London Brawling was pulled from their TNA World Tag Team Championship match at No Surrender for "personal reasons". It's a good thing too. They were going into the match colder than a naked anorexic outside within the Arctic Circle. Granted, the heat for the match may have been skewed because the crowd at the Impact Zone isn't your typical crowd. If they like or intensely dislike someone (and they like Desmond Wolfe), they'll cheer or boo or do whatever to him. Hell, the mental midgets in the Crucial Crew react loudly to everyone. This can be a blessing or a curse for TNA, but in this case, it kinda works in their favor. A normal crowd would have shat all over London Brawling. The reason? They were humiliated in the go-home show before the PPV, at least Wolfe was. Given that Wolfe is the higher-profile member of the team, it was like humiliating both guys. Basically, for those who didn't catch or refuse to watch Impact, last week, London Brawling and the Motor City Machine Guns had a face-to-face promo segment to hype their match at No Surrender. This was the first real exposure LB had gotten to build the match. While the Guns were off wrestling Beer Money and Generation Me on Impact, LB was wrestling on the little-watched Web show XPlosion and starring in pretty bad out-of-the-arena vignettes of them going shopping. When it came time to really hammer home the build, the Guns started to question LB's manhood, to which Wolfe deferred to his valet Chelsea about how big his "member" was. At this prompt, she quickly retorted that Wolfe didn't have all that big a dong.
Yeah, you read that right, in the go-home segment for a big PPV title defense, the challengers were emasculated. This flies in the face of all effective booking. When heels get humiliated, that usually signals comeuppance. Heels get comeuppance. Faces don't. Especially when the heels in question have no heat, no real story other than letting their valet use their credit card, it's just bad booking. If they win, you have heatless Champions. If they lose, it's a foregone conclusion.
It amazes me in the post-Vince McMahon Kiss My Ass Club era that people still think that humiliation booking works to do anything bury the target of that humiliation for a varying amount of time. There's a difference between building heat or making someone look stupid and utterly humiliating them. John Cena taunting Batista for tapping out builds heat. Forcing William Regal to kiss McMahon's ass just buries him.
Good building of heat involves back and forth. There was no build-up to this match until last week, and the first salvo shot by the MCMGs was a killshot. It was textbook "how not to build a match" but then again, it's a fed where Vince Russo still holds enormous sway. Thankfully, they had another match in the wings with Generation Me (who, by the way, got way more heat for themselves by performing awesomely in a match two weeks prior than LB ever could have with their shitty vignettes), and thankfully for LB, whatever they did to piss of management got their heatless asses of the PPV. That being said, humiliation booking is never a viable option for building a feud, and it should only be used on a proxy for an outside source of heat (like using that stand-in for the Nuggets' owner last year) or to kill someone on the way out who was a real pain in the ass.
That is, unless you think making guys out to be small-dicked fools is a way to get them over. Then by all means, enjoy your shitty booking.
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