WWE ROYAL RUMBLE

Tropicana Field, St. Petersburg, Florida

WOMEN'S ROYAL RUMBLE (BAYLEY) (65:03): There were two big stories that came out this week regarding the WWE and neither one had anything to do with the Royal Rumble. Monday Night RAW is going to Netflix in 2025. That's interesting and kind of a surprise. The other story was a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a woman against Vince McMahon. I probably shouldn't even really call it "sexual harassment," as it went beyond that to the extreme limits of the term. Basically, a woman that lived in the same building as Vince McMahon (he lived in the penthouse) needed a job and someone introduced him to her. She got a meaningless job but he began to show signs that all he wanted was to fuck her. He told her to meet him in his apartment to discuss the job and he was in his underwear. You know, typical boss/employer get-to-know-you stuff. Eventually she succumbed to the pressure of fucking him to be gainfully employed plus receive gifts (tickets to the Belmont Stakes, a new BMW, $20,000 worth of plastic surgery which I assume was breast implants). It gets weirder, though. The lawsuit said that she was forced to have threesomes with Vince and a massage therapist guy and also threesomes with John Lauranitis. Vince also loaned her out for sex to John Lauranitis. Vince also attempted to loan her out to Brock Lesnar but that never happened. Brock did get sent naked pictures of her and supposedly asked to get a video of her taking a piss and then texted her back one word: "bitch." So that's why Brock Lesnar wasn't in the Royal Rumble (Bron Breaker took his place). The most sensational thing in the lawsuit was that during one threesome, Vince took a shit on the woman's head, left to take a shower, then returned to fuck her while she still had shit in her hair. Vince also, apparently, used black and white dildo's on her and named them after black and white wrestlers. The lawsuit also featured a few text messages from Vince which are batshit insane. Think about the horniest, craziest, filthiest, unhinged texts you can imagine...and they're actually worse. Vince offered the woman $3 million dollars to sign an NDA and then only paid her $1 million, hence the lawsuit. This is the same reason why, in 2022, the WWE board kicked Vince off the board and basically fired him. He finagled his way back on the board but resigned on Friday after these allegations came out in The Wall Street Journal. Vince still owns 11% of the WWE, though, but he's not working for the company anymore. While you can say all you want about how the outlandish things in the lawsuit might or might not be true, this isn't the first time he's paid woman to sign NDA's. He raped a woman in a limo years ago and never went to jail for it. I remember hearing he paid a woman $12 million to not go to the police once. So, in short, he's been doing this type of Harvey Weinstein shit for years and has just been paying these women off instead of actually being held accountable for it. If it was only one woman that's accused him of this than it's one thing, but multiple women just means that it's obviously true. And, like Weinstein, like Sandusky at Penn State, these type of criminals would have been in jail years ago if they didn't have a bunch of people around them that didn't stay silent. Will any of them actually go to jail for any of this? Who knows? It took a gigantic, cultural Me Too movement to finally get Weinstein and Epstein behind bars. And those two were in the press and talked about in the mainstream for years. Pro-wrestling is not in the mainstream and while people know who Vince McMahon is, will anyone even be talking about this story in a month from now? Probably not. The current lawsuit against him is just a civil lawsuit, meaning if he's found guilty he'll just have to pay money. All of this makes the WWE look really, really bad. Vince has been doing this for years and it's finally come out now, decades later, when he's nearing 80 years old? The current lawsuit is about things that only happened from 2020 to 2022, but supposedly in 2022 when they first tried to kick Vince out there were a bunch of other payments from women that came up. The WWE supposedly did an investigation about all of this and didn't even interview the women that filed the lawsuit. Jesus Christ. This all made me so sick to my stomach that I wasn't even excited to watch the Royal Rumble. Should I even support this company anymore? A company built on sexual harassment and rape and rich fucks acting like they can do whatever they want? Sigh. The only change to the Royal Rumble was to not put Brock Lesnar on the show. He was scheduled to return in the Rumble. The thing is...I bet they still had to pay him. What a horrible fucking world we live in. Oh, and that includes this terribly boring women's Rumble match! I don't know if it was the malaise I had while watching this show, or perhaps the quiet, dull crowd, or maybe because nothing remotely exciting happened on the show...but this was not a good show at all. It took place in the Tampa Bay Rays baseball stadium (where they shot during the pandemic with that Thunderdome gimmick). Maybe because it was such a big stadium (and they filled it up with 40,000 fans) was the reason that it seemed like the crowd was dead for most of the night. Or maybe the crowd was just quiet for most of the night. They did pop big for Jade Cargill, who finally debuted. Honestly, she looked just as akward and sloppy as she did in AEW. She picked up and slammed Nia Jax, which got a big pop. This Rumble was really, really sloppy, though. Maxxine Dupri, the blonde chick in the Alpha Academy group, came out and tried to do a sort-of Hurricanrana move and botched it twice back to back. Ugh. There were a lot of NXT wrestlers in this. There was also a man, R. Truth, who came in thinking it was the men's match (you know your company is in dire straights creatively when R. Truth gets more of a pop than half your roster). For whatever reason, though, they didn't have any past stars show up as a surprise in either this one or the men's Rumble. That was always one of the highlights of these things so I wonder why they stopped doing that. #30 was Liv Morgan, who recently was arrested for driving under the influence of marijuana. Honestly, #30 should be the type of entrant that people cheer about. Nobody cared about Liv Morgan and Sami Zayn at #30 in the men's Rumble was kind of a dumb choice as well (everyone wanted The Rock...but they should have just made CM Punk #30). Bayley ended up winning, which I guess makes sense as Iyo Skye is the champ and they're both in the same group and I guess will turn on one another to make a feud. But Bayley isn't very exciting in the ring, anymore, so who gives a fuck about that match? Rhea Ripley vs. Becky is the bigger women's match, but I guess Becky has won the Rumble too many times. This match was a total fucking bore. AEW Collision went head to head with this show and the main event was an elimination, escape the cage match with FTR & Daniel Garcia vs. The House of Black. That match was better than this whole show. 1/2*

ROMAN REIGNS vs. LA KNIGHT vs. AJ STYLES vs. RANDY ORTON (19:29): This was weird. Why did they put on the championship match before the Intercontinental match? Last year, the Roman vs. Kevin Owens title match was the main event of the show. Was it because nobody in their right mind thought Roman would lose so they figured let's get this over with early? This match was okay, but having Solo Sikoa pull the ref out of the ring then beat everyone up was groan inducing. I can't be the only one sick of this shit, can I? LA Knight was over as usual. The crowd liked Orton's RKO's. Honestly, this was probably the best match on the show. **

LOGAN PAUL vs. KEVIN OWENS (14:00): I thought this would be a bit more exciting because Logan Paul usually provides a spectacle. While it was an okay match, the ending was atrocious. Logan Paul brought in brass knuckles but Kevin Owens took them and used them to knock out Logan and get the pin. The ref saw this and rang the bell for a DQ. So I guess we'll get a rematch? You really shouldn't be doing DQ's on a big show like this. Do that kind of thing on RAW or something to set up the big match. Logan Paul looked good, doing a lot of his high flying stuff...but this never really turned into anything great. **

MEN'S ROYAL RUMBLE (CODY RHODES) (68:11): I will say this: the final two were CM Punk and Cody, and when they were wrestling it was really good and I was thinking: this match would be great in the future as a main event title match. Other than that, this was a pretty boring and uneventful Rumble. Andrade returned, which was really the only surprise (granted, we knew he was going to the WWE eventually). Okada did not enter the Rumble, which probably means he's signing with AEW (the same with Mercedes Monet). R. Truth came out and acted like it was a tag team match and stood in the corner, waiting for Dominik Mysterio to tag him in. That actually got the biggest crowd reaction in the whole match. CM Punk came in late and actually got some audible boo's during his time in there. Punk eliminated Drew McIntyre. Cody eliminated Gunther. And then eventually Cody eliminated CM Punk to win for the second straight year. I thought CM Punk was going to win because I figured The Rock was going to face Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania. Nope! The Rock ending Roman Reigns' streak makes no sense, though, but neither does Cody since it's a retread (Cody lost last year to Roman, in case you somehow forgot one of the most famous stupid decisions in wrestling history). Will they ever do a Rock vs. Roman match? Probably not at this rate. Doing it if Roman isn't the champ makes no sense now or, at least, it won't have the same impact. And doing it anywhere other than Wrestlemania makes no sense (The Rock was offered a ton of cash to do it in Saudi Arabia this year...God help us). Cody beating Roman for the title at Wrestlemania is the right thing to do but then why didn't they just do it last year? What was the point of just doing it again a year later? I'm honestly pretty checked out with this company and have been for a while. Maybe one day, when Vince is rotting away in jail, I'll feel a little bit better about watching and enjoying this company. **