WWE WrestleMania 33: 5 Ways to Improve on Last Year’s Show
By Adam O'Brien
Source: WWE.com
3. Let Dean Ambrose’s Creativity Come to Life
Last year’s WrestleMania was primarily booked with three feature matches in mind.
Triple H vs. Roman Reigns for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, The Undertaker vs. Shane McMahon inside Hell in a Cell with control over Monday Night Raw on the line, and Brock Lesnar vs. Dean Ambrose in a No Holds Barred Match.
The latter of those was perhaps the most mouth-watering concept heading into the event, given how sadistic “The Lunatic Fringe” was made to look in the build-up.
Dean Ambrose knew that he was going to get thrown around like a rag doll, so he enlisted the help of some of the industry’s most extreme stars of all time, adopting Cactus Jack’s barbed-wire baseball bat and Chainsaw Charlie’s iconic chainsaw as his own as he geared up to go to war with “The Beast Incarnate” in Dallas.
The bout had the potential to be one of the most over-the-top slugfests in recent memory, with some of the craziest spots we may have ever seen, but a certain someone’s lack of enthusiasm is what appears to have held it back.
The match fell miles below expectations, with very few of the weapons Ambrose introduced being put to use. The former WWE Champion would explain later on Steve Austin’s podcast that Brock Lesnar didn’t have any desire to go all-out in this match, showing very little interest in any of the ideas put forth by Ambrose.
This year, Ambrose will inevitably be squaring off against Baron Corbin for the WWE Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania 33, and given how a lot of their physicality has come in backstage or behind-the-scenes settings, it would be appropriate if this was given a falls count anywhere stipulation.
So, why not let Dean Ambrose have the match that he wanted to have with Brock Lesnar, with “The Lone Wolf”? The animosity is certainly present to justify this being an all-out brawl that spans the entire arena, so it would feel somewhat poetic for this to be the hardcore CZW-style match that we expected twelve months ago.
It would also add a sense of versatility in a line-up filled to the brim.