[1994-05-16-WWF-Raw] Earthquake vs Yokozuna (Sumo Bout)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

I thought this was lots of fun. Anything that allows Yoko to tease falling down or falling off of something over and over is going to be fun. Earthquake wins, which surprises me.

[Kevin Ridge]

This was way better than the Big Show/Akebono sumo match. They get a couple more minutes here and do a lot of teases of getting pushed out of the ring. Not something I’d want to see in a WWF ring but it works with these two.

[Exposer]

The crowd loved this. This wasn't too bad actually. I feel bad that Yoko was on a slow path to irrelevance though.

[soup23]

Good short segment for Raw. Savage celebrating wins never gets old. I was shocked that Quake won and the pop for him was nice.

[BackToBionic]

I remember Meltzer saying that Tenta wasn't crazy about the idea of this match, due to his legit past. That may be why they gave him the win.

[El-P]

As a sumo fan, these kind of matches are embarrasing. Yoko really was exposed too here as someone who, well, never did any sumo. The Akebono match made me die a little.

[Zenjo]

Like El-P says, as a Sumo fan it's excruciating to sit through such ignorant, insulting crap as this.

[PeteF3]

Another thing that was what it was. They attempted to do some justice to the sumo concept, but this would ironically end up being 'quake's last appearance. Typhoon would be brought back to replace him on their house show run as soon as it began.

[BruiserBrody]

This scored a full ratings point higher than Flair vs. Steamboat that was held that same weekend.

[Superstar Sleeze]

Yokozuna vs Earthquake - WWF RAW 5/16/94 Sumo

They were at a complete loss what to do with Yokozuna between WrestleMania and Survivor Series. They knew Yokozuna still had value to do the job to Undertaker, BUT they wanted to do the Fake Taker angle first in Summerslam, which honestly is not a bad concept for an angle they just botched the execution horribly. Coming off Royal Rumble, the Yoko/Taker match definitely had money written all over it. They were the ones that closed out Survivor Series. The question is what to do with Yokozuna for seven months. It turns out not much. 

The Earthquake push seems weird to me. Earthquake is definitely a guy that I am consistently underwhelmed by. People seem to like him, but I cant get into him. I couldnt get it into this. That paled in comparison to the Duggan/Yoko knockdown match. Duggan has way more charisma than Earthquake. The 1994 crowd is much more forgiving than I am. The stalling was brutally boring. Yoko looks so much more like a star than Quake. The initial shouldertackle exchange was good. They tease going out. They do a double underhook grab the waistband test of strength. Finally Earthquake ducks and gets a mighty sumo slap to take Yoko off his feet and Yoko tumbles out of the ring. 

Earthquake would be out of the WWF by the time this was televised. His last WWF match was on May 15th. It was a weird choice to me to push him, but I think they were trying anything to see what would stick. Clearly they had big plans for Earthquake if he won this match. I didnt care for this, but your mileage may vary. I preferred Duggan/Yoko by a country mile.