The current Ascension team came together in June 2013
with Viktor (at that point still Rick Victor) replacing the artist now known as
Bram1 and then known as Kenneth Cameron, who’d been released in
2012. Konnor (at that point still trading under the name Conor O’Brian) had
been working as a singles performer in the months since Cameron’s release. The
partnership with Viktor signalled his return to the doubles ranks.
And yeah, that return was pretty successful. They won
their first two matches against non-entity teams before losing an eight man tag
match to a team that included Xavier Woods and CJ Parker, but they didn’t take
the pinfall in that. In fact the only loss they suffered in their first year
together was on an NXT live event to then-tag champions Adrian Neville and
Corey Graves.
They were protected with short matches that allowed them
to appear ferocious and explosive, and they beat everybody. From unimpressive
jobber pairings like Mac Miles and Steve Cutler to more formidable units like
Sami Zayn and Tyson Kidd, The Vaudevillains, Too Cool and The Legionnaires2,
everyone who stepped into the ring with The Ascension wound up putting them
over, usually via their Fall of Man double team finisher.
It was a simple, effective approach that got the pair
over because it was designed to make them look good by playing to their
strengths. Even when they eventually lost the tag team titles to the Lucha
Dragons they were protected, the match being presented as the Dragons getting
lucky with their timing as much as anything else.
 |
| The face paint didn't help... |
The Ascension’s first month on the main roster undid all
of that hard work. They were ridiculed by JBL, booked to compare themselves to
tag teams from the 80s and 90s, easily dispatched by the nWo, the New Age Outlaws
and the APA, and had a competitive match in their pay-per-view debut. Nothing
about the approach seemed designed to make fans think of these newcomers as
anything special.
Had it ended with JBL having some digs at them things
would have been fine. That could have been ignored or a segment could have been
booked in which the APA reunited to get trounced by the younger guys, putting
them over in the process. What we actually got seemed designed to let us know
that The Ascension aren’t as good as the Road Warriors, Demolition, or the APA,
and they can only just about take care of the Outlaws.
Imagine how different things would have been if Konnor
and Viktor had spent their first weeks beating jobber teams inside two minutes
before being confronted by Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Sean Waltman, the Outlaws
and the APA (the youngest of that gaggle being Waltman at 42), and they'd taken
out all of them. They would have
looked unstoppable. They could have been pitted against the scant few teams WWE
has over the course of two months before being booked to dethrone the Usos in a
competitive match on the WrestleMania 31 pre-show. After months of easy
victories seeing them in a competitive match would have made it clear the Usos
are an above average team, keeping them strong in defeat.
Instead The Ascension were used to appease the egos of a
bunch of guys who mean little to WWE’s current mass audience. What a waste.
***
1 TNA were presumably influenced by Bram
Stoker when selecting this name. Maybe the original intention was for Bram to
be a vampire? That would be very TNA.
2 Describing some of these teams as formidable
may tickle some people but I think it’s an accurate statement. They had been
presented as such in other matches on NXT. That’s what counts.
