Tag Team of the Year
Chris Jericho & The Big Show
While World Wrestling Entertainment hasn’t put much stock in tag team wrestling since the decline of the Hardy Boyz/Dudley Boyz/Edge & Christian era in 2001, it was in 2009 when it saw its greatest resurgence. Thanks to the company’s World Tag and WWE Tag Titles being combined into the Unified WWE Tag Team Championships the belts became a “floating” championship that allowed the Champions to appear on all of WWE’s programs, regardless of their home brand. Thus the Titles gained a new level prestige.
Chris Jericho and Edge won the Titles out of nowhere at The Bash this past summer, but an untimely injury to Edge allowed Jericho to pick a new partner. At The Night of Champions, The Big Show debuted as Jericho’s new teammate and the duo defeated Ted DiBiase & Cody Rhodes. While on paper the new duo looked like an uninspired pairing they gelled almost instantly. Jericho was able to continue his holier-than-thou evil virtuoso and now had the biggest back-up in the company at his side. Big Show, to his credit, elevated his game as well thanks to his new found purpose. The two men dominated Monday Night RAW this past fall and winter and were usually the first to “greet” each week’s guest host. Thanks to both men’s past resumes as World Champions and main event-caliber wrestlers they elevated the floundering Tag Team Championships to a level that hadn’t seen in years. In fact Jericho and Show (lovingly nicknamed JeriShow) were such a success that their final Tag Title defense, a loss to DeGeneration X (Triple H & Shawn Michaels) was the main event of the TLC pay per view in December; the first time the Tag Championships were ever featured solely in the main event of a WWE pay per view.
Honorable Mentions – Beer Money, Inc. (Robert Roode & James Storm), The Osirian Portal (Amasis & Ophidian), The Young Bucks (Nick & Matt Jackson), DeGeneration X (Triple H & The Big Show), The American Wolves (Davey Richards & Eddie Edwards)
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