Mike Looks Back – The WWE European Title – Part Nine: Surviving Armageddon

Welcome once again to Mike Looks Back!

When we left things last week; Davey Boy Smith had just snared his second European Title reign thanks to the help of his new lackeys The Mean Street Posse. Smith had returned to the WWF in the autumn of 1999 with a reasonable amount of fanfare and had found himself mixing it up in the ring with big hitters like Triple H, The Rock and Kane. However, Bulldog had quickly slipped down the pecking order due to a combination of poor interviews, ebbing star power, a body that was failing him and some deep rooted personal issues. Rather than just move Bulldog off the board entirely though the WWF decided to try and give Smith a boost with a European Title win. However, Smith had fallen so much by that point that his claiming of the belt felt less like a coronation and more like a consolation prize.

Once Smith won the belt he didn’t go on an especially thrilling run as champion either. The Bulldog did defend the belt somewhat regularly during his 7 week reign, with him racking up roughly one defence a week. All of Bulldog’s Title defences happened on episodes of SmackDown, so the belt was at least being defended on one of the two main television shows. This was a mild upgrade when compared to the reign of D’Lo Brown prior to Bulldog, where Brown had sometimes been relegated to defending the belt on the less prestigious Sunday Night HeAT broadcasts. However, in typical Attitude Era style, most of Smith’s Title defences saw short run times with cheap non-finishes being the order of the day.

Indeed, Smith scored just one solitary televised pin-fall victory during his second reign as European kingpin, with him managing to eke out a victory over The Godfather following a gruelling 2 minute battle on the 18th of November 1999 episode of SmackDown. All of Smith’s other defences saw The Bulldog fall to defeat via disqualification. This meant that though Smith was able to come away from battles with the likes of Edge, Christian, Val Venis and Brown with his reign still intact, he ended up taking the loser’s purse in the process. Granted, Smith was a Heel and villains often find nefarious ways in order to keep belts around their waist. The Honky Tonk Man famously rarely pinned anyone during his, for the time, record setting Intercontinental Title run, and he was hugely successful in the role, especially at the box office.

Following his failed attempt at a top of the card push though, it probably would have made more sense to let Smith get some pins during his second stint as the European Champ, especially as he had backup from lackeys Pete Gas, Joey Abs and Rodney. It probably wouldn’t have hurt someone like Edge to fall in a match to The Bulldog after a litany of interference from Smith’s sweater-vest wearing buddies for instance. Edge was more of a tag wrestler at the time and it taking the combined forces of four men to upend him wasn’t going to tarnish his standing in the eyes of the fans, whilst it would give Smith a valuable pin-fall victory that would show he actually had some right to hold the belt in the first place.

Though Smith didn’t defend his European belt at the Survivor Series event in November 1999, he did take part in a 4 Vs 4 Elimination Survivor Series bout. This saw The Bulldog teaming up with his Greenwich chums to take on Val Venis, Mark Henry, Steve Blackman and Gangrel. In many ways it was an unremarkable contest, although it did at least allow Smith to eliminate two members of the other team in Blackman and Gangrel, before falling to Val Venis at the end. By pinning the European Champ on a pay per view event, Venis arguably put himself into the Title picture and the WWF followed up on that plot point. Now not only did Smith have to worry about former Champ D’Lo Brown chasing him down, he also had to worry about Val Venis coming…after his belt.

Venis had previously wrestled in places like Puerto Rico and Japan, where he’d liberally “borrowed” moves from the likes of Kenta Kobashi, Toshiaki Kawada and Jun Akiyama upon his return to the states, such as Kobashi’s running Kitchen Sink, Kawada’s Stretch Plum hold and Akiyama’s Blue Thunder Driver. This meant that Venis had a selection of moves that made him fun to play as on games like WrestleMania 2000 for the N64 at least. Venis had entered the WWF in the spring of 1998, playing the role of an Adult Film Star that appeared in flicks such as Shaving Ryan’s Privates and Soldier of Love. It was a risqué character that fit perfectly into the Attitude Era, and Venis was comfortable portraying it despite being extraordinarily right wing in real-life.

Venis’ feuds often revolved around him getting all up in the business of women who were close to his opponents. His first major feud in the WWF was with Kai-En-Tai, which came about due to Venis having a romantic relationship with Wally Yamaguchi’s on-screen wife. This led to Yamaguchi-San famously trying to “choppy choppy” Val’s “pee-pee” on an episode of Raw, a task which thankfully went awry due to temporary shrinkage on Val’s part (don’t look at me, I didn’t write the storyline). Once that feud was over, Venis moved onto a feud with Goldust that came about after a steamy affair between Venis and Goldust’s ex-wife Terri Runnels. Venis then decided that coaxing Ken Shamrock’s sister, Ryan, into the shower was a good idea, leading to the expected violent reaction from The World’s Most Dangerous Man.

Venis enjoyed enough success as a womanising sleaze bag that he was able to win the Intercontinental Title briefly and he remained a solid fixture in the mid-card. Mechanically sound in the ring, if a bit dull and rest hold reliant sometimes, Venis was always someone you could throw in a European Title match or feud now and then. Indeed, he’d previously wrestled for the belt at SummerSlam 1998 against D’Lo Brown and it had been a decent showcase for both of the young wrestlers at the time. Since that night at Madison Square Garden, neither Brown nor Venis had broken out quite as much as the decisions makers at the time would have hoped, and the European Title’s prestige had taken a bit of a dent due to reigns of non-wrestlers and the belt just getting handed to new champions twice.

With Venis now in the mix and Brown trying to regain the belt, a Triple Threat bout was booked for Armageddon 1999 in December, with the winner closing out the decade, and century, as the Monarch of Europe. The resulting bout between Venis, Brown and Smith was pretty underwhelming, perhaps suitably so given The Bulldog’s overall whimper of a reign. What perhaps made things even worse is that fans were subjected to the hackneyed finish of one wrestler having the bout won, only to have the third one quickly sneak in and steal the win for themselves. The first time such a finish happened it was actually a fun little twist. However, wrestling companies have run said finish into the ground so much that it’s almost the finish you expect in a multi-person bout and it’s actually a pleasant surprise when they go with something else.

However, when all was said and done, Val Venis was sitting atop the European Title mountain. It would be hard to argue that the change was little more than a lateral move. Venis was certainly in better physical shape than Smith and was arguably a more forward-thinking choice as champion due to being younger with arguably more of an upside on the broken Bulldog. Smith ended up doing very little whilst holding the Euro belt and did very little after losing it too. Smith ended up going into rehab in 2000 and had left the WWF by the end of that year. Sadly there would be no fairy tale ending where The Bulldog would get his health and personal life in order leading to one last run in the big time. Davey Boy Smith died in the spring of 2002, yet another wrestler taken before his time.

Smith’s underwhelming run from 1999-2000 is not how most fans like to remember him. Instead they think back to his time as one half of The British Bulldogs or his battles with Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels and Vader in the 1990s, where he entered strong performances and wowed crowds with his unique combination of speed, agility and strength. The Bulldog’s second European Title reign ultimately feels less like a comeback and more like one of the final chapters in a very sad decline. Smith’s 7 weeks with the European belt at the end of 1999 are ultimately best forgotten, as was most of 1999 for the belt in general. Outside of some good efforts from the likes of X-Pac and Brown, the European Title arguably went backwards during the year. It was up to Val Venis to try and rebuild the belts bruised legacy, although he would soon have an Olympic Hero to contend with. However, we’ll cover that next week when Mike Looks Back.