Normal Vault Rules Apply: Touch Not, Lest Ye Be Touched

"Wellllll,
Well it's the Big Show
Yeah it's a big, bad show tonight, y'all
Yeah it's the Big Show
Come on and crank it up, turn on the lights, y'all
Well, get ready for somethin'
That you'll never know
You won't see it comin'
But I promise you'll know
It's the Big Show!"
-"Big," official theme of the Big Show, from WWF The Music Volume 4

Okay, I had a wrestling-related epiphany today, so I had to post about it. WWE Raw, my favorite TV show, was pre-empted this week. The USA network, on which Raw ran for seven years before it jumped to TNN (now Spike TV), has a long-standing contract with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, the world's premiere dog showcase. The Westminster show is famous for three reasons, none of which it is proud of, I'm sure. First, it was expertly spoofed by Christopher Guest's vaunted mockumentary Best in Show. Second, the show was the birthplace of popular Late Night with Conan O'Brien character Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Third, and most prevalent, the show traditionally is broadcast in prime time on a Monday night, and as such part of USA's contract with WWE stated that Raw must be pre-empted once a year in order to air the dog show. When WWE returned to USA in October, the Westminster proviso was still part of the deal. So this week's episode was taped Monday night to be aired Thursday. Thinking I was not going to be able to see the show on Thursday night, I checked WWE.com for the spoilers of Monday's tapings. If you haven't seen the show yet and want to be surprised, skip down to the quick hits at the end of the page.

*Spoilers ahead! Danger, Will Robinson! DANJAH! Danger, high voltage! Please, dont' shoot!*



The spoilers informed me that as part of the Road to Wrestlemania tournament, which will decide the challenger to John Cena's WWE title at WM on April 2nd (only 45 days 'til I'm there, baby!!!), the Big Show met Triple H in the semifinals. The two battled to a draw. I was shocked to read this. Conventional tournament wisdom dictates that in the event of a draw, the person who was to meet the winner of the drawn match gets a bye to the next round. In this case that would mean the winner of the Rob Van Dam-Chris Masters semifinal would get a bye to, well, the winner's circle and therefore be the #1 contender! Could it be true? Did Vince McMahon and the WWE's powers-that-be have the guts to shock the world and not give The Nose, er, I mean, The Game, his pre-appointed main event slot at the biggest show of the year? Were they bold enough to put a fresh face in the most important match on the calendar and try to capitalize on the success of their awesome ECW pay-per-view in the process? Would this finally be RVD's day in the sun, as there was no chance in hell they had that much faith in Masters?

Sadly, no, as we live in the era of the triple threat match. Apparently later in the taping Vinny Mac himself declared that both Show and HHH were still alive in the tournament (despite the fact that they both blew their chance by getting counted out) and would both face RVD--who did beat the Masturbator, er, I mean, Masterpiece--next week for the title shot. All of this got me thinking. And after seven years of frustration, cold sweats, sleepless nights and massive therapy bills, I've finally figured it out. The Big Show is not a useless waste of space. He has a very definitive role in WWE, and I finally realize what it is. Big Show is Mr. Triple Threat.

Think about it, WWE historians. Every time that WWE doesn't have full confidence in their main event, they add Big Show to it. Every time they don't know what to do with the Show, he gets shoehorned into an existing feud and made part of a multi-way match. It almost never fails, and the examples are endless. The first incidence I can remember is the Survivor Series in 1999. Stone Cold was written into the main event, a triple threat match with The Rock and Triple H for the WWE title. But Austin needed some time off for neck surgery. So they run an angle where he gets hit by a car and is injured. The easy thing would have been to make Rock-HHH a singles match and have Trips keep the belt. But they didn't want Rock to lose face, and they wanted to send the fans home happy (or as happy as could be expected considering they got gipped out of seeing the company's biggest star in the main event). So what do they do? Throw Big Show in there for a triple threat! And voila, Triple H gets pinned but also gets a ready-made transitional chump to take the belt back from, and Rocky doesn't have to job. And somehow out of all of this mess, a heatless Big Show, stuck in a stupid feud with Big Bossman over his (fake) dead father's remains, gets a WWE title run he was promised in his contract. Nice and neat.

It doesn't stop there, though. Skip ahead a few months. Wrestlemania 2000 is coming up, and the whole world knows it's going to come down to Rock and Triple H again for the title. But WWE wants to swerve the fans, spike the buyrate for their April pay-per-view and get The Game over again all without making Rocky look bad. So what do they do? Throw Big Show in there, with Mick Foley on top for spice! That way, they can give Show his other contract incentive (guaranteed main event at WM 2000) and soften the blow of their most popular performer losing at their biggest event of the year. Seeing a pattern?

But wait, there's more. September 2002: Eric Bischoff hands the new World Championship to Triple H. WWE needs a credible #1 contender to lose to HHH and establish him as a worthy champion. They don't have much to choose from; just former champ Chris Jericho (who's been jobbing to Ric Flair), unreliable and unmotivated burnout Jeff Hardy, and hot for all of 2001 but fading fast RVD. It's just not good enough of a field for a triple threat. What do they do? Make it a fatal four way with Big Show! Show's rage gets him disqualified, it comes down to Van Dam and Jericho, and as the only one in the match who hasn't lost to Triple H before, Van Dam gets the booby prize, having gone through not one really great contender but 3 almost great ones in one match.

July 2003: Kurt Angle is returning from neck surgery, so WWE fans of course are making him a face. WWE wants him to rekindle his feud with Brock Lesnar from Wrestlemania, but Brock's also a face, and they can't turn either one of them heel right away. They need them to face each other with the buffer zone of a common enemy, but what can they do? You guessed it: have Brock feud all spring with Big Show and then make it a triple threat at Vengeance! The two guys team up on the 500-pounder for a while, but tempers flare between them before Angle wins, thus planting the seeds for Brock's heel turn and the real start of the feud.

February 2004: Kurt Angle and John Cena are clearly the odds-on favorites to challenge Eddie Guerrero for the WWE title at Wrestlemania. Angle's a heel and thus has to win in order to meet Eddie the face, but they don't want to kill Cena's momentum as a face either. Sensing the patter yet? Oh yeah, they go to Big Show! Even though Cena taps out, the fans are made to think he might not have lost if not for Angle and Show pounding on him, and he gets to beat Show for the U.S. title at 'Mania as a consolation prize.

January 2005: JBL is out of viable face contenders for his WWE title, but the fans are really interested in seeing him defend it against the heel Kurt Angle. Just the same, WWE can't make a heel vs. heel title match for the Royal Rumble, and deep down even they realize there's no way JBL would beat Angle straight up. What do they do? I think you've got the picture. JBL pins Angle, but only because he was preoccupied with Show.

I could go on and on. The point is, there's a very real pattern here. And with a little deduction, it's not hard to figure out why Big Show has been slotted with this role. In my opinion, the main reason is that WWE wants to put Show in big-time matches as a way of justifying the fact that they've made him a big deal in the past. It's the classic self-fulfilling prophecy syndrome; WWE says that Show is a major star, so they arrange things in order to have themselves proven right and put him in major matches even if the fans don't want him there. And part of Vince McMahon's belief that Show should be a major star comes from his unusual love for Really Big Guys. Vince follows the classic logic of fake fighting that just like in real life, the biggest guy should always win a fight because, well, he's the biggest. So there. Or at least he thinks the fans think that way. So if a match needs a gap filled in the form of a viable main event performer just so the fans will buy it as important, there's no better way to fill that gap than with a 7 foot tall, 500 pound giant. Because people will believe he can beat anyone smaller than him. Which is everybody. So if anyone actually manages to win a match he is in, that makes them like, Superman. And people will buy tickets to see Superman wrestle. Yeah. This is the thought process that has brought Show to his lot in life.

Now as long as Big Show is gigantic and a former WWE champion, he will continue to be thrown into these situations. The good side of it is that he will always manage to be featured in a high-profile match every few months. The down side is that he will hardly ever get one-on-one matches or storylines of any consequence. WWE will have him muddle around the middle of the card for a little while, then all of a sudden he'll chokeslam some people to remind the fans just how Really Big he is and get jammed into a three or four-way match (or as is currently the case, a tag title match) like cooking lard in a recipe--just for flavor, not for substance. And he'll never win the big one again as far as I can see. Of course, Big Show could break the cycle if he could get over well enough with the fans to become a main eventer on his own. And if you've listened to Jim Ross' commentary for the last 7 years, you know that Show has all the potential in the world to be a major player. But that's just J.R.'s nice way of saying that Show isn't over with the fans without totally burying a guy under a long-term contract. Cowboy diplomacy at its finest. I don't harbor any ill will towards the Show, per se. Every shoot ("real," non-scripted) interview I've ever heard the guy give have made him seem humble, personable and respectful of the business. And he's a hoot on Conan O'Brien. But I can't say I consider him to be a guy who works hard. Even though he was plenty big already, the only thing I've ever seen Show do to his body since signing with WWE is gain weight. And that includes several months in 2000 when they sent him down to OVW, their minor league organization to get in shape and he actually came back bigger. His moveset has devolved into really slow, lumbering offense that doesn't require him to move very much, and at a relatively young age he's starting to turn into the sad shell of himself that Andre the Giant was becoming in the last years of his career. All of this, coupled with the fact that there's only so much a 500 pound guy can do to look cool to young adult fans and women, would seem to ensure that Show is doomed to stay Mr. Triple Threat until he can't wrestle any more.

The sad fact is, WWE will force him to do so because he was originally signed to a huge long-term contract laden with the ridiculous incentives mentioned above. You may be asking why, and the best answer is that Show has been living off one of the greatest rookie years ever for his entire career. Show had an inauspicious beginning in 1995. He was a former college basketball player discovered by Hulk Hogan, trained to wrestle and cajoled into playing the long-lost son of Andre the Giant in WWE's rival company WCW. That was a stupid idea, not to mention obviously untrue, and was quickly scrapped in favor of an even worse idea. Show (then known simply as The Giant) joined up with the evil Kevin Sullivan's Dungeon of Doom group, a cartoonish collection of bad wrestlers playing characters out of B-horror flicks. During this time, Show did such ridiculous things as explode out of a wall in a cave to attack Hogan, compete in a monster truck showdown and survive a supposed fall off the roof of Cobo Hall only to wrestle later in the night. Eventually, though, Show broke off from the Dungeon and was allowed to show his individual skills. Unlike every superheavyweight WWE has ever tried to market as being "really athletic for a guy his size," Show actually was. He moved at a quick pace and leaped around the ring like a much smaller man, all the while adopting a stoic, reserved killer persona that made him far more intimidating than cheap tricks like a fall off a roof. Show became the rare commodity of a guy marketed as a heel who became so badass that the fans clamored to cheer for him, and thus he was given the WCW World title after thoroughly dominating Ric Flair in April 1996, followed by him running through WCW's other mainstays Sting and Lex Luger. Unfortunately, just as things were starting to really click for the Big Guy, his buddy Hogan turned heel and formed the New World Order, taking the belt away from Show in the process. The nWo storyline saved WCW, but it killed Show's momentum. For the next 3 years, he became the first test case for nWo suffocation, as he became awash in the bizarre and excessive booking behind the group and changed loyalties so many times that by January of '99 literally no one knew what side he was on. WCW let him go, WWE signed him to a deal and at the time, he was considered one of the most important free agent acquisitions in the war between WWE and WCW, mostly based (still) on the promise he had shown in his first year. His new name, The Big Show, was meant to reflect not only his size but his status as a main event player. Show's initial heat quickly fizzled, however, and by November of that year, he was stuck in his current loop.

So you could say that Show suffers from the worst case of the sophomore slump in history, or you could blame both WCW and WWE for not giving him the chance to run with the ball as one of their biggest names. Whatever the case, the only thing for certain is that Big Show is without question Mr. Triple Threat, and I think WWE needs to acknowledge it. It doesn't even matter that he never wins the triple threat or fatal four way matches he's in; they've called the Undertaker the master of the casket match for years and he loses them far more often than not. They created the Buried Alive match specifically for the guy and he's never won one! So why not throw Show a bone and just admit to the fact that you don't have anything better to do with the guy than throw him in triple threats. Maybe it'll backfire in some weird way and actually get him over. Of course, the best way to get him over would be to start calling him Mr. Triple Threat, have him win the match against Triple H and RVD next week, then go on to beat John Cena and Edge in another triple threat for the title at Wrestlemania. But I think we all know that's not going to happen, because I'm going to Wrestlemania and God doesn't hate me enough to let the night end with Big Show holding the gold. At least I hope not. I'll be sure to give up extra stuff for Lent this year, just in case.



*End of Spoilers! We now return you to your regularly scheduled quick hits!*

-Baseball is right around the corner. I'm still juiced, more than I have been in quite some time. Make no mistake about it, and believe no one who tells you otherwise: the White Sox are the pick to win it again this year. Their nucleus is still intact, they've got the Frank Thomas bad blood out of their system, and their pitching staff is actually improved over last season. Best of all, Coco Crisp no longer plays for the Indians. I'm telling you, they're unstoppable! The sentimental pick for me, however, is the Cubs. Let me state once again for the record (as I dodge your rotten vegetables) , I am an admitted 'tweener when it comes to Chicago baseball. I feel the Cubs' pain as strongly as anyone, but even if I didn't, I'd want them to win this year. Speaking from the perspecitve of a Sox fan (or any other fan, for that matter), what better way would there be to both cease the whining of Cubdom and kill their annoying status as loveable losers in one fell swoop than for them to win it this year? Especially after Boston and the White Sox have ended their respective cold streaks in consecutive seasons. I'm telling you, the cards are falling into place (the proverbial cards and the St. Louis ones); the baseball deities have had enough and a change is bound to come. I don't care if the potential for greatness isn't on their roster, this has to be the Cubs' year. And if they do win, I'll adopt the same stance I had about the White Sox: I'm selfish and greedy, and as long as they win a World Series in my lifetime, I don't care if they ever win another one. Fuck the grandkids, I can die happy.

-Movies are hard to get to when you're in college. Therefore, I have to root for Crash for Best Picture because it's the only nominee I've seen. That's not to say I didn't think it was excellent, because I did and I told everyone I knew to see it. But I really have no frame of reference when it comes to calling it the year's best movie. And as a film major, I don't think that's a good thing. Oh well, I'm sure someday I'll be so sick of watching movies that I'll lock myself in a cave and read Reader's Digest for days at a time, so I won't complain too much now.

-I don't know if I'm returning to the comics shop this week or not. As I rediscover the medium, I'm also rediscovering the unfortunate truth that many books don't live up to their covers or the previews of what's going to happen in them. And nothing sucks more than that first exposition issue of a new story arc, but without them, the action-packed later issues are too damn confusing. Damn bloodsucking comics companies, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back...oh never mind.

Excelsior!
~Jakeman