Friday, November 29, 2013

Best Coast Bias: Fun From Inside The Vacuum

Joined at the peptide chains
Photo Credit: WWE.com
For the better part of a pregnancy, Dolph Ziggler and Alberto Del Rio have been inexorably linked like DNA strands. They've exchanged barbs, alignments, and titles since the spring, and why the hell wouldn't they? They're two of the most talented guys on the roster when it comes to getting between the ropes and kicking out the jams.

And in the arena of purity that is Main Event where the Authority fear to tread and the title unification is a sentence and not the whole novel, you could always do worse than the showoff and the aristocrat trading bombs and plying their wares for nearly 20 minutes. That's what the Thanksgiving Eve M.E. had on offer to start the show, as the last two men to hold the World Championship before the Cenabot threw down with enzugiris and elbow spam, superb dropkicks and crazy ass bumps, tilt-a-whirl
backbreakers and reverse multiplexes.

It's a shame both of these guys seem to be afloat in the best midcard in the history of mankind, Del Rio due to not being Superman (?) and Ziggler... uhhh... anyway, the important takeaway is that Main Event's vacuum can be a good thing, and matches like these are one of those times. Lost in the shuffle otherwise and shunted to big fish/small pond status, Wednesday night two-segment showcases like these make the easy case - if it need be made - that given enough proper support, either of these men could eventually find themselves back in the spotlight in the center of the maelstrom as possible WWE Unified Champion in 2014.

Speaking of people whom the Cenadozer ran over in the past few weeks, Damien Sandow wrestled like he was still mad frothy in a virtual squash of Santino Marella. Maybe he's given up on educating the ignorami, but now that he's traded in the Terminus for the Uncle Slam Sandow seems to be on a mission from Darwin. It'd be nice if he was more focused on making Cena's life a living hell, as per television that features WWEers he seems to be more ineffectual at the job than a Bella twin. Whatever hell he fails to bring to that task, however, was subsumed by the vigor at which he beat Santino down like he owed him money. Is he going to be lying in wait as the Uncrowned Unified Champion as the calendar turns? Would the E like to make me look like Negrodamus by having him cost Cena that Unified Championship in a fortnight's time at TLC? The latter's probably more wishful thinking than the former, but the Killer Kowalski alumnus is finally going forth with a mean streak that'd make his mentor proud.

The show concluded with the latest installment in the best out of 1,473 between Kofi Kingston and Fandango, a rivalry assumed to be over by the author due to going Full C.J. Parker or something. Without the animus towards the Miz, Kingston's been dirtier than usual about lately going in, Kofi easily reverted to type as hero of the well-hearted and white-hatted. A series of rollups kicked off the Kingston avalanche that culminated in a very nice tope con hilo, and then Fandango started Thanksgiving early with several applications of the visual tryptophan known as the chinlock. How someone can pull off a nice slingshot legdrop and a swank-looking sunset flip powerbomb and suffocate those moments of greatness underneath that much burnt gravy is appalling, Dirty Curty. This isn't to declare a full jihad on the chinlock but throw some knees to the back in there, a fishhook, an eye gouge, something. Change the pitch up. Anyhow, when the guillotine legdrop missed and Trouble In Paradise didn't, it put a bow on the last Main Event in November.

And I'm thankful that no matter how much slow-moving animus I have towards the Unification Uber Alles at the top of the show, on this show it's all about the second W and not the E.