Through The Ropes
By Josh Stewart

Relax, beleaguered writing team.

This wrestling show thing isn’t that hard to put together.

Just start the show with six of the best and let them go at it tooth and nail for more than 20 minutes.

Impressive? Some entire RAW episodes have struggled to have 20 minutes of wrestling.

But on the 5/3 edition, World Wrest-ling Entertainment put away the mi-crophones and banter, and the marquee, wrestling, actually meant something. The match between Evolution and Edge/Shelton Benjamin/Tajiri opened the show, and those who tuned in caught a battle that will be mention-ed when people start kicking around the best five matches of 2004 in De-cember.

This is a good time to explore the old chicken vs. egg argument. The company avoids such good matchups early because the ratings say that the audience picks up over the course of the evening. But for the Phoenix show, WWE switched things up because with the buildup leading to the Chris Benoit/Shawn Michaels World Heavy-weight Title match, the brass knew that people would be tuning in early and often.

Which makes me wonder…. Does WWE show garbage so often at the first of shows because it knows that people aren’t watching, or are people tuning in after the first half-hour be-cause they know that the first part of the show will be garbage?

Something for WWE to think about as it goes forward.

IN THE HOUSE: It hasn’t been long since I railed about WWE not bringing some synergy between its televised events and house shows.

Thank goodness somebody figured it out. During the 5/2 Smackdown! house show in El Paso, TX, Eddie Guerrero celebrated a win over John Bradshaw Layfield by inviting his family, including his mother, to the ring. But Layfield had the last laugh, taking out Guerrero and attacking Mom, causing her to have a "heart attack."

The update was mentioned prom-nently on RAW and put on the front of wwe.com. This is a big step for the company for two reasons.

1. If the company keeps up with this strategy, more people will be go-ing to house shows; they’ll buy tickets if they think that storyline might actually be advanced if they go to the event.

2. It’ll help television ratings on both shows. The momentum that a Monday RAW show brought into Smackdown!, and vice versa, was lost when the company split into two. If you love something from a RAW or Smackdown! storyline, you have to wait a week instead of a few days to see it play out. Now, there is something from a Sunday Smackdown! house show that WWE can mention during RAW that will further whet your appetite for Thursday. Good stuff!

BAD RELIGION: The boo birds have already come out to say that the heart-attack portion of the Guerrero angle was tasteless. But if you want to protest unacceptable content, save your signs for the upcoming Smack-down! storyline featuring a Gothic figure named Mordecai. In the previews, he’s already sporting some kind of cross with thorns on the ends and is talking about prophecy.

I can take the blood, and "adult-themed" storylines don’t bother me, either. But leave the faux religious figures in the can.

You can contact Josh Stewart at throughtheropes1@cs.com.

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