Brock Lesnar vs. Bill Goldberg
Isenberg: The Beast comes back to WWE and faces off against a guy who has not been in a WWE ring since 2004. I give kudos for the writers to make this as interesting as possible, especially with the bad history these two men have had. It is a different time and a different era in professional wrestling, where fans are more understanding of wrestlers having other business ventures. They were not kind to either guy in 2004, but they have been to both over the past six weeks. Neither man will be a clear cut heel or face. That is okay and that is what I want.
I have been waffling back and forth about who the winner will be. Can I really see Vince wanting Goldberg to walk back in and defeat the guy who makes him more money than almost anyone else on the roster? Brock is an attraction, while Goldberg might only have 1-3 matches in him. Let’s just hope they dont take five minutes to grapple this time and the fans turn on them. For the love of God, please do not let them do that. When the night ends, I think Brock and Goldberg give us a physical match and Brock Lesnar stands tall. Maybe…
Killam: Is it totally unprofessional of me to say that I just don’t care about this match at all? I know it’s a different time, but I don’t think for a second the crowd is what made their WrestleMania XX match one of the worst contests of all time (and certainly the single worst on a major stage). WWE has always had issues with handling Goldberg, because when he came over from WCW they didn’t really grasp what made him great in the first place. He is perhaps the best ever at rampaging through jobbers in short squash matches, and that’s really all people wanted to see from him for a very long time. If you go back through the archives, it’s actually incredibly difficult to find more than a small handful of technically good Goldberg matches. That’s because he never had to be a great wrestler. Even true wrestling greats had a heard time carrying him to well-rated matches.
Goldberg was largely a one-trick pony, but he was the best ever at executing that trick. There ARE exceptions to be had, however. On a main event stage, he was able to shine by throwing him inside some kind of structure, or putting him in the ring with a bunch of guys, where there were no rules and they could throw out the mechanics and just start swinging for the fences. That is what this match with Brock NEEDS to be. There should be no rules. This absolutely needed to be a No DQ match of some kind. If they’re smart, they’ll add the stipulation. Goldberg simply isn’t a wrestler, and Brock Lesnar while very good, simple isn’t consistent enough to take him where some people might be expecting this to go. Hopefully WWE is smart enough to realize this, and they plan accordingly. Telling them to go out there for 20 minutes and wrestle will yield the exact same result as it did 12 years ago.
Go back and watch some tape of Goldberg vs. Scott Steiner at WCW Fall Brawl 2000. This was during the downfall of a great promotion in some of its worst ever angles, but even with Vince Russo in there beating up Bill with a baseball bat it was probably the best worked singles match of his entire career. There was no DQ, and people just wanted to see them beat the holy hell out of each other for 15 minutes, and maybe see Russo get speared out of his socks. Now, you can question the finish of that match until the cows come home, but the match itself is actually a great blueprint for how this should have been laid out. Steiner and Lesnar are weirdly similar in that both had the ability to work great matches in their primes (Lesnar still does with the right opponent), but never really needed to, to keep the gimmick going. Goldberg should have had the odds stacked against him. People should want to see Heyman get broken in half at some point during this match. But they don’t. I disagree wholeheartedly with keeping them both in the middle of the road. Having them both run down the middle, splitting the fans – I just don’t foresee this going well. Hopefully I’m wrong. If it doesn’t, hopefully Heyman is on his toes enough to call an audible and do what needs to be done for the sake of a story.
I’m gonna say Goldberg wins, but that’s not the right move. Lesnar should take it, and not anywhere near clean. Lesnar as a babyface is one of the single dumbest things WWE has ever let happen.
