7 Things You Should Know About WWE Royal Rumble 1999

6. The Undercard Matches Were Boring

There were three undercard matches featuring male wrestlers not counting the WWE Title match. This was when the New Age Outlaws were doing their own thing, so they had a chance to have some longer matches. The Big Boss Man beat Road Dogg, Ken Shamrock beat Billy Gunn to retain the IC Title and X-Pac beat Gangrel. At the time, Boss Man & Shamrock were the tag champs, so those titles weren't on the line. The best of those three matches was X-Pac over Gangrel, which got about six minutes. Why not more? Because WWE decided to give Boss Man vs. Road Dogg 12 minutes, which was a really boring encounter between two guys with bad chemistry. Dogg's Hardcore Title wasn't on the line. If it was it may have been better although maybe they felt like if it was too similar to the weapons in the "I Quit" match. Shamrock's match with Gunn was a snoozefest for 15 minutes. To Gunn's credit, he did a good job of selling the ankle injury before tapping out to Shamrock. It's just that Gunn was really never that great in terms of his singles career. He was always better in a tag team. That X-Pac matchup with Gangrel was promising and then it just ended too soon. Gangrel was a guy that had a good character, a unique look and was capable of having good matches, yet he never really got a serious push. The same could be said about the European Title. It was never really given a chance to get big because it was in the shadow of the European Title. Those were the first three matches on the show. Two of them were below average. That's not a good thing obviously.