6 Ups And 11 Downs From WWE Crown Jewel

6. Overselling The Drama

Look, Crown Jewel was a turkey, a goose egg, a big flaming pile of poop.

So you’re going to need the announcers to really sell everything that’s happening as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of this industry.

But Michael Cole was bordering on Tony Schiavone territory with some of his exclamations Friday. The veteran play-by-play guy constantly referred to everything Shawn Michaels did as “Shade of…!” He sold four AARP members sloughing through the main event and using every smoke and mirror trick they could as the greatest, most historic thing we’ve ever seen.

Truthfully, they could have wrestled a basic, standard tag match with a couple big moments and spots built in, and the match would have been fine. But they opted for more smoke and mirrors. It turned a perfectly decent match into an overdone affair. And Cole’s histrionics didn’t help matters, as his grating commentary just made you want to reach through the TV.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.