10 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Extreme Rules 2019

8. Love Letters To Philly

Drew Gulak Tony Nese
WWE.com

As someone who lives near Philadelphia, this writer typically enjoys smart references to the City of Brotherly Love when WWE comes to town.

No, this doesn’t mean booing Santa Claus, or mocking Allen Iverson’s “practice” rant or something like that – we’re all a little more than tired of that one.

But Sunday night, we got a couple nice shout-outs: Hometown boy Drew Gulak wore the orange & black of the NHL Flyers for his Cruiserweight Championship match, which he won; Street Profits dropped a “Trust the process” mention, a mantra used by the NBA Sixers; Corey Graves noted that Otis looked a lot like the Flyers’ mascot, Gritty (which is actually somewhat true); And of course, we had a Paul Heyman sighting at a PPV called Extreme Rules, just a few miles from the old ECW Arena.

All of those were subtle enough references that got the message across without bludgeoning us. Of course, Becky Lynch and Seth Rollins tried to get cute with talking about the Liberty Bell and William Penn, but we’ll let those slide.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.