Every year, it's Vince McMahon's call to select who wins the Royal Rumble, the match that chooses half of the main event of WrestleMania, the match that sets the business tone for the next calendar year. Now, let's stop and realize that the winner of the Royal Rumble for the past two years wasn't the company's most over act in Daniel Bryan (an underdog who could've gotten over huge as a Rumble winner), but a returning and out of ring shape Batista, and in 2015, Roman Reigns. Vince McMahon's love of big charismatic wrestlers is legendary. However, when looking at the future of the business in general, there are three small, athletic and talented wrestlers for every six-foot plus, 250-plus pound giant. Vince McMahon is figurative spitting into the face of some of possibly the most uniquely gifted and overall entertaining wrestlers that the industry has ever seen in order to placate his own fetishization of jacked up giants.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.