Typically, the Royal Rumble is kind of like pizza, or sex: even when it’s bad it’s still kinda good. But that’s not always the case is it? Pizza can give you food poisoning, and sex can leave you with all sorts of unwanted problems. Am I saying this year’s Men’s Royal Rumble was the equivalent of diarrhea or an STD?
Honestly…kinda, yeah.
The main problem with this year’s Rumble is not that it was a disappointing victor. We’ve had plenty of those in the past: Vince McMahon in 1999, Batista in 2014, Roman Reigns in 2015. We as fans can live with that. The main problem was that we knew exactly who was going to win before the match even started. That’s not totally unprecedented: Hulk Hogan winning in 1991, Shawn Michaels winning in 1996, and Triple H winning in 2002 were all telegraphed. While those rumbles had an obvious finish, at least we didn’t know FOR SURE that the person was going to win.
Perhaps a more fitting comparison would be in 2013, when John Cena won the Royal Rumble after the Rock had defeated CM Punk for the WWE Championship earlier in the night. Knowing they already had a Wrestlemania match lined up, as soon as The Rock won the title, we all knew Cena was going to win the Rumble.
So what made the 2022 rumble a more egregious offense than 2013? At least in 2013 Cena was already announced for the Rumble. This year, WWE decided to give us a “surprise” entrant in Brock Lesnar, after he got screwed out of his title earlier in the night by Roman Reigns, who he will undoubtedly face at Wrestlemania for the title.
Nobody was surprised. Nobody was excited. It was the most obvious “surprise” in the history of Royal Rumble surprises. In fact, the better surprise (and better performance) of the rumble came from Bad Bunny. I suppose it’s appropriate, given that Bad Bunny and Brock Lesnar have had about the same number of matches in the past year.
What’s worse, Brock winning was completely unnecessary. The mere fact that Roman screwed Brock out of his title at all gives us all the reason needed to have these two face off, once again, at Wrestlemania.
Meanwhile, we have Bobby Lashley, who isn’t looking like a strong champion at all given the fact that he only won because of Roman Reigns’ interference. He has no clear opponent for Wrestlemania, and while there’s plenty of time to shoehorn in a storyline, wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense for Lashley’s opponent to have come from winning the Royal Rumble? Someone like Kevin Owens, AJ Styles, or even Seth freakin Rollins winning the Rumble and having just cause for a Wrestlemania showdown would surely make more sense than whatever cockamaimy story we are going to be force fed over the next two months.
For all the years of creative experience, for all the dozens of writers on staff, for all the time and preparation they had…this was the best they could come up with. It’s no wonder ratings are plummeting. Personally speaking, while my interest in the product has been waning for some time now, after what WWE pulled on Saturday, they have officially hit rock bottom.
