The Master's Dojo: SS Review and Raw Part 2

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another edition of The Master’s Dojo!! Today, I will be giving my personal review of WWE Summerslam, and will be talking about what has happened on the RAW brand since Mid-2005/2006. Let’s light this candle!!

I’ll start with my review of WWE’s most recent Pay-Per-View, Summerslam. The show’s opening match was for the Intercontinental Championship. I didn’t think this until now, but I think Dolph Ziggler really has potential. He faced Champion Rey Mysterio in quite a good match in my opinion. The match was fast paced, which I enjoy. Ziggler, to me, looked like he could be someone who could hold the IC title. However, that would not be the case. Rey was able to take the win after a big finish to retain his championship. Looks like his gripes about short title reigns paid off. Next came Swagger vs. MVP. Nothing special, MVP picked up the win after Swagger missed a top rope move and MVP hit the Playmaker. It was nothing special at the PPV, but who knows what might happen. Then came the match for the Unified Tag Team Championships, between The Team of The Big Show and Chris Jericho (anyone have a name for them that I can use?) and Cryme Tyme. Their match was back and forth and slowly paced. I honestly thought Cryme Tyme had a chance in this match. I thought they might be able to pick up some momentum when JTG was able to break up the Walls of Jericho, but The Big Show hit the Knockout Punch, while the ref was turned away,  and the champs retained. Those guys are good together. After that was The Great Khali for Kane. A Battle of Beasts turned into another not-so-special match for me. Kane went for Ranjin Singh early, then went at the legs of Khali. Eventually Kane delivered a DDT to the Great Khali and picked up the victory. Following that came the much awaited return of D-Generation X. They came in with a very interesting and pretty cool Military-esk entrance and a lot of fireworks. Legacy, of course were their opponents. Legacy was in control early, but the match become nicely fast paced and fairly back and forth eventually. The end of the match came when Shawn Michaels delivered Sweet Chin Music and scored the pin. Good (and not surprising) return for DX. Next came the disappointing ECW Championship match. Shortly after the bell rang, Christian delivered the KillSwitch to William Regal and won. After the “match”, Vlad Kozlov, Ezekiel Jackson and Regal (ECW’s new stable) all attacked Christian with finishers. Strange stable combination in my opinion. Then came the WWE Championship match between  Randy Orton and John Cena. The match was restarted three times, once when Orton was DQ’d, once when Orton was counted out and once when Brett DiBiase (Ted’s brother) interfered, before Randy Orton hit the RKO and beat Cena. Finally, in The Main Event, CM Punk faced World Heavyweight Champion Jeff Hardy in a Tables, Ladders and Chairs match. The weapons were used a lot, and a huge spot in this match was when Jeff delivered a Swanton to CM Punk, off of a ladder onto the Commentating Tables. CM Punk did leave the match victorious though, after he kicked the Enigma off of the ladder and took the belt. After the match though came the big moment of the night. While CM Punk was celebrating, The Undertaker’s gong sounded and all of the lights went out. When the lights come back on, CM Punk didn’t realize that ‘taker had replaced Jeff Hardy in the position of lying on the mat. Undertaker got up, Chokeslammed Punk, posed, left the ring and posed again. To conclude this brief review, here are my parting thoughts from Summerslam 2009: Ziggler may have lost, but he is going to have the Intercontinental title soon. Kane and Khali is a lame feud. Jack Swagger vs. MVP could become something, but isn’t anything special right now. The World Tag Team Champions appear unstoppable, and DX is back and badass. ECW looks the same, Orton and Cena will have another basic Orton vs. Cena feud (nothing special) and finally, The Undertaker is back and is coming for CM Punk’s World Heavyweight Championship. Things look good for SmackDown, OK for RAW and not great for ECW.

Now, onto RAW in recent history. I’ll start by talking about arguably WWE’s biggest superstar, John Cena and his career on RAW. People were stoked when he came over in the draft, and he since then he has had some memorable moments. Although he come over as a face, Fans started to boo Cena while he was on RAW. Cena was booed quite often coming into his feud with Edge, after Edge cashed in his Money in the Bank contract after Cena won an Elimination Chamber.Their feud ended after the Royal Rumble, when Cena and Triple H started to feud and fans really booed Cena and cheered for his opponent. Even more boos came in feuds to come, most notably his match vs. Rob Van Dam for the WWE Championship at One Night Stand, where fans chanted many anti-Cena things, a few of which I can’t put into this article. Cena, by the way, won at WrestleMania 22 against Triple H with an STFU and lost to RVD at One Night Stand. Following that, Cena started feuding with Edge again over the WWE Championship, with Cena being more clearly the face. The feud culminated in a TLC match at Unforgiven, which Cena won after giving and FU to Edge off of the ladder through a table. His next feud was with Co-World Tag Team Champion Shawn Michaels. The two faced off at WrestleMania 23 and Backlash, both of which Cena won, despite Michaels winning what was rated the best match of the year before Backlash with Sweet Chin Music on Cena. Since then, Cena has feuded with the likes of The Big Show, Randy Orton, Triple H and more. John Cena is now, has been and will continue to be one of RAW’s biggest superstars.

Since its Homecoming back in Mid-2005, RAW has seen many a feud. Some of these feuds have been very good, but others bad. One of these feuds was the aforementioned Cena vs. Edge feud. A lot of big things happened during their feud. One being when Edge had Lita throw John Cena’s WWE Championship Spinner Belt into a river, then replace it with his own Rated R Spinner Belt. Another moment was Cena attacked Edge inside a hotel room, or when Edge went to Cena’s home and attacked Mr. Cena. And who could forget Edge and Lita’s live sex on RAW which Ric Flair interrupted, then John Cena interrupted and FU’d Lita. An example of a bad feud would be D-Generation X vs. The McMahons. Despite how awesome it was to see, it wasn’t a great feud. DX won every match, did some fairly lame pranks, and it just didn’t really amount to anything, unfortunately. Another example of a good feud was Chris Jericho vs. The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels. Matches were won by both men and were all fought well. At one point, the World Heavyweight Championship was fought over in a Ladder Match at No Mercy, which was, in my opinion, awesome. Shawn Michaels pushed his way out from under the ladder at one point, shooting Jericho way to the outside. Jericho would end up winning the match, but man it was great. Their feud was full of awesome matches, awesome promos, etc. Their feud ended in a Last man Standing Match in England, I believe it was, when it looked like HBK and Jericho beat, but JBL came and hit Michaels with a chair, disallowing Michaels from beating the 10-Count. That deserved the award of Feud of the Year. A Bad feud from 2008 was Kane vs. Rey Mysterio. Rey should have never won any of the matches, except maybe one. I’m sorry, I like Rey, but Kane is way bigger and way stronger and should have easily overpowered the small Mysterio. I didn’t like it or believe it, and that is why I really like Rey’s current feud. Ziggler is bigger than Mysterio, but is a beast like Kane. Anyway, Kane and Rey Mysterio was deserving of the Worst Feud of the Year Award it got from PWI. That is a brief overview of a few of the feuds we’ve seen in the last few years on RAW, but we have sure seen more, this was a quick, quick rundown.

These articles that I have been putting out for you readers is for the purpose of maybe learning something about WWE and how it has recently changed. I hope you guys have been enjoying them and have maybe learned something from them. They aren’t full histories, just overviews. There is one more coming next week, I hope you guys, the readers, will enjoy that one and have enjoyed the ones I’ve previously written.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for reading this week’s edition of The Master’s Dojo. My WWE Evolution series comes to an end next week with my SmackDown, 2006-Now talk, so remember to tune in. Until next time, I am The Master of Puppets, the Dojo is closed and I AM OUT!!

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