WWE Monday Night Raw 11/21/2011 - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

It's no secret that I'm a huge CM Punk fan, so I was happy to see him win the title last night (albeit in a match that wasn't really about much of anything). It made me even happier to see Punk back on the ball with the knowing, winking promo that opened last night's show. No, it wasn't exactly a pipe bomb, but the segment, which had the Hershey crowd eating out of Punk's hand, still had a lot of great bits.

The most notable topics Punk covered were the "pro-wrestling vs. sports entertainment" distinction and the fact that the WWE Title changes hands kind of all the time - both of which are huge bugaboos for Punk's core demographic (shitty, half-clever guys on the Internet like yours truly (and odds are, you too)). While I could do without Punk's sitting in the middle of the ring, which really cuts into his natural charisma, and I'm already tired of the ice cream bars bit, Punk really is a new type of face for the promotion. Now it just remains to be seen whether WWE will actually treat him like the top talent he is....

Last week I raved about a match between Sheamus and Jack Swagger, talking about how the Great White got a shockingly decent performance out of his opponent. Someone backstage at WWE must have had the same thought, as the two were thrown into another one-on-one match on Raw this week.

While the match itself was about on par with last week's, it ended up feeling like filler, with absolutely nothing added or developed in the story between these two. In fact, as it stands now, the angle is just "Swagger gets beaten up by another dude," which has been the story pretty much ever since Swagger ended his implausible World Title reign (remember that?). Again, not a bad match, but I was unsure why I was being shown it again, especially since Sheamus once again went over clean.

CM Punk was 18 when the New World Order was formed back in 1996, so it's not much of a stretch to assume that a young Phil Brooks was paying attention to Kevin Nash at his peak. In fact, Punk's initial pipe bomb promo this past summer owed quite a bit to what WCW did really well (for a time at least): Worked shoots with just enough shop talk to reward obsessive fans, but not so much as to be off-putting. At his best, Punk is an expert at this balancing act. On the other side of the spectrum is 2011 Kevin Nash...

It's fascinating to see Big Daddy Cool come out and try to one-up Punk's inside baseball promos, because it just doesn't work. Even when referencing the infamous MSG "Curtain Call" incident and calling out Scott Hall by name, Nash's promos come off as forced and phony, partially because of those references. While Punk uses real life events to bolster the contents of his promo, Nash shoves them in willy-nilly, drawing attention to the obvious fiction of his feud with Triple H. And to think, Nash apologists used to point to his promos as one of the wrestler's greatest strengths....

I mentioned it last week, but I'm still chaffing at WWE having Cody Rhodes lose what was undoubtedly one of the best gimmicks going in wrestling today. Instead of a psychotic, vane, scheming mastermind, Rhodes is now just a really cut up lisping guy in a sleeveless hoodie - he's the Scarlet Spider of professional wrestling. And while we're happy for the sake of Rhodes' joints that he's finally wearing kneepads, we kind of dug the older look, just because it was something different.