JIMMY VAN, LLC
WINTER HAVEN, FLORIDA

About Jimmy Van About Jimmy Van Jimmy Van is the former owner and writer of JimmyVan.com, a once popular pro wrestling news and information website that died a slow death due to the dot-com bubble burst of 2001. He is also the former promoter of independent wrestling companies in Canada including the Xtreme Wrestling Coalition (XWC) and Full Impact Wrestling (FIW). JV has written a book, “Wrestling’s Underbelly: From Bingo Halls to Shopping Malls”. He resides in Toronto, Canada with a woman that loves him (or at least pretends to) in a house they can sort of afford. Jimmy Van Of course the big draw was The Rock vs. John Cena. It was a year in the making, and Rock’s first singles match in eight years. WWE brought Rock to Raw every week for about a month before Mania in order to do the big build and really sell the show. But for the most part, I absolutely hated the booking, and it seems I wasn’t in the minority since Raw ratings flattened out despite The Rock being live in the building every week. WWE really needs to listen to their own scripting and “embrace the hate” with John Cena. They need to accept the fact that their fan base – aside from children, teenage girls and some women – despise John Cena’s character. When The Rock first threw down the gauntlet and issued the challenge to Cena in 2011, he “told it like it was” about John Cena, and fans ate it up. Rock talked about Cena’s ridiculous look with the over-sized rainbow colored T-shirts. He talked about Cena’s phony character, always smiling and joking and acting obnoxious, even in serious situations. He talked about Cena’s stupid “You Can’t See Me” catchphrase. He talked about how Cena had done nothing original in years aside from changing his shorts from jeans to camouflage. He said what everyone had always thought about Cena’s wrestling character, but what no one had ever said on television aside from a few brief moments of brilliance out of CM Punk. The fans ate up Rock’s words, and ratings were on the upswing. But then like always, the WWE creative machine screwed it up by snuffing out Rock’s momentum due to their fears of Cena becoming a full fledged heel with the fans. They made Rock tone down his promos to the point that Cena would take the mic and tear into Rock, while Rock in return would just stand there looking angry and say nothing. WWE wanted a 50/50 split with the fans going into Mania, failing to understand that the show was taking place in Rock’s hometown and he’d be treated as the hero regardless. By the time they got to the Raw broadcast the week before Mania, the fans were still booing Cena (big shock there), but now they were also giving Rock a mixed reaction because he’d been booked like a disingenuous wuss in promos with Cena too often. WWE refused to take risks, they refused to do something different, because they were too interested in protecting their full-time cash cow. The company even quietly lowered their internal targets in terms of PPV buys prior to Mania. But luckily for them, Rock vs. Cena, Taker vs. HHH and the draw of the Wrestlemania brand itself was still enough to generate a reported 1.3 million worldwide PPV buys, a record breaking figure for the company. Rumors began circulating over Wrestlemania weekend that Brock Lesnar had quietly flown to Miami to finalize a new deal with WWE, and there was even anticipation that he’d show up at Mania and interfere in the main event. While that didn’t happen, one night later on Monday Night Raw the live crowd almost blew the roof off the building as Lesnar’s music hit, he walked to the ring (where John Cena stood, having called out The Rock), hit the F5 to a huge pop, then put an exclamation point on the segment by kicking Cena’s bright green hat across the ring. Just like that, WWE became interesting again. Everyone was talking about Lesnar’s return, and various other MMA fighters like Tito Ortiz and “King” Mo Lawal started talking about breaking into pro wrestling themselves. Lesnar reportedly signed a deal unlike any other in the history of the company – $5 million for one year, a requirement for just 24 dates (an average of just 2 per month), and the right to sell and wear his own sponsorship. No one – not Hogan, not Rock, not Austin, not Cena, not Taker – had ever gotten WWE to agree to such a deal. You could sense the momentum that WWE had generated through Lesnar’s signing and his well booked return appearance. But then one week later – again – the creative machine screwed it all up. WWE has put a lot of time and effort into making John Laurinaitis this era’s Vince McMahon – the evil, crooked corporate boss who pulls the strings, screws the babyfaces, and gets what’s coming to him in the end. The problem is, Laurinaitis sucks as a performer, and the fans don’t give a damn about him. He doesn’t have the, “he’s evil and I’ll pay money to see him get his ass kicked” type of heat that McMahon did during the “Attitude Era” when he feuded with Steve Austin. The fan response to Laurinatis is more like, “Oh God it’s him again… let’s see what else is on TV.” He’s got the face of a corpse, the delivery of Larry Merchant, and quite simply he’s not a draw and there is zero money in him as a heel, just as there was zero money in Michael Cole as a heel (WWE has seemed to finally figure that out, it only took them a year). So what does WWE do? They align Brock Lesnar with John Laurinaitis and announce that his first match back in WWE will be against John Cena at Extreme Rules – a “B” PPV show that never draws – just THREE WEEKS after Brock’s return. Once again, WWE’s poor creative decisions and refusal to take risks wipes out a huge opportunity to engage new or former fans and make some serious money.