8 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Extreme Rules 2017

7. Swann Breaks Hometown Curse

rich swann sasha banks
WWE.com

We’ve referenced this multiple times before, but there’s a strange unwritten rule in WWE where wrestlers lose their matches in their hometowns.

We saw Bayley lose her Raw Women’s Championship last month in San Jose. Both Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks lost the same title to each other in each other’s hometowns. And last week, AJ Styles lost to Dolph Ziggler in Atlanta, which is an hour away from his hometown of Gainesville, GA.

That’s why it was a pleasant surprise to see Rich Swann get the win in a mixed tag match with a Phoenix Splash on Noam Dar at Extreme Rules. Swann is a great hand to have on the roster with a tremendous personal story. There’s no indication of whether that factored into the decision, or if it just was in the cards, but it seems like wrestlers lose in their hometowns so often that this was completely out of the norm – in a good way.

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Contributor

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.