SummerSlam Shun: World Champs Take Backseat To Revenge Matches

    The World Heavyweight Championship. The WWE Championship. The two biggest prizes in the WWE today. And yet their futures are put in the backseat in favor of the big names.

    At SummerSlam this past Sunday, the World Heavyweight Championship was put on the line, with CM Punk defending against JBL. A highly emotional match. JBL has been Punk's loudest critic, calling him a "paper champion" and a "transitional champion". Punk was looking to make his second Pay-Per-View title defense a successful one. And yet, for all the buildup to this match, it didn't even main event. Not even co-main evented. It was the third to last match on the card.

    Hey, at least you can't say it was the middle of the card. That dubious "honor" goes to 12-time World Champ HHH, who defended against the Great Khali. HHH, one of the 3 biggest stars in the company, gets shut out of the main event. Why? Well, because!

The co-main events for that evening? A "grudge match" between Batista and John Cena, and a Hell in the Cell match between Edge and the returning Undertaker. Now, I understand that a Hell in the Cell match takes precedent above all else on a card. It's the feud-ender. The showstopper. The curtain-closer. But for a simple one-fall match with nothing on the line is apparently a bigger deal than the two biggest titles in the sport, there's problems.

Firstly, Cena-Batista was rushed. A match 6 years in the making, whether the 'E will admit that or not, was rushed for quickie buys. What was the build to this epic encounter? They win the tag titles.

GASP! But how? They're rivals! They can't win the titles! How will they work together?

Well guess what? They didn't. They had a week-long reign, ended by their own feuding and a loss to the men they beat for the titles, Team Priceless.

If you remember, in the buildup to WrestleMania 23, Cena and Shawn Michaels won the tag belts, but kudos to them, they held them for awhile, until Michaels had enough and superkicked Cena, something the fans had waited to see for three months, from the week after the Royal Rumble, until the week before WrestleMania. That was a buildup.

What buildup does Cena-Batista get? Cena accidentally punched Batista. Oops. Let's be angry at each other for 3 weeks, then fight, then the next night we're pals again.

Stupid. A blown opportunity. SummerSlam made the WWE look damn foolish. They buried their own titles, and blew off potentially the biggest feud of the decade. 

That's an Adamle Original, all right.