10 Things WWE Regrets About The Royal Rumble
3. A Disastrous Endorsement
The 2015 Royal Rumble was, in retrospect, hilariously bad.
Just this wonderfully harebrained, magnificently spiteful thing, Vince must have sneezed on Sunday morning, or something, for he punished himself and all matter in the WWE Universe by laying out a match calibrated perfectly to annoy f*ck out of everybody in the arena - and, given the rise of the #CancelWWENetwork hashtag, everybody with a Twitter account.
It wasn't the dumbest bullsh*t ever, but the cynical gesture - Roman Reigns is going to avenge all of your humiliated, buried favourites by last eliminating the two creaking dinosaurs that killed them off - was much too cynical. In effect, the layout mirrored and magnified precisely why Roman Reigns was so profoundly unpopular with the audience. He was put over by default: you gotta like Roman, because everybody else is terrible!
At least one person liked Roman in Philadelphia: The Rock. That was the idea, anyway; Rock, mortified at a reception even he couldn't control, let the mask slip once his initial return pop subsided to a sustained din of mightily pissed off vuvuzelas.
To recap: WWE killed their top babyface, killed everybody else to get that top babyface over, which of course failed, and made The Rock think twice about tainting his brand.
At the close of the 2005 West Side Story-inspired Rumble commercial, Vince woke up in a cold sweat. "That's not the Rumble I had in mind!"
For once in his life, he was 10 years too early.