Monday, July 14, 2014

Best Coast Bias: Oh, Kidd, You Devil

The suxeN is undefeated; FACT
Photo Credit: WWE.com
Desperation and fear aren't synonyms, but at the very least they're cousins.  It's a quadrilaterals/squares kind of thing where the subset of one can be folded neatly into the other.

Maybe in theory you shouldn't be into skullduggery and you should be one of those nice people what helps matrons across the street and donates their old newspapers to the local library and all that jazz, but do you ever notice people bring up theoretical situations to deflect and distract from realities of trying to survive with your wits intact without going into meltdown?

But fine, let's dust off a fedora and play devil's advocate.  It's the hottest game on the Interwebs, after all.  So hypothetically if you were the secondary character in a two-wrestler marriage and you possibly lost a couple of the best years of your life due to injury and in theory your career had turned you into the white Xavier Woods and you were losing so often that not only were members of the Brazilian national team laughing at you but the next generation of wrestlers was already using you as a stepladder to take the spot you'd fallen off of maybe it could perhaps kind of make you the sort of person who wants to win first and check on his wife later.

In a completely related note, Tyson Kidd pinned Sami Zayn in the middle of the ring, and was so chuffed over his morally wonky victory you could almost hear the playlist in his head yelling out DEEEEEJAAAAYYYY KHALED!  With he and Justin Gabriel overcoming Zayn and the NXT Champion Adrian Neville in a great match to close out the show about the only thing that could hinder Tyson's perceived righting of his ship would be the fact that the endgame saw him faking a knee injury to avoid getting Helluva Kicked before he would (accidentally?) bump into Nattie off of a Zayn punch and send her sprawling before feigning going to check on her with Sami and rolling him up for the three.  Well, that, and the fact these episodes are broadcast, so you would have to figure Nattie would see him almost backstage preening and celebrating the fact that he did it before coming back down to the ring.

Irregardless, that .6 Eddie impersonation was the crumbled-up cookie things on a really superlative match frogurt, made all the better by the fact that up until the last 90 seconds or so Tyson didn't do anything overtly scummy.  He may've gotten in a couple of to-date-in-NXT uncharacteristic stomp and punch flurries in on only Zayn but besides that -- in theory -- you could've been forgiven for thinking this was a battle of babyface tag teams if you didn't have the prior knowledge of the past couple of months to bounce off of.  Oh, sure, the Nattie chants when the Harts came out followed by the Nattie's Husband chants as Tyson found his arm worked over by the partnership of Canadian Air may've given away a scoch, but not enough. No, this was things like Neville doing a freakin' corkscrew moonsault off of Sami and standing Shooting Star Presses or a textbook tope con hilo from Zayn to everybody involved and their heirs being met by the full legal parameters of aggression by Kiddriel, even if the main roster veterans were losing pretty badly on points before the end.

It was certainly a good Thursday to be bad, as outside of a Sin Cara victory the people who were left standing tall all would be pushing the previously referenced matron into traffic rather than holding it up for her to cross past it safely.  Eddie Princeton, err, I mean Bull Dempsey won another squash, CJ Parker laid Woods out with what should've been an enzui sidekick but instead looked like the world's biggest fan wave (well, maybe the resultant breeze from it whiffing gave Dr. Woods hypothermia thus triggering his President Harrisonesque reaction), and Summer Rae decided the best way to make this the Summer of Summer so far as she was concerned was to best Bayley and earn the #1 contendership alongside a shot at her former BFF Charlotte for the title.

She got the spot despite (in a really nicely subtle recurring theme on this show) facing a more aggressive Bayley, who didn't let the crowd's willingness to take a bullet for her keep her from starting off the match by almost nearly introducing Summer's pretty face into every turnbuckle in every corner of the ring.  Bayley being who she is, she couldn't stop herself from indulging one more time chants to do the whirlybird on Summer's back on a second occasion after grappling her down to the mat but it's always interesting to see her character development slowly increase over time and given the right antagonist, as the seemingly arrived fully formed Summer was here. For crying out flayven, she got booed for yanking off a hair tie.  A hair tie!  And anybody who can survive an Exploder suplex to win a match cleanly in the center of the ring referee hiccups aside deserves a shot at the prestigious belt no matter what her frenemies say.

Of course, in that aspect, Summer's got it relatively easy.   After all, she's not the one currently making a frenemy out of her wife.