That Wrestling Blog 03/03/2019
That Wrestling Blog
12th Edition – March 3, 2019
The Return of Bluetista
If you follow my multi-award-winning Instagram page, @that__wrestling__guy, you will know that every week I like the delve (great word) into the archives of professional wrestling and take you back to a ridiculous moment from the past. This week I want to go back in time only 5 years to when Batista made his first return to the world of professional wrestling.
We all remember the return of Batista back in early 2014. The Animal was returning to WWE after being away for 4 years. While it was great to see Big Dave back in the squared circle, the landscape had shifted, and there was a little Hobbit looking man called Daniel Bryan taking the wrestling world by storm and the WWE Universe certainly didn’t want some big blue bastard taking the spotlight.
The fans rejected Batista as a babyface and was booed heavily when he won the Royal Rumble. The initial plan was Randy Orton vs Batista for the main event of Wrestlemania 30, with Dave set to get bring home the gold. But once again, that little Hobbit like creature Daniel Bryan created an unprecedented wave of support, which turned Wrestlemania into Yestlemania, and as they say, the rest is history.
Then Batista decided it would be a good to come out dressed in bright blue tights and boots in a 3 on 3 tag match against The Shield. This of course, sent the internet into meltdown with memes and videos flying around everywhere. My personal favourite is Batista dancing to the song Blue by Eifel 65, you know the one, “I’m blue, da-ba-dee, da-ba-die.” Go look it up right now, go on, I’ll wait.
Dave would leave the WWE only after a year of being back and with rumours flying around about the creative differences between the two it didn’t seem like he had the best year of his life. But he left and found tremendous success in Hollywood and the Universe moved on to the other things.
The questions would them come up over the following years, would we see Batista again? Was he bitter with WWE? Would he ever dust off the horrendous blue trunks? Well, we kind of got a bit of an answer on Smackdown 1000 where they teased a match with Triple H and honestly, when Hunter pretty much ripped his pec away from his arm at Crown Jewel, I thought no way this match was never going to happen, and maybe we wouldn’t see Batista again for a while.
But as the WWE always says, “never say never” and thankfully I was mistaken, and we saw Batista dragging a lifeless Ric Flair across the ground on his 70th Birthday party and leaving us with a perfectly delivered “Do I have your attention now?”.
The reason I brought up Batista’s last run was that I am sure he wasn’t happy with it and wanted to make amends for how he left the audience last time. By bringing him back with what will be monster heat, it has fans going “Oh yeah hey look there’s Batista” to “FUCK YEAH! Batista is back, and I cannot wait to see where they go with this!”.
I am not always negative, and I will shout praise at the WWE when they deserve it, and they really deserved everyone’s praise this week for some masterful storytelling.
Speaking of storytelling, the ability to advance a storyline on social media is something the WWE has certainly been taking advantage in recent weeks, especially the Ronda Rousey and Becky Lynch feud. I am sure like most people, they were in a little bit disbelief as we saw Ronda use the words shit and dick while Becky photoshopped Ronda’s husbands face on the end of an arm, implying that he was a dick, or a dickhead as you will.
Now that his pandoras box of insults has been opened on Twitter, does this mean other superstars can start using more “colourful” language as long as it’s not on TV? It would be fun to see people like Samoa Joe, Kevin Owens and Fandango (not really) being unleashed and be able to say whatever the fuck they want to people online.
Could you imagine if Twitter was around during the Attitude Era and ECW? I can picture Val Venis giving us a daily “Hellloooo Ladies” tweet followed by “You know something ladies, the Big Valboski is a lot like a twitter feed, you don’t know what you’ll find but you know you’re going to be entertained!”
Look, don’t get me wrong I love the banter between Ronda and Becky, I mean I am a fully-grown male who says far worse ranting in the car (see it all on my award-winning Instagram page @that__wrestling__guy). But surely a company who had a “bitch” quota of one per week, can’t be talking about each other husbands and their penises.
Where is the line? To quote Reverend Lovejoys wife from the Simpsons, “won’t somebody think of the children!” Well I mean, I couldn’t give a fuck about the children, if you’re letting your 10-year-old go on Twitter then you need to check your parenting skills because I’ve seen some of the weirdest shit in my life on there.
I am not sure how actually far it will go, I mean what’s next? Ronda calling Becky a cunt and telling her that she is going to murder her entire family by breaking off all their arms and using them to choke the person to death? Ok, maybe that’s too far but it will be interesting to see what they come up with next.
Love/Hate you all,
That Wrestling Guy
