Tonight on Smackdown, Christian went out on top against World Heavyweight champion Alberto Del Rio after a 20 minute main event showdown.
It’s quite common for the challenger of a championship to beat the champion prior to their showdown. It’s a way to create doubt in the champion keeping his title. Prior to the weekly television days, wrestling used this sparingly and preferred to have a singles champion lose in a tag bout. That way he could blame his partner or the match format. Christian defeating Del Rio a week and change prior to WWE SummerSlam isn’t my entire issue.
My entire issue is that Del Rio lost to Rob Van Dam on Monday night in a non-title match as well.
Your World Heavyweight champion should not be losing two non-title matches in one week. Neither should your Tag Team champions. Or Divas champion. Or Million Dollar champion. Or the Saskatchewan Hardcore Invitational Title champion. Or the Airpoke World champion (that’s a real thing).
It’s one thing to lose two straight matches. It isn’t even a streak yet. But we are talking about the Big Gold Belt. We’re not talking about the European Championship or the 100 kg and Under Championship (thank you Russo era WCW) but the championship held from legends like Ricky Steamboat and Ric Flair. It’s one of the most iconic championships in pro wrestling. It’s why out of all of the images that Vince McMahon tried to bury from the annals of WCW, he still brought in the World Heavyweight Championship and made it equal to the WWE Championship. It represented just what the title was called. The holder was the World Heavyweight wrestling champion instead of the champion of the WWE.
The reason this boils my blood so much is immersion. When Liam Hopkins wrote about the MMA fighters under the most pressure in August, a few of his examples were fighters that after two losses could be cut from the UFC. Now of course UFC fighters do not fight as often as pro wrestlers and we are comparing combat sport to sports entertainment, but imagine Cain Velasquez deciding he wasn’t going to put his UFC Heavyweight Championship up in his next fight and losing. And in his next match, he once again tells UFC nope, not putting the belt up again… and loses. What would the public reaction be? They would be outraged that UFC would even allow him to fight in a non-title match, let alone two, and that he lost both fights. His name on the title plate would be a disgrace to the promotion. Yet here we are in pro wrestling where you can decide your own finishes and you have World Heavyweight champion Alberto Del Rio losing two straight non-title matches.
Why couldn’t he have lost to RVD by DQ? The plan was for him to turn his back on Ricardo. Why could that not have been accomplished by a disqualification? And why set up on Friday for Alberto Del Rio to have another non-title match and lose that one as well by pinfall? How does this build up any interest in the match between Del Rio and Christian at SummerSlam? Even worse, it ensures no outcome will help the competitor. If Christian wins of course he wins, he just beat a guy he beat on weekly television who couldn’t beat Rob Van Dam either. But if Del Rio retains, why should I care? He proved absolutely nothing on Raw and Smackdown. If he wins through cheating, all the more to completely disregard him as champion.
Truth be told, I am more disgusted with this than TNA Wrestling hot-shotting the TNA X Championship between Chris Sabin and Austin Aries dressed as Suicide only to give the belt back to Suicide/Manik. At least it was established that a champion was beaten for the title every time. Here, it’s established that the champion is not as good as two different competitors supposedly ranked underneath him. It’d be like Mike Tyson making his boxing return and losing to Buster Mathis Jr. and Bruce Seldon, yet still go and fight Evander Holyfield for the WBA Championship. Only we’re not talking about a competitor getting a title shot after consecutive losses but a champion still holding their title after consecutive losses! Sure it won’t show on the title history but our viewing today should matter more.
The WWE has a ridiculous issue with jobbing their champions on live television. They used to do it all of the time with the Intercontinental champion a few years back and then later to the United States champion last year. Now they have moved to the World Heavyweight champion? Maybe this is the new plan for the last standing tradition that existed of WCW: turn the Big Gold Belt into a piece of tin.
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