The accidental epics of WrestleMania weekend

A trio of accidental epics took place during WrestleMania weekend, but did they all tell the pro wrestling stories they intended?

The busiest week of the pro wrestling year, the one surrounding WrestleMania, is now behind us, leaving time to reflect on its many shows from major and independent promotions. Some were funny, some were weird, some were athletically impressive, and a few stood out as larger than life even in the larger than life world of pro wrestling. Productions by WWE and GCW featured bouts with years of history behind them that made them feel epic (or at least like they were supposed to be epic) in a way only pro wrestling can pull off. Here, we look at whether or not they were actually were and why.

Accidental Epics

When you watch wrestling, you’re told stories in a few different ways. Wrestling TV shows use sketches and promos to flesh out characters and their motivations. Many independent promotions do this at their live shows as well. The more conventional writing and dialogue in wrestling often aren’t all that great for very understandable reasons. It’s largely improvised or written by non-actors/writers and continuity can get messed up and cut short because someone missed a flight, got injured or had a contract dispute.

Fortunately, the spectacle of the matches and stories told within them are wrestling at its core, physical tales of struggle played out by performers who have trained for hours and months and years to develop their unique craft. Everything else is to get fans invested in the matches and to get them to keep coming back to future shows. Even when the build to a match is bad or when there’s no build at all, performers can steal the show with purely what they do with their time in the ring.

But while the nature of the wrestling business, an industry based around of high-risk, live-action performances, makes long-term storytelling difficult and mostly unnecessary, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The same aspects of wrestling that make this so difficult are what make those matches that do play on long histories more meaningful, even epic.

Dictionary.com defines “epic” as “noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style,” or something that resembles or suggests these types of works. Those of us who aren’t cracking open the Iliad or War and Peace on a regular basis have still probably experienced epic storytelling through something like Lord of the Rings and understand that a common element of this type of work is that it takes place over a long time, usually years.

With a book or a movie, you experience these years in a matter of pages and/or hours and with a sense that their events are building to some sort of conclusion. With wrestling, you experience them in real time and sometimes can’t tell they’re building to anything because they’re not; they’re just time passing. Those epic-feeling matches are, in a way, “accidental epics.” Though they were booked with the knowledge of the air of importance they would have, that importance was created in part by a history that was not and could not have been planned out to lead up to this point.

Eddie Guerrero winning the WWE Championship and Kenta Kobashi returning to Pro Wrestling NOAH in 2007 are just a few the wrestling matches that have more felt important because of not only how they were produced by their respective wrestling companies, but because of incorporation of external factors. J.J. McGee recently wrote for Spectacle of Excess about the power of the relationships fans have had with certain real-time, long-term wrestling stories and Max Landis has talked on multiple occasions about the character arcs present in certain characters’ WWE careers. You could write a book or make a really good documentary (if you somehow got the rights to all the footage you wanted) about this stuff.

The reason this article is being published now is to examine three cases of accidental epic matches – Triple H vs. Batista, Josh Barnett vs. Minoru Suzuki and Kofi Kingston vs. Daniel Bryan — that took place during the 2019 WrestleMania weekend and their varying degrees of success.

A Presentation By The Executive Vice President

The last of these matches chronologically, Triple H vs. Batista, was both the least successful and the one planned furthest in advance. These men had already had a high-profile, months-long feud in the previous decade that featured the ascent of Batista from the muscle of Evolution to the man to knock the King of Kings off his throne at WrestleMania 21. Even if the matches aren’t your favorites, you can’t deny that they and this feud were successful in building up Batista as a massively popular, heroic figure. That’s partly why Round 2 in 2019 didn’t really work.

When Batista, now a bona fide movie star, returned to WWE to crash Ric Flair’s 70th birthday celebration on Monday Night Raw, it was as a despicable, old-man-beating-up heel. But as he and Triple H cut promos on each other building to what could become a no-holds-barred, loser [between these two men who rarely wrestle anymore anyway] retires from sports entertainment match, Batista referenced what happened in their earlier feud, when Triple H was undisputedly the villain.

The battle between a 49-year-old executive and a 50-year-old actor could maybe have still worked despite the weird moral alignments (why did vengeful babyface Triple H chose to make his entrance as the villain of a movie from four years ago? Or was a heel again? Or does he think Immortan Joe was the good guy in Mad Max: Fury Road?) but it didn’t deliver in the ring. After a surprisingly brutal opening sequence and the memorable “Oh, that’s why Batista was wearing a nose ring this whole time,” moment, it just dragged.

It was the longest match on the WrestleMania 35 card. It felt long partly because the audience had no interest in it. It easily fell into place in the history of not-accidental epics of wrestling, but epics Triple H has attempted to manufacture for himself at WrestleMania shows over the years.

Kings of Pancrase

A few days earlier, the main event of Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport, the all shoot-style wrestling show produced by Game Changer Wrestling, could have had the same problems. It involved a major behind-the-scenes force in the production, Barnett, 41, who isn’t the most prolific pro wrestler in 2019, against a 50-year-old opponent (albeit, in Suzuki, one much more active in the ring). But at Bloodsport, the history of the wrestlers, the atmosphere of the event, the support of the audience and the execution of the physical performance all came together to create something special.

Suzuki and Barnett didn’t have a storied in-ring relationship prior to this match, but were known to be real-life friends. They were also both known to be people with hard-earned reputations and/or personas that could be summed up as, “a guy you do not want to mess with.” Barnett is a former UFC Heavyweight Champion; Suzuki has won championships all over the wrestling world; both are former Kings of Pancrase (Suzuki in 1995, Barnett in 2003), Openweight Champions of the MMA promotion Suzuki co-founded.

By the time of the main event, it would be an understatement to say the Bloodsport audience was receptive to what these two were going to do. The previous matches on the card had gone over very well, for the most part — the more hard-hitting and violent, the better. Suzuki and Barnett maintained the intensity of the show’s earlier matches and ramped up the drama.

The audience that had already opened their hearts to the belief that this match and these performers were cool and important went along with them through even the most over-the-top creative choices. The “fight forever” chant that broke out seemed to not only reflect the audience’s enthusiasm for what they were watching but to sum up the artistic statement of the match. As the wrestlers neared the 20-minute time limit they seemed to throw out Bloodsport structure that had been outlined at length at the beginning of the show, caring about the struggle of the match more than the outcome.

The match was declared a draw, but the wrestlers and the audience called for five more minutes and got them. Then they drew again. If it had been another wrestling audience, another show atmosphere, and so many other pairs of wrestlers, it all could have fallen flat. But with decades of pro wrestling and MMA history behind them and an audience who both cared about it and was thirsty for violence, Suzuki and Barnett created an epic.

A New Day In WWE

The greatest accidental epic of the weekend and one of its most successful matches, in general, was Kofi Kingston vs. Daniel Bryan for the WWE Championship.

Unlike the previous two bouts discussed in this article, there was never any question whether this would deliver in the ring. Bryan is almost universally accepted as one of the greatest of all time and the reminder of Kingston’s skills as a singles wrestler was a big part of what made this angle take off in the first place. His performance in the pre-Elimination Chamber gauntlet match on SmackDown had reminded WWE fans that there was more to Kingston than his annual Royal Rumble spot and being one-third of the New Day. Further great performances in the Elimination Chamber itself, then in another gauntlet drove home that yeah, this guy is really good, and fueled the flames of the #KofiMania movement.

Though Bryan vs. Kingston at WrestleMania soon looked inevitable, the outcome was up in the air for reasons beyond “challenger has been a tag team guy for a while and he’s facing a dominant champion,” and that’s a big part of why the match felt so important. It wasn’t only that Kingston was a well-liked, 11-year WWE veteran who had never held the world title. It was that WWE has a history of portraying black people stereotypically hasn’t had a black WWE Champion besides The Rock.

The company’s bleak history with black performers wasn’t directly referenced on SmackDown but was heavily alluded to through the language used by the New Day (using phrases like “people like me/us”) and picked up by the audience. Ian Williams wrote for Deadspin that this was WWE “trying to defuse its own history with a storyline,” saying they were making “the racism that’s added meaning and depth (and heat) to Kofi Kingston’s rise … both very real and safely not.” Joe Anthony Myrick took a different perspective on Daily DDT, saying that the way the company treats black men has “been an elephant in the room for so many decades now and if WWE want to use that elephant to craft a meaningful, compelling storyline, then more power to them.”

Kingston himself told The Washington Post :

"The storyline we’re doing now is very powerful for a number of different levels. There’s a lot of reasons why people feel the way they do. We can speculate on the whys and everything, and we’ll never get an answer. I think the most important thing is it’s happening now and we’re in the midst of something that’s groundbreaking and historic and something a lot of people want."

Using language similar to that he had used in character on TV, he also said that “Kids who look like me can look at the screen and look at a WWE show and see that things are possible because I’m doing it.”

With talented performers, well-liked characters, decades of history of real-life discriminatory treatment by the company hosting the show (who had trotted out a self-admitted racist to kick off the main card, to cheers) and over a decade of history in said company for Kingston, the audience was heavily invested in the WWE Championship match at WrestleMania 35. They cared about the ringside presence of Rowan, Xavier Woods, and Big E and about every counter and every two-count. When Kingston won the title, people teared up or cried.

When Kingston celebrated in the ring with his teammates and his children and Woods shouted, “They said we couldn’t make it! We made it to the top!” it was more than a satisfying conclusion to a very good match. WWE had spun shameful aspects of their past into a moment that pointed to a brighter future. WWE Champion Kofi Kingston meant something as a moment in wrestling history, something that will resonate with generations to come.

Professional wrestling has the unique ability to do this specific thing, to spin years of real time into stories and carry them out through physical performances designed to make the audiences boo and cheer and clap their hands and display emotions with freedom they don’t have in their everyday lives. WrestleMania weekend 2019 gave us a few examples of how this can fail or succeed. As time and wrestling continue, we will have more accidental epics.