Sunday!
I’m sure that I’ve mentioned before that the Royal Rumble is my favorite PPV of the year.
Sure, WrestleMania is the biggest spectacle, but that PPV seems calibrated to be the “if you only get one PPV a year… GET THIS ONE!” PPV which means that it’s aimed at the people who only get one PPV a year.
If you told me that someone only gets two PPVs a year, I would know automatically that they got WrestleMania but I would have to guess what the second one was… was it Summerslam? I could see it being Survivor Series, I suppose (given that it’s six months opposed to WM). Back when King of the Ring was a thing, I could see someone who loved single-elimination tournaments picking that one. (The eventual problem with King of the Ring was that there were too many Billy Gunns winning the thing and not enough Rocks.) People who like the hardcore stuff might pick the Hell in a Cell PPV or Tables, Ladders, and Chairs. (Allow a small complaint: Hell in a Cell went from being a “holy cow, this will decisively end the storyline of this absolutely epic rivalry!” to being Just Another Hardcore Match.)
But the Rumble is like nothing else the WWE does all year. It’s an hour-long match that intertwines multiple storylines, creates new rivalries, provides comedy moments, has multiple ways to push multiple wrestlers, and does it in such a way that leaves even the most jaded wrestling fan looking forward to the “If You Get Only One PPV A Year” PPV.
The conceit is simple: this is a 30-man over-the-top-rope-elimination Battle Royal. One wrestler goes down to the ring every 90 seconds.
There are different ways to make the audience say “dang, that wrestler is pretty good!” in this particular event. Have the wrestler be one of the first ones out to the ring and just survive for a good long time before being eliminated. Have the ring be filled with 10-12 wrestlers and then have the next wrestler come down to the ring and “clean house” and eliminate five or eight wrestlers in a fairly short period of time. Of course, the big one is “winning the dang thing”.
But even in addition to all of those, you can do little things like have your submission wrestler get a current big wig in a submission hold of some sort and have the current big wig tap out. The announcers need to be yelling that tapping out doesn’t mean anything in these circumstances, you have to go over the top rope… and then have someone else break the hold (or the wrestler breaks the hold himself) and then have the submitter throw the submittee over the top rope. Tah-dah! You now have a new feud! Perhaps you can have a very big name wrestler in the ring and have the announcers talk about how this big name wrestler is one of the favorites to win the Rumble… then have an up-and-coming midcarder eliminate this very big name. Tah-dah! You now have a new feud!
So you walk out of the match looking forward to at least two non-world-title-level feuds, have several different wrestlers that come out of the match looking good (even though they didn’t win) and everything wraps up with everybody looking forward to how these different storylines will play out… including the ones that you know will play out at WrestleMania.
Incidentally, tonight is also the first 30-woman Royal Rumble. So that’s going to be interesting as well. A big night *FULL* of firsts happening there.
And I can’t wait.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
I’m reading the Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914. For watching, I splurged on the latest episodes of Season 11 of the Murdoch Mysteries this weekend along with the BBC’s Edwardian Farm.
Over at LGM, there is a thread on School of Rock that is a reminder of one of most pernicious influences of Marxism; the need to analyze everything through the lens of ideology. Its a discussion on the problematic nature of ideology.Report
Okay, breaking all of this down:
Opening match was AJ Styles vs. Kevin Owens/Sami Zayn. This was a good match (to be expected) that had a good finish that managed to not bury Owens/Zayn (this surprised me). Good stuff. I’m hoping that Owens/Zayn are out of the title picture until after WrestleMania… at which point I hope they get back in it (and maybe even win it for a while).
Usos defeat Benjamin/Gable in 2-0 (in a best-of-three-falls series). This was a waste of a 2-out-of-3 falls series. I’d have preferred them just making scheduled for one fall (ONE FALL!) and opening the show with Bobby Roode vs. Mojo Rawley instead of opening the show with a WWE championship match.
The Mens’ Royal Rumble. OH MY GOSH WHAT A GREAT RUMBLE! Sure, the camera work was troubled at times and, okay, there were a handful of botched spots, but it hit all of the emotional notes it needed to, had some great teases, and finished up with Roman Reigns vs. Shinsuke Nakamura and everyone in the room was talking about how they knew it was never going to be Nakamura (though they wanted it to be). AND THEN NAKAMURA WON! The room exploded. Seriously, everybody went nuts. Most everybody else in the room ranges from “doesn’t hate Reigns” to “kinda likes him” and I’m the only “I HATE HIM SO MUCH!” person there but, even so, everybody loved Nakamura and we’re all excited about the *REAL* WrestleMania main event. And it was nice seeing Shane Helms again, even if only for a minute. And, oh my gosh, Rey looked *GREAT*.
The Bar defeated Rollins/Jordan for the Tag Team belts. If you were going to do a tasteless concussion storyline, why would you put that storyline in the middle of a PPV? They, seriously, could have removed this match from the show entirely (or swapped it with the aforementioned Roode vs. Rawley match) and the show would have benefitted from it.
Lesnar vs. Strowman vs. Kane. I love me some Kane, don’t get me wrong, but when I first saw this match my immediate thought was “they’re obviously just throwing Kane in there to eat the pin.” It was *SO* obvious that I thought that, maybe, they were going to subvert the expectations? Like “everybody knows that we’re throwing Kane in there to eat the pin so maybe we’ll have a different finish” or something? But, no. Kane ate the pin. Which means that we’re getting Lesnar vs. Strowman vs. Reigns at WrestleMania and *THAT* is how they’re getting the belt off of Lesnar.
As for the Womens’ Rumble, the main thing that I was worried about was that the match might be bowling shoe ugly. The secondary thing that I was worried about was that the match might not be bowling shoe ugly but merely only good enough to damn with faint praise. As it was, the match was really, really good! It had a handful of problems, sure… foremost was that instead of having two or three “hey, I used to *LOVE* that wrestler!” surprise entrants, they had about nine (maybe ten) and this limited the stories they could tell (and increased the amount of ring rust in there at any given time dramatically). That said, it was *AWESOME* to see Molly Holly again. And there were sevenish women who would have been good choices to win it and they picked one of those seven.
All in all, I remember it as a really enjoyable night with really enjoyable main events and I’ve already forgotten the worst of the matches on the card.
Good stuff all around. The Rumble remains my favorite PPV.Report
It was a good Rumble. The worst parts were the tag matches. I do not know why they decided to have them both be throwaway stories. Ugh.
Still it did not detract from one of the best 30 man Rumble matches I have seen. Good comedy, good stories to come from it and a dream match for many fan at Wresltemania.
The women’s match was also the best 30 women match I have ever seen (see what I did there). Jay is right, they made it good. My main problem was seeing the men’s match before this and it being much better with the stories, so the lack of stories to come out of the women’s Rumble was in stark contrast. Having Ronda come out did not elevate it. It main ways I thought it detracted from the winner.Report