WWE Hell in a Cell: Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins

TITLE: WWE Hell in a Cell: Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins

GENRE: Professional Wrestling Match

RATING: TV-PG for moderate violence and brief language

GRADE: Pass

A Hell in a Cell match is more than a typical steel cage fight. In this case, the cage surrounds the entire ring and exposes the concrete floor. You can’t win the match by escape because there is no escape. It’s just you and your opponent inside a wire mesh cage with no rules or regulations to hold you back. As heel commentator JBL so appropriately puts it, the only limit to your attack is your imagination. Dean Ambrose has a wild imagination in case you couldn’t tell from his erratic behavior. Seth Rollins can be just as sadistic and crazy. The first Hell in a Cell match between John Cena and Randy Orton was…acceptable. But this main event match between Ambrose and Rollins was going to steal the show.

Normally a match of this caliber would start in the ring and the bell would sound off three times to start the battle. Dean Ambrose didn’t want that. Carrying a kendo stick like a samurai sword with him, he wanted to start on TOP of the cell. Seth Rollins along with his two stooges Joey Mercury and Jamie Noble were (kind of) happy to humor him. Mercury and Noble got kendo stick welts for their troubles and Rollins and Ambrose fell off the cage and crashed through the English and Spanish-speaking announce tables.

It could have been over before it started. Dean Ambrose didn’t want that ending. He got off of his stretcher and chased Seth Rollins down before throwing him in the cell to officially start the match. Once the bell rung three times, these two warriors brutalized each other. They used chairs, sticks, steel stairs, and wooden tables, all in an effort to achieve victory. Corporate Kane was outside the cell and interfered by blasting Ambrose in the face with a fire extinguisher. That didn’t cool off the fire in the Lunatic Fringe’s belly. He wasn’t just pissed off at Seth Rollins; he had a bloodlust for him. He wanted to torture and twist him in the most painful ways possible.

Dean Ambrose was so close to exacting his revenge when he put an unconscious Seth Rollins’ head on top of cinder blocks to set up for Rollins’ own finisher move, the curb stomp. And then the arena went black and strange tongues were being spoken with a lantern and a ghost in the center of the ring. The speaker of that tongues was none other than the hypnotic and frightening Bray Wyatt, who downed Dean Ambrose with a spinning face buster and allowed Seth Rollins to cover Ambrose for the 1-2-3 pin. The match is over, but the emotional scars bleed like waterfalls and the physical pains burn like hellfire.

And now for the actual critique. To put it shortly, this match was as violent and psychotic as anybody could ask for. The blood was minimal, but the pain was at its maximum with the creative use of weaponry and the multi-story fall from the start of the match. This wasn’t just a wrestling match; this was a fight for survival. Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins beat each other so badly after that fall it was amazing they didn’t have a hearse parked outside the arena. You’re damn right they were sore and bruised.

Believe it or not, the finish to the match where Bray Wyatt interfered didn’t bother me in the least bit. Yes, I wanted to see Dean Ambrose curb stomp Seth Rollins’ head into powder and slush. But then again, Bray Wyatt had been off of WWE television for a long time and needed a grand reintroduction. And now that the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view is in the books, we’re looking at a rivalry between Ambrose and Wyatt.

You know what that means? It means two crazies, two psychopaths are going to tear each other apart at some point. Dean Ambrose is like The Joker and Bray Wyatt is like Charles Manson. The two wrestlers have the mindset of serial killers and if they have to bleed each other out to get to the climax of their battle, well, let me put it his way: Seth Rollins is the luckiest guy on the planet. If these two loony tunes play enough mind games with each other for long enough, one of those minds will be running down a sewer drain while the other is bleeding with psychological trauma.

What you have to remember when watching WWE is everything happens for a reason. All you have to do as a fan is wait patiently for your favorites to triumph. It’s not an instant situation. It takes time for a climax to launch. Lots of time.

When Daniel Bryan was screwed out of the WWE Title at Summer Slam 2013, it took him until Wrestlemania XXX, which is an April 2014 pay-per-view to regain it. The point of this analogy is if you’re a fan and you want to see Seth Rollins get brutalized over and over again, but eventually for a final time, wait patiently. WWE waited patiently for Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins to climax and it paid off in the most violent way possible, which is why this match in particular gets a passing grade.

Billy Rogue

I’ve been watching the wrestling tag team of The French Pirates in my head for quite sometime. It appears as if they’re living…two lives. One of the lives is Jonathan Thief. He broke away from the tag team and became a successful multi-time world champion and future Hall of Famer. He has a social security number (not really). He pays taxes (to his home country of France). He even takes out his landlady’s garbage.

The other life is Billy Rogue. He couldn’t find the same success his tag team partner did and fell into obscurity. He is also guilty of virtually every drug crime the US has a law for. One of these lives has a future. The other does not. Billy Rogue is the one who doesn’t have much of a future.

The French Pirates draw a lot of comparisons to the real life WWE tag team from the early 90’s, The Rockers. Jonathan Thief found the same amount of success Shawn Michaels did. Billy Rogue couldn’t, a la Marty Jennetty. Having said that, what do you give a man who has no future? A bottle of poison? A loaded gun? A grudge-match storyline against his old tag team partner? No, no, and yes.

But more importantly, you give Billy Rogue drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. You make him so depressed with his lack of success (that rhymes) his only option is to use every kind of illegal drug imaginable. Pot is becoming legal in a lot of states and it has no harmful side effects, so that doesn’t count. I’m talking about the hard stuff. The extreme stuff. The tubes of glue. The balloons of cocaine. The bigger balloons of heroin. And then wash it all down with a nice big bottle of vodka.

Sending Mr. Rogue to rehab would seem like the right way for a wrestling company to spend its money. If he followed the right steps, he could make a full recovery much like former WWE superstar Joey Mercury did and become an inspiration to those wanting to be sober. But how do you sell such a gigantic bill of goods to someone who still harbors jealousy toward his former tag team partner? If he gets sober, can he stay that way? Even if he does get sober, will he not find another destructive outlet for his raw feelings?

Let’s say it’s possible. Let’s say for the sake of argument Billy Rogue quits drugs and alcohol altogether and becomes a better person for it. His criminal record is spotless and he’s actually able to hold down a job. What kind of life is there for him on the other side of recovery? He didn’t have much of a life before he turned to drugs, what makes you think he’ll have one after? You think he’s going to be content with sitting in an office building or getting his computer science degree? Or maybe he can completely dork out and sell popcorn for the same wrestling promotion he was a part of.

This is a struggle that is all too familiar in drug fiction and nonfiction. It can be said about any kind of addiction, really. You don’t have to constantly shoot heroin in your arm in order to relate to addiction. There are porn addicts, adrenaline addicts, self-harm addicts, and then there’s that one addiction I personally can relate to: food addiction. Billy Rogue is to drugs what I am to food.

I’ve been addicted to food ever since going on my first round of schizophrenia medication. I used to be a skinny little twig in high school. In today’s world, my belly is large, my clothes barely fit, and my energy is gone. Food was the one thing I could turn to that gave me just a little bit of satisfaction in a world where mental illness kept me from having fun. One Reese’s Cup was more intense for me than any song written by Rammstein or Pink Floyd. Because I was so attracted to that constant high, my weight spiraled out of control and now I’m left with the daunting task of having to lose all the weight and keep it off permanently.

Addiction is the only thing Billy Rogue and I have in common. Though I live through my own characters, I don’t want to be the guy who lives through someone who openly admits to having no future. I refuse to accept dystopia. If I have a big belly and a weird appearance for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t matter to me as long as I still had a future worth working toward. That future starts with editing the crap out of Brawl Mart and sending it to a reputable publisher instead of doing the heavy lifting myself with Smash Words. I don’t know how far away that time in my life will be, but it is there. I will make my own dreams come true one way or another. I’m an adult. It’s my right to make my dreams come true.

　

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“I’m torn to pieces. I’m broken down. I still see your face when you’re not around. I sit here in misery wondering if I’ll ever be half the man you wanted me to be.”

-Pop Evil singing “Torn to Pieces”-