[1999-09-23-WWF-Smackdown] Chris Jericho vs Ken Shamrock (First Blood)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Jericho shows up in full hockey gear, which Jericho has a hard time moving around in. Not the best booking for a guy trying to overcome a label that he couldn't work. Curtis Hughes runs in and Shamrock beats him up until Jericho attacks Shamrock with the hockey stick. Hughes holds Shamrock down while Jericho does a frog splash in the gear to cause internal bleeding from Shamrock's mouth and give Jericho the win. I am pretty sure this was the last time we saw Shamrock in the WWF. Bad match.

[Superstar Sleeze]

I believe you 100% Charles this is a bad match, BUT don't you wish WWE could pull a character piece like this off nowadays. That used to be their bread and butter in the 80s and 90s, who you were in terms of a gimmick or the angle actually affected how the match was wrestle. Jericho is the ultimate wussy and chump. He is doing his best chickenshit heel but in 1999. They go over the top and drive it home. They come up with an interesting way for Jericho to get Shamrock down using one aspect of his gimmick (Mr. Hughes) and hit him in the ribs with another aspect, his hockey pads, to cause internal bleeding which was the interminable storyline of 1999 that I remember. Nowadays you just send two midcarders out who just have a match, but there is nothing unique because they are bereft of a simple angle or gimmick hook. More character pieces in wrestling is what I would like to see.

[Loss]

Oh yeah, totally agreed with that point. It's one of my biggest hangups with WWE now and one major reason I find it difficult to watch.

[Matt D]

I think there can be a middle ground between the two, though. Honestly, a lot of the Honky Tonk Man matches I was revisiting recently had just that.

[Superstar Sleeze]

Of course, everything in moderation and like I opened with in my response, I am sure it was not good and I am not going to seek out, but the way Charles described it shows the redeeming qualities of booking like that. One reason I have really dug Miz matches his return is because they all had interesting hooks. At first, it was don't hit me in the face. They really played up how big of a deal it would be for someone to hit them in the face. When Ziggler finally did at Summerslam, I popped, but I didn't feel like the reaction was as big as it should have been because A. it was not the finish and they still went for 5 more minutes & B. Fans aren't really trained to care about cool like hooks like that anymore. I think Mizdow stuff has incorporated in a really cool way for the most part. Now you send out most midcarders and really everything looks and feels same-y. Even in that Miz/Ziggler series, how did each match build on each other. They really did not. I have watched enough 80s WWF to know that within a single loop the match between two people were almost identical, but from loop to loop the plot advanced. Something new happened. Matches should be designed to get at least one person over or the angle over. These matches that just exist to entertain me just don't entertain me anymore.

[Tim Evans]

What a poor way to write off Shamrock. How many first blood matches end with internal bleeding? Jericho is still missing something in WWF. Reminds me of Show's first couple months.

[soup23]

So long Shamrock. For the two minutes this occurred, I was shocked at how bad it was. Jericho certainly hadn't found his footing of whether to be comedic heel and then flip the switch once the bell rings. Shamrock being able to bleed from the mouth on command was always a bit disturbing. 1/2*

[PeteF3]

Jericho's in an interesting spot right now--he made himself big through mid-card comedy, but he was signed with the expectation that he would be the next Shawn Michaels. Shawn could do comedy too, but not stuff that made himself the butt of the joke as Jericho often was. Chris, despite this attempt, still needed work on coming across as a true main event threat. But, he gets the on-screen credit for Ken Shamrock getting written off TV.