100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 69 - The Big Show vs. Sabu
ECW Championship - Extreme Rules Match - Summerslam 2006
After entries 72 and 71 were mind numbingly boring resthold ridden matches, in a way I’m relieved that 70 and 69 make the list of the weight of the absurdity of the match alone while not being outright boring.
Few things in this process are easier low-hanging fruit than 2006 Big Show and the ill-advised reincarnation of ECW. The first six months of the brand can only be described as an absolute disaster as a combination of suspensions, poor/unmotivated/washed up talent, and disagreements between Paul Heyman and Vince McMahon made the Sci-Fi brand a disjointed mess that it would never fully recover from. In the aftermath of the Rob Van Dam suspension, Paul Heyman found the opportunity to revive his bizarre fascination with the Big Show, elevating the now-heel giant to the ECW Championship.
In retrospect, having this match on the Summerslam card did massive damage to the perception of WWECW. Their world title - being defended for the very first time on a WWE PPV- was the second match on the card. An afterthought. A match only booked 5 days earlier after a memorable (for all the wrong reasons) ladder match between Rob Van Dam and Sabu. There's a lot of things history has told us about the 3rd brand of WWE, and I can't help thinking that ECW may have been a success if it was treated like the Takeover era of NXT, where it was kept mostly separate from the main roster. However, even then I think ECW in its original (new) incarnation was doomed as we can see from their first ever “Takeover”-like event separate from WWE … December to Dismember. Far too many volatile factors doomed this brand from the start, and the result, ultimately was matches like this.
These two didn't mesh at all and what we get is an 8 minute botch fest with some cool spots that may convince you that this match is any good (it’s not). This match definitely leans into the “entertaining crap” category of shit wrestling, but even then it still feels quite mundane - especially for a Sabu match. I think in an alternate universe where a Sabu vs Big Show match could have been a lot of fun. However 2006 Big Show is one of the worst versions of Big Show, probably second only to pre-OVW WWE Show. He’s slow, moving like his feet are in cement, visibly struggling and out of shape. While it’s not late-era Andre the Giant, the similarities are there. Taking over a year off was undoubtedly one of the best decisions for his career. WWECW Sabu was an unmotivated, watered down version of a classic character - a caricature of what he once was. In a lot of ways, Sabu embodies what WWECW was all about - a washed up, out of place, shameless piece of nostalgia-bait that is mercy killed by the company once they realise what an abhorrent mistake everyone has made in this situation.
The story of the match is that Big Show doesn't need weapons so he keeps throwing them away, whereas Sabu needs the plunder to have any chance of winning. Fine story, but unfortunately without weapons, Big Show is a lumbering mess with slow uninteresting offence. It’s no surprise that the only watchable Big Show matches from this time period are plunder matches - most notably when Ric fucking Flair of all people has the most ECW-like match of any in the WWECW run. Sabu typically has no regard for either himself or Show’s health, including a nasty looking chair shot that cannons off Big Show’s head. Unfortunately, outside of using the weapons everything Sabu does looks like shit. Hell, even half the stuff he did with weapons looked awful.
Speaking of chairs -in a spot which exemplifies this match perfectly - Sabu drops a chair to the outside while he’s trying to set up a spot, meaning Big Show has to waddle around waiting for him to recover the spot. Big Show doesn’t improvise, or change the plan, instead he just lets the spot happen as it would have done. This would be somewhat forgivable if it were a one off, but there's a good three or four times where someone is just lying around waiting for the next spot, making the whole match a disjointed hodgepodge of random spots with all the flow of a blocked sink. One notable example sees Sabu climbing a turnbuckle for absolutely no reason with Big Show standing in the opposite corner purely to set up the next spot.
The contrived spottiness is never more apparent than Big Show taking 2 whole minutes setting up a table bridge between the steel steps. Of this 8 minute match, a quarter of it is dedicated solely to this one spot. Big Show, who is struggle to walk around the ring, picks up both parts of the steel steps to throw into the ring, to set up this table bridge. A table bridge which, I hasten to add, is roughly the same as … just setting up a table? Hilariously, all that set up is just for Sabu to Sabu the whole thing, as he slips and topples the table. Meaning he has to awkwardly scramble to set it back up while Big Show, once again, just staggers around waiting for the spot to happen as planned. It’s such classically bad wrestling when a guy fucks up a spot and goes straight back to it without working for it or improvising in any way.
Would you say this was worth taking a quarter of the match to set up?
The most embarrassing part of this is watching this and hearing Joey Styles have to whore himself out to this sham. A basic, sluggish WWE plunder match that everyone has seen a hundred times before, while Styles pulls out all his catchphrases and claims this is everything the original ECW was.
After the table spot, Tazz proudly proclaims that you’ll only see this kind of action on ECW, not on Raw or Smackdown. This, of course, is an absolute shameless lie too. Made even more egregious because if you want to watch a proper ECW-like match, fast forward about 20 minutes on this very show - and watch old man Ric Flair and mostly-retired Mick Foley put everyone involved in this to shame in a truly barbaric, memorable, and compelling story.
Up Next - Brock waits nine years to get his win back.
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