The main event of last week’s WWE TLC pay per view was Kurt Angle and The Shield facing The Bar, Kane, Braun Strowman and The Miz in a Tables, Ladders and Chairs match.
The match was absolutely nuts, with weapon spots galore, Braun Strowman turning on his team mid match and getting thrown into the slowest moving garbage truck I’ve ever seen and Kurt Angle walking down to the ring in Shield attire with the goofiest smile on his face.
Simply put, it was chaos. A huge amount of it was silly, ridiculous stuff. Kane dropped a bunch of chairs from the ceiling onto Strowman, and the commentators sold it as if he stabbed the man and he was going to die.
Yet that’s what wrestling is all about and what we need more of. We need more brawling in the crowd. We need more fighting in the backstage area or in the locker rooms. Or to up the ante, we need more fighting in places outside the arena. When was the last time someone was thrown into a river?
Some of the best wrestling moments happened outside the ring. Think of Stone Cold beating Booker T up in a supermarket, or The Rock throwing Stone Cold off a bridge.
A more recent example would be Sheamus and Cesaro fighting some guys in a bar and becoming friends through the experience. It was a fantastic segment that sold me on the tag team.
It’s the kind of wacky, out there stuff that makes wrestling entertaining and fun. It allows the wrestlers and writers to get creative with what they do, and makes the show feel like can’t miss stuff.
Nowadays WWE takes itself too seriously and always plays it safe. It’s nothing offensively bad, but at it’s worst it’s very boring. Moments like Strowman getting thrown in the trash compactor makes for compelling TV.
Since wrestling is fake and everyone knows it’s fake, why not go all out? Why not have more bar fights, more beer trucks, more zambonis and more people getting thrown into bodies of water? These are moments that make wrestling fun and helped make the late 90’s, or The Attitude Era, its biggest boom period.
However, it can’t all be that wacky stuff. There needs to be a solid mix of crazy backstage mayhem and good in-ring wrestling, and that’s what we got at TLC.
We saw the amazing cluster that was the main event, but we also got a very solid wrestling match that was mostly spent in the ring with AJ Styles vs Finn Balor. As with most things, balance is key.
A common complaint with the WWE is the fact that it’s predictable and boring. An easy way to fix that is to inject it with some chaos and have more crazy gimmick matches and more feuds that take it outside the ring, or the arena.
What do you think? Would more crazy stipulations and out of the ring action make wrestling more interesting? How do you want the WWE formula to be shaken up?
Henry Wolski
Executive Editor