9 WWE WrestleMania 37 - Night 1 Impulse Reactions
WrestleMania's only for the top WWE Superstars, but could they do it on a wet Saturday in Tampa?
The last hours leading up to WrestleMania 37 were thrilling.
The ever-demonised (and archaically-labelled) Internet Wrestling Community seemed to come together as showtime approached, sharing an agreed-upon excitement for something about the night, even if it wasn't the card. For those unmoved by Sasha Banks Vs Bianca Belair, there was the prospect of 25,000 actual human beings making noise in a venue for the first time in over a year. For those relatively non-plussed with Bobby Lashley Vs Drew McIntyre, there was pre-existing footage of f*cking pirate ships shooting fireworks out of cannons.
For everybody else, there was the weather.
A thunderstorm had loomed large over Raymond James stadium, engulfing people's first event pictures and indeed Wrestling Twitter, creating yet another wrinkle of chaos to this completely chaotic event. Bizarrely, nobody appeared to doubt the show going on - this sort of thing is where Vince McMahon really earns his psychopath points after all - but more if it might have ran late or ran under sodden conditions similar to that incredible Minoru Suzuki/Kazuchika Okada match from 2018 or the insane WWE Puerto Rico show from 1985.
But it did. Nothing - not a global pandemic in 2020 nor an almighty karmic slap in the chops from earth itself one year later - could put the blockers on things. The job of "showstopper" fell, as it should, to the performers themselves.
Arguably worth as much as any belt, which one of them took that title home?
9. The Crowd
Without one individual match from the card generating the typical buzz for the biggest show of the year, major anticipation centred around how exactly the 25,000 in attendance would look and sound during the show after 13 months of sterile atmospheres.
Pre-show shots of people taking their seats amongst the cardboard cut-outs ramped all that up. Going over a year without anything is weird - going without a key component of a pro wrestling show has never fully become the normalised experience promoters would have hoped for.
It was worth the wait. And what a wait in turned out to be.
Just minutes after a bizarrely evocative introduction by Vince McMahon that saw the whole roster rolled out on stage, Michael Cole greeted audiences with a weather delay. An actual honest-to-god weather delay. WrestleMania 37 had another first before the opener.
After 13 months, the jokes about having to wait even longer wrote themselves, unlike the the promos...