#WilliamRegalWeek: Difference of Opinion

It’s the Final Day of #WilliamRegalWeek, a celebration of all things Made in England and the third installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. We started with A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better, and given you the finer points of the Lord Steven oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. We marched through Hump Day with a GIF parade and  made our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true yesterday with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“ Now, we finish everything off with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a tea-fueled civil war.) 

Nick: I think we can both agree that William Regal is, well, great. Easily the best guy we’ve covered so far.

Dave: Oh, definitely. He has an actual, palpable legacy in the wrestling world.

Nick: He may have matched him crazy promo for crazy promo, but in the ring Ahmed was, uh, well Ahmed.  And while Cesaro has the potential to be at least at his level (if not a little better, which is crazy) in the ring, it’s hard to imagine that Antonio will ever be the character Lord Steven is.

Dave: Yeah. Character-wise, Regal has been better established and developed than almost any non-main event star ever.

Nick: Wasn’t he — when he was King of the WWE and GM of Raw — in the main event, though?

Dave: He was knocking on the door, but we’ll never know. I think he would have had a short run in the upper echelon, just to get knocked down by John Cena (or the like). The “turning off the lights” thing was very main event, though. Some of the Triple H COO stuff is reminiscent of that era

Nick: Are you surprised they aren’t using him as some sort of heel authority figure on Raw or even Smackdown?

Dave: Surprised? Not really. They already have at least five too many authority figures. I enjoy his work, so I wish we saw more of him on the big shows, but he’s still a huge contributor to what we will be seeing soon thanks to his role on NXT.

Nick: Is that going to be his legacy, ultimately? Training Punk and Bryan? You know, like how Killer Kowalski’s legacy is now in large part as Triple H’s trainer.

Dave: His legacy stands on its own two feet without bringing in other wrestlers, but people who actually care about the history of the wrestling business will remember him as a consummate contributor. To other guys’ pushes, to establishing the overall tone of shows, to grooming the future of the business. I’ve heard it said of the Greak Kabuki in World Class that he “set the table, but wasn’t there to eat.” I think the same of Regal.

Nick: I know it’s terrible, but let’s pretend for a second that the Hall of Fame was an objective thing, he’s in, right?

Dave: It’s almost too much of a leap for me to even get to a place where I can envision an objective wrestling Hall of Fame. But if we’re grading on match quality, contributions to historically important things, and “doing the right thing” consistently, he’s in.

Nick: But, with the Hall of Fame more of a “cool kids table” thing?

Dave: Well, it’s an odd collection of cool kids, the guys the cool kids looked up to, and guys who are valuable from a marketing/licensing point of view. So if Punk, Bryan, and that crew ever officially become “the cool kids,” Regal’s in by that standard too. If the cool kids are the people who push Ryback and Brock Lesnar and (ahem) Triple H, I don’t know.

Nick: When do you think we get the Ryback-Regal match where Regal makes him do mat wrestling?

Dave: They would just cut to commercial now, I’m sad to say. But if they were going to do some big worked-shoot mess where they tried to replicate that moment (God, I hope we’re not giving them ideas), it wouldn’t be a sixteenth as effective or important as it was with Goldberg.

Nick: Well, in terms of internet wrestling nerds, that’s one of the true “must see” matches

Dave: Rightly so. In an oxymoronical way, it’s the perfect example of how cooperative wrestling really is.

Nick: It metaphysically explains the line between “work” and “shoot”.

Dave: Those of us who aren’t trained will never understand how a match really works, but that match shows you how it doesn’t.

Nick: Though, on some level, it still does. It’s an enjoyable match.

Dave: Oh my gosh, it’s the best Goldberg match. By a lot. Regal has his fun, but he’s still the heel. He still ultimately sets up Goldberg to look good and go over strong. Which I think was part of his point. Let someone who knows what they’re doing do a real job. Don’t just have them get thrown around by a moron with no grasp on psychology.

Nick: Would Regal have worked during Hogan era WWF?

Dave: Yes. A thousand times yes. Can you imagine him as the third British Bulldog? He could have worked with Davey when Dynamite Kid was in Japan.

Nick: Or deteriorating.

Dave: Yeah. Post Wrestlemania II-bump Dynamite Kid. I think he would have been a huge part of that amazing tag team roster they had. And he could have easily been built up for his turn against Hogan.

Nick: Would he have Goldberg’d Hogan?

Dave: Naw. Hogan played ball in the ring. Hogan may have been a dangerous politician, but he treated people with a lot of respect once they were between the ropes. How many times do you remember seeing Hulk Hogan drop someone on their head?

Nick: Not many, but he was also a wrestler and not a terrible animal. Unless you hit your finisher. He’d no sell the shit out of that.

Dave: Or punch you in the face.

Nick:  Speaking of that — the finishers, not the punching — which was better: the Regal Stretch or the Knee Trembler

Dave: The Knee Trembler is more “it can come out of nowhere” main event, but the Regal Stretch is one of my all-time favorites. There’s nothing like a wrestler who the announcers portray as a hooker using a move that looks like a hook. If that’s not over with you, then you don’t actually like wrestling.

Nick: He is a “hooker” in the purest sense: everything he does seem real. That Dean Ambrose match in FCW is ridiculous.

Dave: I remember he main evented (I think) against Randy Orton on a UK edition of Raw, and it was just the most realistic-looking main event match I had seen in years. For me, though, that was almost a weakness in Regal. His in ring work made him look so uncomfortably more talented than the main eventers that they couldn’t book him anywhere near them. He was so good it held him back.

Nick: Is that a lesson that Bryan and Punk learned?

Dave: Definitely Bryan. Look at him now. Kick, kick, surfboard, headbutt, Yes Lock, Flying Knee…. Bryan definitely learned how not to be like Regal.

Nick: He seems to be more HBK than Regal in terms of pacing.

Dave: Oh yeah, he’s exciting. Regal is decidedly un-exciting. It’s part of the lost art of being a heel. “Punch-kick-hold on the mat” has a bad rap with internet smarks, but boy does it put the heat on the babyface.

Nick: How much longer do you think he has wrestling?

Dave: Wrestling as in working matches? I couldn’t say. I think he has one more angle putting over the right guy in him. But I think he’ll be a lifer in terms of contributing to wrestlng.

Dave: So, Nick. You’ve allowed me to wander through a largely tangential discussion of one of my all-time favorite wrestlers, so let me ask you: what does William Regal mean to post-Attitude Era WWE history? He’s been there playing largely the same character since 2000.

Nick: It’s hard to compare wrestling to other sports because it’s so cooperative but Regal is the “Mirror, Mirror” version of Mike D’Antoni. The non-goateed part of that equation, of course.

Dave: The guy that everybody loves until they don’t?

Nick: Well, more accurately, the guy who understood a specific part of the business better than anyone: for D’antoni’s it was offensive spacing and game flow. In Regal’s case, a very specific understanding of the level of realism that got people interested. They both missed out on the other half, though: Lord Steven didn’t realize that people only want a certain level of realism before the returns diminished. With D’antoni, he didn’t realize you have to play a certain amount of defense, like, during practice, for instance.

Dave: That’s a really good point. I’ll say this of Regal, though: if wrestling had playoffs, he’d be more successful than Mike D’Antoni.

Nick: Man, why do you have do Steve Nash like that? Even Dave Taylor feels like that was a low blow.

#WilliamRegalWeek: Juice Make Sugar Recommends…

It’s the Day Four of #WilliamRegalWeek, a celebration of all things Made in England and the third installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. We started with A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better and gave you the finer points of the Darren Matthews oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. We marched through Hump Day with a GIF Parade and now we make our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true tomorrow with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“. We’ll finish everything off tomorrow with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a tea-fueled civil war.) 

Album:

LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver

While British punk, or British music in general seems like a more sensical comparison, this album and the song “North American Scum” in particular speaks one of the largest obstacles in Regal’s career, his accent. Well, not his accent as much as what his accent meant: after years of behavioral training, wrestling fans had been programmed to see anyone who wasn’t American as “the bad guy”. Not because they were doing bad things, of course, but because they were doing things whilst also having a funny accent.

If William Regal were Canadian, or sounded Canadian, he’d likely have been a World’s Champion at some point. Instead, because he talks “funny”, he was put on the back burner and treated as a “foreign heel”, with all of the emphasis on the first half of the phrase. Much like Regal, LCD had to overcome a bias against them, as they were seen by many as “some electronica band from England” before hitting it big with this album. They were not in any way shape or form English, of course, but because of the style of music they played and the vocal affectation of lead singer James Murphy, many people to grouped them with a movement they had nothing to do with. 

That and it’s as fantastic and important an album as Regal was a wrestler.

Movie

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Beyond the obvious connection between Hugh Grant and William Regal, this movie is largely about missed opportunities and the ability to cope with that idea from an existential perspective. But, really, it’s mostly that William Regal should remind everyone of Hugh Grant.

TV Show

The IT Crowd, American version

There was something that was missed in translation that wasn’t quite the fault of anyone involved, but it definitely didn’t hit the way it was supposed to stateside. Some of that was a function of the fear over what had come before — read: the Coupling DEBACLE from 2003 — but mostly it was that the country wasn’t ready for two separate worlds to come together: attractive people and nerddom. The same can be said for the WWE and the new-school hyper realistic style of wrestling mixed with old school psychology that Regal is known for.

Of course, Regal’s style, the ideas from the IT Crowd that mattered — that nerds can be laughed at AND with, so bonus — would be packaged into something much more popular, but not necessarily better.

Athlete

Michael Vick

Both helped popularize (even if they didn’t “invent” it) a style of play and their shared inability to turn that into on-the-field success at the highest level is kind of depressingly similar.

Actor

Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Both Hoffman and Regal have had their share of moderate success and critical acclaim, but they’ve made their big money either selling out as monsters, madmen or goofballs. For every match with HE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED at the Third Annual Brian Pillman Memorial there is a run as Eugene’s second banana, in the same way that for every Lancaster Cobb that Hoffman gets to play, he is forced to play the bad guy in a Mission: Impossible shitstorm.

Book

Bret Hart, Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling

While Bret Hart may have had a wrestling bear in his basement, nothing says “real life” and “cartoon world of wrestling” more than starting your career as a carnival wrestler.

It’s the Day Two of #WilliamRegalWeek, a celebration of all things Made in England and the third installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. We started with A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better and now we give you the finer points of the Darren Matthews oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. We’ll march through tomorrow with a GIF Parade before making our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“. We’ll finish everything off on Friday with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a Knee trembler-fueled civil war.) 

 

#WilliamRegalWeek: GIF Parade

It’s the Day Three of #WilliamRegalWeek, a celebration of all things Made in England and the third installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. We started with A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better and gave you the finer points of the Darren Matthews oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. Now, we’ll march Hump Day with a GIF Parade before making our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true tomorrow with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“. We’ll finish everything off on Friday with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a tea-fueled civil war.) 

There is more to life than hurting people for William Regal

Not a lot more. Especially if you’re Christian

But, in those moments where he’s not pretending to brutalize his co-workers, he likes to catch with old friends:

teach young performers his signature moves

so that they can fill comfortable trying them on their own:

But, this being wrestling, they usually end up turning on him

and that NEVER ends well

That’s okay, though, he’s found a way to deal with it:

#WilliamRegalWeek: Essential Viewing

It’s the Day Two of #WilliamRegalWeek, a celebration of all things Made in England and the third installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. We started with A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better and now we give you the finer points of the Darren Matthews oeuvre with some Essential Viewing. We’ll march through tomorrow with a GIF Parade before making our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…“. We’ll finish everything off on Friday with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a tea-fueled civil war.) 

Writing about which William Regal matches to watch five years ago would have been a dream job for me. There was a stretch of time from his redebut as the snobbish Steven William Regal in 2000 until his push-ending sixty-day suspension in 2008 in which Regal was my all-time favorite (hold your nose) performer. To paraphrase the Beatles, there’s just something in the way he moves.

In the Eric Bischoff/Vince Russo era of storylines first, wrestling twenty-seventh, Regal stood out as a guy who was there to wrestle. However, for all his appeal, Regal was both poles with no equator.

His promos ranged from the menacing to the highly amusing, but while entertaining, the style was never main event and even when he had “help,” his look was never quite there either. While gorgeous and legit, his in-ring style made it nearly impossible for him to effectively work with main event stars. For me, contextualizing Regal’s place in wrestling is like that realization that Full Metal Jacket is “awesome,” but not even a top five Kubrick movie.

From the instant he arrived in the United States, Regal was acknowledged by anybody who actually understood what was going on as a next-level worker. Unfortunately, the North American wrestling world of the early-to-mid-90s was still reeling from the 80s’ crazy reliance on foreign heels. Regal, a heel who happened to be foreign, was highly respected and completely trusted to put on great matches, but not given much to sink his teeth into by WCW bookers. Here, at Clash of the Champions 28, we see the ultimate example of how William Regal was treated early in his career:

Yes, that’s the Antonio Inoki he’s wrestling. From a storyline perspective, it made as little sense then as it does now for a talented midcarder to be wrestling one of the most popular and successful stars of all time in a one-off, but it shows what WCW thought of Regal. Think about all the pressure on him in this match: Inoki was already in his 50s, had minimal connection to the crowd beyond name recognition to a small percentage of wrestling magazine readers, and was going to get himself over no matter how hard he had to kick, chop, or slap Regal.

The match isn’t the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but it is yeoman’s work. Even though Regal was never presented as a main event wrestler, his bosses trusted his abilities to the point where they felt they could put him in the ring with a babyface nobody knew and get heat on the match. Conversely, you could say our hero was asked to do a job that nobody higher on the food chain was willing to do. Either way, it speaks to Regal’s greatness.

Regal didn’t become one of the most recognizable midcard acts of the last twenty years just because of his wrestling ability, though. After his (kayfabe) protege Jean-Paul Levesque left WCW, Regal embarked on one of the most humorous missions in the history of wrestling: transforming legendary Midnight Express member “Beautiful” Bobby Eaton into an adopted member of the British upper-class:

It’s hard to find a better comedy sketch anywhere, be it Monday Nitro, Saturday Night Live, or Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Eaton’s “mouth full of mashed potatoes” accent and bull doggishly determined but dumb facials round out a superb performance by Regal as the Upper-Class Twit of the Month. Regal plays the comedic heel masterfully while also satirically tearing down the British class system of which he and his family had been victims. Of course, Regal and Eaton were both tremendous wrestlers, which made the Blue Bloods gimmick work in spite of their odd couple pairing and comedic presentation. In a sense, the Blue Bloods were a microcosm of Regal’s career: tough enough to keep credibility in the face of slapstick.

Regal famously washed out of WCW for getting cute with a guy who got cute with everybody on the roster, ending up in the WWF as  “The Real Man’s Man” Steven Regal. The gimmick was legendarily terrible, with Regal wearing a bright yellow hard hat (which seemed a size or two too small) and a flannel vest. In spite of the sheer manliness of the gimmick, the year was 1998 and a construction worker character was about as relevant and sexy to then-Russo-loving fans as a wrestling Dickensian orphan. While the gimmick is a mere footnote in the career of a long-established great wrestler, it did give us the finest Titantron video in the history of Sports Entertainment:

Mixing your own concrete? Manly. Working construction? Professionally manly. Hand-squeezing orange juice? Domestically manly.

After bouncing back and forth between short runs on WCW TV and in WWF’s then-Memphis-based developmental territory, Regal suddenly became a hot free agent following a spectacular match against HE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED at the third Brian Pillman Memorial Show.

Regal and Benoit’s match is something between a Japanese house show of the mid-80s and a English carnival show at the turn of the century. The two work holds with legitimate, sports-like intensity and work in multiple test of strength spots along with the signature tumbles of Commonwealth-style wrestling. The match also contains one of the best submission finishes this side of MMA. After nearly fifteen minutes of working holds, Benoit finally locks on his signature Crippler Crossface, and Regal taps instantly. If you suspend your disbelief only as much as you need to to enjoy wrestling, this match feels real.

Following his strong showing at the Pillman show, Regal embarked on the part of his career for which he is now most famous: his run as sometimes-wrestler, sometimes-authority figure William Regal in the WWE. This performance leaned heavily on the tricks and strategies Regal had learned leading the Blue Bloods: acting like a snob, making funny faces, and beating the ever-living tar out of people in the ring. He was simultaneously the comedic “that guy is such a maroon” and “I wish someone would shut this guy up!” heel.

Regal settled into a long run as a midcard “gatekeeper” heel. He would get the European or Intercontinental Title, beat up a couple of guys, and then work a program where he made someone look really good. His IC Title match with Rob Van Dam at Wrestlemania X8 is on the short list of matches that WWE brings up when touting the high-match-quality legacy of the belt. It’s Regal at his best: a tough, but easily duped jerk just flawed enough to be incredibly vulnerable.

One of the things that made the William Regal character special though was Regal’s own ability not to take himself too seriously. He understands the twenty-first century WWE style of entertainment-based wrestling as well as anybody. He can hit an internal switch and go from being a wicked villain to an object of ridicule. Perhaps the finest example of this is his backstage encounter with the then-more-over-than-people-remember Cryme Tyme:

Even now as his in-ring stints get further and further apart, Regal can wrestle and tell a legit-looking, dynamic story as well as any wrestler ever to grace the ring. This match from a 2011 episode of Superstars helped elevate the profile of Regal’s former student Daniel Bryan in the WWE. As with Benoit, Regal played the perfect, heelish adversary to “great wrestler” Daniel Bryan.

When you step back and look at the career of William Regal, he’s something of a mystery. There’s a near Goldust-level number of missed or spoiled opportunities, but also a main-event-level number of memorable moments outside of the ring that give him a truly unique place in WWE, and wrestling, history.

A Wrestler You Should Probably Know Better: William Regal

It’s the First Day of #WilliamRegalWeek, a celebration of all things Made in England and the third installment of our (patent-pending) Juice Make Sugar Wrestler of the Week series. As always we’ll start by making Mr. Regal a Wrestler You (Should) Probably Know Better. Tomorrow, we give you the finer points of the Darren Matthews oeuvre with some Essential Viewing then march through Wednesday with a GIF Parade. After Hump Day we’ll make our Amazon.com-on-steroids dreams come true with “Juice Make Sugar Recommends…” before finishing everything off on Friday with a Difference of Opinion (where JMS HQ erupts in a Knee-Trembler-fueled civil war.)

There was a moment when I thought William Regal might be a World’s Champion someday. It was after winning the King of the Ring tournament while serving as the commissioner of Raw. He’d been on a hot streak, having recently been so infuriated with John Cena that he had (in kayfabe) cut transmission of Raw, and the King of the Ring victory had for the first time in his career given him the in-and-out of the ring gravitas to finally compete for one of the big boy belts.

Then Mr. Kennedy ruined everything. Well, kind of.

It’s not so much that he ruined everything, as his existential suckiness intersected with a nadir in the career of Lord Steven William Regal when, only a week into his reign, Mr. Regal lost a Loser Leaves the WWE match to him. Of course, Regal wasn’t actually fired, but suspended 60 days for his second violation of the E’s then-nascent Wellness Program. Instead of a chance at a main event title match, a puncher’s chance of a (very) short run with the belt and at the very least, a crown, cape and scepter, he was given a two-month unpaid vacation. When he came back, he was no longer a king but a “free agent”, and gone, along with the royal accoutrements, was his massive push.

Regal never winning a top title isn’t a travesty, though, even by kayfabe standards. For that moment, when he was sitting on the throne, he had a chance to be king. When you think about where he came from, it’s remarkable he got there in the first place.

***

The real origin stories of many professional wrestlers – how they got into the business and what they did before – have long been part of the fabric of the medium, and one of the most integral parts of the quasi-reality that wrestling attempts to construct . In the same way that Mick Foley’s jumps off his roof and Dude Love promos articulated a very specific version of his “character”, Regal’s time as a carnival wrestler tells us a great deal both Darren Matthews and how he became Lord William.

The idea of – as a teenager, especially – wrestling grown men for money as part of a travelling show like a reincarnation of the Gold Dust trio was mindboggling when it first started, back before JR’s beloved Oklahoma was a state. The idea that there is someone who got his start in the business that way is still semi-active feels anachronistic, not just for the danger involved, but the level of dedication to the craft of wrestling not just for sport or entertainment, but the preservation of the artform itself.

It helps to explain why he’s accepted the role he has in WWE developmental, too. The love he has for the business informs nearly every aspect of his time in FCW and NXT. How eager he is to talk up performers, his willingness to put over young talent, and especially, the palpable giddiness that comes across his face and voice when he’s particularly tickled by something, speak to a love of what he does that is rare in any walk of life, but especially nice to see in THIS BUSINESS.

That love can be found in his protégé, Daniel Bryan, who has ridden Regal’s signature hard-nosed grappling style (mixed with the acrobatics of his other mentor, Shawn Michaels) to one of the hottest runs of the last decade. That’s right, it’s fairly easy to argue that the resurgence of wrestling (spearheaded by Bryan and CM Punk, another Regal pupil) in the WWE has been a result of the influence of Lord Steven himself.

But Regal has been bucking against the trend of entertainment encroaching on the artistic aspects of the for longer than most people remember, and it’s even cost him work.

***

A lot can be said about Goldberg’s career. Most of it involves underwhelming action buttressed by overwhelming crowd reaction. Although he was pushed to the moon, he was, at best, a middling worker and never really had a *great* (or even particularly good) match during his short run at the top. The matches were “exciting”, inasmuch as they told an overarching story that the crowd enjoyed. But especially during his “streak” his matches left a LOT to be desired, even for squashes.

That was until February of 1998, when in what was supposedly planned to be a squash match, Regal took some, well, liberties. Although he claims that no such thing happened, considering he was let go immediately following the match, it seems much more likely that he forced Goldberg to actually “wrestle” with him, using chain wrestling and no-selling to make him improvise his way into an actually enjoyable match.

So, even if Daniel Bryan’s career stalls out and NXT dissolves, Regal can be known for something no one else will ever be: he made Goldberg watchable.