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| Photo Credit: WWE.com |
WWE World Heavyweight Championship Match:
Alberto del Rio (c, w/ Ricardo Rodriguez) vs. Jack Swagger (w/ Zeb Colter)
How: Swagger won the Elimination Chamber match, giving him the opportunity to challenge del Rio for the Big Gold Belt.
The Story: After a self-imposed exile to "find himself" in the fall of last year, Swagger came back in February with a vengeance. He aligned himself with Zeb Colter, a radical anti-immigration parody of the Tea Party's worst elements, and the two started a crusade to end what they not-so-subtly thought was the freeloading of goods and services by illegal immigrants. That put the World Heavyweight Champion square in his crosshairs. In order to get there, he had to win the Elimination Chamber, which he did eliminating Randy Orton by sneaky roll-up after he had done the heavy lifting.
Swagger and Colter attacked del Rio via direct and indirect promotional material. The Champ responded in kind saying that even though he was born in Mexico, he represented the American Dream by being able to come here and make a better life for himself (despite the fact that he was already an aristocrat). In turn, he started parodying the crass YouTube videos that Swagger and Colter were making, to which they responded by viciously assaulting Ricardo Rodriguez the last two episodes of RAW.
Analysis: In theory, this should be a good story. Angry, insular, fringe conservative nutjob is irrationally angry and attacks the popular Latino Champion. Popular Latino Champion fights back. They do stuff to each other, bam, instant heat for a match. The problem is that WWE, in typical WWE fashion, has done a ham-handed job of presenting the narrative that it doesn't even feel worthy of a feud to be settled on Hell in a Cell or Payback or Wrestling Match: The PPV let alone Mania.
It almost feels like Swagger was rushed into the story and the character. Rodriguez and del Rio making parodies of We the People's YouTube series came way too soon after the genesis of them for those counterpunches to really mean anything. del Rio's motives are half-baked at best and totally ill-fitting at worst. There are plenty of reasons why I'd want to root for a Mexican guy over a virulent racist/xenophobe in a big match, but knowing that he's the Latino Million Dollar Man (El Hombre del Mil Milones de Pesos?), I don't think he'd really need to be the symbol of the American Dream. That's left for sons of plumbers and gutter snipes who work their way up the social ladder to attain success, not dudes with silver spoons in their mouths.
I'd rather have waited for Swagger to get more character momentum before pulling the trigger on this feud and had del Rio go up against a seasoned Mania performer like Chris Jericho here if just for a spectacle match. But this is what we have, and it's so WWE that maybe we shouldn't be surprised.
Who Should Win: del Rio should win, not for story reasons, but because I'm still not over Swagger's DUI arrest.
Who Will Win: del Rio is probably going to win, not because of DUI reasons, but because I don't think Swagger as a character is ready for gold yet.