RAW Deal: The Mae Young Classic

This week saw the opening of the inaugural Mae Young Classic, a premier tournament for women hosted by the WWE on their Network in the same vein as last year’s Cruiserweight Classic.

You know what it is: 32 women from around the world were gathered by the biggest pro wrestling company on Earth to see who’s the best of the best… outside of WWE’s own main roster. The Mae Young Classic is a thrilling concept on paper, especially considering the pedigree in the talent pool and the success of last year’s Cruiserweight Classic, but unfortunately the tournament suffers from a few missteps in its execution.

But first, the good things: if anything at all, the amount of talent the WWE recruited internationally definitely does justify this tournament. A lot of these women can be slotted into the women’s revolution/evolution going on right now on RAW, SmackDown Live, and/or NXT and completely fit. They’ll even elevate those divisions, in fact. Like what they did for the cruiserweights, you can expect women like Dakota Kai, Candice LeRae, Renee Michelle, and Santana Garrett to join signees such as Kavita Devi, Kairi Sane, and Lacey Evans to bolster the WWE’s ranks. It really is a good time to be a fan of women’s wrestling.

There are a couple of glaring issues with the Mae Young Classic. The first is the release schedule, with the WWE Network dropping the entire first round—4 one-hour episodes—in one go. I understand that weekly appointment television is definitely on the decline, but to keep up with this wrestling watercooler event requires you to set aside 4 hours (whether it’s one quick burst or cumulative) on top of the 7 hours of programming. That’s if you watch the entirety of WWE’s schedule, of course, but I’m assuming you’re a hardcore fan who tries to keep up as much as you could. I mean, I know I have to in order to give you this column.

Owning an on-demand streaming service does give them a lot of freedom to play around the rules however they want, but since they’re also providing continuous 24/7 programming, WWE should have also been somewhat sensible about this. They should have followed the example of real sports leagues and dropped each episode every other day—they’ll never do this, but imagine if the NBA dropped entire rounds of playoffs in one go on League Pass? You’d see a sharp drop in viewership, simply because fans couldn’t keep up no matter how much they wanted to.

The second round and what I assume would be the quarterfinals will be dropping on Tuesday, local time, and we’ll be back in the grind all over again. There’s still time to fix it, since the nature of the beast also allows the WWE to be reactive—which they have been before.

The other big issue is that in the company’s attempt to book compelling first-round matches in each episode, a lot of deserving talent have gone out the window. We got a taste of this in the Cruiserweight Classic when former teammates Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa were pitted against each other in what was easily the best match of that round, as well as some other decent matchups.

I understand the need for good action to hook in viewers who might be reluctant to embrace the competitors, but too many of these end up creating a weaker long-term bracket just to shore up the first-round. Women like Santana Garrett, Tessa Blanchard, Sarah Logan, Jazzy Gabert, Kavita Devi, and a few more could’ve helped diversify the second round. I suppose it actually speaks to how much untapped talent there is in women’s wrestling around the world, and I can only hope they justify their decisions here.

Matches you really need to catch: Kairi Sane vs. Tessa Blanchard, Mia Yim vs. Sarah Logan, Piper Niven vs. Santana Garrett, Jazzy Gabert vs. Abbey Laith.

A quick word about Roman Reigns and John Cena

The biggest talking point of this week’s WWE programming is this particular segment between Roman Reigns and John Cena, in which they traded words about each other leading up to their first encounter at the No Mercy PPV. Their insults comprised of their real-life internet reputations—Reigns accused Cena of hogging the spotlight and holding younger talent down, while Cena took aim at Reigns’s lack of talking skills.

Many are crowning this as a long-awaited victory just because of the self-awareness involved in the segment. They’re finally acknowledging that Reigns is limited on the microphone! Cena has brushed off his own bad rep over the past few years, considering a who’s who of people who were able to get past him—like Daniel Bryan, Shinsuke Nakamura, and AJ Styles—so this is truly more on Reigns, who has so much pressure on him being the next big name of his generation.

The idea of this segment is great, even if it’s a little silly that WWE’s self-awareness could ever be a touchpoint of a feud in a sport that’s still trying to push some level of (fake) competition, and suspension of disbelief toward that. The problem is that in completely scripting what should have been an explosive segment on its own led to mishaps such as Reigns forgetting one of his lines, which does not bode well for him as the next big thing. Sure, it does present an obstacle for him to overcome out there, but you want to make both men look as good as they can here. Hopefully they can learn from it and just give them talking points next time.

The other thing is that while the idea of self-awareness is wonderful, especially in a WWE under a Vince McMahon who mostly refuses to listen to what his crowds want (which is how we got here in the first place), it’s not a win yet until this self-awareness translates to change. You know Reigns can’t talk? Great, maybe that means you’ll stop scripting his every word and stop acting like everyone in the arena absolutely loves him. 

It’s entirely possible that this self-awareness could just be the WWE’s way of co-opting the crowd’s criticism and not really do anything about it, simply because they’ve already acknowledged it. If Taylor Swift can acknowledge every criticism lobbed at her and still refuse to change, all the more WWE won’t need to. It’s the last bastion of trust the fans have, and they’ll need to tread correctly here to stop them from finally moving on.

*****

Do you listen to podcasts? Would you want to listen to a local podcast about pro wrestling? If the answers to those questions – especially that last one – are yes, then you should check out the cleverly-named Smark Gilas-Pilipinas Podcast, featuring PWR General Manager Stan Sy, wrestling writer and Wrestling God Romeo Moran, and all-around multimedia person and former voice of PWR Raf Camus! This week, PWR superstars Trian dela Torre, Evan Carleaux, and Officer “Kap” Tutan join the podcast to talk about the #FindTDTBeforeAPCC storyline! Listen to it here!