Casual Friday - 12/1/2023

Image: AEW

 

Good Morning! What a week it’s been! From the return of one C.M. Punk to the WWE to the continuing sagas of both Chase U on NXT and the mysterious Devil on AEW, we’ve had a lot of soap opera stuff in both real life and on screen. But there’s been some great matches as well, with AEW’s Continental Classic pitting some of the best in All Elite Wrestling against one another and WWE seemingly pushing Shinsuke Nakamura versus Cody Rhodes for the weeks before the Royal Rumble. 

I already wrote about last week’s Summer Slam show, featuring both Punk and Randy Orton returning from time off for very different reasons. It occurs to me now, of course, that You can check that out right here if you haven’t yet. But since this is our weekly wrap-up, we’ll get into the stuff from this past week, i.e. Raw, NXT, and Dynamite. 

We Watched Some Wrestling!

Some great matches from this week from each big promotion:

AEW Collision gave us Brody King versus Eddie Kingston in a battle of two big, beefy men. Not quite up to the level of the BIG MEATY MEN SLAPPIN’ MEAT match that we love here at Let’s Watch Some Wrestling, but a great battle regardless. It was followed up by an equally passionate promo by a defeated, deflated Kingston. Swerve Strickland and Jay White had a good matchup on Dynamite as well, with a lot of heel-knowing-heel-tactics reversals.

While the moment was Cult of Personality ending Survivor Series, don’t sleep on the Women’s WarGames match that started the premium live event. All nine women – Dakota Kai included despite injury – put on a showcase of insane moves, fun weapon spots, and some great PG-hardcore wrestling. A blast from the second Damage CTRL entered the arena in matching masks.

And NXT gave us the aforementioned Fatal Four Way match between Wes Lee, Bronson Reed, Cameron Grimes, and Johnny Gargano. While only Lee had any real stakes, it was a surprisingly tense match as all three other competitors looked like they were really doing their best to make Lee look like a goddamn hero if he could survive their onslaught. Good on everybody involved for that!

A Soap Opera With More Suplexes and Less Violence

Obviously this week’s WWE news was focused on C.M. Punk’s appearance at the end of Saturday’s Survivor Series. As I said, I wrote about it earlier this week, and we’ll see if any of my speculation holds up. In storyline stuff, things progressed a little but no huge developments yet – Bayley took the loss in the women’s WarGames match, but the rest of her team didn’t turn on her yet. Judgment Day’s attempted cash-in on champ Seth Rollins near the end of the men’s WarGames match was thwarted by a returning (and JACKED) Randy Orton. And after Raw, it looks like Cody Rhodes and Shinsuke Nakamura will be feuding to pass the time until the Royal Rumble at the end of January. The period between Survivor Series and the Rumble is typically pretty quiet for WWE, so some time-killing rivalries are likely to pop up for the next couple months. Nothing with big ramifications, just things to pass the time until the big Rumble to Mania matches start to take shape.

NXT continued its setup for next weekend’s Iron Survivor match at Deadl1ne, with the lineups now including Dijak, Trick Williams, Josh Briggs, and Bron Breakker on the men’s side, and the women’s match featuring Tiffany Stratton, Lash Legend, Blair Davenport, Kelani Jordan. One more entry for each will be picked on next week’s show, and we’ll do a full preview on the blog next week! Wes Lee also picked up a solid win against a trio of WWE main roster guys to earn a rematch with Dominik Mysterio for the NXT North American Championship, and we had a bit of storyline development in the Chase U slash NXT Mafia scandal but nothing too major yet. 

AEW saw some incredible matches in the Continental Classic, with Rush defeating Mark Briscoe and Swerve Strickland stealing a win from Jay White. We also saw the return of Dante Martin, and the kid looks like he hasn’t lost a step despite that nasty injury months ago. The Devil storyline and MJF’s title reigns continue to dominate the non-wrestling portion of the program, with Max and Joe being challenged to a tag team match next week against mysterious Devil-aligned opponents. I think there’s a lot hinging on a great reveal at this point, and my guess remains an increasingly-irritated Britt Baker. I’d love to see her with a full on stable though, guys like Jack Perry, Wardlow, maybe even Adam Cole  – if he’s not part of the reason she’s so mad in the first place. I think it would be a fun sidestep to some of the more predictable options, but I’m also a fan of chaos so what do I know?

Let’s Remember A Guy

Our first edition of Let’s Remember A Guy is dedicated to beloved WWE Superstar Kerwin White. Now, the terms “beloved” and “Superstar” are being used very loosely here, but I’ll bet those of you who watched wrestling back when Kerwin was a part of WWE programming still remember that shockingly racist-ass storyline. 

Image credit: theofficialwrestlingmuseum.com

White was played by Chavo Guerrero, a man who has worked with just about every wrestling company in the world. His father is a legend in both Mexico and the United States, but it was probably his tag teams with uncle Eddie Guerrero that most Fed-heads remember him from, myself included. 

Chavo has probably had as many heel/face turns as Big Show, although I can’t be sure. He was enjoying a heel run on SmackDown – after a concussion put him out for two months, and a face run against his concussor Billy Kidman ended quickly. Chavo was traded to Raw in June of 2005, late in the draft and after a few weeks of assaults by the Mexicools, the lawnmower-riding group consisting of Juventud, Psicosis, and Super Crazy. 

Those assaults saw Guerrero turn his back on his heritage and embrace “White America” by way of a polo shirt, bleached blonde hair, khaki pants, and a cardigan tied around his neck. He also got a golf cart –  complete with clubs for assaulting his enemies – to ride to the ring, along with a young Dolph Ziggler as his caddy a little later. Oh, he also got the catchphrase my old man used to use on his oversalted food: “If it ain’t white, it ain’t right!” *puts head in hands* WrestleCrap tells us that this character was loosely based on this Eddie Murphy SNL bit, but I haven’t been able to find definitive proof of that.

Thankfully, this gimmick was never gonna last. While weeks of casual racism against just about every group you can imagine were the norm, Kerwin was mostly relegated to house shows and Sunday Night Heat matches, with Shelton Benjamin being his only major rival during the four months and 39 matches that the character was active. The death of Eddie Guerrero on November 13th, 2005, caused WWE and Chavo to drop the Kerwin White gimmick in favor of Chavo returning to the Guerrero family to honor his late uncle. So we never got to see the character progress to the ACTUAL KLAN UNIFORM WEARING WHITE GUY that Chavo said he’d have liked this hatable guy to develop into. 

That got a little darker at the end than I would have liked, but ,man, that was such a dumb gimmick. That theme music though…if you have a Carlton dance at the ready, this is the time to bust that shit out:

Closing Up Shop

And that’s the end! Thanks for coming with me on that journey. No pay-per-views or premium live events this weekend, so it’s “just” the five hours of WWE SmackDown, AEW Rampage, and AEW Collision to keep up with. Next weekend is NXT Deadl1ne, which features the unique Iron Survivor match that they used last year to great effect. 

We’ll see you next week for the usual Casual Friday blog. If you have questions, concerns, or comments, drop 'em in the comments section below! And follow us on Twitter (X), Facebook, BlueSky and/or Instagram using the links on the right.

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