Gimmick Some (Wrestlemania) Lovin': Double Pneumonia, Double Titles

In each edition of Gimmick Some Lovin', we take a look at one iteration of a gimmick match available on the WWE Network. Some are iconic for their success, others for the extent to which they flopped, and some just... happened.

We defined a "gimmick match" as, in any way, adding a rule/stipulation to or removing a rule from a match, changing the physical environment of a match, changing the conditions which define a "win", or in any way moving past the simple requirement of two men/women/teams whose contest must end via a single pinfall, submission, count out, or disqualification.

This week, Kurt Angle face the ire of his bosses, Stephanie McMahon and Triple H, for blurting out the details of their backstage conversations about newest WWE signee/sign-pointer Ronda Rousey; the blame was placed on Kurt's recent bout with double pneumonia addling his brain, but The Olympic Hero still faced a pretty strong rebuttal from The Game.

Every now and then, WWE likes to give the internet a gift; this one should have been wrapped with a bow.

Today, we take a look at another time a double distraction occupied Angle's mind leading into the biggest show of the year, as The Most Celebrated Real Athlete in WWF/E History looked to defend his European and Intercontinental Championships (aka the EuroContinental Championship) in a Two Falls Triple Threat Match against fellow Wrestlemania rookies Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit.

A debut year for the ages

It's rare, but occasionally, WWE will debut a new superstar who, through a combination of sheer determination, innate charisma, front office faith, and that intangible "it" factor, will seem very quickly like they had always been ingrained in the fabric of the company's history.

AJ Styles, for instance, made his first WWE appearance at the 2016 Royal Rumble and entered the 2017 event defending the WWE Championship after high profile matches (and several main events) at WWE's other marquee shows throughout 2016.

Brock Lesnar, similarly, made his WWE main roster debut (promoted from the Ohio Valley Wrestling developmental system) the night after Wrestlemania X8 by interrupting a Hardcore Championship match and demolishing its competitors. One year later, Lesnar captured his second WWE Championship in the main event of Wrestlemania XIX, The Next Big Thing's first-ever appearance on the Grandest Stage of Them All.

The man Lesnar faced in that main event, however, was the superstar who set the gold standard (pun intended) for a debut year in WWE: Olympic wrestling champion Kurt Angle.

[silently to self]: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Angle debuted with a series of vignettes in the fall of 1999 hyping up his celebrated amateur wrestling accomplishments and his status as a "real athlete" deigning to appear in the World Wrestling Federation. Angle's promos accentuated his athletic accomplishments with an earnestness in the defence of his hero status; according to those present in creative at the time, Angle was unaware that he was a heel, and felt that it would be impossible to boo an Olympian, an attitude he brought into his professional persona.

The result was the WWF repeating a mistake they'd made three years prior with newcomer Rocky Maivia, aka Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who was told to smile as much as possible and simply be a traditional 1980s babyface in a company quickly transitioning into more adult-oriented Attitude era content. Fans quickly soured on the beaming former Flex Kavana, and the front office's response was to double down on their support by giving him the company's number two singles title.

Luckily, WWE learned their lesson here and never tried to force another member of the Anoa'i family on their audience as an unwanted babyface ever again.

The difference with Angle, though, was that the backlash was fully intentional; McMahon and the creative team knew that it would be impossible to convince Angle to play a traditional (cheating, angry, sneaky, etc.) wrestling heel, but also understood their audience well enough to know that such actions wouldn't make Kurt a heel. What would make Kurt Angle a bad guy at that time would be, as they learned with Maivia, to have him be the honourable traditional babyface in an era of middle fingers, beers, abductions, and other Attitude Era craziness.

By the time Angle captured the European Championship from Val Venis on an episode of Smackdown airing February 10, 2000, he was being booed out of arenas nationwide for his holier-than-thou approach to his accomplishments and the business of professional wrestling; at No Way Out later that month (a show featuring a future Gimmick Some Lovin' entry in the Triple H-Cactus Jack Hell in a Cell Match, this author's vote for Greatest HIAC of All Time), Angle defeated Jericho to add the Intercontinental Championship to his waist, becoming the top non-McMahon affiliated heel in the company.

This is easily the best a double champion has ever looked with the two belts. Oh, it's true.

By the time the next Survivor Series arrived, Angle was the defending WWF Champion, having also held both secondary mid-card championships and won the King of the Ring tournament previously that summer. In twelve months, Angle had accomplished everything (of value) a singles competitor possibly could.

Rookie-Mania

The sheer amount of talent added to the WWF roster between August of 1999 and August of 2000 is still staggering in retrospect.

Angle's two opponents in the match were also very recent entries into the World Wrestling Federation, but men who had taken a very different path to get there.

We've covered Jericho's debut, as well as his up-and-down first year after leaving World Championship Wrestling for greener (and far more likely to remain open) pastures. Around the 2000 Royal Rumble, Jericho began showing the value McMahon and company hoped for when they invested in the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah with a high-profile feud with Chyna over the Intercontinental Championship.

Jericho's speed, agility, and blend of styles between North American technical wrestling, Mexican Lucha Libre, and Japanese strong style was a welcome change of pace from WWF's offerings up and down the card. His first full year as a WWF competitor would be defined by his repeated clashes with another WCW defector with a similar resume and history as a world traveller and mosaic of wrestling styles, Chris Benoit.

No jokes here; the eventual fates of 3/5 of the men in this picture are absolute tragedies.

Benoit, like Jericho, arrived to a massive babyface pop, which the company managed to quickly turn into genuine heel heat that same night; also like Jericho, Benoit's first year on the roster was marked by inconsistency in his booking and presentation, finding himself all over the card and suffering from inconsistent amounts of front office faith.

Benoit made his pay-per-view debut on the same No Way Out card where Jericho dropped the Intercontinental Title to Angle, losing alongside Radicalz partners Dean Malenko and Perry Saturn to Rikishi, Grandmaster Sexay, and Scotty 2 Hotty, also known as Too Cool. Wrestlemania would be his first match on premium television as a singles competitor.

The year without a singles match

There was plenty of time for this, but not enough time for two superstars to square off only against each other.

WrestleMania 2000 is noteworthy for a lot of reasons: it marked the WrestleMania debut of at least sixteen different WWF superstars, it was the first WrestleMania to see a heel walk out of the main event as WWF Champion (go ahead and guess who that was), and was the first WrestleMania in six years to feature neither 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin nor The Undertaker, two of the company's biggest stars not just at that time, but at any time.

What most people remember this card for, however, is the fact that it's the only WrestleMania to not feature a single traditional one-on-one contest (and, before anyone begins to argue, we're opting not to count the Terri/Kat "Catfight"). Half of the event's matches were multi-faceted matches (this contest, the Fatal Four-Way main event, the Triangle Ladder Match, and the Hardcore Battle Royale), and the other half were tag matches with varying degrees of logic and thrown-together-ness.

As long as matches like this exist, nobody can complain about a match not being "Wrestlemania-worthy".

WWF/E escalated a WrestleMania trend here where, trying to squeeze as much talent as possible onto the card, multi-person matches are shoehorned in at the expense of quality storytelling; later events would include an exponential increase in multi-team Tag Team Championship matches (both of the climbing and the pin/submission variety), "we can't decide on a number one contender" multi-person singles championship matches, and battle royals. While all of these had appeared on Wrestlemania cards before, never had an entire event seen so many of them and so few one-on-one matches.

The Rules

If your mentor volunteered you for a match with dangerously lopsided stipulations, you might react the same way.

As negotiated by former WWF Champion Bob Backlund, the match would be contested under two-falls rules (the phrase "best two out of three" gets thrown around a few times on commentary, which makes zero sense); the first fall would decide the winner of the Intercontinental Championship and the second fall would determine the European Champion. Any pinfall or submission to any competitor would result in a win.

The Match

Three of the best technicians the turn of the millennium had to offer in the ring at the same time. What could possibly be wrong with that?

This is a difficult match to write about. By and large, triple threat matches tend to be difficult to invest in emotionally, since it's harder to build a three-way narrative as opposed to a one-on-one narrative; there are some obvious exceptions, but most triple threats end up feeling a bit like a cop-out instead of allowing a single feud to shine.

Further, it's hard to know when a move, a moment, or an advantage truly matters; there are lots of great and memorable moves in this particular match, but it's hard to feel anything because the moves don't build on each other. They can't, after all, because the nature of triple threat matches tend to see most big moves followed by a reshuffling of the deck and a new pairing-off.

To be fair, there are lots of great moments in this match, but the sum is, unfortunately, not a great match. Early on, Angle and Benoit fought on the ring apron, allowing Jericho to perform his triangle springboard dropkick, but adding the twist of knocking the Canadian Crippler into the Olympian in a fun spot. Later, Angle had locked in his now-former mentor's Crossface Chickenwing on Jericho and, just before Jericho's arm could fall a third time and signal a submission, Benoit nailed Angle with a low dropkick to the face.

Moments later, a Benoit flying headbutt put Jericho down for three, making Benoit the Intercontinental Champion and exposing one of the flaws of this match: Benoit's music plays for roughly two seconds, and Benoit has no opportunity to celebrate his first WWF championship, nor any fanfare.

There's a small, but brilliant, heel moment where Benoit remembers that the match is still going, and attempts a second pin on Jericho to capture both belts, but Angle keeps that from happening.

Always one of the most impressive moves in The Man of 1,004 Holds's arsenal, alongside the double powerbomb (which also makes an appearance in this match).

There's a fun technical section, featuring a series of suplexes like Benoit's rolling Germans and a dragon suplex (which Jim Ross somehow calls a German Suplex). Angle works in his missed moonsault spot after a top-rope back suplex from Benoit to Jericho, and Jericho knocks referee Tim White out cold with a flying forearm aimed at a ducking Crippler.

Benoit would then lock in the Crippler Crossface, and Jericho taps almost immediately; Benoit goes to check on the referee, allowing Jericho to recover and lock in the Lion Tamer (no Walls of Jericho here; we get the elevated bend and the knee to Benoit's back). Angle, though, takes advantage of the downed official to clock Jericho with the Intercontinental Title, covering for a two count (broken up by Benoit).

The ending sequence, more than a little bit out of nowhere, comes when Benoit attempts another diving headbutt, this time to Angle; Angle would roll out of the way, unable to fully stand up, allowing Jericho to springboard off the second rope for the Lionsault. Though Angle is still very close by, the Lionsault gets three for Y2J, leaving Angle shocked and beltless, having lost all of his non-Olympic gold without actually losing.

It's easy to forget, based on the television presentation, that another man won a more storied title in this match.

Herein lies another of the match's flaws: Jericho has just won the lesser title, but he won last, so his music is playing. Benoit has won the more major singles championship, but won it about six minutes prior and is now getting the gold in hand for the first time (and, again, while another man's music plays). Benoit attempts to bask in his first Wrestlemania victory but is easily overshadowed by the flashier Jericho, whom the cameras (and the crowd) all follow.

My Rating

When these are two of your ingredients in a triple threat match, and the third is future Hall of Famer Kurt Angle, you'd be right to expect more than we got here.

It's impossible to look at this match as anything but a disappointment. There are great moments, yes, and all three competitors did well with what they were given, but thanks to the format and the presentation, this one was snakebit from the start (to borrow a Prichardism).

Bell-to-bell, the match gets just over 13 minutes. Thirteen minutes for the secondary and tertiary singles titles, contested between three of the hottest mid-card acts in the company, who all three would challenge for the WWF Championship by year's end, which two (well, one and a half; Jericho's Monday Night RAW Dusty Finish doesn't fully count) would win.

The two falls format, and the dual championships at stake, should have afforded this one some more time, but the match just feels rushed and incomplete. Like their SummerSlam contest later that year, Jericho and Benoit were in the process of telling a fantastic story (with Angle's help, of course), but couldn't do that story justice (and, just like SummerSlam, Terri Runnels and The Kat got ample time to put on little more than an interactive striptease).

Even in the WWF's raunch-heavy Attitude Era, it's impossible to justify television time going to this which could have gone to the triple threat match.

This does not feel like a match worthy of Wrestlemania, and it barely feels like a match worthy of pay-per-view; with the exception of the title changes, this feels like it could have simply been the close of the first hour of RAW, a pair of title changes to pop a rating.

The company does right to keep Angle out of the falls, leaving his controversial win streak intact (controversial because he argued that Tazz's Tazzmission was an illegal hold, ergo Angle's Royal Rumble loss was invalid); Benoit and Jericho would be able to continue heating up the mid-card while Angle, unshackled by minor belts, could ascend even closer to the main event.

The third "I", intelligence, lets you escape from a match where you lose two titles in better shape than you entered it.

The best way to describe this match is what would happen if one were to mix Count Chocula and Lucky Charms cereals: both are immense crowd-pleasers on their own, and on paper, a union between the two would be divine, but when mixed together, the flavors of one would drown out the flavors of the other, and leave you with something that is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Jericho-Angle, Jericho-Benoit, and Angle-Benoit are all million-dollar feuds and, left with enough time, instant classics on any night. Mixed together, and clipped to a paltry quarter hour, the match becomes a mishmash of fun, but ultimately meaningless, spots, with a finish that just doesn't feel like a finish.

I'd go 5/10, not bad enough to regret watching, but not good enough to recommend with any enthusiasm.

Meltzer Says

Meltzer felt equally blase about this contest, giving it **3/4 in his Wrestlemania 2000 review.

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