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The 2011 TWF Awards
By: TWF Dave | Posted: 01/04/12


Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the TWF Year End Awards for 2011!

Over the past few weeks the members of The Wrestling Forum have been deep in thought trying to decide the best (and worst) of the wrestling world across a number of categories in 2011. The discussions were in depth and the opinions varied but in the end, this is what we came up with:

Breakout performer of the year: Mark Henry
Runner up: Dolph Ziggler
Its hard to question the fact that the year of 2011 was undoubtedly Mark Henrys best in the wrestling business. He'd spent the best part of fifteen years lumbering merrily in the mid-card to the point that early in the year when there was talk of him retiring, frankly, he was that much of an afterthought that none of us would have noticed. Now however, he's one of WWEs top guys - a shining example of how WWE can push somebody and just how well the writing team can work when given the opportunity. The runner up in this category ranked in at number three in the TWF50, so that probably tells you all you need to know about our opinion of him!

Epic Fail Award Joint Winners: Jeff Hardy at Victory Road & WWE cooling down CM Punk
Runner up: Matt Hardys meltdown
Its been an interesting year for the Hardy Boys, interesting in an I can't believe they just did that way that is. The majority of this years celebrity gossip style wrestling news was centered around Matt - from drunken crashes, to arrests, to posting what appeared to be a suicide note on Youtube, to his release from TNA, Matt has really made a concerted effort to take our Epic Fail Award... and he may well have done if not for both the WWE and his own brother - Back in March Jeff Hardy "wrestled" in the main event of TNAs Victory Road PPV whilst clearly out of his mind on something. It appeared that he was either high or drunk and the match itself became a two minute debacle with Sting forcibly holding Hardy down for the pin as, well, just watch The Video and see for yourself. People have blamed TNA for letting Hardy go out to the ring in that state but the simple fact is that Jeff Hardy showed up out of his mind on something at one of his companies major events. He also managed to bag himself a jail term in 2011 too.

The other joint winner of our Epic Fail ties into a number of our other awards; The 2011 rise of CM Punk to a genuine WWE headliner is a big story but, for about seven weeks back in the middle of the year, it was beyond big. That promo and it's subsequent storyline made wrestling cool again in the mainstream media. Unfortunately WWE struggled to capitalise on him and actually managed to extinguish his fire themselves by bringing him back from his absence far too soon, apparantly being undecided as to whether he should be their champion or not and, when he was at his peak, setting up a pointless feud with Kevin Nash that went nowhere. Congratulations WWE, you almost had another Steve Austin on your hands but you managed to reign him back in... well done!

The Matt Striker "I'M MARKING OUT BRO!" Award: THAT CM Punk Promo
AND
The Angle of the Year: CM Punk shooting on WWE & leaving with the WWE title
Remember This? Yep, it's the promo that set CM Punk and the wrestling world on fire back in June. During a John Cena match and seemingly off script CM Punk came out, grabbed himself a microphone and made history. In one seven minute span CM Punk said out loud what the internet & smark fans had been thinking for years. From Brock Lesnar to the Rock to the McMahon family to mentioning other promotions, nobody and nothing was off limits. He also said that he was leaving the company with the WWE title on July 17th in his home town of Chicago... setting the scene for the hottest main event WWE had all year.

The Match of the Year: CM Punk vs John Cena at MITB
Joint Runners up: Undertaker vs Triple H at Wrestlemania & Davey Richards vs Eddie Edwards at Best in the World
The match of the year is always going to be a hotly contested topic - is it about workrate? Should it be a spotfest? Does a lack of crowd reaction ruin a matches chances of being the match of the year AND, conversely, would a good crowd reaction help push an average match into being a MOTY candidate? In the end of course, the only answer is that your MOTY should be the one that you enjoyed watching the most. This year TWFs match of the year award goes to the one that had the hottest crowd reaction since ECW One Night Stand 2006... albeit with an extra 12,000+ people in attendance. The Chicago crowd were on fire for their favourite son back in July and even though the match itself was only very good, the crowd made it a world beater. Check out the entrances of CM Punk and John Cena to see what I'm talking about.

PPV of the year: WWE Money in the Bank
Runner up: ROH Best in the World 2011
Unsurprisingly, when a PPV ends with the best match of the year people will think highly of it. The fact that the show also featured two excellent Money in the Bank matches, one of which featuring another of the internets favourite sons winning a World Title shot, as well as another classic in the Randy Orton vs Christian series sealed the deal for this one.

Ones to Watch: Justin Gabriel, Sin Cara.
A catagory for guys that we think could potentially become the breakout stars of 2012. There was no polling on this award so our winners, Justin Gabriel and Sin Cara, were simply the two names mentioned most in the discussion thread - check out the thread HERE to join in the discussion.

Promotion of the year: WWE
Joint runners up: TNA, ROH
For a lot of people WWEs' glossy graphics, licensed music, big crowds and even bigger production values outweighed the fact that Chikara put out endlessly entertaining shows with fun characters throughout the year OR the fact that Ring of Honor signed a big TV deal and put out the best pure wrestling television show available in 2011. Go figure.

TH over on The Wrestling Blog made a very compelling argument to not nominate WWE in his year end awards Here... Unless they get their act together we may have to consider dropping them from our nominees list next year.

Best Female (as defined by the TWF50): Beth Phoenix
Runner up:Sara Del Rey
When it comes to individual performers and mass voting, the unfortunate fact is the ones that get the most mainstream exposure will be the ones that receive the most votes. Sara Del Rey has never been in WWE or TNA and has barely wrestled in ROH so for her to be the runner up in this one is quite the achievement in itself. Meanwhile, our winner was in WWE.

Best Tag Team (as defined by the TWF50): Wrestlings Greatest Tag Team
(Runner up: The Osirian Portal)
With the dissolution of TNAs tag-team division and WWEs complete lack of one, it fell to Ring of Honors consistently great tag division to provide our tag-team of 2011. Hass and Benjamin spent a large portion of the year as the Tag-Team Champions and had some great matches across the past 12 months so their position as Wrestlings Greatest Tag Team was never really going to be threatened.

The Worst Wrestler of the Year (as defined by the Terrible25): The Great Khali
Seriously, that makes it four years out of five that the lumbering disaster has topped our Terrible25 listing. In fact, the one year he didn't top it he finished second and even that was only because of Hulk Hogans nepotism towards Brian Knobs. Khali truly is a terrible wrestler... the only question is; now he's been released from WWE, who's gonna take this "award" next year?

The Wrestler of the Year (as defined by the TWF50): ......
Its probably fair to say that simply by reading this far, you've probably already guessed our winner. Having been directly involved in winning five of our awards this year it should be clear that the man that topped this years TWF50 has been the shining light in WWE for the past six months. By breaking the fourth wall he made wrestling cool again for however short a time and it's been a long time since anybody has managed to do that. To try and define just how good he's has been since WWE loosened his leash a little would be fruitless, suffice to say he's carried the WWE since June and despite falling ratings, Michael Coles incessant belittling of the product AND WWEs flipflopping from pushing one guy quickly on to the next, he's the guy we continue to tune in for.

If you're still not sure of who we think The Best In The World is then maybe this will help you out a little:



That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen our....
TWF Wrestler of the year for 2011

CM PUNK!


Thanks for reading, be sure to check out the forum and let us know your thoughts on our awards by Clicking Here!
- TWF Dave
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