What I Learned from Fantasy Booking, P2: 2013 Year in Review

[Big Red Machine]

Standard intro. Plug my ongoing fantasy booking project. I think trying an on-going, fantasy booking project gives me some insight into booking that others might not have. Blah blah blah.

With that well-written intro out of the way, let me state that this is (obviously) not a traditional year-in-review column (though I am always interested in any feedback people may have about my fantasy booking). Instead this is part two of what will hopefully be a biannual series of articles in which I share some insight into or thoughts about booking that I have gained as a result of doing an on-going fantasy booking project, using examples from it to illustrate my points.

1. Injury angles
The standard practice in wrestling nowadays (especially in WWE, though they seem to be moving away from this a bit) is that if someone gets injured, if that person is not a top star, just take them off of TV with no explanation and maybe announce the injury on the website. Rarely do they ever make an angle out of it, and if they do (as was the case with Kofi Kingston this spring), they forget about the angle when he comes back. This has always seemed like such a big waste to me. Why not make it an angle, so that when the guy comes back, he immediately has a hot feud to go into?
I will admit that, despite my intended goals to keep true to the available WWE roster as best possible, if someone I had some big plans for got injured, I have just ignored the injury (mostly Tyson Kidd, really). For most other cases, though, I have kept true to the injury. Kofi was one of these cases.
Kofi got hurt so I had to write him out. At the time, I had Kofi as part of a heel tag team with Christian, so I booked an angle where Kane injured Kofi and Christian could have tried to save Kofi, but didn’t. This way, when Kofi came back, I not only had a feud ready and waiting for him, but a reason for him to be a babyface. In fact, by happy coincidence (I’ll talk about those later), the whole reason I had them team up would be so Christian had something to do until he won MITB and successfully cashed in on Dragon, so not only did I have feud waiting for Kofi when he got back, but it was a WWE Title feud, to hopefully elevate him even more.

In real life, Kofi was ready to return about two months before I was ready for him to return, so I kept him on the shelf (I am currently doing the same with Cena, too). At that point I realized that in addition to Kofi, I had several other upper-midcard wrestlers on the shelf with kayfabe injuries (Rey, Ziggler, Big Show, Christian, Ambrose- though in the last case it was kayfabe mental problems), and the card felt refreshingly free (I was even able to devote focus to a non-title Divas feud)!
In the first edition of this column, the major problem I wrote about was that there just wasn’t enough space on the card for everyone I wanted to push. Having guys taken off with kayfabe injuries did create some space, though, and if done correctly, could create hot feuds for the guys when they came back. I also assume that the wrestlers enjoy having some time to heal up from the wear and tear of being on the road so much.
The idea of cycling guys off of TV every year or so to give them some time rest is not a new one in the wrestling industry, but it is one that I have really latched onto. You can keep people happier and healthier, make spots for other people on the card to freshen things up, and if you write them out correctly, you have a hot feud for them when they come back (and it doesn’t always have to be an injury angle I’ve had guys take time off for “personal reasons” and even to focus on training for a big match).

Take Ryback, for example. I didn’t have anything for him to do for a while. He is a big enough name that I would feel obligated to use him on TV if he were healthy, but I need space on the card for other people, and I didn’t want to job Ryback out… so instead, I wrote him out by having Christian injure him. Now I have a reason not to use him on TV, and when he comes back, he has a feud with Christian ready for him.

2. If You Think Hard Enough, You Can Find It
One of my major disappointments with my WWE fantasy booking in 2013 (aside from falling so horribly behind real-time) has been the lack of focus on the women’s and tag team divisions. For the past few years in TNA and until very recently in WWE, the tag team and women’s division have been reduced to just “the champion feuds with a challenger” and no one else is even on TV unless the champion and challenger needs tag partners for filler matches against each other. When I did this fantasy booking, one of my goals was to not allow this to happen, and for the most part, I think have failed at that.
Even worse, I failed at it so miserably that I didn’t even notice it. Then, at one point in the early fall, when I was pushing Sandow and Otunga as challengers and was looking for teams that they could beat to build them up, I realized that pretty much every team was expendable. They were all just jobber teams that I fed to one another on their ways up the card to lose to the tag team champions. How could I solve this problem?
Sometimes the simplest answers are the hardest ones to think of. I just sat there and said “I am going to book an undercard tag team angle” and didn’t get up until I came up with an idea (and thus Usos vs. International Airstrike 2.0 was born).

3. Happy Coincidences
Sometimes you just get lucky and things just happen to line up the right way to create a perfect opportunity. Sometimes these things are obvious, but other times you will completely miss them if you aren’t keeping your eyes peeled for them.
As Wrestlemania XXIX came around, I was looking for people for Sheamus to defend the World Heavyweight Title against after Wrestlemania. I had already set the seeds for Wade Barrett to challenge Sheamus again with the finish of their first match back at TLC 2012, so that match was set for the first PPV after Mania, but I needed other challengers. I was also pushing to find guys that Sheamus hadn’t faced before in an attempt to better differentiate his long title reign from CM Punk’s (Punk tended to face the same group of guys while Sheamus was running through pretty much the entire roster). This thought, of course, led me to the obvious answer: Punk himself. Sheamus had never faced Punk because Punk had been the WWE Champ for all of Sheamus’ reign. Even more luckily for me, the second PPV after mania was going to be in Punk’s home town of Chicago. Everything was working out perfectly! (well… mostly perfectly. I really wanted to have Dragon win the WWE Title from Cena at this show because Chicago is a smarky crowd and I couldn’t do that on the same show as Punk vs. Sheamus in Punk’s hometown because both demand the main event spot, but I was willing to move Dragon’s win to next month’s PPV in equally smarky Philadelphia).
I then set to work with both guys writing promos talking up their title reigns while also seeing how much time I had to build up Sheamus’ next major challenger for Summer Slam… and while doing this, I realized that Summer Slam would take place the day before Sheamus would pass Punk’s title reign. That right there was the perfect angle for this feud, and it made everything fall into place perfectly:
- A major blockbuster feud with an angle behind it that is both big and simple at the same time was a perfect main event for Summer Slam (even with it being in Punk’s home town, it almost felt like a waste doing it on a “B” PPV)
- It gave me more time to work on Punk and bring him down from having been WWE Champion (and put Dragon over on his way down) and more time to bring him back up to face Sheamus (the way that Dragon lost the title to Sheamus and then once he was done losing to Shemaus immediately started challenging Punk for the WWE Title right after that in 2012 really annoyed me, so I didn’t want to do that)
- It let me have Dragon beat Cena for the WWE Title as the main event in June so I could focus more on the AJ side of their angle for Summer Slam
- A little thinking and fiddling let me extend the Barrett vs. Sheamus feud to a third match, which let me tell a more interesting/unique story that built to their Last Man Standing blow-off match a bit better while also let that match be the main event of MITB instead of playing second fiddle to Cena winning the WWE Title from The Rock at the first post-Mania PPV.

Sometimes you just get lucky and things fall into place, but you might not realize it unless you are looking for it.