MLW: Making a Championship
Without a strong top title, it’s nearly impossible to write a high-quality week-to-week wrestling show.
Since arriving on beIN SPORTS, Major League Wrestling has seemed determined to break out as the next big wrestling company. One simple indicator of MLW’s ambition is the fact that they refer to their top prize as simply “the World Heavyweight Championship” on TV without any further qualification. That wording is telling because it speaks to Court Bauer’s operation understanding that without a strong top title, it’s nearly impossible to write a high-quality week-to-week wrestling show.
If the title doesn’t seem like something worth winning, it opens a huge can of wrestling worms: How do you get wrestlers into the ring together without writing so many personal angles that you burn out the whole idea of the personal angle? How do you visually indicate to the newest viewers which matches are especially important? What shiny beacon is hypothetically attracting a field of the world’s greatest competitors to the GILT Nightclub in Orlando?
A look at history’s great world titles, from the NWA World Heavyweight Championship and IWGP Heavyweight Championship to the AWA and WWF/E Championships, reveals three qualities of a great wrestling championship:
1. The Championship is held by top wrestlers whose reigns have distinct personalities
2. The Championship is sought after by a variety of different challengers from around the world
3. The Championship is the embodiment of a widely respected league or talent pool
So, how is the MLW World Heavyweight Championship doing in each of these departments, you ask?
Let’s start with a look at the MLW Champion, Shane “Swerve” Strickland. Unlike Billy Corgan’s NWA, which relaunched its brand by putting the title on longtime TNA/Impact stalwart Nick Aldis, MLW selected a veteran wrestler whose face had not been seen extensively on national television prior to their reboot. By resisting putting their title on an MVP or a Jake Hager, Bauer and his team have given themselves a blank page upon which to define what it means to be an MLW champion. With that said, starting fresh in this way requires a lot more work in terms of both writing and wrestling to get the champion and championship over to the appropriate level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN1ufVwHzj0
Almost two months into their weekly TV show, it’s still a little tough to explain who Strickland is without simply repeating that he’s “the champion,” but at least his feud with Pentagon Jr. showed that he is a champion who is willing to take any punishment and absolutely refuses to quit due to pain or humiliation. When Pentagon spat burning mist in his face, he came right back and stated plainly (in a promo that was reminiscent of Poo’s training scene from the game Earthbound) that he was willing to fight beyond the destruction of his entire body, if necessary.
That feud with Pentagon demonstrated perfectly that the MLW World Heavyweight Championship is already off to a great start when it comes to attracting world class international competition. Pentagon Jr. provided the ideal initial challenger for Strickland, as the masked man is one of the hottest acts in the world as well as a vicious heel who forced Swerve to dig deep and find levels of perseverance and courage that the audience hadn’t seen before.
Even before the two entered the ring for their championship bout, MLW made sure to demonstrate that getting a world title shot is no easy feat. In the match that saw Pentagon Jr. earn his number-one contender status against his brother Rey Fenix, Tony Schiavone and Rich Bocchini both emphasized that the prestige and glory of the title were enough to make two siblings attempt to break each other’s necks. The action of the Fenix-Pentagon match, combined with the story the announcers told, communicated extremely effectively that the Major League Wrestling World Heavyweight Championship is a prize that the best wrestlers in the world are desperate to put it all on the line to earn.
That leaves the final component of a great title: it must represent the cream of one of the world’s great talent pools. The NWA World Title of the 1960s and ‘70s was so strong and such a powerful draw because people around the country understood that NWA territories were the top level of the game, and the World Heavyweight Champion was the league MVP. To strengthen their title in this way, MLW must develop a core team of top-contender-level regulars.
While bringing in stars from other shows and promotions is useful for buzz and to help the title seem important in the wrestling landscape (as mentioned above), the name Major League Wrestling must ring formidable unto itself for the championship to truly become one of the best and most prestigious in the world. MLW can’t simply be the best of the indies or a sandbox where wrestlers from other promotions with talent-friendly contracts can pick up high-quality dates; they must define the space that is Major League Wrestling and populate it with recurring characters whose progress toward or away from the World Heavyweight Championship is their primary or close secondary concern.
Given how much it takes to create a wrestling title worthy of being called a true World Heavyweight Championship, it’s hard to imagine a belt that sat inactive for almost fifteen years suddenly becoming one of the richest prizes in the game. However, in spite of the challenges they face, Court Bauer, Shane Strickland, and the team at MLW might be just a few months away from a title and a champion as widely recognized as those of Ring of Honor, Impact, or NXT. With the right core roster, cherry-picked outside challengers, and a breakout performance by Swerve, the MLW World Heavyweight Championship might be the next big belt.
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