Both are former talents who were gone and then came back. Both squashed people only one man went over huge and the other is in a gimmick death dive I don't think it is a case of Mr Perfect v Red Rooster where one person had a far more marketable gimmick. Is it really a matter that more people just recognized Albert or is it a matter of Nikita Koloff-Goldberg-Ryback having more charisma Or a case of Lord Tensai begin a slow moving squasher and Ryback being a fast moving squasher? Curious on your take. Wayne
"Mr. Burns, your campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train..."
I think perception is an interesting thing, because Ryback hasn't actually beaten anyone of note, but he's current getting a good reaction, so the perception is that he's over. However, keep in mind that he has not moved ratings one bit (and in fact, ratings have plummeted in the month since his megapush began) and he's never even been in an advertised PPV match. I'm not saying he's the reason for the ratings troubles, since he's rarely featured at a point where he could make a difference, but please do keep in mind that his actual push to the main event only started two weeks ago. This is PLENTY of time for him to crash and burn just as dramatically as Tensai. Actually, Tensai hasn't done anything "dramatically" since his debut, so that's probably a bad analogy. But the Cell PPV could (probably will) be a total flop, the fans could turn on the gimmick if the Punk match doesn't work, and Vince could wake up the next day and have Ryback doing jobs to Zack Ryder. One never knows, so I think all the talk about programming him with Lesnar or Undertaker is a wee bit premature.
However, if we want to compare, then yes, Ryback squashes guys quickly and gets out of there before he can get exposed, whereas Tensai bored the people from the start and never recovered from it.
Simple: if they could have come up with a catch phrase for Albert to pipe into the crowd, he would get "over" just like Ryback did. Maybe they should have had him come back with all his back hair and piped in "shave your back" just like back in the day!
ReplyDeleteI think part of it was people remembered and were basically told Tensai was Albert, they weren't told and they didn't seem to remember or care that Ryback used to be Skip Sheffield.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think they thrust Tensai into the main event way too soon and people rejected him because they found it ridiculous he was beating Punk and Cena. They waited a little longer with Ryback, where people were actually wanting and anticipating him going up against bigger names. Had they put Ryback in with a big name a month in, I think it would have flopped.
The two are absolutely polar opposites in the ring. Tensai is slow, emotionless, methodical and moves around like a "wrestler". Ryback is intense, quick and angry and wrestles like he just wants to beat the shit out of a couple of dudes. Tensai may be the better wrestler but Ryback is the better badass, and in 2012 badasses catch on quickly while slow guys bore the audience.
ReplyDeleteThey gave Tensai a pinfall over Cena on RAW. That was his peak. Then he got pinned by Tyson Kidd for that MITB angle and lost momentum.
ReplyDeleteNormally I'm not a grammar Nazi, but wow, that e-mail was difficult to read.
ReplyDeleteRyback looks like a crazy badass, while Tensai looks like a slow fat baby in a red diaper. Which of those is more likely to get over?
ReplyDeletePeople are thinking too hard about this. Ryback returned to TV in April and started squashing jobbers and skinny indie goofs once a week, sometimes twice a week. It is now October and he has just now within the past few weeks started getting real reactions from the crowd. Up until the past month or so people would joke in reviews about the Goldberg chants or report on the silence until the shellshock. The crowd chanting "feed me more" is very recent also.
ReplyDeleteTensai came back to TV in April. By mid-May they took away the Lord part of his name. He started losing matches. He's only occasionally been on TV in the months since then and he mostly loses when he's on TV.
This isn't that hard. It has less to do with intensity, ring skills, match duration or anything. If you push someone for months and keep plugging away, it will take time but they will get over. I have no doubt that if they built up Tensai another few months before putting him against main eventers he would have got over also. Hell if you give me 6 months of a consistent and nonstop push, *I* would get over.
Or freaking acknowledge that he was Albert/come up with backstory of his going to Japan and becoming a big name over there and coming back to get revenge against the WWE for firing him oh so many years ago....
ReplyDeleteI thought they pissed away a huge opportunity here. The crowd likes to react and play into the show so they could have made a point of showing that the Albert/A-Train references made him mad.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a huge reason for why Daniel Bryan's act stays so hot because they made it a part of his character that the crowd chants get to him. The more he plays off of it, the better reactions he gets. Tensai could have had that but they missed the boat.
It's probably an unpopular opinion, but I would really like to see Punk beat Ryback fairly clean.
ReplyDeleteRyback hasn't accomplished much, but he is over, and pretty much booked as unstoppable. A heel CM Punk taking down that kind of giant would push Punk to the next level, into Cena territory, in terms of being hard to beat. The WWE needs another full time wrestler at that level.
If Ryback wins, it will give the WWE another big face, but he will still be second in line to John Cena, and that will hold him back (like it does Sheamus and did Punk). Not to mention, it will be another case of a wrestler getting the belt too early, and the world champion will be a guy who doesn't cut promos, and can't work good matches.
Either way, it's match neither guy can afford to lose, and those only come around a few times a year, so I think it's a good main event.
Agree with this. They didn't give anyone a reason to care about Tensai, so they didn't.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Ryback could afford to lose the match. He may be over, but he hasn't beaten anybody of note, and Punk is the WWE Champion and a 10+ year veteran. He SHOULD beat Ryback. He's held the belt for nearly a year. Anyone who takes it from him should at least be somewhat established.
ReplyDeleteI think WWE gave up on Tensai too quickly. Who cares if he doesn't get a reaction immediately? Just keep pushing him and eventually he'll get over.
ReplyDeleteThe bigger mistake WWE made was with his gimmick. Obviously, he couldn't be Giant Bernard the stereotypical (to a Japanese person) American in WWE. However, today's WWE fans have no memory of the Japanese heels of the old days so turning him into an old school evil Japanese heel complete with the mist and the Von Erich claw wasn't going to work. Giant Bernard was a great tag team wrestler in Japan and his teams with Tomko and "Machine Gun" Karl Anderson were both very successful. He held the IWGP Tag Team Championship with Anderson for a record reign of a year and a half and also held the GHC Tag Team Championship for the last 6 months of that reign. They only dropped both sets of belts in January because Bernard/Tensai was on his way to WWE.
If he was going to be Lord Tensai, maybe he should have been in a tag team with Yoshi Tatsu and maybe they could have been an inverted version of Bad Intentions (Bernard and Anderson). Also, they should have delayed his debut until a week later so he doesn't debut in front of a crowd of angry smarks that were never going to give him a chance. They also made a mistake by changing his in-ring style. His workrate was much better in Japan and he regularly had good matches. Or maybe Matt Bloom is the Stan Hansen of the current era.
Tensai didn't have a catchphrase people were encouraged to chant along to. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but so far Ryback's gotten people the chant "Feed Me More". That's it. He's not helping ratings, he hasn't shown he can have great matches, it remains to be seen if he can draw a decent buyrate. Getting people who are already in the arena to chant along is one thing, getting them to go to the arena but you're there is another. I will say this for Tensai - I have one friend left who still cares about wrestling. He's not an internet fan, just watches Raw and goes to Wrestlemania every other year. And he's been texting me "Feed Me More" for two weeks now. So he might actually be getting over, but we'll see.
ReplyDeleteThere's other factors with Tensai to. Tensai was recognized off the bat as a nobody former star. They knew it was just A-Train with a silly gimmick. And his matches were boring. Slow, boring, and the fans were dying to shit on him from the start. And he's a heel, so they don't want you to like him, they just want you to react to him. Ryback was a guy they wanted to make into a top face for a couple of years and once he got healthy they started working to make that happen from the start. Murdering jobbers in quick time, tossing two guys around, dominant, never showing weakness. They're too different situations, not completely fair to compare.
WWE's own damn fault for deciding to push four fucking monsters at roughly the same time: Big Show, Tensai, Clay and Ryback. Part of me wonders if they decided on Tensai in Show's position and then got cold feet and thus turned Show and have him cry for ten minutes. God knows if there even was a plan for Clay on his return.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of when Mr. Burns gets all excited and employs Frank Grimes...only for Burns to have lost interest and hired a heroic mutt before he's started so Grimes gets to work with Homer instead.
The problem might have been feeding Tensai main event talent too early. People weren't ready to see him squash John Cena a month after debuting, but after five or six months of Ryback squashes, the fans have seen enough to be intrigued by seeing him fight top guys.
ReplyDeleteHow long did Umaga keep fighting squashes before he got moved up to main events?
Tensai had a catchphrase from Day One! It was written all over his face!
ReplyDeleteOne more thing: have you people forgotten that Tensai is still being punished for his racist tout?
ReplyDeleteUmaga beat Cena, Triple H, Ric Flair and Shawn Michaels within his first 3-4 months
ReplyDeleteGo fig, after watching some of their stuff, I think bringing in Bad Intentions as-is would've solved a lot of the problems: it provides a clearer reason for them to align with Big Johnny (another castoff who made it big in Japan) and you can do a spin-off program between Anderson and Orton; you don't necessarily have to put Anderson over in that one, but it would've been fun to see Johnny tell Orton the proper name for the move is the Ace Crusher.
ReplyDeleteCRZ's board has been drawing parallels between 3MB and 3 Count and are suggesting Tensai become their Tank Abbott. That idea...is not terrible.
ReplyDelete