Triple H and Shawn Michaels and the Banality of Awful

It's more boring than it seems.

WWE

Triple H is fascinating because of the variety of atrocities he inflicted upon the pro wrestling art form. Against Booker T, we get to see how the capitalist monopoly of the WWE over the industry combines with a callous racially-fueled heat angle to produce one of the most dismissive destructions of a hot babyface ever. The WrestleMania XIX match is bad because so much of it is designed to be. It’s meant to feel bad, and those involved in producing just handwave away the unpleasantness behind the idea that it’s “just for heat.”

This Hell in a Cell match against Shawn Michaels is something else entirely.

At least where I sit, everything about this match and rivalry reads like it comes from a place of love. Shawn and Hunter are legitimately longtime buddies at this point, Shawn’s no longer in a position above Hunter, and both seem to be in a place to want to give back and work together. Hunter’s giving his friend a renewed place of prominence after years away, Shawn’s stepping aside to give Hunter the run at the top of the card. They have the political pull and name value to have the freedom to do exactly what they want.

This fucking match is the realization of their vision. And it sucks.

First, some credit where it’s due. It’s not immediately obvious just how bad this can get because it starts out decently. It’s not all-timer Hell in a Cell level action, but squint and you can certainly see the makings of perhaps a decent, heated championship match here. The lock up is sturdy, there’s punches that have some decent heft to them, and there’s a sensible heat segment from our heel on the babyface’s famously injured body part.

And hey, again, if we’re being honest here, Hunter’s attack on the back isn’t bad. I’ll say, I think it’s a pretty good control segment actually. Not only is it targeted, but there’s a good amount of variety here to never keep it too stagnant. The control emerges naturally too, with Shawn seizing up in attempting a power move and Hunter immediately zoning in. It’s made even more exciting when Hunter introduces weaponry to beat down Shawn with.

Shawn’s comebacks even come in sensible, clean looking ways like blocking an attempted abdominal stretch by hip tossing Hunter out of the ring and to the floor. The cycle generally repeats as makes sense: Shawn makes these brief comebacks, and Hunter exploits the bad back to get back in control. Add increasingly spectacular weapon spots, and escalate ‘til the finish.

On paper, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Very sensible structure to the whole thing, all the elements fit together.

That’s the problem with bad wrestling sometimes. It’s easy to point to the obviously bad, the botchy and the overtly stupid, and say, “That! That is the opposite of good wrestling.” And yet, something like this has come across as foul and awful to so many in the years since. That’s because the faults of it are, for the most part, subtle. But they’re so deeply baked into the match’s construction that they create a cumulative effect by the end that makes the finishing stretch one of the most unbearable things I’ve ever seen.

That’s the banality of awful. It’s wrestling that makes sense if you just read about it on paper. Good ideas ordered in a way that sound “correct” but in reality never inspire anything but disappointment.

The problem here is that, no matter how sound everything is mechanically, there’s just a distinct lack of fire. From Hunter’s perspective, this makes some sense. He’s the heel here and the “methodical” approach to controlling a match has always been his preferred style. And like I said, he works in that way here. Somehow, it’s Shawn that’s pissing me off more on this go around.

He does a lot right like the bladejob and the back selling, but he makes some of the most limp, lifeless comebacks I’ve ever seen throughout this match. The match is practically begging for him to deliver some form of catharsis via a big rally or a burst of violence, but he’s just doing his standard kip ups and attacks as if it was any other night on Raw. What’s worse is the deeper into the match this gets, the more he emphasizes selling the blood loss and exhaustion of the match, which further drains the energy from the bout. The match never peaks, but at a certain point, all its momentum and steam subsides, leaving the viewer themselves with the experience of having their life force drain slowly into a gutter.

It’s this inability to spike the action in a way that feels organic that ends up hampering the match. There’s a world all that limp, verge-of-death selling at the end maybe works if they just looked like they had expended some goddamn effort in the 40 minutes prior. But now, instead they hum along at an inoffensive pace until suddenly neither man feels like they can be bothered sit up off the mat like the indulgent, lazy dudes that they are. This match is wrestled for people who saw the Booker T match from 2003 and thought the best part of it was Hunter’s crawl over to the winning pinfall.

They quite simply just don’t try hard enough. And then, they stop trying at all.

All of that doesn’t even get into the political aspect of this all. Triple H maintains his stranglehold on the Raw pay-per-view main event slot, one he has yet to relinquish since Bad Blood in 2003, despite already having dropped the World Title to Chris Benoit. Don’t let the lack of a belt fool you, we’re still deep in the trenches of the reign of terror at this point. Hunter’s still well into his almost mythical monopoly of the Raw main event scene, a domineering position that' will only become a more overt part of his character in the years too come.

See, because that’s the secret with Triple H. The bad reputation of his politicking isn’t a flaw of his legacy, to him it’s the whole point. All the rumors and frustration, that’s what he wants to get out, and that becomes ever clearer as he takes on the mantle of “The Authority” in the decade to follow this. It’s the most interesting thing about one of the most boring, lifeless matches on earth. Triple H stokes those fires because his actual creative abilities are incapable of sparking such powerful emotion, lest he’s being held by the hand by an all-time great worker.

Triple H needs to play “The Game” because otherwise, no one would ever give him a second thought. It doesn’t matter to him if you hate him for being a politicker or the man who ruined Raw for a few years or any other foul insult worth throwing at him for the damage he did to the WWE product in the 2000s. In fact, he encourages those percpetions. He has to, because the reality is that if you strip it all away, he’s something so much worse and much harder to live as.

Without politics and scheming, Triple H is just a bad artist without the ability to make his dreams come true.

Rating: **