Worst: So About That Body Tape You’re Wearing

so that means you guys are hurt, right

so you’re uh, you’re gonna prob’ly have a tough time wrestling tonight i guess

no?

well all right i guess

Best: Hawkins And Reks Are Way Better Than Kofi And Truth

I wanted to like the tag match, because the tag team division is so anemic and needs our support and because HEY NXT GUYS, but no. Truth and Kofi jumping around selling F**KING NOTHING while wearing elaborate body bandages was the worst, and as hard as they worked poor Hawkins and Reks could only do so much. Seriously, I think R-Truth has pretended to be injured more convincingly during games of Jenga than the did in the match last night. Dude wasn’t just fresh, he was EXTRA FRESH. He should’ve wrestled the match in a f**king exoskeleton.

I expect this sort of thing out of Kofi, but c’mon Killings, you’re a former NWA Heavyweight Champion. You once held in your hands the legacy of Brent Albright, Mike Rapada and The Sheik. No, not that one, the sh*tty one. If your ribs are broken, don’t spin 8 times when you forearm someone. If Orville Brown was alive today he’d beat the sh*t out of you, and not just because he was probably a total racist.

Worst: Hooray, A Bait And Switch For A Thing You Just Advertisted

I understand the nature of a bait and switch. Sometimes you announce something to get a specific response, then change it up at the last minute to enhance or change that response. It’s a purposeful decision. What I don’t necessarily understand is Raw’s obsession with announcing something on the fly, then deciding that isn’t good enough and announcing it differently on the same fly. Maybe it mirrors the writing process of the show. Maybe it’s WWE Creative’s attempt at a Charlie Kaufman thing where art’s imitating life, but f**k that, without a directly competing concurrent wrestling program happening on TNT there is no goddamn reason for you to spend the first 15 minutes of your show setting up a match and the final 15 tearing it down. If you’re gonna do “Cena has to beat Lord Tensai, and if he does, he gets a match with Michael Cole”, just announce it like that at the beginning.

Worst: Goodbye Forever, Serf Tensai

If the dirt sheets are to be believed, Yokozuna is joining the Hart Foundation WWE isn’t happy with how Lord Tensai has played out and want to either repackage him completely or fire him and ship him back to Japan to pump machine guns with Karl Anderson, depending on who you read. As regular readers of the column know, this is disappointing for me. I like the character. I like the wrestler, I like the Mountain Dew Spit Hand, I like the whole thing. Okay, I don’t like the WHOLE thing, but he’s my weird looking fat bald uncle who does The Creep in slow motion. I’d like for him to stick around.

I hate being the guy who looks at how much time is left in Raw when the main event starts and figures out what’s gonna happen, but that’s me … when the Tensai stipulation was announced, I saw we had like eight minutes and an overrun left, so OBVIOUSLY Tensai’s getting Cena’d and Michael Cole’s having his match. Of course, I thought THAT would end with Big Show showing up and punching Cena in the mouth again and getting him pinned by Cole, but that was from a fantasy booking perspective, not the f**king Speak N’ Say they use to write the real show.

If this is goodbye to Tensai, so be it. They gave him an interesting character but moved him into the main-event scene too quickly for WWE fans to handle, and without the spectacle of Brock Lesnar or the in-the-blood destiny of Alberto Del Rio, he wasn’t able to survive. Here’s to hoping this isn’t the end of the track (pun) for A-Train, and that he gets repackaged as A-Train again and gets to go RAHHH and Tree Bomb dudes for a little while longer. If you need further fantasy booking, have him go to Mexico, dominate the Mexicans and come back as ALBERTO, all caps, wearing a poncho and a sombrero with Taco Bell fire sauce smeared across his forehead.

Best: Haha Was That Sakamoto Shove Closure On An Angle That Never Happened?

If I’ve learned one thing from WWE master/servant relationships, it’s that the servant eventually builds up too much sympathy for himself and breaks away. Virgil did it with the Million Dollar Man, Diesel did it with Shawn Michaels, Hiroko became the General Manager of HUSTLE and slapped Kenzo Suzuki in the face. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim.

So if Tensai is gone (last chance to make this joke: it takes five Raphaels to get Tensai) (not worth it), I hope him jogging out and shoving Sakamoto aside is our 5 Second Films version of the Lord abusing his servant, Sakamoto tossing salt in his eyes or whatever and John Cena Attitudinally Adjusting him into nothingness. We can skip the part where John Cena pretends to have a Japanese friend for two weeks.