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WWE couldn’t have treated its debuting combat sports stars more differently.
Former two-time UFC heavyweight Cain Velasquez, who signed a multi-year deal with WWE, left “Crown Jewel” in Saudi Arabia on Thursday having tapped out to Brock Lesnar’s kimura lock to end a short, uninspired match for the WWE championship.
Later on in the card, lineal heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury was given time to actually work with Braun Strowman. He acquitted himself well in the ring and earned a count-out victory after a big punch that stunned Strowman and knocked him from the ring apron.
WWE handled the Strowman-Fury match perfectly. Fury has some cachet should he decide to return to WWE, and Strowman wasn’t pinned or submitted. A rematch would make sense (they even had “The Monster Among Men” power-slam the boxer after the match).
Lesnar-Velasquez, on the other hand, leaves WWE with some rebuilding to do with the storyline and Velasquez himself. No one expected a title change after Lesnar recently was crowned WWE champion, but with all the promotion that was done for Lesnar-Velasquez, it has to be treated better than that.
Velasquez, who can overcome this misstep with the in-ring ability we saw during his matches with Lucha Libre AAA, left Saudi Arabia worse than he arrived. On top of all of it, WWE ended Kofi Kingston’s emotional and meaningful WWE championship run in seconds on the first “Friday Night SmackDown” to set up this feud, and none of it seems worth it right now.
It was the latest fumble in WWE’s handling of Velasquez, who doesn’t appear to have gotten over with the company’s audience yet. There is time to make it right, to advance the story and rebuild Velasquez’s character, but this was an uninspiring start.
Velasquez dressed and treated the match like a UFC fight, not a wrestling match, which he’s proven to be good at. WWE can’t assume its audience didn’t at least see clips of Velasquez’s matches with AAA and that’s he’s been training in pro wrestling. It felt like he was held back in a big way at Crown Jewel.
The only way this makes any sense is if Velasquez turns around and says, “I tried to beat Brock with what I know and it didn’t work, so now I’m going to beat him at his own wrestling game.” But Velasquez will need something to happen to reestablish him as a viable challenger. He may need to resort to weapons or really get the better of Lesnar with an attack.
Still, what made Velasquez special and a hot commodity in wrestling was his athleticism for his size and his ability to perform the lucha libre style. He did a hurricanrana in Mexico. We got none of that, not even a show of athleticism. We got kicks and punches — one that did drop Lesnar — and that’s about it.
Nothing about this match made Velasquez seem special or someone fans should want to see wrestle again and care about. He came into the match trying to force Lesnar to back off his bullying. Instead, Velasquez, for now, was another notch on Lesnar’s mostly predictable path of destruction in WWE.
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