100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 68 - Brock Lesnar vs. Cain Velasquez
WWE Championship - Crown Jewel 2019
In all products, the very first question the creator needs to ask themselves: who is this for? For what subsection of the public will this appeal to? Whether it’s an R-rated violent video game, a K-Pop album, or even a Stephanie Meyer book - anything produced by any human for consumption by others needs to first ask themselves: who is this for? This question will become relevant as the review progresses.
Cain Velasquez challenges for the WWE Championship in his very first WWE match.
I think what frustrates me about this match isn’t just that it exists, but rather how we got here and what we got from it. The Kofi Kingston rise to the WWE Championship was an organic, amazing moment - the likes we hadn’t seen in WWE for half a decade. His reign was alright, I’d say nothing spectacular but worthy enough of a good conclusion. But then - on the first day of SmackDown on FS1 Fox- Brock Lesnar defeats Kofi in a matter of seconds, a result that still upsets people to this day and permanently ended the Kofimania storyline and Kofi Kingston as a main event wrestler.
Immediately afterwards, WWE began an angle with Lesnar versus a ghost from his past: Cain Velasquez, who defended the honour of Rey Mysterio who had been viciously attacked by Lesnar.
I suppose in a way this is the closest thing to WWE’s version of Hogan vs Warrior from Halloween Havoc 1998. A tragic match between two guys that were beefing over an event that happened in another promotion, where the original loser finally gets his win back nearly 10 years later. If I could say one thing positive about this match, it’s that at least it doesn’t hit the unfathomable depths of Hogan vs Warrior II - although that is a low, low, low bar to clear.
Here’s a thing about me. I don’t watch MMA. I know of it in as much as you’d expect any wrestling fan to know about as a bare minimum. I have watched a couple fights here and there (mostly out of curiosity when Brock and CM Punk ventured into that world). It’s just not my thing in the same way that most legitimate combat sports aren’t for me either. However, being me I decided to watch their UFC Heavyweight Championship contest from 2010 just as a perverse comparison for this match.
It would be ignorant of me to compare a WWE match to a UFC fight. In all honesty, I don’t really know what I was watching when I watched the 2010 fight, and the only thing I was thinking of was the “stop stop he’s already dead” meme from the Simpsons. But it’s fitting to have watched it, because at Crown Jewel 2019, they tried to emulate that sort of style in a worked WWE match.
And it sucked.
There’s a time and a place for MMA influence in wrestling. Hell lots of wrestlers have been heavily influenced by it, and cite it as such. One of my personal favourite TNA matches is Kurt Angle vs Samoa Joe from Lockdown 2008 which leaned extremely heavily into a faux-MMA style of wrestling that felt, dare I say, cutting edge. And surely if any match deserves to have an MMA influence on it, then a match between Brock Lesnar and Cain Velasquez deserves it arguably more than any other wrestling match put to film.
The problem is, this sucks. This isn’t an interesting grappling match, or an aggressive fight between two heavyweights that want to punch and kick the shit out of each other. Instead what we get is a very lazy, very weak looking fake MMA match. At 2 minutes long, this is among the shortest matches to make the list. Frustratingly, if they tried to have a real MMA fight, it could have been interesting. If you tried to do a worked pro-wrestling match, you can maybe make it interesting. Instead they went for a worked MMA match, and it was as horrific as it sounds. Listening to Michael Cole and Corey Graves trying to commentate this like an MMA match is equal parts excruciating and jarring, and the whole thing feels out of place.
Now the question is, would a fan of MMA like this, and the answer is almost certainly no. I can’t put myself in that mindset, but I would imagine the general feeling for an MMA fan watching this would be embarrassment more than anything. It circles me nicely back to the question of this whole review: who is this for? It is not for wrestling fans, and it certainly isn’t for MMA fans. What human being watches this match wrestled in this way and thinks “yes, this is for me!”.
In the end, Cain gets paid an exuberant amount of money to job to Lesnar in two minutes, looking like a total punk in the process. Conspiracy theorists have speculated that this whole ordeal was due to Velasquez being in negotiations with AEW, so WWE signed him to bury him. While I question if that’s true, it’s inarguable that Velasquez has gone on to do absolutely nothing in a US promotion since this match.
After the match, Rey beats the shit out of Brock anyway, so he didn’t really need Cain Velasquez to back him up. This truly was pointless.
Up Next - maybe one day Papa Shango will make it to the ring.
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