The thing about epics is – they take time to tell. Kevin Smith might joke about how long it took to walk to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings, but it wouldn’t be the Lord of the Fracking Rings if Mordor had just been around the first bend.
Professional wrestling is a storytelling medium – really a soap opera whose dramatic turns all happen in the fighting arena. And if you hadn’t noticed, daytime soap operas with decades-long histories are falling like bowling pins lately, so who’s got the more durable dramatic construct now?
Those nights that are truly unforgettable for wrestling fans do not stem from a great spot, or a great match, or even a great storyline. It is the fusion of all three with something extra, when a performance meets a moment that – whether it was articulated or not – was a long time coming. It is the furious conversion of, as they say in physics, potential energy to kinetic.
The Hulk Hogan-Andre the Giant feud that led to the Slam Heard ‘Round the World at Wrestlemania III started to peek out at a trophy ceremony, where Hogan was awarded a trophy for holding the (then) WWF Championship for three consecutive years. Andre also got a trophy, for being undefeated for fifteen years. His trophy was much smaller.
What juiced this showdown was that, although Andre turned heel and started doing heelish things, you couldn’t completely fault him. The mere fact of his still-existing streak said something – that Hogan, belt notwithstanding, had not proven himself against everyone. Suddenly, Hulkamania had a worthy quest, and The Slam was the achievement of that quest; one that had been built on Andre’s 15+ years of hard work amassing such an intimidating record, which was then cashed in to fatten the legend of Hogan. When the boss says do the job, you do the job.
In the modern WWE, where the “superstars” are dropping matches to each other on free TV a couple of times a week, and titles never stay on anyone’s waist for a year, that kind of simple W-L column dominance just isn’t available to stake on the table anymore. The only thing left resembling it is The Undertaker’s Wrestlemania streak – which already reached its maximum portfolio value when it was staked against Shawn Michaels’s career and came out on top. If ‘Taker ever does lose at ‘Mania – and he’ll have to appear in a ring again first if that’s going to happen, no sure thing – it is difficult to imagine anyone whose storyline could need it enough to finally use it after 20 years.
You have to look elsewhere to find those rich deposits of story potential, and not just any writer or wrestler always knows what to do with it. The highly-successful heel turn by R-Truth this year managed to exploit something that was (again, this helps) essentially true and known to the fans – that as a smiling, badly-“rapping” non-threatening face, he had gone nowhere slowly for many years. The door was open, if he had the agility to go through it – and his new angry conspiracy-theorist persona earned him a PPV main event and a whole lot more quality camera time than that sh*tty “Get Crunk” song ever did. Man met moment, and his performance was worthy of the opportunity that had been sown.
Of course, with such an insane number of pay-per-views, each one asking for main event matches that are supposed to be worth $50, you’re just not going to make magic happen every three-four weeks like clockwork. That’s a structural problem. The WWE has a few of those which have been frustrating their most ardent fans. It’s been frustrating them for several years, as a matter of fact…
Enter C.M. Punk, the Money in the Bank Pay-Per-View, and what has become the most exciting storyline in WWE in years; one that, last night, created one of those legendary moments at the climax of their best show of 2011. It was based on a premise so insanely audacious that almost no one actually trusted the key players involved to stick the landing. The premise was that the WWE’s product hasn’t lived up to its billing for far too long.
This couldn’t be settled with a press release, and you couldn’t shift the company’s direction and not acknowledge it. Like all conficts in the WWE Universe, this needed to be settled with a match. The best man to wrestle on behalf of the disaffected? Punk – the madly-committed purist darling of the independent circuit, the man whose love for wrestling was written by the miles he traveled wrestling in promotions around the world. The man who, surrounded by scripted “personalities” and preening bodybuilders, could speak with authority, with a sense for history and trivia and culture, and do it from the heart with wickedly-provocative humor. The smallest throwaway reference he could make on the microphone showed that this man lived for wrestling to a degree that was – well, to borrow the line against Daniel Bryan – even kind of nerdy.
And the man who needed to face him in the ring was John Cena – the standard-bearer for this PG generation, when the corporate memos went out that wrestlers couldn’t be called wrestlers but had to be called “superstars”, when the middle “W” in “WWE”, literally, stood for nothing anymore. When Vince McMahon’s naked desire to be accepted among the finer media moguls had his programming on autopilot; just keeping the machinery going in as inoffensive a way as possible while his wife ran for Senate and he tried to build a movie studio. On the last Monday Night Raw before this pay-per-view, C.M. Punk had Vince McMahon in the middle of the ring, and an arena full of fans chanting “We want wrestling! We want wrestling!” Other wrestlers must have felt the audience’s potent desire to chant that. But only Punk was able to tap into that, in part because of the character he has built with such integrity, but also because he had the skill to channel and direct it to his will like the Green Goddamn Lantern. In plainest terms – he can work a crowd at a level any wrestler should envy.
This was a storyline that demanded the presence of “Mr. McMahon”; it might just as well have roused him from that storyline coma he had been put in so long ago but which (like so many other storylines) was simply abandoned when it outlived its usefulness. And didn’t a coma turn out to be an unintentionally apt metaphor? But McMahon showed that he is still willing, as the face of his company, to occasionally do what the “WWE Universe” demands, like step into the ring and take his medicine. For a man of such reputed pride and ego, he has gone out of his way to choreograph his ultimate comeuppances on-camera for a paying crowd, because that’s the show he runs. He did it in 2010 to finally close the door on the Montreal Screwjob of Bret Hart, and now in 2011 he did it to answer for his attempt to turn wrestling into “Entertainment”.
Though reconciled, the Screwjob still lives large – it helped form the skeleton of what happened at Money in the Bank. The legend goes that Vince hatched the Screwjob because Hart was leaving the company, and Vince feared that he would take the Championship belt with him to WCW at a vulnerable time. Over the course of the last month, Punk smirked in the ring and promised to do just that, and McMahon played the role he was fated to play, trying once again to be The Chairman – to assert control as he did that long-ago night.
And less-noticed among the many subplots here is something with serious long-term impact – John Cena’s role in standing against the Screwjob and, ultimately, taking the clean 1-2-3 and jobbing the title to Punk. Cena’s playing the long-game here – he knows that his championship tenure already puts him in very rare company, but he also knows that there’s a not-dismissable segment of the fan base that cannot stand him. I don’t know if he takes grubby Internet complaints about “Super Cena and the 5 Moves of Doom” seriously, but he is certainly aware of it. And he is demonstrating his willingness to face this challenge head-on, and I will say right here and now, though I have criticized him myself, that I admire that.
You see, the stand Punk took forced Cena to show where he stood. For this challenge he had to be more than words on a T-Shirt and That Guy Who Always Wins. And he needed an action that would define that. As with Punk’s challenge to McMahon for a shoddy product, Cena had to challenge McMahon on sportsmanship. That’s something for which his character can legitimately act as exemplar. It’s consistent. By threatening to drop the belt if Punk wasn’t re-instated, and by putting his fist in the way of the Screwjob, Cena just put himself over Shawn Michaels, whose ever-shifting stories on his role in Montreal (always changing based on who is in the room with him) are one of the weaslier parts of his legacy.
There aren’t many people higher than Cena on the mountain now. The Rock’s one of them – and their showdown is already scheduled for Miami in the spring. Many wondered what Cena would do this year while waiting for what ought to be a ritual torch-passing. As with Hogan’s need to face Andre, what Cena is going through now is an acknowledgment that he needs to face something of great import in order to ascend to more rarefied heights. But his quest is not to defeat Punk, but to defeat the legions Punk has positioned himself to speak for, and answer their charge that his is an empty dynasty, based on merchandise sales to kids and McMahon’s whims rather than in-ring ability.
And Cena can’t do that by locking in the STF, he has to do it with efforts like his performance last night, a 30+ minute, wrestling-heavy match that may be one of the finest in which he has ever participated, followed by self-sacrifice and humbling. The humbling may continue tonight on RAW if, as Mr. McMahon promised, Cena is “fired”. Cena will go on a journey now, and, if they keep playing this right, come back a more mature hero. Who knows if he will have to chase Punk outside of the WWE for that belt in order to earn absolution. Whatever debt he must pay, surely it will be paid in time for him to meet Rock in the ring. That’s just storytelling. Maybe he will even win over some haters through hard work. I’d like to see that happen.
There have been many rumors that Cena has needed an extended time off to rehab from some nagging injuries – that his needs, Punk’s desires, and McMahon’s instinct that it was time to signal a change in company direction, could all be addressed by this story is a credit to whomever devised it, and credit should be given to both Cena and McMahon for playing their roles so well – this artistry was not Punk’s alone, even though he gets the rock star’s share of credit for it and got to bask in it in front of a hometown crowd.
I had a good feeling when I listened to Punk’s is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex? promo, which worked the important boundaries of true kayfabe like Catherine-Zeta Jones bending around those lasers in Entrapment. Everything he said, even those times when he was self-confessedly punching glory holes in the fourth wall; the entire promo was always working within the premise that there was a wrestling match coming up that Punk was determined to win. It’s a subtle distinction but it’s everything – he maintained the illusion that this was ultimately going to be decided in the ring.
Punk may have malcontent credentials, but he fundamentally did everything Vince McMahon could have wanted out of Main Event-level talent. He tapped into something the audience wanted to see dealt with; knew they wanted to see it dealt with in the ring, and he promised to make it happen and sold tickets for it. He was doing the job – he was just doing it better than we’ve seen in a long time.
You can see the impact not just in that match and that climax, but in how the WWE delivered us the most wrestling-heavy PPV in memory. Backstage skits were at a minimum. Ring entrances weren’t supersized – some of them were downright rushed. In 170 minutes, we spent more time engaged in ring action than most 4-hour Wrestlemania-s. The two ladder matches were expertly-paced and executed, and indie/Internet darling Daniel Bryan actually ended up hoisting a briefcase that will make him a Main Event player on Smackdown.
But the end of the night belonged to Punk, slipping out of the ring with a rude gesture to McMahon’s face, and out into the hallways of Allstate Arena, an anti-hero with a hero’s ovation and a belt he has pledged to re-design. It was a moment that could not be improved for anyone who loves wrestling. It was epic.