Maybe this is a premature post-mortem on The Miz’s first WWE championship reign, but even if he should retain the belt at Wrestlemania XXVII, the build we’re seeing right now can be taken as pretty representative of his peak as an example of the heel champion.
I read a lot of wrestling commentators (aka People on the Internet) who were very upset for a period when Miz was getting a lot of cheap wins and feuding with Jerry Lawler – this was seen as beneath someone in a position of wearing the strap. I wonder if they have any memory at all of how The Honky Tonk Man held onto the Intercontinental belt for over a year, or how Sgt. Slaughter’s two-month WWF Championship reign started with cheating and was marked by dirty matches and DQ/countout losses to second-tier opponents before Hulk Hogan ultimately beat his face in For America. Heels retain via foreign objects, outside interference, and taking the loss to retain the belt. That’s why they are heels.
I’ve actually been relieved at the arc and pacing of Miz’s reign; it shows that Vince McMahon is continuing to move away from the Attitude Era convention of the belt changing hands seemingly every other week. Not only did that reduce the import of a title change to effectively nothing, it crowded the roster with former-flavors-of-the-month who now had to be booked as dangerous and consequential because they’d managed to touch gold briefly. When the bulk of your roster is made up of former champions, it gets a lot more difficult to sort out a pecking order. I sincerely hope this is going to trickle down to the other championships as well – Daniel Bryan enjoyed a long United States Championship tenure, and the Intercontinental Belt is starting to settle down as well. Maybe the same will someday happen to the Tag Team Championship, but first they’re going to have to, um, have some stable tag teams.
The Miz, though, has had the longest and most stable heel reign with this belt since JBL’s run almost seven years ago. Not many heels get to hold this title for anything more than a transitional period – just ask Stan Stasiak. The Miz, though, has been given a generous opportunity to prove he can hold the spotlight, and he’s running with it.
It’s fitting that he first became media-known through reality-TV, because he’s incorporating real modern-media savvy into his persona. He Tweeted a picture of John Cena getting mashed into a steel cage live on Raw, and you have to think more “superstars” are going to be pulling variations on that stunt. Hell, his title victory spawned an internet meme.
When you’re The Champ, you have to walk that kayfabe tightrope as an ambassador for the product, and Miz is doing this incredibly well. He’s working the talk-show circuit heavily – Bret Hart may be the Best There Is Blah Blah Blah, but he never got his curtain music played by The Roots on Jimmy Fallon.
As for his matches – yeah, he was getting booked pretty weak early on – the better to increase the rage of Randy Orton, from whom he pinched the title. But then he got a clean and dominant win over Daniel Bryan, and opened 2011 with an epic Falls Count Anywhere match with John Morrison on RAW. There’s a clear strategy here – by triumphing over old rivals, old teammates, and in Lawler, an aging legend, he has gradually built main event credentials. That’s no guarantee when you win via Money-in-the-Bank cash-in, notoriously the cheapest method (other than Hulk Hogan throwing a backstage bitch-fit) of getting the gold.
Now, in the final countdown to Wrestlemania, he has master-minded a beat-down of John Cena on four consecutive Mondays, and is looking more dangerous each time. Bronzing himself and putting on a bald cap in order to tease a guest appearance by The Rock brought down some gonzo heat, and it has the added bonus of being in-character. Unlike someone like ol’ Psycho Sid, for whom it was difficult to turn up the volume on the way to a main event (He’s Spitting Crazy Like Always…only…CRAZIER!), The Miz is playing out a version of his arrogant narcissism reaching absolute critical mass. This is happening in perfect parallel with a similar evolution in heel announcer Michael Cole, whose obnoxious Miz cheerleading has been indispensable in this whole process.
Roddy Piper said that the great thing about being the top heel is that you didn’t need the gold for your gig to work. Someday soon we’ll find out if that’s true for The Miz – it’s often a heel’s lot to fade for a time after they’ve had their rotation as The Guy Who Feuds With The Guy. Even if this is the highlight of his career, he can be justly proud – and then maybe after Wrestlemania he can get traded to Smackdown and start pulling this routine with Edge over the World Heavyweight Championship. Now that has the potential to be Awesome.