 |
| Suspend your disbelief. |
There are a lot of things that annoy me about Rey Mysterio. Every bad promo is the same old crap with random Spanish mixed in. His personality is boring. They never sync up his hand movements with his pyro correctly. It also irks me that I have no clue what he says to the kids when he virtually headbutts them ringside. However, if there's one thing that annoys me the most about Mysterio, it's the way he's booked all the time.
Mysterio, because of his size, goes into nearly every single match wherein he's billed as "the underdog". They talk about how much smaller he is and run down the same old speech about how he needs to use his speed to counteract his opponent's strength. What's tiresome is that this never changes, and every single match follows the same few guidelines and nothing more:
1. The opponent goes to grab him, but Rey jumps out of the way.
2. Rey kicks him in the legs over and over and over again, until he falls down. Then, Rey kicks him in the head.
3. The bigger guy catches him, "dominates", the commentators say that now that he has his hands on him, Rey's a sitting duck.
4. Rey counters EVERYTHING.
5. In doing so, he's able to somehow throw men thrice his size into positions that are physically impossible based on the sheer momentum of things.
6. The 619 happens and looks extremely choreographed.
7. Despite being so much bigger than him, Rey's opponent can't kick out when he does something as simple as a West Coast Pop or a springboard splash...even though smaller guys will kick out of these moves easily when the bigger guys do it to them. IE, Rey can do a simple splash and beat someone like Big Show, but if Mark Henry jumps full force onto Rey, then Mysterio will undoubtedly kick out if it isn't their finisher.
Mysterio's only been world champ twice, but if you think about it, how often does Rey come out of a match looking bad in comparison to his opponents? Nearly every time, the giants are made to look like they're inadequate. If the WWE was a legitimate competition like MMA, someone like Rey Mysterio would never, EVER be able to last even 5 minutes with someone like Big Show or the Undertaker. Yet for some reason, whenever he faces people this size, he ALWAYS ends up essentially dominating the match. By "dominating the match", I certainly don't mean that his opponents are bloody and stumbling around half-unconscious the entire time, but take a look at the tapes and you'll see that the matches are dominated by him in the sense that move after move, it's Rey getting the advantage. Big guy lunges after him, he moves out of the way. Big guy picks him up, he somehow reverses and takes them down in a feat of strength that someone their own size would still struggle with. So on and so forth.
They always use this excuse that Rey has the biggest heart and that nothing can beat that. That sappy stuff is all well and good once in a while, but they need to balance it with reality. Wanting something more than your competition doesn't give you a replacement for a lack of the other tools necessary for accomplishing the task. You could have the biggest heart and the most motivation in the world, but if you have no arms, you're certainly not going to win an arm-wrestling contest. You're expected to suspend your disbelief at times when it comes to professional wrestling, but when they beat concepts like this over your head repetitively, it just becomes insulting to your intelligence and kills the atmosphere. Granted, Rey winning a match against a giant is nowhere near as bad as Hornswoggle, but it's pretty much the next step up unless you count the divas.
Coming up in the next few days is SummerSlam, wherein Kane will defend his world title against Mysterio. Is Rey going to win that match? No. But guaranteed, it isn't the squash match it should be. Now, yes, rightfully so, it's better to have a competitive match on a ppv rather than short the fans that paid for it...but this happens all the time, not just on ppvs. We've seen Rey vs Kane before and the matches consist almost entirely of Kane being unable to grab Rey and spending the whole match getting kicked in the leg and pretending like it hurts as much as a shotgun blast.
The underdog angle is a safe thing to bet on. It works. But you're no longer the underdog when you win the majority of your matches and the ones that you lose, you still come out of it looking like a tougher opponent than the guys that are bigger than you.
1 comments: