10 Things I Hate About The Royal Rumble
8. It’s Just Part Of The Obsession With WrestleMania
For far too many years now, WWE have promoted the Road To WrestleMania to lead into their biggest event of the year, the so-called SuperBowl of wrestling. Historically, the Royal Rumble event marks the beginning of that road, given that the storyline surrounding the Royal Rumble winner leads directly into the main event of WrestleMania.
Now, for some time stores worldwide have been replacing Christmas lines with Easter eggs at the tail end of December. I can go and buy hot cross buns in January - what the hell is that about? Similarly, in recent years WWE’s Road To WrestleMania has begun to move steadily backwards in the wrestling calendar. These days, the two months leading up to January's special event are treated as kind of a slip-road or causeway into WrestleMania oriented storylines.
The Road To WrestleMania is heliocentric, almost exclusively geared around the main event picture and the world title hunt - or world titles, if you’re inclined to be charitable about the Universal Championship (I’m not. It looks like the consolation prize at a seaside arcade). Even more so than usual in WWE, all storylines and angles begin to be subordinate to the big boys and their big toys.
With the weeks leading up to the Royal Rumble now officially a part of the Road, a full quarter of a year of WWE programming is now focused almost exclusively around the big belt(s) and the people fighting over it, to the detriment of everything else.
And since the Road To WrestleMania is when things happen in WWE, storylines can't afford to change too much in the weeks leading up to the Road, or the weeks leading away from it.
Incredibly, that means that at least five months of the year, December to April inclusive, can see WWE focusing on recycling the same two or three main event stories - over and above everything and everyone else on the card.
The Road To WrestleMania is a ring-road, a satellite freeway orbiting The Grandaddy Of Them All, with the Royal Rumble squatting to one side like some grotty truckstop diner.