It’s nearly the end of the year. You know what that means.
That’s right, the eighth edition of the Freakin’ Awesome Network WWE Awards have been decided and Golden Snowcones are about to be handed out, in representation of yet another year of WWE competition. It’s damn near impossible to get a read on the true state of WWE, as while ratings and attendances have fallen, the company is more financially secure than they’ve ever been even at peak critical acclaim. We’ve got 21 Golden Snowcones to and make sense of it all, plus some Bonus Snowcones that have come from our lovely voters that particularly tickled my fancy.
Let’s get crackin’…
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Best Tag Team – The Undisputed Era
If I’m correct here, The Undisputed Era join The Revival as the only two teams to win this category out of NXT. Makes enough sense to me, they’ve just won just about everything else in 2018. They may look like something straight out of stereotypical internet fantasy booking, you know, the heel invader stable of ROH alumni looking to TAKE OVER the brand, but this quality quartet have become regular highlights of not just NXT, but WWE as a whole.
Adam Cole (BAYBAY), Kyle O’Reilly, Bobby Fish and Roderick Strong make up The Undisputed Era. Originally a trio, Strong joined the group this year after betraying partner Pete Dunne in the finals of the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic and gifting the win to Cole and O’Reilly. Joining largely to replace Fish as O’Reilly’s partner in the regular tag team of the group (Fish spent most of the year out with a long-term knee injury), Strong and O’Reilly would captivate audiences with incredible tag team bouts against the likes of Moustache Mountain, Oney Lorcan and Danny Burch and War Raiders, with O’Reilly becoming even more versatile by showing as much tag team chemistry with his new partner as he did with his previous separate long-running teams with Cole and Fish. Speaking of Cole, as the main singles guy, he’d become the first NXT North American Champion in one of WWE’s greatest ever ladder matches at NXT Takeover: New Orleans, as well as having stellar bouts with Aleister Black and Ricochet (that super kick to Ricochet, upside down in mid-air… *chef kiss*). But what sets Undisputed Era apart from everyone else is their sleazy swagger. These guys strut around the place, thinking they’re the hottest shit in wrestling ever, what with their nWo-esque backstage promos and O’Reilly coming to ringside, playing his NXT Tag Team Championship belt like a guitar. It’s the same kind of attitude of a bunch of guys in their mid-late 30s who never grew out of college in their minds and are constantly reliving those days working at the campus.
So, what comes next for The Undisputed Era in 2019? You’d think a main roster call-up wouldn’t be too far off, but they’ve become so entrenched in the fabric of NXT, their absence would leave a gaping hole that would almost be impossible to fill. Either way, it’s undisputed that wherever they go, success usually isn’t too far away.
Honourable Mentions:
*The Usos
*The Bar
Worst Tag Team – The Lucha House Party
Once again, this was a category with no real runaway winner, with many of your usual long-running contenders just not active enough to do anything to be considered the worst (although Konnor of The Ascension getting a random singles push for like two weeks was funny). That said, there was a clear winner, and I have a fairly solid hunch as to why that might be.
The Lucha House Party is a trio consisting of three masked luchadores from 205 Live, that being Kalisto, Gran Metalik and Lince Dorado. Kalisto’s been around a while, won a few belts, done the team thing before with The Lucha Dragons, solid hand for the group, right? Metalik got to the final of the Cruiserweight Classic and is one of the most highly regarded and underrated talents on the roster. He’s good for a group, yeah? And Dorado… well, he’s been in groups before, winning a CHIKARA King of Trios and being under the learning tree of all-time tag team specialist Cesaro in CHIKARA’s BDK stable. Fine enough to make up some numbers, yes? It shouldn’t be a Golden Snowcone winner in this category on paper. All three can wrestle well, and they seemed well-liked enough on 205 Live, if not a little bit grating with their noisemakers and pinatas. But then came the “Lucha House Rules”. Simply put, upon joining RAW, they got to use all their members in regular tag team matches, turning every match into a handicap match in their favour. And they were supposed to be the babyfaces, seemingly unaware of the unfair advantage they had just because they liked having fun. Combine that with the fact that their only victims of this stipulation were hard-done-by sentimental favourites The Revival, and crowds were done with this lucha trio quicker than you could say Mexicools. The Lucha House Rules stipulation was so contentious, Seth Rollins listed it as one of his grievances to Baron Corbin when he was giving out to him about his management of RAW.
As things stand now, the Lucha House Rules have been abandoned, and The Lucha House Party are simply making up the numbers in RAW’s tag team division. But the few weeks where that stipulation was in effect was seemingly enough to get their little masked heads over the line and into Golden Snowcone infamy.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Braun Strowman and Nicholas
*The Forgotten Sons
Best Promo/Non-Wrestling Segment – Elias and Kevin Owens take aim at Seattle, RAW 10/1
Insulting the local sports team. It’s as much in the fabric of wrestling as the Irish whip, the evil foreigner and a hot dog and a handshake being used as financial payment. A well-trodden trope in your wrestling promos in all companies, especially the mass appeal-minded WWE. But by the sheer dumb luck of being in a city where that kind of thing hits just a little too close to home because the local sports team you’re insulting doesn’t exist anymore, Elias and Kevin Owens found themselves getting more heat than a top babyface doing improv. Good thing these Golden Snowcones don’t melt until nearly 2000°F.
So, it was the final build towards a rather random match in the grand scheme of things, that being John Cena and Bobby Lashley teaming up against Elias and Owens at Super Show-Down in Melbourne, Australia, the least problematic of WWE’s international stadium sojourns in 2018, but more on that later. The claim that set off the KeyArena that night? That Cena and Lashley teaming up made as little sense as having a basketball team in Seattle. Such an innocent throwaway line, but in Seattle you couldn’t have hit a nerve any harder if you’d actually taken a knife and properly hit a nerve in one’s body. The loss of their beloved Supersonics from the NBA to become the Oklahoma City Thunder was an acrimonious ordeal for the Emerald City that, even with an NFL team that would win the Super Bowl in 2014, an MLS team that is regularly in post-season contention and a brand new NHL team on the way (sorry MLB fans, there’s not much to polish there for the Mariners in recent years), is something that they are still sore about, and boy were they going to let Elias and Owens know about it. Elias and Owens sat on their stools in silence, waiting for the crowd to stop booing, but they just wouldn’t stop. They tried to continue their promo, going over the top of the booing, but they JUST WOULDN’T STOP. Owens demanded that the house lights be turned off, which were already dark anyway because it was in Elias’s pre-existing sit-down concert mode, but they JUST. WOULDN’T. STOP. If anything, it became a missed opportunity for Lio Rush, the recently debuted new hype man for Lashley, who would interrupt Elias and Owens with his own promo. Dude, just drop the names Shawn Kemp or Detlef Schrempf and Seattle would have been behind your man like he was peak Steve Austin.
Was this promo necessarily the best delivered? I wouldn’t say so. Was it the best written? It was Elias’s usual competent fare with able assistance from Owens, sure, but probably not. But it was theatre realness to watch these two just play this crowd like a fiddle all because of a basketball reference, and that is why the Golden Snowcone is walking with Elias and Owens.
Honourable Mentions:
*Becky Lynch leads SmackDown’s women’s roster in an invasion on RAW (RAW 11/12)
*The new Daniel Bryan declares The Yes Movement dead (SmackDown 11/20)
Worst Promo/Non-Wrestling Segment – Sami Zayn introduces Bobby Lashley’s “sisters”, RAW 5/21
Here’s a little secret about your boy… As much as I generally hate the reality TV genre, I love RuPaul’s Drag Race. A wide, colourful cast of characters in a misunderstood artform… Sounds a lot like wrestling, to be honest. That said, drag and wrestling isn’t often something that combines well, and one segment on RAW in 2018 is about to be read for filth. The library is now open.
Sami Zayn set things off on this farce by taking offense to some life stories Bobby Lashley had brought up about his sisters in an interview with Renee Young. And they were weird anecdotes, too… His sisters chasing him around the house with brooms? Pranks that left him with permanent scarring? It’s no wonder he hit the gym like he did, it would have had to be for self-defence. Anyway, a couple of weeks later on RAW, Zayn felt it necessary to bring his “sisters” out to get the real story. And by that, I mean he brought out three men in dresses. Jinkx Monsoon, they were not. One of them still had a damn moustache, and not one of your bumfluff dealies either, a proper Steve Harvey one. With some needling from the excessively obnoxious Zayn, the transvestite trio claimed that dear brother Bobby was the bully of the family and that he was being a big old liar about being such a nice guy. How did Lashley respond to this sullying of his good name? By having a laugh about it. After all, Zayn went to all this work to hire actors to dress up in wigs and dresses solely to mock him, it’s all in good fun, right? Zayn would go on to sic the sisters onto their brother, but Lashley chose to partake in some intergender violence and laid them out in short order.
And thankfully, that was that. It reads way less awkwardly than how it actually was. In a day and age when LGBTQ characterisation in the media is being treated with way much more care and awareness than in years past, it was jarring to see WWE use transvestism as the vehicle with which to garner heel heat for the horribly-miscast Zayn and face sympathy for the almost-as-miscast Lashley. All that came out of this is that Zayn and his cross-dressing cronies have sashay’d away with the Golden Snowcone.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Ronda Rousey goes off on Becky Lynch and millennials (RAW 11/12)
*Sasha Banks and Bayley do a Q&A with the audience (RAW 11/26)
Best Feud – Becky Lynch v Charlotte Flair
Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair were always seen as the two opposite ends of the “WWE Four Horsewomen” spectrum. Flair, the homegrown company favourite with the family heritage and All-American mainstream look. Lynch, the weird, literally red-headed stepchild with silly jokes and a thick Irish accent. This wasn’t their first time being paired off as rivals, but this is definitely their best run together, in this Golden Snowcone winner for the year’s Best Feud.
The roots of this feud start with Flair taking a leave of absence for medical reasons, allowing Lynch to go on a winning streak on SmackDown, the longest of her WWE career, as she tapped out SmackDown’s other women one-by-one to the Dis-Arm-Her, including Flair herself before she took her leave. But just as Lynch had finally claimed a title shot against SmackDown Women’s Champion Carmella at SummerSlam, Flair returned, and circumstances came to be that Flair was added to the match, making it a triple threat. Lynch wasn’t happy, but she had momentum and confidence so it was OK… at least until Flair won the match and the belt, pinning Lynch, at which point enough was enough and it was time for a change. Lynch laid out the new champion, and we were off to the races, albeit with a rocky start as they leaned way harder into Lynch as a pure heel at the beginning, easing off as the weeks went on. Lynch would not be denied anymore, and with Flair rattled by the sudden change in her old friend, Lynch capitalised and beat Flair at Hell In A Cell to get the gold. But winning the gold wasn’t enough. Lynch wanted to humiliate and humble Flair, demanding the satisfaction of being called “Queen” after the years in her shadow. It was here when Flair finally realised that the old Lynch was gone and got her act together, getting two close calls in title rematches against Lynch before a Last Woman Standing Match was deemed necessary at Evolution, WWE’s first all-women PPV. 28 minutes later after a modern epic, Lynch had convincingly beaten Flair once and for all, and she wasn’t just champion, she was “The Man”.
The feud actually played out incredibly lop-sided, with Flair barely getting any upper hand over Lynch over the two months between SummerSlam and Evolution, with only the spectre of “because WWE” keeping Lynch as the underdog in the eyes of the justifiably cynical and perpetually jaded. Lynch was the one who gained the most, for sure, but it takes two to tango with these things, and Flair definitely held up her end of the deal, continuing to establish herself as one of WWE’s best big-match wrestlers.
Honourable Mentions:
*Johnny Gargano v Tommaso Ciampa
*AJ Styles v Samoa Joe
Worst Feud – Roman Reigns v Brock Lesnar
It was the feud that stopped WWE in its tracks. Not literally, of course, but it’s hard to think of other times where so much energy was devoted to two people for so long, for so little return. Put on the new hit single Uptown Funk, because we’re right back to 2015 with this ish.
For years, Roman Reigns was marked for this role as the beloved babyface toppling the vile Brock Lesnar to a rapturous chorus of approval. The only problem was that WWE never quite nailed down the “beloved” part for him, as any broad attempt to build Reigns up for that via the tried and tested methods of the Royal Rumble and big-time feud wins simply led to mass rejection, partially due to how blatantly transparent it was, partially due to other pre-beloved babyfaces getting the shaft, partially due to Reigns’s shortcomings in the ring and on the mic. They lucked out in 2015 with the match actually being really good, not to forget Seth Rollins and his Money In The Bank, but in 2018 they called their shot once more, as Lesnar v Reigns was set for the main event of WrestleMania. Actually, the shot was apparently called in 2017, if you were reading Dave Meltzer’s newsletters at the time. In contrast to how a babyface challenger should be made to look strong heading towards a big title match, Reigns was either acting the whiny bitch, calling Lesnar out for never showing up, or getting laid out by the champion. As such, it seemed obvious that on WrestleMania Sunday he’d be getting the W, but all Reigns got that night was hate, five knuckles to the dome and a shit-ton of stitches as he lost to Lesnar clean in a match that was nowhere near the quality of the 2015 bout. Reigns’s response? More whining, claiming that Vince McMahon didn’t wise him up to… well, I don’t know what, really, you can’t exactly say “I wasn’t booked to win this match” in a kayfabe narrative now, can you? This was followed by a cage match at Greatest Royal Rumble that went to a disputed double escape finish as Reigns speared Lesnar through the cage, but since Lesnar was on the bottom of the pile of humanity, his feet touched first constituting an escape. For months, Reigns would have a moan at Lesnar whenever he wasn’t pre-occupied with busy work like Samoa Joe and Jinder Mahal, until yet another match was scheduled for SummerSlam. Money In The Bank was even back in play, as Braun Strowman lurked at ringside ready to cash-in on the winner. That presence led to Lesnar’s downfall, as Lesnar being pre-occupied with laying out Strowman led to a winning Spear from Reigns. AFTER ALL THAT, THEY WOULDN’T EVEN LET HIM BEAT THE GUY CLEAN.
It all turned out to be a moot point anyway, as barely two months into his reign as Universal Champion, Reigns had to give the damn thing up. Do they dare tempt fate and go back to the well again for a third time once Reigns is healthy again? If so, I may not even need to open nominations for this category.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Bobby Lashley v Sami Zayn
*Carmella v Asuka
Most Improved Superstar – Buddy Murphy
205 Live has often struggled to capture the imagination of the wider WWE fanbase over the course of its two-year run, with 2018 largely seen as a rebuilding phase for the purple brand after the loss of top stars Neville, Enzo Amore and Rich Swann. At the heart of that rebuild, was a man widely regarded from those in the know as WWE’s best kept secret. But now the secret is out.
Buddy Murphy had a brief flash in the spotlight in 2015, getting an NXT Tag Team Championship run with Wesley Blake that led to a place on the first Takeover Brooklyn card in August that year. However, after their valet Alexa Bliss went on to main roster superstardom, Murphy and Blake were left behind and struggled for relevance in the following years. Murphy spent most of that time getting underground buzz based on months of strong performances on NXT’s non-televised Florida house show loop, but his ticket back to TV didn’t come until February 2018, via a spot in the tournament for the Cruiserweight Championship that had been stripped from Amore. Undergoing a drastic weight loss regimen and regular weigh-ins to remain under the 205-pound limit, Murphy, along with Cedric Alexander and Mustafa Ali, became the three pillars of excellence that drew even the most jaded eyes towards 205 Live thanks to a series of matches against each other and a capable supporting cast led by Hideo Itami and Drew Gulak, among others. Murphy’s crowning glory would come in October, on the hallowed turf of the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia, his home city, as he beat Alexander for the Cruiserweight Championship in front of a 70,000-strong crowd at Super Show-Down. Murphy has since found himself regularly making WWE’s PPV cards with his title defences, something Alexander had only done twice in his reign, even getting onto the main cards occasionally.
The question should be asked, especially since Ali has since made the move to SmackDown and found himself going toe-to-toe with WWE Champion Daniel Bryan, of whether or not Murphy is better than being the top guy of WWE’s C-brand. It’s all subjective to me, but what isn’t subjective is that you couldn’t find anyone else in 2018 who came from literally nothing to become a metaphorical highlight reel like Buddy Murphy did.
Honourable Mentions:
*Elias
*Becky Lynch
Most Exciting Moment – Daniel Bryan comes out of retirement, WrestleMania
It was something that was thought never to be possible. That the only way Daniel Bryan would ever put on the trunks and wrestle again would be in a non-WWE ring. But through a bit of medical magic and a whole lot of faith and trust from doctors and officials, the heart of the Yes Movement was beating again… for a few months anyway.
Bryan had been fighting his forced retirement since it began, to the point of stir-craziness, and finally he laid down an ultimatum to WWE’s main concussions expert, Joseph Maroon. You tell me who you trust most in the field, and if I go to them and they clear me, you finally clear me. Bryan held the doctor to his word, and in March, just over two years since his emotional retirement and nearly three years since his last match, Bryan was cleared for active competition. And no time was wasted in getting him into the firing line of some rogue baddies, as under his duties as SmackDown General Manager, he had fired Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn for attacking Shane McMahon and they wouldn’t respond very well to that, laying him out as well. Conveniently, the next PPV up was WrestleMania 34 and a bout between Bryan and McMahon and Owens and Zayn was scheduled, and in the very same stadium where Bryan had his greatest triumph at WrestleMania 30 in 2014, Bryan would lead his team to victory, showing that he had lost none of his ability in his forced sabbatical (nor none of the drama that usually surrounded Daniel Bryan matches, he did spend the first 10 minutes of the match laid out from an apron powerbomb, after all, leading the bulk of the match to a man suffering from a hernia and diverticulitis). The rest of the year for Bryan was rather strange, as he would go over an hour and a quarter in the Greatest Royal Rumble, dominate a feud with Big Cass, reunite Team Hell No, team up with his wife Brie Bella against The Miz and Maryse before wrapping that long-burning rivalry up with a win inside two minutes at Super Show-Down, become WWE Champion again by low blowing AJ Styles and turning heel AND have his dream match with Brock Lesnar at Survivor Series. It wouldn’t be Daniel Bryan in WWE if it wasn’t needlessly convoluted.
While many don’t agree with turning such a beloved favourite like Bryan into a militant environmentalist maniac heel, it can’t be denied as we close out the year how well he’s playing that role. The new Daniel Bryan may now only be fighting for his own dreams and not those of the Yes Movement, but the fact that he’s actually fighting in the first place provided more than enough excitement to leave with the Golden Snowcone.
Honourable Mentions:
*Becky Lynch leads SmackDown’s women’s roster in an invasion on RAW (RAW 11/12)
*Ronda Rousey makes her full-time WWE debut (Royal Rumble)
Most Hilarious Moment – “Titus Worldslide”, Greatest Royal Rumble
Poor old Titus O’Neil. From all accounts, he’s one of wrestling’s biggest nice guys, with all his charity work and PR appearances for WWE. But it doesn’t cover for the fact that he’s got a tendency of being a really damn clumsy oaf at times. And in this instance, he may have hit the all-time jackpot for clumsiness.
It was a hot, humid April night in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia as the stars of WWE (only the men, though, more on that soon) competed in the Greatest Royal Rumble, a 50-man spectacular for a prize of significantly less substance than the traditional 30-man bout back in January. The match goes on as it does, when the buzzer sounded for the entry of #39, Titus O’Neil. What was meant to be a casual sprint to the ring became etched in history when O’Neil clipped the front of his foot on the edge of a protective mat, fell onto his stomach and slid almost completely under the ring. Anyone who was watching, be it Corey Graves on commentary or yours truly at 6:30 in the morning Sydney time, LOST THEIR SHIT at the sight of this big brute of a man and his ankles poking out from underneath the apron like a wrestling ring had just crushed the wicked witch. O’Neil sheepishly got up and properly entered the match, but the wind was out of his sails and he didn’t last very long. What gets understated in the hilarity of the situation is how close O’Neil actually came to a serious injury. He falls a couple of feet later, he cracks his head open on the edge of the ring frame, just like New Japan wrestler Yoshi-Hashi did in a similar incident later in the year. A little bit to the right, bang, slides right into a support post. And you shudder to think what could have happened if WWE had shipped the LED apron screens over.
To O’Neil’s credit, he took in it in his infamously shaky stride. After all, this ain’t the first time he’s fallen over himself on WWE TV. A Golden Snowcone, then, to a man with a big heart, wobbly legs and his moment that went viral and took the Titus brand… WORLD-WIDE.
Honourable Mentions:
*Matt Hardy v Bray Wyatt in The Ultimate Deletion (RAW 3/19)
*Heath Slater keeps getting laid out by Royal Rumble entrants (Royal Rumble)
Most Disappointing Moment – Brock Lesnar wins the vacant WWE Universal Championship, Crown Jewel
This one was a two-fold level of disappointment, with horribly unfortunate, very real circumstances leading to this decision in the fictional narrative. This represented a giant leap back to square one after the one small step taken a couple of months earlier.
Roman Reigns had finally beaten Lesnar to win the Universal Championship at SummerSlam, but barely two months after winning it, he had to give it up to due to a recurrence of leukaemia, a disease he had battled in his college football days. It’s not out of the question that Reigns may never come back to wrestling, but nearly all hope that he does. As such, this left a scheduled triple threat title match between Reigns, Lesnar and Braun Strowman at Crown Jewel as a singles match for the vacant belt. It all seemed perfect for Strowman to finally beat Lesnar himself and get his own world title run, regaining most of the momentum he’d lost from a short-lived heel run against Reigns, Seth Rollins and the recently-returned Dean Ambrose. If only it weren’t for acting RAW General Manager Baron Corbin to be an onion in the ointment and waffle Strowman in the back of the head with the Universal belt first. The bell rang and Strowman was never in the fight as a consequence of that, and although he did kick out of multiple F5s, eventually he couldn’t kick out of any more and Lesnar was Universal Champion again. Strowman was skittled by The Beast once more, and as of this time, is still yet to regain his peak momentum as a consequence of this and an unrelated elbow injury that has kept him out of action late in the year.
It’s hard to say too much more about this that I ain’t just going to say again later on in this article. Lesnar held this belt for over 500 days last time waiting for Reigns to be over enough to win it, are WWE just now going to wait for Reigns to return from his leukaemia treatments? Is Strowman ever going to win a world title? You really can only be disappointed at RAW now missing its world champion once more.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Roman Reigns vacates the Universal Championship due to his returning leukaemia (RAW 10/22)
*Charlotte Flair breaks Asuka’s undefeated streak (WrestleMania)
Most WTF? Moment – Shane McMahon wins the WWE World Cup Tournament, Crown Jewel
So many of our winners of these dodgier Snowcones have come from WWE’s government-funded adventures in Saudi Arabia this year, and it really feels like this will be a recurring situation over the lifetime of their deal as long I still do these. That said, it might be hard to top the Russo-esque madness that led to this outcome.
The WWE World Cup Tournament would make up the bulk of the Crown Jewel match card in November. No prize or anything, just a trophy and the vague honour of being “the best in the world”, which almost certainly rustled the jimmies of CM Punk loyalists. First red flag… For a World Cup, it was severely lacking in “World”, with every scheduled entrant being from the United States. Second red flag… John Cena was scheduled to be in the tournament, but pulled out because his budding Hollywood career didn’t need the PR hit of working a wrestling show in Saudi Arabia right in the middle of the developing Khashoggi situation. Third red flag… The original final ended up being two heels against each other, The Miz and Dolph Ziggler, meaning that the World Cup final was scheduled to be competed for by two blokes from the same city. And after this, it’s the whole damn red flag factory. Before the match officially started, Miz tweaked an ankle. Shane McMahon, who had come to ringside to offset the presence of his RAW’s Baron Corbin, couldn’t allow RAW to win the oh so valuable WWE World Cup and have Dolph Ziggler represent all its dignified lineage, so he stripped off down to a singlet and pants, and took Miz’s place in the match. Ziggler, who had already gone through long bouts against Kurt Angle and Seth Rollins on the night, had no gas in the tank left to counteract the 100% fresh middle-aged non-wrestler, and McMahon won the World Cup and the honour of being known as “the best in the world”. He seemed almost as baffled by it as we were. This was the kind of stunt you’d be expecting Stephanie to pull off.
What’s weirder is that this one-off, likely to never be mentioned again vanity trophy is actually still part of an ongoing angle. Seriously, it shows up more than Brock Lesnar does. Miz has spent the last couple of months cozying up to McMahon, hoping to team up with him, which looks for all money like the bog-standard “face turn fakeout”. But after this, who the hell really knows?
Honourable Mentions:
*Roman Reigns vacates the Universal Championship due to his returning leukaemia (RAW 10/22)
*Braun Strowman picks 10-year-old Nicholas as his tag team partner and wins the RAW Tag Team Championship (WrestleMania)
Best Spot – Randy Orton twists Jeff Hardy’s earlobe with a screwdriver, Hell In A Cell
This award usually goes to something more along the lines of the big bump or the high fall. This year, not so much. Instead, it’s going to a sick son of a bitch who committed one of the most visually unsettling acts ever seen in a wrestling ring. And no, I don’t mean Drake Maverick pissing himself.
Randy Orton would return in mid-year after a brief absence, beating down Jeff Hardy and turning into a heel role. Now, Orton as a heel isn’t exactly revolutionary, it’s well-trodden ground, but for this early part of this run, something was a bit different. Orton was more concerned with taking away Hardy’s identity, at one point dousing him with water and wiping away his signature facepaint to prove his point after a beatdown. This feud ended up inside the Hell In A Cell, the first to be held inside the new “big red milk crate” variant of the Cell. The match goes on as it does, a fairly brutal match as it turned out, until Orton has the upper hand. Going under the ring, he pulls out a screwdriver, goes back into the ring and PUTS THE GODDAMN SCREWDRIVER IN HARDY’S STRETCHED EARLOBE. Now, Orton had done this spot with his finger a few weeks earlier, but this was in a whole different ballpark. And then, if things weren’t enough, he gives the screwdriver a good 270 degrees of twist like he’s trying to pop open a bottle of champagne with a corkscrew. The crowd became unglued with shock, commentators were freaking out, Hardy was screaming in agony and Orton… It was a Sunday walk in the park. Hardy finally managed to escape via a low blow, and the match went on, but it was the defining visual of the match, if not the entire show.
Now, I’m no fancy big city doctor or nothing, but that looked like it proper hurt. Whoever thought of it needs psychological help and/or a raise. Randy Orton and Jeff Hardy… Proof that you can have fun with screwdrivers without the need for opening up the vodka.
Honourable Mentions:
*Ricochet double-rotation moonsaults from the top of the steel cage onto everyone else (NXT Takeover: WarGames II)
*Adam Cole super kicks Ricochet while upside down in mid-air (NXT Takeover: Brooklyn IV)
—
And now, a brief intermission as we go through our Bonus Snowcones!
*The Snickers “You’re Not You When You’re Ignorant” Award for The Department That Really Shouldn’t Be Getting A Raise: Public Relations, not just for the whole Saudi Arabia thing, but for naming their all-women battle royal at WrestleMania after a woman whose alleged exploits in sex trafficking are slowly becoming public knowledge. Runner-up prizes to whoever designed the replacement trophy to look like a uterus.
*The Microsoft Paint Award for Most Photoshoppable Face Of 2018: Paige, introducing the first clip from the movie about her life, seemingly painted up like The Joker for some reason.
*The Michael Scott Award for Excellence in Management: Constable/General Manager Elect Baron Corbin, whose reign of terror was left so unchecked, that the entire McMahon family basically had to come out and grovel to the fans for forgiveness due to a sharp ratings plunge.
*The Harold P. Warren Memorial Award for Botchiest Hands of Fate: Nia Jax, punching Becky Lynch out of Survivor Series and possibly into a WrestleMania main event. But only for the hands… Brie Bella’s got dibs on the feet.
*The Enzo Amore Award for Biggest Scumbag: James Ellsworth, who may end up being a “Registered Penis” as opposed to Amore’s “consensual” equivalent. But also, for scuppering Asuka’s momentum mid-year too, I suppose.
*The Red Forman Award for Biggest Dumbass: Big Cass, for taking liberties and big leaguing a little person dressed as Daniel Bryan, getting fired as a result once regular-sized Daniel Bryan tapped him out.
*The Steven Bradbury Award for The Anti-Jannetty Of 2018: Carmella, for outlasting the aforementioned dumbass, the aforementioned scumbag and the other scumbag and succeeding in her own right, cashing in Money In The Bank successfully and later finding a much suitable babyface role, when she was the one expected to fail the most.
*The Vic Joseph Award for Announcer Most Likely to Make Everything On-Screen So Much Fucking Worse, God, I Hate That Guy: Vic Joseph, as suggested by someone who clearly has an axe to grind with the 205 Live play-by-play man. Allegedly, he’s the guy that suggested the screwdriver spot to Randy Orton…
*The All-American Lex Luger Award for Biggest Kayfabe Chump: Samoa Joe, for being unable to beat WWE Champion AJ Styles for the belt in four separate attempts, despite using dreaded family mind games. At least Shinsuke Nakamura got the United States belt in the end, Joe got nothing.
Thanks to the posters who sent them in. I hope you didn’t mind some of the tweaks. Now to the home stretch of these awards…
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Worst Match – D-Generation X vs The Brothers Of Destruction, Crown Jewel
It should be almost be illegal for a match with this much legendary talent to be this rubbish. In one corner, you have Shawn Michaels coming out of retirement to team with his buddy Triple H, who is always in great condition. In the other, the iconic duo (not Billie Kay and Peyton Royce… but there’s now something I need to put a pin in to see in 2K19) of The Undertaker and Kane. What could go wrong? Well, how many words have I got left in this thing? I could use all of them for this.
The trivia point that was often cited leading into this tag team bout at, you guessed it, Crown Jewel (man, that show just keeps popping up this year, doesn’t it?) was the combined ages of the four participants being well over 200 years old. Based on this outing, The Undertaker and Kane may as well have been 200 years old each. Undertaker’s gone on years too long and has been reduced to stunt booking matches like this and the five-minute squash match with John Cena at WrestleMania that wasn’t even officially happening until Undertaker was entering for it, because his bones and muscles are turning to dust. And Kane is now the mayor of Knoxville, TN, an actual political office job, and he has the body and cardio to match. So, it was left to DX to carry the workload, at least until Triple H tore his pectoral muscle five minutes in and became the one-armed man in a geriatric ass-kicking contest. So, eight years out of action later and having finally conceded defeat to male pattern baldness, it was down to Michaels to try and save things. Bless his shiny head, he gave it the old college try, but it was nowhere near peak HBK. For the other three, it became a tragedy of epic proportions. Of note, Triple H and The Undertaker running into a barricade together like Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff after botching an Irish Whip sequence, and Shawn Michaels punching the mask and attached hairpiece right off of Kane’s head as he was perched on the top turnbuckle. 28 MINUTES LATER, DX somehow won the wrestling match, leading to Michaels literally exclaiming that he was too old for this shit.
It was the best worst match that I’ve ever seen, if that makes sense. At that specific time in my own life, I hadn’t had a genuine laugh at anything like I did at this match in months. Almost absolutely nothing went right as soon as the bell rang. I only hope that the tidy sum of money each of them got was worth it, and that’ll be the first and last bout in WWE’s ill-fated Seniors Division.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Brock Lesnar vs Roman Reigns (WrestleMania)
*Roman Reigns vs Braun Strowman (Hell In A Cell)
Best Match – Johnny Gargano vs Tommaso Ciampa, NXT Takeover: New Orleans
This bout was close to a year in the making, as part of a rivalry that has defined the 2017, 2018 and possibly even the 2019 of the men involved. On the surface, it may look like a match from a wrestling 101 tag team breakup feud, but off the back of strong character work and wrestling skill, Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa took an Unsanctioned Match, and made it unmatched by anything else in WWE in 2018 and possibly in all time.
Ciampa had spent the remainder of 2017 out with a knee injury after betraying his former tag team partner Gargano at Takeover Chicago in June, but would make his return after Gargano’s loss to NXT Champion Andrade Almas at Takeover Philadelphia in January, turning the crutch into his weapon of choice. Ciampa would haunt Gargano all through NXT, eventually costing him his job after interfering in a title vs career rematch with Almas. With nothing else left to lose, Gargano would turn the tables on Ciampa, attacking him anywhere he went, from the parking lot at the Performance Center to Ciampa’s own house. Enough was enough, a match needed to happen to try and settle this at Takeover New Orleans. Since Gargano was not under a contract, the match was declared Unsanctioned with the stipulation that if Gargano won, he’d have his contract reinstated. In his first TV match since the night he put a knife through the heart of #DIY, Ciampa entered to the sole sound of deafening boos, a stark contrast to the reception received by the heroic Johnny Wrestling. What would follow would be one of the most engaging and captivating matches in WWE history. Even for NXT standards, the story and call-backs were being laid on thick. One man was fighting for his life, the other to take it away for good, and every last bit was going into it. Gargano even went so far as to powerbomb Ciampa onto the exposed concrete floor of the arena. 35 minutes later, both men were exhausted. Ciampa was right where Gargano wanted him, and he was ready to strike with a broken crutch. But in a scene calling back to their first bout against each other in the 2016 Cruiserweight Classic where Ciampa had Gargano dead to rights, before #DIY, before all of this… Gargano couldn’t pull the trigger. Together they sat on the canvas, and it looked like Ciampa had suckered him in as he reached for his knee brace… But Gargano saw it coming and, quick as a whip, locked in an STF and, getting the knee brace over Ciampa’s face for extra leverage, got the submission win and his NXT contract back. Johnny Triumphant.
As the year went on, the Gargano v Ciampa rivalry dominated NXT to the point of it may have been too much of a good thing, as subsequent matches at Takeover Chicago II and Takeover Brooklyn IV left Gargano unable to maintain composure and seal the victory, with Ciampa winning by sheer luck and circumstance. And now they’re even on the same page somewhat, as Aleister Black ended up getting involved as all three chased after the NXT Championship that was won by Ciampa from Black. Regardless of where this goes in 2019, there will be always be the five-star New Orleans epic, making it three wins from the last four for NXT Takeover matches in this category.
Honourable Mentions:
*Becky Lynch vs Charlotte Flair (Evolution)
*Andrade Almas vs Johnny Gargano (NXT Takeover: Philadelphia)
Worst PPV/Major Event and Most Embarrassing Moment – Crown Jewel
I don’t pretend to be an expert in politics or religion. It’s a couple of subjects that have long been actively kept out of FAN Forums due to their inflammatory nature, and I try to steer clear of it all where possible. But it became almost unavoidable as WWE ended up mired in the centre of a major international incident, all for a show that wasn’t even that good in the end.
As “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase would often say, everybody’s got a price. While we don’t know the numerical specifics, the Saudi Arabian government managed to name WWE’s, as in 2018 they began the first year of a long-term partnership aimed as a major PR exercise for the fundamentalist Middle East nation. The first show, Greatest Royal Rumble, went off smoothly enough, albeit with controversy, mostly in relation to how no women were permitted to wrestle on the card, a stance that many believe led to the set-up of the all-women Evolution show just a week before their next trip as a make-good. But as WWE prepared for a second show later in the year titled Crown Jewel, a massive story was breaking as dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, allegedly at the behest of the Saudi Arabian government. WWE came under criticism for doing business with the Saudi Arabians from US government officials and respected satirist John Oliver, but in the end went ahead with the show anyway. And what a mess it was. First, the show was relocated from a large athletics stadium to a smaller football stadium, possibly for fears of low attendance. Second, Roman Reigns, John Cena and Daniel Bryan were all originally booked for Crown Jewel, but Reigns went down ill and the latter two boycotted the show as a consequence of the Khashoggi situation. Third, this of all shows was where Hulk Hogan made his first appearance under the WWE banner since being exiled for his leaked racist tirades in 2015, causing more unease. Finally, the three main drawcards of the show ended up being complete and utter rabble. The WWE World Cup Tournament was won by a non-wrestler that wasn’t even originally entered. Brock Lesnar reclaimed the vacant Universal title by squashing Braun Strowman after an ambush attack by Baron Corbin. Finally, the piss de resistance, as D-Generation X and The Brothers Of Destruction sullied the ring with what was ostensibly meant to be a wrestling match.
And this is only the first year of what is supposedly a 10-year contract between WWE and the Saudi Arabians, with WWE pocketing a tidy sum of money for each show, getting bigger profits than even WrestleMania. It’s hard to remain a WWE fan at the best of times, but it’s a completely different prospect now with problematic arrangements like this. And they couldn’t even have the show be good to try and make up for it.
Dishonourable Mentions (Worst PPV):
*Backlash
*Survivor Series
Dishonourable Mentions (Most Embarrassing Moment):
*Sami Zayn introduces Bobby Lashley’s “sisters” (RAW 5/21)
*Drake Maverick pees himself getting choked by Big Show (Survivor Series)
Best PPV/Major Event – NXT Takeover: New Orleans
Fun fact… It was actually suggested to me before voting began that this award be split into a category for Best Main Roster PPV and Best NXT PPV, such is NXT’s dominance in this category over the years. My stance was “Wouldn’t I have to do a Worst NXT PPV for balance? Is there even such a show I could give it to that wouldn’t feel like a copout?”. The matter didn’t go any further, and even with some capable efforts on the main roster, this Golden Snowcone was only ever going to one show.
From top-to-bottom, NXT Takeover: New Orleans may be the strongest single major show ever presented under the WWE umbrella, topped and tailed by two five-star matches as rated by pre-eminent wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer. To put that in perspective, only six other matches in the history of the company have received that distinction. The first match would be an amazing ladder match for the new NXT North American Championship, won by Adam Cole over an eclectic set of opponents, including new arrivals EC3 and Ricochet, hossy boys Killian Dain and Lars Sullivan and the enigmatic Velveteen Dream. Shayna Baszler would assert her dominance over NXT’s women’s division by defeating a brave Ember Moon for the NXT Women’s Championship. In a match that counted as both an NXT Tag Team Championship match and the finals of the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, Adam Cole would partner with Kyle O’Reilly as cover for the injured Bobby Fish and, with the assistance of Roderick Strong, would win all the marbles over The Authors Of Pain and Strong and Pete Dunne. Aleister Black would overcome the cunning wiles of Andrade Almas and Zelina Vega to claim Almas’s NXT Championship. And finally, the Golden Snowcone winner itself, the modern classic that was the Unsanctioned Match between Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa.
As we close out five years of major NXT cards, the idea of these cards delivering top-quality wrestling action and winning the Golden Snowcone has become as much of a guarantee as death, taxes and the 20-minute promo at the start of RAW. The main roster shows may never win one of these again. Maybe I might have to re-consider that earlier suggestion for 2019…
Honourable Mentions:
*Evolution
*Royal Rumble
Worst Male Superstar – Brock Lesnar
The novelty has well and truly worn off now. It took a couple of years, with some brief flashes here and there, but as of the end of 2018, the voter fanbase is completely over Brock Lesnar.
Now, is some of it not his fault? Sure. He’s not the one who demanded that he hold the Universal Championship in perpetuity until Roman Reigns was over enough and beloved enough to win it from him. That’s largely on Vince McMahon, wrestling “genius”. But on the rare occasions when Lesnar does show up to work, he doesn’t show up to work. Even the venerated Paul Heyman is spinning his wheels at this point. Other than one bright spark of brilliance against Daniel Bryan at Survivor Series, Lesnar was going through the increasingly limited motions all year, often at the expense of unlucky Braun Strowman. And the complicated thing is that this is now part of the official TV narrative, that Lesnar never shows up to defend his belt, and when he does, he’s “lazy” because he’s preserving himself for UFC. Like, isn’t everyone supposed to win these matches as quickly and as effortlessly as possible? Is he expected to throw the matches by artificially prolonging them for the sake of doing more and different moves? The perils of modern WWE when nothing is off the table to try and get someone over, I guess.
As things stand at the close of 2018 play, we’re back to the beginning. Reigns went down ill barely two months after beating Lesnar at SummerSlam, so the Universal belt is back on The Beast, and Strowman’s back in line for what seems to be his hundredth shot at him at this point at the Royal Rumble with no differing conclusion in sight. Once again. we’re all waiting for the lucky so-and-so that gets to beat Lesnar, just so that he might finally go away for good.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Baron Corbin
*Jinder Mahal
Best Male Superstar – Seth Rollins
In all honestly, judging by the final ballot results here, it hasn’t really been that much of a standout year for any man on the main roster, having largely been overshadowed by the women going from strength to strength and some stellar NXT work. But, if there was anyone on the main roster that probably earned this Golden Snowcone more than any other, it’d be hard to look past Seth Rollins.
And it was largely off the foundation of one epic performance on a late summer episode of RAW. In a seven-man gauntlet match between prospective Universal Championship contenders, Rollins would wrestle for 65 minutes, a record time for a televised non-Royal Rumble match in WWE, and gain clean pinfalls on Roman Reigns and John Cena in back-to-back legs of the gauntlet. However, with the Universal Championship eluding him after this point, Rollins would win the Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania and spend the majority of the year as a fighting champion fending off the likes of The Miz, Elias and Dolph Ziggler in high-level bouts. As it was back in 2015 when he was the company’s top heel and was holding the Money In The Bank briefcase, Rollins was the de facto top champion in the regular absence of Brock Lesnar. Upon the return from injury of Dean Ambrose, Rollins would pair back up with Reigns and Ambrose for a Shield reunion run, which was cut unfortunately brief again when Reigns took his leave for illness, but the magic was still there as shown with a six-man thriller at Super Show-Down against Braun Strowman, Ziggler and Drew McIntyre. A subsequent feud with Ambrose, who turned on Rollins the same night that Reigns announced his illness, hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, but that’s largely been down to Ambrose’s heel character going in a different direction away from his established strengths and not really anything Rollins has done.
It has been a couple of years in the wilderness for The Architect since the first time he won this award. There was a serious knee injury and a slow journey to really finding his feet as a babyface, but in 2018, things finally came together again for Seth Rollins. In 2019, does he finally get the chance to burn down Lesnar’s stranglehold on WWE? Here’s hoping.
Honourable Mentions:
*Tommaso Ciampa
*Daniel Bryan
*Johnny Gargano
The Eva Marie Memorial Snowcone for Worst Female Superstar – Tamina
It’s hard to think of what to say about Tamina. She hardly did anything this year, hell she hardly does anything ANY year. Yet, according to polling done on the FAN Forums for a separate project, Tamina is both the most disliked and least liked talent on the entire WWE roster. And she’s won arguably one of the signature Golden Snowcones too, so… Where do we start?
I guess the easy statement to make is that she just simply isn’t that good at wrestling. Her in-ring stuff isn’t much chop, she has no promo game and her whole act is something already done better by Nia Jax, and considering how close she came to winning this thing herself, that says a lot. And it’s been like this for her entire run of something close to a decade now. She’s just been… there. Once in a while she’d become a title challenger, but she was never any chance of winning it. Other times, she’d somehow land a role as someone’s enforcer, like for AJ Lee or Naomi or Natalya’s short-lived “welcoming committee”. And when she’s not doing either of those, or doing enhancement work, she’s out injured. In the last three years alone she has had separate, months-long injury absences with her knee and her shoulder. And the shoulder was this year, between January and November, so she’s won this award based off of two and a half months of action. Is her pairing with Jax that inflammatory? Or that time when Jax helped her to beat Ember Moon? Or getting onto the RAW Survivor Series team instead of, say, Liv Morgan from The Riott Squad? She doesn’t even botch that much. She didn’t injure someone else by accident, like our two dishonourable mentions both did. Oh, right, and her old man killed someone and got away with it, but I don’t think we’re cruel enough to cast the sins of the father onto the daughter.
Look, this isn’t something I dispute, there’s just so little substance to Tamina in comparison to others that could have won this, or have won this in the past. Well, I think I’ve managed to pad this out enough. Onto the one we’ve all been waiting for.
Dishonourable Mentions:
*Nia Jax
*Brie Bella
Best Female Superstar – Becky Lynch
There’s an old famous saying in wrestling… To be The Man, you have to beat The Man. Yet in 2018, that idiom got turned right on its head when a long-suffering, downtrodden wrestler had taken all they could stands and they could stands no more, and took the mantle of The Man all for herself.
Becky Lynch had always had a loyal crowd following sticking with her through a long and lean run of results after her first SmackDown Women’s Championship win back in 2016, but in mid-2018, it looked like things were finally turning around as she ran through nearly the entire SmackDown women’s division en route to a title bout against champion Carmella and second challenger Charlotte Flair at SummerSlam. But it was after coming up empty-handed one time too many that Lynch cracked and laid out her former friend and new champion Flair, in what was nominally meant to be a heel turn, but only got live crowds rallying behind her even more. Lynch’s frustrated outburst in the face of her long struggle for relevance resonated with the WWE fans much more than Flair’s despair at losing a friend in the process of winning yet another women’s championship in a match that was initially one-on-one between Carmella and Lynch. This run led to a dramatic shift in attitude for The Irish Lass Kicker, as she dropped her more comedic attributes and became a ruthless and confident fighting machine, with three shots of Steve Austin, a jigger of The Rock and a dabberoo of Conor McGregor for flavour. This led to her defeating Flair for the SmackDown Women’s Championship next time out at Hell In A Cell and retaining that gold in a captivating Last Woman Standing match at Evolution, arguably the greatest main roster women’s match in the history of the company. Following that, Lynch set her sights on RAW Women’s Champion Ronda Rousey, putting the microphone in her hands and turning it into a lethal weapon as they headed towards an inter-brand clash at Survivor Series. Unfortunately, a stray punch from Nia Jax put Lynch on the shelf one week before the bout, although it did lead to one of the most iconic images of the year, Lynch standing among the crowd covered in blood, having delivered a beatdown on Rousey and the entire RAW women’s roster. It was a near perfect encapsulation of the new and improved Becky Lynch. She would lose her title to Asuka in a TLC match as 2018 drew a close, but it may have set her on the road towards possibly the first-ever women’s WrestleMania main event, as her issues with Rousey rage on into 2019.
No other WWE wrestler, male or female, commanded as much attention in 2018 as Becky Lynch did. At the very beginning of all this, it could have been argued that all Lynch wanted and that we as a fanbase wanted for Lynch was validation. And now it’s grown and blown up so much, that it could lead her right into wrestling immortality. The Man has truly come around, in one of the most dominant Golden Snowcone wins I’ve ever seen.
Honourable Mentions:
*Charlotte Flair
*Asuka
*Ronda Rousey
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And that is that for another year in the FAN Golden Snowcones. Thanks to all the good brothers and sisters at the official FAN Forums who nominated, and thanks to WWE for all the good, bad, mad and maddening wrestling content. 2019 already looks to be an interesting year with some potential history in the making in the women’s division and the start of some big new TV deals in the United States, and it all begins again, the same day the old year ends.
Enjoy your wrestling, where the race for the great prize never stops.
Image Credit: WWE.com
Typeface Credit: F1 2017 Collection, as interpreted and collated by Matt Amys (http://twitter.com/mattamys)
Dedicated to the memory of the late Alison Davis
1967 – 2018