Welcome cats and kittens to the fourth annual Cewsh Reviews End of Year Awards. As we ring in the 5th (!) year of Cewsh Reviews, it only makes sense to take a look back on the things that defined the past year. There were incredible matches that took your breath away, shocking moments that tested the narrative truth of jaws actually hitting floors, and things that were so goddamn awful that my I’ve been using the rag they gave me to power my coffee maker for months now. So despite the fact that we’re almost a month into the new year, (I was in a coma after knife fighting a wildebeest) tonight we’ll celebrate the best and worst of it all, and put 2012 to rest in the most dignified way possible.
NOT HELPFUL, TNA.
Now, if you’ve read our end of year awards before, you already know that we don’t do things like any old wrestling blog off the street. Oh no, we use math. And through the use of this ancient and mysterious method, we’ll see just who was REALLY the best, worst and Tanookiest of them all. How can math help us after all the times it betrayed us in school? Well…
Each match that we reviewed this year was compiled and averaged out to determine the score for each wrestler’s full year. We only included wrestlers who had at least 3 matches this year that we reviewed, and for the purposes of these awards we used my (meaning Cewsh’s) ratings. For reference, anyone receiving a cumulative average score of 60 – 69 is considered to have passed in terms of having been part of enjoyable matches in the past year. An average of 70 – 79 means that your matches were consistently good, if not particularly special, and a score of 80 – 89 means you had really good to great matches so consistently that your entire year qualifies for a Download Seal of Approval. Should anyone crest the diamond mountains of the 90 – 100 range, it should probably go without saying that they are some kind of goddamn sorcerer. And for the record, these awards are being given out prior to our review of WWE TLC 2012, but those match ratings have been counted as well.
Alright, everybody good? Nobody fall asleep during that? Well then let’s let down the curtains, fire up the band, and get this jungle party started!
The Good:
Match of the Year:
Triple H vs. The Undertaker – Hell in a Cell – 100 out of 100 – WWE Wrestlemania XXVIII
Cewsh: You can read our review in all of its lengthy majesty here. The Undertaker has won this award every time that we have handed it out. Not a bad run for a Deadman.
Male Wrestler of the Year (Minimum of 3 Matches Reviewed):
Bobby Roode (TNA) – 82 out of 100
Cewsh: Nobody’s more surprised to see The It Factor win this year than me. But, perhaps thanks to us only reviewing the 5 biggest TNA shows of the year, Roode stood tall this year. He had amazing matches with James Storm and Austin Aries and was the glue that held the promotion together right up until it fell all fell apart. So this year he stands at the top of the heap. But TNA being TNA, don’t expect him to be given a chance to repeat.
Female Wrestler of the Year (Minimum of 3 Matches Reviewed):
Gail Kim (TNA) – 69.7 out of 100
Cewsh: A clean sweep for TNA this year, though the 69.7 score for the winner is more of an indictment of mainstream women’s wrestling in 2012 than anything else. So congrats to Gail for being the best of a rotten bunch during her refreshing run on top of the Knockouts Division.
Favorite Male Wrestler of the Year:
Cewsh: He’s basically become what Jushin Liger was in his early 30s. If you don’t like him, then your brain is wired wrong and you should punch it.
Favorite Female Wrestler of the Year:
Cewsh: I have never not loved a Hamada match. NEVER. And she’s wrestled Eric Young before, so you know that I mean it.
Best Team of The Year:
The World Tag Team Champions Of The World (TNA)
Cewsh: With the new focus on tag wrestling going on throughout the wrestling world, I figured it was finally time to give credit to the best and worst tag teams in the land. Pretty much none of them have a PPV sample size that qualifies them to be statistically graded as teams, so instead I’ll just assign the winner and, narrowly edging out the Primetime Players, Team Hell No and The Queens of Winning, Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian take this one. It’s one thing for a team to be great with the support of other great teams and with great writing supporting them. It’s quite another to be great when you’re wrestling Chavo Guerrero every night and have to make the Claire Lynch angle work. These two earned it.
Show of the Year:
WWE Summerslam 2012 – 77.7 out of 100
Cewsh: We laughed, we cried, we enjoyed a show where every match was better than expected. And we made fun of a Slim Jim commercial for like 600 words. Because that’s how we roll.
Best Mic Skills of the Year:
CM Punk (WWE)
Cewsh: In four years, Punk has won this award…four times. Nobody else was even a serious contender this year.
Feud of the Year:
Kazuchika Okada vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi (NJPW)
Cewsh: Now I know there’s a heavy contingent of you guys whose eyes glaze over whenever Japanese wrestling comes up, but stay with me here, because this feud is perhaps the most baffling winner this award will ever have.
Late last year, Okada was pretty much considered to be one of the most disappointing prospects in New Japan history. He had all the tools to be a great performer, and he had done his tours of the world as each young Japanese wrestler is supposed to, (in this case TNA stuck him in a “Green Hornet’s sidekick” gimmick and forgot he existed,) but when he came back he was just incredibly bad. They gave him a low profile match at Wrestle Kingdom last year and he stunk the place out. So he obviously found some kind of genie lamp somewhere, because immediately afterwards he showed up bleached blond and FUCKING AMAZING. In no time whatsoever he shocked the wrestling world by dethroning Hiroshi Tanahashi and holding the title against all comers.
In many ways he was the polar opposite of the heroic and lovable man that he beat, as Okada cultivated a character that coasted by on his incredible athletic gifts and couldn’t be bothered to care about what anyone else said or did. To say he became a sensation is an incredible understatement, as in one year this feud took him from a complete failure to the top heel in all of Japan, drawing huge interest from crowds by never talking,worshiping the swag lifestyle and pissing everyone off. The incredible feud between the purest babyface in professional wrestling and it’s most hateable heel culminated on January 4th at NJPW’s biggest show of the year, Wrestle Kingdom. And yeah, you can expect that review later on.