Anatomy of a Disaster: Rob Van Dam & Booker T vs. The Dudley Boyz

ANATOMY OF A DISASTER: ROB VAN DAM & BOOKER T vs. THE DUDLEY BOYZ:
-Welcome back to another Anatomy of a Disaster! This one was inspired by me looking back at my HHH vs. Steiner column after Alex P wrote his own review of that match and linked to mine. I found an old comment that I remember, suggesting Booker T & Rob Van Dam vs. The Dudley Boyz from a 2004 RAW! For whatever reason, I never got around to doing it (despite them offering a link)- probably forgetting they’d linked it so I looked into the wind and was like “wait, which one?” after writing it down. This match isn’t really famous or infamous or anything, but Tommy Hall gave it a “D”. I’ve never found anything about the match’s backstory, but it’s been suggested that they were told to fill 20 minutes of TV time with short notice. I’ve never heard that story, but let’s check it out!

THE STAGE: WWE RAW (March 15th 2004)

THE PERFORMERS:
Rob Van Dam: RVD was by this point a failed HHH opponent and had moved back to the “IC Title Tier”, and the month before had won the RAW Tag Titles with Booker T. He was by this point a long-time star and actually hadn’t quite gotten his biggest push as Cena’s opponent (which would itself be kiboshed).

Booker T: Another failed HHH opponent who’d tumbled down the card and was now slumming it in a makeshift tag team.

The Dudley Boyz: Bubba Ray & D-Von had a weird run- Bubba had joined ECW as “Buh-Buy Ray”, a stuttering idiot, and D-Von had beaten some sense into them. This turned the Dudleyz from a comedy jobber stable into a serious team, as Buh-Buh lost the stutter and became a vicious heel, making the most of ECW’s lack of censorship. They’d become big ECW stars, then would redo the gimmick in the WWF, Vince McMahon reportedly loving the stutter (because of course he did), and the same thing kinda happened- they became a serious team, this time mostly as babyfaces doing crowd-pleasing spots with tables, but sometimes as vicious, woman-beating heels like in ECW. By this point, however, the bloom was off the rose- neither was ever a great talent on their own, but had some chemistry and were booked VERY well… but now they had been split up to be stars on separate shows, both failing pretty badly (Bubba had some energy as a Dusty Rhodes-like brawling midcarder, but was crushed by the HHH Vortex like all the others and de-pushed), so now this was a “well THAT didn’t work” going back to what had worked before, and everyone knew it. Like… fans are AWARE when someone fails and just falls back to their old gimmick in an attempt at recapturing that. It never works.

WWF WORLD TAG TEAM TITLES:
ROB VAN DAM & BOOKER T vs. THE DUDLEY BOYZ (Bubba Ray & D-Von Dudley):
* The Dudleyz not only have a positively hideous theme (“Giddup! Giddup! Giddup! Drop the bombshell!”) but an awful color scheme, Bubba now where very short yellow & black camo shorts to match D-Von’s cago pants. Booker’s in black trunks & RVD’s in yellow & black (matching the Duldeyz, which should be a major faux pas). And speaking of hideodious themes, the Tag Champs have a theme combining their music together, but Booker’s is just an endless rap beat of “Can you DIG IT?” with “One of a kind!” shouted at random.

Booker & Bubba immediately do a time-killing “repeated lcokup” and OH GOD- a Booker leapfrog during an International leads to Bubba just running into him and they have to improvise a spinebuster! They fucked up an INTERNATIONAL thirty seconds in! Bubba immediately covers (to apologize I bet haha) and instead of glossing it over Jim Ross tries to figure out what they were trying. Booker back elbows D-Von and they work him over in a very time-killing fashion that’s rather uncoordinated. RVD pulls D-Von down with a bodyscissor pin but gets clotheselined, then Booker & Bubba slug it out. Man, nobody here has any idea where they need to GO- they’re just wandering all over the ring. Case in point, Bubba does a weaksauce shoulder-ram into the corner and after RVD’s blind-tagged in, he appears to TOTALLY forget the next move, appearing surprised when he clotheslines Booker T- his stance was all wrong (he just stands stock-still and leans forward with his arm up high) and he probably thought he was supposed to miss. Then he looks at RVD and THEN goes for the pin, of course getting stomped. A few fans chant “You fucked up!”, having realized what happened there. Lawler fills airtime by talking about the upcoming draft- “How would Bubba Ray fare as a singles wrestler, if he & D-Von split up” and JR just cuts him down with “well they TRIED that”. It’s wild seeing an Attitude Era-looking match do all this aimless shit given how fast the 1998-2002 matches were.

So RVD messes about with splashes and kicks for two-counts, and Booker & Bubba fight over a vertical suplex and Bubba spears him after the double-down, doing another one where it looks like he’s taking a nap on Booker’s leg. Bubba just makes the tag and D-Von works over Booker with an elbow & blind neckbreaker for two. A corner-ship & charge get two- RVD breaking it up as the babyface champs are resorting to working heel. Booker does his kick set-up for the scissor kick but runs right into 3D… for almost ZERO POP, as the crowd is dead. Yikes. RVD breaks up the pin, spinkicks Bubba, and does the “caught foot” spinkick to D-Von, runs to the corner for the tag, then runs all the way back over for the two-count. Desperately trying to make something out of this, he leaps to the second rope and takes a GREAT bump off a D-Von neckbreaker leading to the break. We’re back with RVD hitting a roundhouse kick and still selling the neck, but the fans are so dead you can just hear Bubba squawking on the apron. Booker’s still dead on the floor from 3D so Bubba gets cocky and starts showboating, openly calling RVD a “muthafuckah!” plain as day, taunting him and showing him how hurt Booker is. He punches Booker T to put him down AGAIN, then casually fights back from a comeback and hiptosses RVD with a strange cradle that turns it into a big impact move.

Bubba is so done he just starts doing Vader crossfaces and a NERVE HOLD, then tags out to D-Von for a chinlock that Booker tries to turn into a hope spot from the apron. Except they wait for that to calm down and THEN RVD pumps his fist for the comeback, getting bowled over again. The Dudleyz do a false tag to heel it up, but the ref treats it like a babyface spot and tries to push Bubba out of the ring. D-Von throws a huge amount of punches, Bubba hits a neckbreaker as this is just DRAGGING. So much that Bubba just sits on him for the lazy version of the camel clutch until RVD finally fights out… and gets clotheslined down again. Bubba just kicks around RVD like “lol you suck” until Rob catches him with a turning kick and FINALLY tags Booker, who manages a weird overhand forearm and clothesline, backdrops D-Von and does the Harlem Side Kick, then catches Bubba with the “arm caught” version. D-Von runs into the Manadatory 2004 Spinebuster and Booker does the Spinaroonie, which draws the best reaction so far (pathetically quiet by old standards). A side kick to Bubba sets up the Scissor Kick/Five-Star Frog Splash combo, but D-Von stops the pin. RVD flings himself & D-Von over the top with a rana and the other two slug it out until Booker, THANK CHRIST, avoids the Bubba Bomb and counters a whip with the Book End (rock bottom) for three at (15:04 of 18:11 shown). EIGHTEEN MINUTES for this shit.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFFFF this was just a total mess. Like they botched a move straight away and either had the yips for the entire rest of it, or went out there with no plan and just did “random moves” for 15 minutes, aimlessly countering stuff. No heat sequences, babyface alignments screwed up, nobody ever knowing where in the ring they were supposed to be, and more. Bubba looked TERRIBLE out here, fucking up everything he tried and making poor D-Von have to fling himself around like crazy because he DEFINITELY realized something was up. The legnth ends up being the worst defining factor though, as they stop botching about 5 minutes in but just KEEP GOING, and the Dudleyz, who have horrible offense, are made to fill like ten minutes of match-time with their own shit, which is almost all back elbows, punching and neckbreakers. They even hit their FINISHER with ten minutes to go, meaning they had nothing to look forward to in the match!

Also like… the Dudley Boyz are known for one thing in matches: Tables! WHERE ARE THE TABLES?! Why would they wrestle this long, arduous TV match, hit their finisher too early, then fuck around for ten more minutes without a plan to bring tables into it? They didn’t even do their Whazzup Drop, either. Was it because these were babyface spots and they wanted to “work heel”? Because they didn’t even work heel correctly! Like they behaved dishonestly and showboated too much, but it was hardly a smorgasbord of dishonesty if they were going for that.

I think I realized a major issue with this match, though- it’s babyface vs. babyface but they don’t want the Dudleyz turning heel, nor getting TOO MUCH of a babyface pop. So they don’t use tables, don’t use the Whazzup Drop, and don’t do any of the babyface stuff that draws good reactions. So they just use some mild dishonesty and taunting, so what we’re left with is… Devon Hughes and Mark Lamonica… doing regular wrestling. Trying to get by on their fundamentals and their holds. Which just exposes them both as sub-average guys who lucked out into the only era they ever could have thrived in, where being a good wrestler was incredibly tertiary.

The funny thing is the last 5 isn’t nearly as bad- it’s just insanely boring. But they worked the botches out of their system and just do a standard lazy-ass “Babyface Formula” match, excep the Dudleyz aren’t heels, don’t cheat, and have no real variation in offense so it’s dreadful for non-botch reasons. Booker’s one of the better hot tag guys you’ll find, but even that was barely drawing a reaction after 14 minutes of garbage. At least he just won cleanly. The funniest part of all this was seeing RVD & D-Von seem to realize this match was sucking and so they just started pulling out all the stops to try and save it, haha.

Rating: 1/2* (absolutely awful, dreary match with early botching, a boring heat segment and more- only some Booker & RVD stuff saved it)

The Fallout: The fallout from this was HUGE. The Wrestling Gods were so offended by Bubba’s performance here that they cursed him to move to TNA for his biggest-ever push, which would be in an angle so infamously bad that it would stick to him forever and result in him being clowned for decades by wrestling fans. … what? I bet that’s totally how it went down! You can’t prove that DIDN’T happen!

But uh yeah, everyone just moved on with their lives and the dreary-ass WWE run that killed my fandom for years continued on. The Dudley Boyz in fact got drafted to SmackDown! next week, ending their run there after another Tag Title set. In fact, all four guys would move over there, the champs splitting up this team after they jobbed the tag belts to Ric Flair & Batista. RVD mostly messes around for the year, but Booker gets turned into the US Champion in the summer and transitions the belt to John Cena after a Best of 5 Series. He would spend the next few years as an Upper-Midcarder feuding with top guys but usually losing, even after becoming King Booker, go through heel turns, etc.

Mitigating Factors: uh, well it’s like 18 minutes long. The amount of guys who can easily fill that time on TV are few, especially at this point (WWE was JUST coming out of the AE “every TV segment is 5 minutes long” era and nobody had experience at drawing things out yet). And it does legitimately look like they have no real gameplan or at least huge gaps in what they were supposed to be doing. The lack of crowd reaction was probably messing with them, too, though that’s their own fault for having such a terrible match. IF the match was short notice, that would explain a lot. But TV wrestling kind of needs a “template” if you’re gonna try to fill this much time (AEW currently uses one for most big “AEW Banger” matches where guys hit apron moves about 3 minutes before the finish, do some false finishes, a Shocked Kickout Face, then the winner scores two big moves in a row for the win). These guys clearly had no template and went from an Uncoordinated Fuckup Fest into a Standard Territory Tag Match in the end.

But REALLY, four professional wrestlers with this level of experience between them should be able to wrestle a better match than THIS. If anything, this really exposes the Dudley Boyz for what they are- a pair of lucky garbage brawlers that got their finisher protected and made the most of their charisma and catchphrases, because without any of that, they were hopeless and even guys as good as Booker & RVD couldn’t help them.

Overall: As this was the last RAW before the Draft put all four guys on SmackDown!, this was an obvious forgotten bout that never mattered- the Dudleyz got belts on SD! and the tag champs jobbed next week, were split up, and did separate upper-midcard feuds for ages.