Hi, hello & welcome to News From Cook’s Corner! Last week was kind of weird for me. I had more time to write than usual, yet I got less done than usual. Life is strange like that sometimes. I’m hoping that since I have less time this week, I can get more done. Seems to make sense.

Speaking of getting things done, let’s hit the news! WWE had a show last night.

What happened in the Chamber?

I actually watched this one after getting home from work! You guys know that’s  a rarity at this point.

Daniel Bryan won the SmackDown Men’s Elimination Chamber

This match showcased one of the main ways my fandom has changed over the years. Back in the day, I would have been outraged that Daniel Bryan & Cesaro had to start the match, as it lessened the chances of one of them winning. Now, I’m like “Cool, they get to carry most of the match, so it’ll be good”. Also, the first people in these matches tend to do very well. Bryan outlasted everybody, but tweaked his left knee while delivering a flying right knee off the turnbuckle on the padding. It was a main story of the match, but didn’t help him much afterward.

Roman Reigns made short work of Daniel Bryan

Rough break for Reigns’ challenger to not even get some time between matches, but that’s how Roman does things. Edge speared him afterwards, pointed at the WrestleMania sign and set off some pyro. Guess that makes it official!

Bad Bunny slapping Miz around was entertaining enough.

Riddle beat Bobby Lashley & John Morrison for the US Championship

I seem to remember somebody calling Riddle winning here since he’d done little else but get beat up by Lashley for weeks at a time. I wonder who that was? Morrison won a 4-way on the Kickoff Show to get in this match, but he has no excuse because he had an hour more prep time than Daniel Bryan got for his second match.

Nia Jax & Shayna Baszler defended the Women’s Tag Team Championship against Sasha Banks & Bianca Belair

We didn’t get Asuka defending the Raw Women’s Championship against anybody, but we did get this match, featuring Reginald wandering down to the ring with some champagne and distracting Sasha. One wouldn’t think that Banks would be so easily distracted, but here we are. Not a bad match, not great, kinda there.

MVP gave Miz some advice!

Drew McIntyre retained the WWE Championship in the Elimination Chamber

The announcers made a big deal of Randy Orton having history with everybody in this match, which makes me wonder if there’s somebody that’s been on the roster over the past several years that doesn’t have history with Randy Orton. Pretty solid match, quickly forgotten after…

The Miz cashed in his briefcase & won the WWE Championship

Somewhere, #AngryMizGirl pouts again. #WWEChamber @mikethemiz pic.twitter.com/0BOPl8pcpR

— WWE Universe (@WWEUniverse) February 22, 2021

With some help from Bobby Lashley! Lashley beat the crap out of McIntyre, who had just been through an Elimination Chamber. Not much of a chance there. I know some of you might be looking to blame me for all this, but I don’t tell WWE which of my ideas to use. There are plenty of great ideas I have that don’t involve Miz as WWE Champion that they don’t use. Should I mention my idea of having Bad Bunny beat Miz for the title here or not? Nah, I think it’s more likely Lashley gets involved.

Here’s the thing: If Miz as WWE Champion heading into WrestleMania is an every ten year thing, he’ll only be fifty years old the next time around. So we definitely can’t rule it out!

Show was just kinda there, to be honest. Not worth going out of your way to see unless you’re an Elimination Chamber or WWE Championship title change completionist.

Old Guys Are Big In Japan Too

We here on the Interweb have been giving WWE a lot of guff lately for pushing older wrestlers on top, middle & bottom of their cards. 54 year old Bill Goldberg & 47 year old Edge as top championship contenders…little did we know that’d pale in comparison to what other wrestling companies could offer!

Name value is a very important thing in pro wrestling, not just here in the United States, but all over the world. Pro Wrestling NOAH is looking to expand globally. It’s been a rocky road for the promotion since the death of its founder Mitsuharu Misawa. It’s been sold to various companies, and is now under the umbrella of a company called CyberAgent, along with DDT Pro-Wrestling & Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling. There’s big plans for the group to go global, run domes and become the biggest thing in Japan.

In order to do that, they need stars. And there isn’t a much bigger star in Japan, globally, than Keiji Muto. People still fondly remember the Great Muta from his WCW days, not to mention his time with pretty much every group in Japan. The man has an incredible staying power with his fan base.

NOAH is looking to use that to their advantage. Muto defeated Go Shiozaki for the GHC Championship last week, completing his goal of holding the major championship of each of Japan’s three biggest promotions. Apparently the match went near 30 minutes too, and Muto held up his end of things. Didn’t do much, but what he did worked.

Keiji Mutoh signing a two year contract with Pro Wrestling Noah today. pic.twitter.com/1pKAeA8bzw

— Pro-Wrestling Noah Eng (Hisame, 冰雨) (@Hi5ame) February 15, 2021

See? No reason to dump on WWE for pushing the old guys. Its been proven as a good way to get attention, which NOAH needs. The show drew a pretty good house too, given the Covid limitations. There’s an audience out there for Old Man Muta.

Doesn’t seem like my cup of tea, but at this point I can’t knock them for trying. One could point out I’ve gone softer on the idea of pushing old folks as I’ve gotten older, but that’s more self-reflection than I care to do right now.

In case you were wondering, Lou Thesz holds the record for oldest heavyweight champion of a major wrestling promotion, as he was 62 when he held the UWA championship in Mexico. I expect this record to fall some time in the not so distant future. At least in 11 years or so, as Triple H is currently 51.

Kyle O’Reilly worked people into a shoot

Some interesting doings at the end of last week’s NXT got a lot of people on the Internet worried. Adam Cole is being Adam Cole again, a bit of a dickhead, and he’s reestablishing this personality trait by beating up his buddy, Kyle O’Reilly. Cole delivered a brainbuster to O’Reilly on the ring steps, which back in my day would have resulted in somebody riding out on a stretcher.

Come to think of it, that’s what happened here too. O’Reilly rode off on a stretcher afterwards. It probably wouldn’t have drawn much more attention than usual goings on at the end of an NXT show…except that some fans there really freaked out.

Apparently Kyle selling with a seizure a la D-Von Dudley back in the day made them worried. Which made online fans worried. I saw more people complaining about posted pictures of O’Reilly being carried out than I saw actual pictures. Which is funny…because the whole thing was storyline. NXT wrestlers playing into it were either in on it or being worked too.

Heck, Kyle probably would have appreciated more pictures & video of his selling being posted. The guy did a good job! I’m sure he appreciated the positive thoughts though, as it’s nice to know that the fans care.

I was impressed that the angle made that kind of impression on people. We’ll see if it leads to anything down the road.

Update on Sammy vs. Impact

We wrote a bit on the rumored issues surrounding Sammy Guevara’s aborted trip to Impact Wrestling last week. Since then, representatives of both sides have spoken to Internet journalists to give their take. Gotta love it when that happens! I might be a little more interested than you here since I’m a Sammy fan and dig a lot of what Impact does these days.

Dave Meltzer got the Impact side of things. Whoever the source was didn’t think much of the idea, pointing out that Sammy shouldn’t have liked the idea, which came from Chris Jericho & Don Callis. Sammy apparently suggested alternate ideas, including his winning the X Division Championship. Allegedly, this didn’t include Sammy dropping the title, as he’d return to AEW with the title and Impact would have a tournament to crown a new champion. Whatever the plan was apparently involved Sammy winning three matches.

Bryan Alvarez got the response to the Dave report from a source friendly to Sammy, who claims that Sammy never suggested winning the X title and not dropping it. Apparently, a large source of Sammy’s issue with the creative concerned the fact he was doing a bunch of tag team matches after leaving the Inner Circle to go out on his own. Going somewhere else to just do more tag team matches didn’t seem to make much sense.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and apparently things between AEW & Impact are fine for now. We shall see. It’s not like Impact has a whole lot of leverage, and their main hope here is that they can be the middlemen between AEW & New Japan. Gonna be interesting to keep an eye on for sure.

Buddy & Alliyah Dropped

Remember when everybody was complaining about the angle featuring Rey Mysterio’s daughter Alliyah having feelings for Murphy? Everybody got their wish, as the story has been dropped with no hint of an explanation. I mean, relationships end all the time and they don’t always need to be played out in public. Maybe Alliyah needed to go back to school. Nevertheless, this doesn’t strike me as a good sign for the career of one Buddrick W. Murphy.

Murphy was off of TV until he was part of the nameless mob walking out on a Seth Rollins speech. Poor guy, there was a time where Murphy would have been the subject of such a speech! Now he’s back to being the Best Kept Secret in WWE, which isn’t the worst role but doesn’t seem like it would pay much.

We can only hope that the next time WWE gets around to giving Murphy something to do on TV, it’ll be something that the Internet approves of. Its the only chance he has, obviously.

Big Week for Bo Dallas News

Y’all, I haven’t even thought about Bo Dallas since whenever he last appeared on television. Which, according to the Internet Wrestling Database, is September 2019. So it’s been awhile. Anyway, Bo’s name came up this week during an interview Sami Zayn did with Sportskeeda. Zayn mentioned how Dallas is one of the most talented people WWE has that isn’t even being used at all.

Some people might have felt tempted to feel sorry for Bo not even getting invited to catering during the pandemic…until they found out via the Wrestling Observer that he’s living on a farm with Liv Morgan. Hmm, let’s see. Go to TV and get beat up all the time, or sit at home, study some real estate and wait for Liv to get home?

Sounds like Bo’s made the best of the pandemic to me.

Bow Wow training with Rikishi

As we all know, the combination of music with pro wrestling has proven to be a success here in 2021. Many of you just saw WWE’s 24/7 Champion doing a musical performance on Saturday Night Live. While it feels like we’ve been talking about the decline of SNL since at least the 2000s, it’s still a pretty big deal.

Bow Wow is looking to follow in Bad Bunny’s footsteps. Well, he wouldn’t say that, but that’s pretty much what’s happening here. Mr. Wow is currently training with Rikishi’s school and making some noise about working for WWE. Which, honestly, would be a good career move for him. He “retired” from rapping some years back and was most recently seen on The Masked Singer. Pretty big show, I’m told.

Personally, I have zero desire to see more singers get involved with pro wrestling. But that’s me. There’s obviously an audience for it, and WWE will milk as much out of it as they can. So don’t be shocked if you see Bunny vs. Wow headlining WrestleMania in the future.

I kinda wanna see it happen because I’ll be able to get some jokes out of Bunny vs. Wow for whatever Greg’s calling his site at that point. Hopefully it’s still The Chairshot, I love the brand name!

That’s all we have time for this week! Thanks for reading, and keep your stick on the ice.