Thursday, March 28, 2024
EditorialRetro WrestleMania Review: 19

Retro WrestleMania Review: 19

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Sooooo, Daniel Bryan is back. There’s that. In my continuing reviews of previous WrestleManias, here is WrestleMania 19 from Safeco Field in Seattle, Washington (which, coincidentally, happens to be near the birthplace of Daniel Bryan).

 

Matt Hardy (C) def. Rey Mysterio – Cruiserweight Championship

I’m sure both of these men were told that they were working with a time constraint, because this match had a very quick pace from start to finish, and I actually dug it. The Cruiserweights have greatly improved since the start of the tournament, but beforehand, they were basically smaller versions of the main roster. This is what I envision a cruiserweight match to be like, except Matt really isn’t much of a cruiserweight. Point remains. I don’t know what the actual time length of this was, but it sure felt like 6 minutes. However, I felt as though they occupied that 6 minutes very well. Mysterio dictated the pace of the match with his high-flying moves while Hardy tried to keep him grounded, especially with interference from Shannon Moore from the outside. With the loaded card, I can understand why this wasn’t given much time, but this was a perfect warm-up match for the crowd to get ready for the rest of the night. Solid start. I also dug the fact that Rey looked like a Power Ranger here. But I think the two probably should have gotten more than 5 minutes since this was a four-hour show, as they pretty much had the equivalent of a present-day RAW match before commercial. **

The Undertaker def. The Big Show and A-Train – 2 on 1 Handicap Match

When you look back, you’ll see that Undertaker had some underwhelming performances at WrestleMania from the early to mid-2000’s. That said, I was actually surprised that the pace of this match wasn’t nearly as slow and plodding as one would expect in a match featuring 1,100 lbs of weight between the three. And seeing the Undertaker now, it’s so unbelievable to see him running and jumping in the air, running across the place. Seems like a century ago. I know WWE doesn’t typically pay attention to rules, and all that, or maybe it’s me, but shouldn’t The Undertaker have been disqualified after Nathan Jones came running down and going RVD on Big Show? Nathan was originally supposed to be Undertaker’s tag team partner, but since he was out it was a set handicap match. So doesn’t somebody else attacking the two people justify a disqualification. Technicalities aside, I thought these three did about as well as they could do given the conditions. Undertaker dictated the pace of the match, The Big Show and A-Train got their power moves in, and the young Nathan Jones got his moment, I guess, to the end the match.  Guess that’s about as good as this could have gotten. But ultimately, it was uneventful, kind of dull and one of Undertaker’s forgettable WrestleMania matches. *3/4

Trish Stratus def. Victoria (C) and Jazz – Women’s Championship

Jeez, the bar for women’s matches must have been close to the ground back in the Ruthless Aggression era. This year, they repeated the triple threat formula featuring two of the same three competitors from the year before. While they still followed the same sloppy format of just hitting moves without telling any sort of story to transition between them, I thought the pace of this match was far better than the women’s match of the year before, and that’s actually not saying much, because it was still kind of sloppy. The two on one dynamic that Victoria and Jazz were to have on Trish wasn’t played out well at all, Trish was doing a lot of the work, and the crowd really didn’t seem interested in the match at all. I wasn’t either, but the match wasn’t as horrible as I was expecting. Trish pretty much did much of the work, Jazz had a couple of power moves and Victoria was solid, but it was pretty much a quick sprint that really didn’t amount to much. **

Charlie Haas (C) and Shelton Benjamin (C) def. Chris Benoit/Rhyno and The Guerreros – WWE Tag Team Championship

Ultimately, there was too much for me to follow here to take it seriously, but for what we got, it was pretty decent. I felt like I was watching a series of rushed singles matches, and the finish had so little build-up to it, it just came out of nowhere. Aesthetically speaking, the match was fine, and while I was disappointed that Eddie and Chris couldn’t elevate the match to something more intense like the Smackdown tag team battles of 2002 used to be, it was still a hard-worked effort from all involved. But yeah, the match had little heat and there really wasn’t enough of a reason to care here, unfortunately. **1/4

Shawn Michaels def. Chris Jericho

RAW’s first contribution to WrestleMania 19 came in the form of what many believed to be the match of the night. What I can certainly say is I dug the old school vs. new school dynamic that they were playing here. Chris Jericho basically believed that Shawn’s time was over and that he was better than him, and I liked what Jericho was able to do here, which was trying to do Shawn Michaels better than HBK himself. Meanwhile, Shawn was relying on old-school tricks and ingenuity in order to stave off Jericho here. There’s always something about WrestleMania that raises Shawn’s game and he was certainly up to the task in putting Jericho over as a big deal and did so in a much better fashion than Triple H did the year before, when it was all about him and Stephanie.

There are a couple of things I didn’t like, however. For one, HBK’s selling of his back was widely inconsistent here. There would be some moments where he would hold is back when Jericho hit his submission, and there were other moments where he seemed to be doing just fine. I also didn’t like the fact that Jericho went away from working HBK’s back even though that’s what gave him the advantage in the match. Overall, however, the match was very well done, and while I didn’t think this was the vintage, instant classic people made it out to be, it was certainly a quality match and one of Jericho’s better performances. ****

Triple H (C) def. Booker T – World Heavyweight Championship

I was never Booker T’s biggest fan, but his feud with Triple H in 2003 made you want to have sympathy for him and give Triple H his comeuppance. While I didn’t think their feud was necessarily racist in its intent, it certainly had some undertones that were completely unnecessary and would lead people to believe otherwise. One would think after Triple H emasculating Booker T and unconsciously taking a shot at his ethnicity, one would think that Booker T would come away as the conquering hero and he would ride off into the sunset as World Champion, taking down the prick, Triple H. Nope. This is the time where Triple H ruled RAW with an iron fist and the World Heavyweight Championship in tow. I’m not saying Booker T winning here would make him like an instant legend or something, but this was one of the worst feuds ever and how WWE went about it, especially after that whole Katie Vick debacle with HHH fall prior with Kane was embarrassing.

The actual match itself wasn’t bad, I suppose. It was a good power vs. power struggle and they did trade some good back and forth moments. Booker T was especially nimble here with some of his top rope moves. One issue I had was that the selling of his knee was kind of weak. And how about one of the weakest finishes in WWE history? Triple H hits a Pedigree on Booker T and both men collapse out of exhaustion. Triple H crawls over to the cover after around 30-45 seconds elapses and Booker just stays down like a chump and clearly needed around 5 minutes to recover from the almighty Pedigree, which I guess showed what WWE thought of Booker T and Triple H at the time. I almost equate it to that Triple Threat match Stone Cold had with Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho back in 2001, when the match ended with Stone Cold doing a superplex from the top rope on Jericho, and after a long time passes, he just pins him. Booker looked like a total chump there. Match itself wasn’t anything bad, but the whole context of this feud was awful, and how it ended was just flat. **3/4

Hulk Hogan def. Vince McMahon – Street Fight

My goodness, was Vince looking extra jacked here. If you look at his entrance here, it was like he struggled to maintain the great weight of his upper body and had trouble balancing it out with his lower half. Looking at Vince and Hulk face to face reminded me of what it would be like if two old guys in a retirement home remembered a rivalry they had when they were young adults and just started hitting with each other with canes. The two men here had a combined age of 108 at the time and were given 21 minutes at WrestleMania. Ain’t that something? Anyways, I admire their endurance regardless and while the pace of the match amounted to what it would be like if a turtle challenged a snail to a race in a desert in Arizona, both men busted their asses, literally. Even though the match wasn’t anything special, I could tell from both of them that they wanted this to work badly.

You had the beginning of the match with some intense, but uninspired brawling and Vince trying to incorporate some psychology by working over Hogan’s left arm, and the size of one of Hogan’s arms is probably a PS4 console. Then it proceeded into a straight out brawl with chairs being incorporated. How about a Spanish Announcer taking a bump than the actual table for once to boot? He even did a blade job. Hopefully, he got a bonus for that.

Anyways, I actually enjoyed the brawl here. The crowd seemed to buy into Hulk Hogan’s offense and Vince did a good job of being a detestable douche here. The pacing of the match was obviously an issue, but it didn’t hurt it enough to compromise the match. Unless I’m mistaken this was Hogan’s final WrestleMania, and while it wasn’t as big a match as Andre The Giant or Ultimate Warrior, it was a good way to go out. ***1/4

The Rock def. Steve Austin

The main question coming into this match was Stone Cold’s health and how he would fair in a match. It was clear that the strain of wrestling with a bad neck had taken its toll and he was in pretty bad shape before WrestleMania 19. But just like a rattlesnake, he gutted it out and put on a great, gutsy performance against his greatest foil ever, The Rock. Now I forget the entire context of this feud this go around, but I believe it was something revolving around Stone Cold winning some sort of award The Rock didn’t get and Dwyane lamenting the fact that beating Stone Cold was the only thing he never accomplished at WrestleMania. To give you a perspective of what I thought about this match, I believe that this match was better than WrestleMania 15, but not at the level of WrestleMania 17. I think that should give a clearer indication. Both men did a great job of complimenting each other’s styles and basically kicking the piss out of each other.

While I thought the finisher, kick-out sequences were a bit much, I definitely liked the story they were telling with Stone Cold’s tenacity and The Rock needing three Rock Bottoms to finally put away. I also loved how The Rock had to shove the referee after the match and gaze over him as a sign of respect for Stone Cold being able to fight through the pain and give them the finality of their feud that was a long time coming. They had better matches, but quality wise, this was top-notch. ****

 

Brock Lesnar def. Kurt Angle (C) – WWE Championship

Ah yes, the match most remembered for Brock Lesnar damn near incapacitating himself for life and Michael Cole’s voice cracking the entire match. This deserved to be the main event. I think it was highly telling that it was a match from the Smackdown brand that was chosen to main event WrestleMania, because it showed how far ahead it was, quality-wise, from their RAW counterpart. For perspective’s sake, the next time a Smackdown-branded match would main event WrestleMania was at WrestleMania 24 when Edge defended the World Heavyweight Title against The Undertaker. Here you had two legitmaite athletes with street cred go out there and beat the hell out of each other. Kurt Angle was forced to do this on his own without the help of Team Angle, but at the same time, Kurt Angle had beaten the likes of Chris Benoit AND Brock Lesnar on his own without any help, so even if he was on his own, you could still believe that Kurt was capable of winning straight up. However, seeing as how Brock Lesnar won the Royal Rumble and was screwed out of the title and getting his hands on Lesnar time and time again, it was clear he would win.

Being that this was the last match of a four-hour show, it wasn’t surprising that the crowd was kind of silent until the ending sequence, but that didn’t hurt the quality of the match at all. In fact, the final 7-10 minutes were straight fire, as you had Lesnar going as far as to sell a German Suplex from Angle by landing on his belly. I couldn’t imagine Lesnar doing that today even if he wanted to. Normally, WrestleMania is the time where feuds tend to cease or at least almost end, but Lesnar/Angle in the main event of WrestleMania actually jump-started what was probably the best feud of 2003. They’d go on to have great matches at Vengeance, Summerslam and capitalized their feud with a 60-minute Iron Man Match on Smackdown later in 2003. This was the start of that, and it was a gutsy performance from both men who came into WrestleMania, not in the best of shape. ****1/2

Conclusion:

WrestleMania 19 had a blast from the past, but also looked forward to the future. A good watch.

Definitely enjoyed this edition of WrestleMania far better than 18. We got three matches in the 4-star range and everything else was either what it needed to be or kept simple. While I didn’t agree with some of the booking decisions in Triple H essentially punking out Booker T and Shawn going over Jericho, nothing was too down in the dumps for me to hate it. Both brands were also pretty well represented as well with each producing at least one 1 4 star match. Even Hogan looked a little spry here, so I gotta go thumbs up for WrestleMania 19. Until next time.