Who Knew Kane Was Pure Awesomesauce?

The Big Red Machine
Photo Credit: WWE.com

I'd like to take an informal poll. All of you who thought that Smackdown's MVP and the best promo in the WWE through three-quarters of the year this year would be Kane, please raise your hand. I'll wait.

If any of you raised your hands, you're either psychics or filthy liars. Kane's ascendency to the top of the Smackdown heap was about as unexpected as anything that happened this year and then some. The Nexus' rise to prominence was shocking, but hey, at least all of them were young guys with futures. Kane though? The man had been used about as terribly as one wrestler could have since that fateful run in 2002 when he was buried, absolutely buried by Triple H and the WWE creative staff with the Katie Vick angle. He vacillated back and forth between jobber to the stars and mid-card alpha male, with a few diversions in between like winning the ECW Championship and various stints teaming with the Undertaker as the Brothers of Destruction.

So for him to come out and take over the focus of Smackdown for two months with his investigation into the plight of his kayfabe brother before winning Smackdown's Money in the Bank match and the World Heavyweight Championship is pretty shocking. What's even more jaw-dropping, though, is how he's carried himself throughout this entire run. Many people, myself included, had Kane pegged as just one those bit players, a guy you could count on in a pinch for an angle, misused yes, but pretty much settled into a role that he was good at. Then, they gave him the microphone and let him cut extended promos. Extended promos that were blowing away those from nearly everyone else who was given a microphone at the time except for maybe CM Punk and The Miz. Maybe.

Yes, Kane has been that good, selling and getting an angle that really at its heart is hokey and wrestling at its facepalm-inducing worst. He's made Smackdown must see for more reasons than the excellent array of workers and characters that reside in the undercard. The shame part is that the WWE could have been tapping into this a lot sooner than they started.

As with any good argument about the underutilized in this past decade, it all starts with Triple H. He eluded putting guys like Rob Van Dam, Booker T and Chris Jericho in meaningful fashions while at the same time laying some pretty serious kayfabe heat/embarrassment on them. I mean, Jericho had to pick up dog shit for Stephanie McMahon in the lead up to their WrestleMania X-8 match, which didn't do much to lend credibility to then-Champion. In fact, the feud was more between Triple H and Stephanie than it was between Trips and Jericho, so that tells you how much the head creative mind at the time (who was, you guessed it, Stephanie McMahon) thought of Y2J. Booker T had his mugshots from when he was arrested for theft in his earlier days plastered all over the Titantron, and you know how he got his heat back? By having Triple H endure the Harlem Hangover and defeat him with a Pedigree in the middle of the ring. There was no real burial moment for RVD, but when Trips beat him in the middle of the ring at Unforgiven in 2002, the arena deflated after having witnessed yet another Trips title win over a guy they wanted to see as Champion so bad they could taste it.

The most humiliating burial, however, was Kane's. Triple H accused him of necrophilia and even humped the reputed corpse of his victim. Then, you guessed it, he jobbed clean at the PPV, never to get his heat back against Triple H whatsoever. The Trips fanboys all say "yeah well tripel h had to f*kk a corps and he wuz fien!!1" Yeah, you know why he was fine? For one, the corpse-humping was done as a measure of fratboy ball-busting, and two, Triple H got to continue on the push of his lifetime, one that really never ended, even with him FINALLY putting guys like He Who Shall Not Be Named and John Cena over. Kane? Well, like five years later he got to be ECW Champion. Oh, and he jobbed a shitload of times to Rey Mysterio. That's a great consolation prize if this were Opposite Day.

We all know that the guys Triple H held down were great talents who could have injected some life into the main event had they gotten their due sooner than they did. However, it was the consensus that Kane was the weakest of the lot. Given what we're seeing now, there's no doubt that we were wrong in that assessment. As an overall talent, he was far better than Van Dam and probably better than Booker T. It's hard for me to gauge him against Jericho because I'm the world's foremost Jerichoholic, but he had one thing over Y2J that Jericho never could have made up... the size.

So, in the same way that I, like most of us all do, revel in Kane's awesomeness now, in the same way I get a bit disappointed in the fact that this freedom to be completely and utterly epic wasn't unleashed in a time when the then-WWF could have used it more and at a time where he would have been in a position to carry more of a weight for a longer period of time.

Still, better late than never I guess. Here's to Kane, who is making Friday nights better for him having to be on Smackdown!

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