The Pride is (Ry)Back!

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: “Crazy Randy Orton” is somewhere between “Angry Mark Henry” and “Anti-American Bret Hart” in terms of “best version of an already great performer.” Oddly, at least since we don’t think about him in terms like this very often, but a lot of that has to do with just how big he is.

While we, as fans, fundamentally understand that Randy Orton is not a small person, we have a tendency to ignore the fact that he’s significantly bigger than nearly every “normal” sized performer on the roster. He — and this is a comparison that’s been made before, but is still apt — makes you forget that he’s essentially the same size as someone like Luke Gallows and Lance Cade/Trevor Murdoch in the same way that LeBron James  makes you forget that he’s essentially the same size as David West. So, when he goes after someone like Seth Rollins — who is somewhere in the Chris Paul zone — and goes through large men he towers over like HHH, it genuinely feels like something bad might happen.

Seth Rollins is filling his role as “skinny Triple H” almost perfectly, but the job that Joey Mercury and Jamie Noble are doing as the new stooges is a truly thing of beauty. They’ve done the Lord’s work every time they’ve appeared on television and, because they are “just old enough to be retired from active competition” and not “just old enough to be in a home”, they can do a lot more in the ring than Brisco and Patterson. That’s not to say they’ll be able to surpass what the original Stooges did — the first Stooges-Mean Street Posse match on Raw was one of the highest rated in the history of the show —  but it’s still nice to see.

Good God, Seth. Be careful selling like that, or you’ll end up in a match later tonight with Kane.

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