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ECW: 06/03/08 RRC: 06/02/08 RCC Spotlight: Confident Picks: One Night Stand 2008 OTC: Smackdown Grades - 05/30/2008 WWE: Judgment Day '08 Review
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Between The Lines: In Defence of...JBL
by: Chris Gow on: 6/6/2008 8:48 pm est  It’s been a while since my previous ‘In Defence of…’ column, and I certainly didn’t expect my next one to be in defence of JBL. After all, it’s no secret that I’ve never exactly been a big fan of the man as a wrestler. But I’ve felt a bit sorry for JBL as of late. The same fans who once eulogized about the hatred he inspired during his heated feud with Eddie Guerrero, and who reminisced fondly about his 10-month reign as WWE Champion on Smackdown during his recent stint as an announcer alongside Michael Cole; those same fans are now the ones knocking JBL for his lacklustre performances since returning to the ring late last year. We wrestling fans are a very fickle bunch. Personally I’ve yet to be persuaded that JBL’s run as WWE Champion was really any good. I can count the number of memorable matches he had on one…well, okay, maybe two hands, and the vast majority of those were against vastly superior workers like Chris Benoit and Rey Mysterio, not to mention Guerrero of course, which isn’t to say that JBL didn’t play his part as well. It takes two people to have good match after all, and match quality undoubtedly only counts for so much. But more crucially for me, JBL’s title reign was severely lacking in credibility from the outset. Despite Guerrero performing the sickest blade job I’ve ever seen at the 2004 Judgment Day PPV, in order to get JBL over as a legitimate threat during their WWE Championship match, JBL’s push to main event status was far too rapid. Within a matter of weeks he went from being one half of The Acolytes with long-time partner Faarooq to WWE Championship material, from a beer-swilling muscle-for-hire to a rich, right-wing asshole. There may have been a dearth of challengers for Guerrero’s title at the time, and to his credit, JBL certainly threw himself into his newfound persona with a lot of gusto. But there were serious question marks hanging over the plausibility of his sudden ascension to the top of the card. All that said, the criticism and largely negative reviews that JBL has received since he returned to in-ring action strike me as very unfair. After all, JBL hasn’t exactly had the best luck since his return. First of all, it was in hindsight most likely a mistake to put him in a feud with Chris Jericho upon his return to the ring. Admittedly, the odds of JBL having a good match with Jericho, who had only recently returned to in-ring action himself, were much better than him having a good match with someone like Batista. I believe that borderline great talents like Jericho never completely forget how to work a good match, no matter how long a hiatus they may take from the business. But the fact is that Jericho did take a while to re-discover his groove and find some consistency when he came back to WWE. Indeed, it did Jericho himself no favours to have to work with JBL in his first serious feud after his return (I’m not sure I can rightly call his extremely brief program with then WWE Champion Randy Orton a ‘feud’ as such). Both men may be veterans, but they had both been inactive for significant periods of time prior to their respective, almost simultaneous returns, and booking them in a feud with each other didn’t really make any sense. To say that JBL or Jericho would have benefited more from working a feud with someone of the calibre of Shawn Michaels would be an understatement. (Unfortunately Michaels was busy risking life and limb at the time, trying his hardest to drag decent matches out of Mr. Kennedy.) To make matters worse, the premise of JBL and Jericho’s feud was extremely weak, even by WWE’s modern standards. During his WWE Championship match with Orton at Armageddon in December last year, Jericho accidentally stumbled into JBL, who was at the Smackdown announce table, as he brawled with Orton outside the ring. Yes, that was the act that prompted JBL’s big return. Jericho BUMPED into him! JBL cut several promos after Armageddon, explaining how Jericho disrespected him. But in truth Kane had more of a right to be pissed after Jericho spilled hot coffee over him way back in 2000. The basis for a good feud, let alone a fully-fledged comeback for JBL, this was not. It would seem that the bookers quickly cottoned on to the fact that Jericho and JBL weren’t exactly setting the world on fire every time they stepped in the ring with each other (even if their matches were inoffensive enough). Their feud came to abrupt end in the middle of a humdrum edition of Raw, shortly after their poor showing at the Royal Rumble in January, with Jericho scoring a fairly easy pinfall victory over his opponent. Remember that their feud had one point been pegged to culminate at Wrestlemania XXIV, the biggest PPV of the year. JBL’s next opponent by contrast seemed a much better choice to ease him back into the pro-wrestling swing of things. A feud with Finlay, one of the best, most reliable and most experienced wrestlers in WWE, seemed much more promising for JBL than a feud with Jericho did. The problem was, Finlay was involved in one of the most nonsensical and insulting storylines in WWE history; namely, the Hornswoggle/Vince McMahon ‘bastard son’ saga. The way in which the Raw writers went about suddenly introducing JBL into the Hornswoggle/McMahon angle, several months after the storyline had already commenced, was questionable to say the least. In the weeks leading up to Wrestlemania, JBL interrupted McMahon as he was cutting a promo on Raw and informed him that Hornswoggle was not McMahon’s child. He was in fact Finlay’s son. How exactly JBL became privy to this knowledge, or why he felt the need to share it with McMahon, I can’t recall. The how and the why may never have been explained. The point is that JBL was effectively asked to spin shit into gold, to make an absurd, completely unbelievable angle somehow plausible and compelling. Needless to say, he failed, but such a task would have been beyond even the greatest mic workers in the history of the business. JBL’s eventual match with Finlay at Wrestlemania, a streetfight pointlessly dubbed a ‘Belfast Brawl’, was fine. But the nature of the Hornswoggle/McMahon ‘bastard son’ angle, that their feud was ultimately just a small part of, didn’t allow JBL and Finlay to achieve their full potential in the ring together. Reduced to physically abusing and psychologically tormenting leprechauns, this wasn’t the same JBL that had inspired so much visceral hatred from WWE fans during his 2004 feud with Eddie Guerrero. His third major feud, with John Cena, hasn’t been a great success either, mainly because we’ve seen it all before on Smackdown. Their ‘I Quit’ match at the 2005 Backlash PPV is arguably JBL’s best WWE match to date, but for whatever reason they haven’t been able to recapture that magic. While their matches thus far have been far from awful, they have been decidedly average. And for all his strengths, Cena isn’t particularly adept at carrying inferior workers to good matches. (Yes, I realise his matches with The Great Khali exceeded everyone’s expectations, but were they actually any ‘good’?) So in short, cut JBL a little slack already. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever attain the level of greatness of the wrestling legends of yesteryear that he so clearly apes in his appearance and in-ring style. Indeed, based on his current form he may not even attain the modest standard he set for himself during his WWE Championship reign on Smackdown several years ago now. But given the right opponent and the right feud he’s still a worthy addition to the roster, especially at a time when there’s a shortage of main event heels, a dilemma that Randy Orton’s collarbone injury has compounded in recent weeks. His return may have been disappointing (depending of course on how high your expectations were), but it’s due more to poor booking and choice of opponents than it is JBL’s fault. He still has a role to play, albeit probably more so back on the B-show that is Smackdown rather than Raw, where he simply looks out of place next to WWE’s franchise players in HHH and Cena. Maybe the upcoming draft will rectify the situation. But if not, everyone can at least take comfort in the knowledge that we’ll probably be singing his praises if/when he returns to an announcing role. Because like I said, we’re a fickle bunch… _____________________________________________________________________________ Like what you read? Hated it? Email me at gow21@hotmail.com or leave some feedback on our forums... |
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