast, power-move standbys, but Punk was able to hang with
one of the promotion's heaviest hitters. It was the compelling story of two
very different wrestlers trying to beat one another at their own game, and was
truly fascinating from a formal perspective. What's great about Taker/HHH,
however, is that they didn't need any of that to put on a driven, emotional
match.
Within moments of the bell ringing, Undertaker and Triple H
were on the outside, tossing one another through plexiglass and tearing up
announce tables. It was over-the-top and excessive - like a game of WWE '12 - but every explosive move made
sense, and you believed that these two superhumans were dispensing with pretense
and going right for the big guns. Too often No Holds Barred, No
Disqualification, Extreme Rules Matches and the like devolve into a nonsensical
series of weapon spots, but it's a testimony to the talent of both Undertaker
and Triple H that they were able to turn things immediately up to 11 without
losing sight of the psychology of their match. The two veterans didn't use a
slow build in their match because they didn't need to, and it was a better, tighter,
more efficient half hour of entertainment as a result.
Outside interference
While it's clearly not the fault of Cena or Punk, another
issue with their Money in the Bank match
that simply cannot be ignored is the outside involvement that led to the
match's finish. So much of what elevated Cena/Punk to the amazing level it
reached was based on storyline reasons: Punk's still-riveting meta-promo, his
promise that he would leave WWE with the title, the fact that the match took
place in his hometown of Chicago, etc. Like the above, Mr. McMahon's attempt to
repeat the Montreal Screwjob with help from John Laurinaitis made the match
even crazier and more fun at the time, but now, the run-in makes this
phenomenal match seem dated and compromised.
It doesn't take anything away from the tremendous abilities
of either Cena or Punk, or the amazing accomplishment that was their Money in the Bank match, but the
attempted run-in roots the contest in a very specific time in WWE storylines,
while tainting Punk's victory as the result of a distracted opponent. Even
worse, seeing McMahon and Laurinaitis force their way into the match rubs salt
in the still-fresh wound of how WWE either squandered (or deliberately pissed
away) the amazing heat and buzz
Punk had stoked this past summer. It's true
that Cena/Punk was elevated by its storyline, but looking back, it also suffers
from the very same. In contrast, Taker/HHH succeeds solely based upon what
happened between the bells.
Ultimately, if given a choice between the two matches, I'll
still choose to watch John Cena vs. CM Punk at Money in the Bank every single time. The question of how much of
Punk's infamous promo was officially vetted, the uncertainty over whether he
was actually leaving the company, the delightfully different way in which the match
was paced, seeing two guys in WWE move through multiple styles in a single
match - they all contributed in a major way to my enjoyment of the match,
making it my favorite of the year. But if pressed, I have to admit: Undertaker
vs. Triple H was the better match.
Which did you think was better: John Cena vs. CM Punk or
Undertaker vs. Triple H? Was there another match that you liked even more? Tell
us all about it in the comments below.
