February has never exactly been the most celebratory time of the year. Other months have Christmas or Thanksgiving but Valentine's Day is an occasion a lot of us don't even want to remember. The football playoffs are over but the baseball season hasn't started yet. The awards showcase movies are leaving theaters but the blockbusters won't be here for months. Really, February just amounts to 28 more days of cold without a whole lot worth blowing a kazoo over. Given the season it's no big surprise that WWE's February tradition, No Way Out, has never ranked highly among most fans‘ lists of the pay-per-views they look forward to. No Way Out is typically a forty dollar commercial for Wrestlemania, less eventful than the episodes of RAW and Smackdown that came before it. So when the World Heavyweight Champion lost the title about five minutes into the opening match I thought there had been a mistake.

I was sitting in the ninth row of the Key Arena, my elbow hanging out into the entrance ramp. Fans were still taking their seats, buying beer and running through their cell phone directory looking for people to blast with crowd noise. I was still excited
about the fact that I'd gotten to touch The Undertaker's coat when the ring handlers were taking it back to the dressing room. It's fuzzy, by the way, and thick. I think it would be uncomfortably warm. Jeff Hardy and Edge were working some basic chain wrestling and wrestling school mat take-downs in the ring. Then, without warning, Jeff Hardy rolled him up and got the pin.

Without being able to hear the live commentary, much like Vin Scully after Kirk Gibson's home run I did not believe what I had just seen. Maybe it had been a very close two count. Maybe Edge had gotten his feet onto the ropes at the last second. Maybe the referee was actually John Cena wearing a mask. But there was a trick. There had to be. World championships had almost never been defended in the opening match. That alone was unexpected. But for a world title to change hands that early, that casually, as though wrestling weren't scripted to ensure epic confrontations that lasted until just before the scheduled commercial break? Something akin to a Mike Tyson first round knock out? It couldn't happen.

Well, it almost couldn't happen. Being a viewer of eighteen years I do have an obsessive-compulsive need to point out that this has happened before, just not since Titanic was in production. At the inaugural SummerSlam in 1989 The Ultimate Warrior, brand new to the wrestling scene, ended The Honky Tonk Man's record setting Intercontinental Title streak in 31 seconds. At Wrestlemania IX in Las Vegas Hulk Hogan returned to the wrestling scene as a big surprise, knocking off newly crowned WWF champion Yokozuna in just 21 seconds. The latter moment is infamous among wrestling fans as one of the most unfortunate errors of creative judgment in wrestling history. Yokozuna may not be regarded as a founding father of the sport not to be trifled with but the knock has always been that asking a champion to lay down after mere seconds devalues the world title. In 1996 Bob Backlund lost the world title to Diesel in eight seconds during an non-televised local show at Madison Square Garden. That was thirteen years ago. This stuff doesn't happen every day. A child born around the last time this happened would be in the eighth grade right now.

Normally I would agree that it's a terrible idea for the world championship to change hands in a moment of comedy, worst of all when Edge, one of the best workers of his generation, is the butt of the joke. This was different. This was a statement. "You're welcome to tune in late if you want but I wouldn't recommend it." The crowd in the arena was excited but the reaction was muted as the fans at ringside frantically tried to explain to their dates why that was significant.

The creative team's master plan became clear, of course, when Edge opportunistically returned to steal a spot in the WWE Title match at the end of the evening. Rather than simply have Edge retain the belt, WWE Creative cleverly allowed both world championships to change hands in a single night, keeping the audience guessing and creating a cutely symmetrical story within the No Way Out show itself. Edge gets gold, Edge loses gold, Edge gets gold back. No doubt Creative's motives are also practical. Allowing Smackdown wrestlers to hold both world championships at once confuses the RAW and Smackdown brands and effectively combines the casts for several weeks, allowing for new creative possibilities heading into Wrestlemania.

What also came to surprise me about No Way Out, though, was the extent to which it closed up old storylines, leaving wrestler's with their dance cards clear. The strained business arrangement between Shawn Michaels and John Bradshaw Layfield - which had been built over several months as one of the top storylines heading into Wrestlemania - wrapped up early. With Michaels riding off into the sunset with his wife both Michaels and Bradshaw are now available for new rivalries without much time left to build them. Michaels will likely feud with The Undertaker in an intriguing clash of The Undertaker's 16-0 Wrestlemania winning streak and Michaels' reputation as ‘Mister Wrestlemania himself.' Ever since a rumor of that pairing was leaked onto the Internet several months ago fans at sites like Wrestling News World have perpetually kept the speculation going, even when it looked like there was no basis for hope. That's clearly going to be one of the top matches driving pay-per-view buys this year. Bradshaw will likely have to settle for a spot in this year's Money in the Bank ladder match, adding some brute power to what's typically a contest between daredevils. Someone has to fire John Morrison into the third row.

Jack Swagger wrapped up his feud with Finley and accidentally planted doubts as to his long term prospects for success. The crowd was so unresponsive to Swagger's, well, swagger that you would have thought they'd settled down for nap time. The tall, heavyset fraternity brothers who had been standing for well over an hour and blocking my view finally sat down. It was that bad. Christian will likely go on to Wrestlemania to take the title from Swagger, giving the rookie a chance to perfect his routine before getting another opportunity under the big lights.

With Wrestlemania 25 only 47 days away the surprising writing strategy for No Way Out seemed to be addition by subtraction, canceling the company out of failing rivalries before they drag down the Super Bowl of Sports Entertainment, swapping wrestlers between brands and putting the belt on Triple H. In other words one of the least eventful pay-per-views of each year was, for once, surprising and gratifying because it was used not to continue a slow build to Wrestlemania but to kill a Wrestlemania that never was and leave rich soil for re-harvesting. It's not exactly what I would expect out of February but with the WWE beginning a promotion marketing wrestling as “The Best Value in Entertainment” the writers couldn't have picked a better time to give me more for my money than I was expecting.



Henry Jenkins, Buddy TV Staff Writer
(image courtesy of the WWE)