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BRUCE MITCHELL FEATURE
Original Headline: "Bruce Mitchell's Guide To Misused Gimmick Matches and Stipulations"
Original Publish Date: November 21, 2007
Pro Wrestling Torch Newsletter #999

So I'm watching Raw last week and I see Triple H facing Umaga in a lumberjack match in the main event.

Uh, why the hell are these two facing each other in a lumberjack match? I mean, I know what WWE Creative is thinking - get the two unofficial captains of the two "traditional Survivor Series teams" and their respective teammates in a big ol' fight as the show goes off the air to plug Sunday's pay-per-view.

But you know what a lumberjack match is about, right? It's about the reason those lumberjacks are around the ring, and it ain't to cut down trees.

You see, back in the days before Monty Python, when rough men worked side-by-side
in lumberjack camps for long months at a time and drank in rough bars every night of those months, sometimes those rough men had to settle things like rough men should.

And when those rough men got bored, they fought. There wasn't much else to do. Sometimes a lumberjack wasn't quite rough enough. Maybe he didn't want to fight. Maybe he was a coward. The lumberjacks knew what to do. To make sure nobody ran and that the loser took his beating like a, uh, lumberjack, the rest of those lumberjacks took their places in a circle around them. If, well, when the coward tried to run for it, the lumberjacks tossed him back in the circle. That's how things were settled among the lumberjacks.

Or at least that's how Dutch Savage or Stu Hart or Da Crusher or Johnny Weaver or Whitey Caldwell or Eddie Graham told the tale some long-ago night in some long-ago wrestling promotion. You see, this is the one we've been waiting for, this time we finally get a fair shot.

It doesn't matter whether it was true, what matters was - could it lure the suckers in for one more week

...and set up the next?

See, lumberjack match stipulations in pro wrestling, like all stipulations, should serve a specific purpose. That purpose is simple, to make that fervent, loyal, paying fan think if he just reaches into his wallet for the money one more time for one more ticket for one more wrestling show he'll finally get to see, once and for all, that loudmouth, yella belly backstabber get his at the hands on his tough guy hero.

So he pays his money and takes his seat, and damnit, just at that moment the coward is about to finally get stomped once and for all, another damn lumberjack jumps in and beats the crap out of his hero.

This creates mixed emotions in the heart of our fan. He paid good money for justice, for final resolution, for all the things that are now just generic names for generic pay-per-views, and he didn't get it. But damn, he was so close, just one more show and surely the rat bastard would finally fall.

But first, next week's tag match, where the coward and his cowardly partner are forced to face the wrath of his hero and his heroic buddy. He'll want to see that too.

So he throws more good money after bad and buys another ticket.

The lumberjack stipulation is a con, an illusion - justice snatched away at the last second, and it requires two things. The first is a bad-ass tough guy, and Raw certainly had that in Triple H.

The second was a problem. Lumberjack matches need somebody to run away. Umaga is a scary monster, not a cowardly backstabber. He never runs away. Even the good guys, with the exception of The Game, are a little scared of him.

So basically, you've got a bunch of lumberjacks hanging around with no real reason to be there. If either Triple H or Umaga somehow find themselves tossed out of the ring they're not going to run to the back, they're going to run right back to the fight.

WWE Creative team booked a stipulation that has been used in this business thousands of times and completely forgot what the thing is there for in the first place.

It happens all the time. Stipulations are booked in WWE and TNA without much thought as to why they are there, then management is surprised, if they even know, when the match doesn't get the level of emotional reaction they expected.

Well, I'm here to help. Before I get started, though, let me point out something to those I deliberately irritated with the Whitey Caldwell paragraph above, the ones who think the Outsiders were way back in the good old days - WWE and TNA have used every one of the stipulations in one way or another in this column in today's pro wrestling, so they might has well have some idea what teey are for.

So let's cover (some of) the rest:

The Triple Threat Match - One Guy vs. One Guy vs. One Guy: Originated at the creative height of ECW and featured Paul Heyman's meticulous year-long booking of a championship feud between Shane Douglas, Terry Funk, and Sabu. Takes patience, time and an attention to detail to get real interest, heat, and revenue. You have to plot a course where the champion has two challengers who arrive at match-time at precisely the same place - the very precipice of the world championship. That's not easy to do.

So, of course, a decade later it's the three-man to ten-man graveyard for talented wrestlers to stall out and go nowhere - the refuse of the lazy booker who needs to accomplish three things......

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