How AEW Broke The WWE Royal Rumble Curse
Stardust ('16) received the message and successfully sought his release that same year, subverting the curse by very fractionally affecting WWE's bottom line via the formation of All Elite Wrestling. Kofi Kingston ('17) broke the curse by capturing the WWE Heavyweight Title two years later. The curse was formally broken by Shinsuke Nakamura in 2018. He became the first man to win from the position. That match was expertly premised on the idea that fans had already fantasy booked it. It was laid out to create the illusion that it wasn't going to happen, between the dramatic, please-not-Roman-again crescendo and, just maybe, the manipulation of the fans' awareness of the curse.
It's been doing the rounds for years at this point, surviving past message boards and onto Reddit every January as an interesting distraction ahead of the event itself. It's obviously nonsense; far, far too many wrestlers were cursed, under this criteria, irrespective of the number from which they entered. The #14 slot isn't #1, or #27. It isn't a pop spot. The performer booked to enter the ring from it isn't a major attraction to unglue the crowd early or wake them up late. #14 is a guy who joins the mass of indistinguishable mass of flesh to maybe get a few spots in, and then hide by the ropes as the middle phase of the match takes hold and waits for a real star to blitz through the field.
14 is the number of the journeyman, or the disposable, and the journeymen of the '90s did something other than play video games to crunch time on the road. They also took certain substances in a bid to transcend that status. The disposable were of course disposed of, frequently, in the era of spring cleaning. There is no curse, or at least, the old machinations of pro wrestling were inherently cursed to fate young men to early deaths.
If WWE is aware of it - if - that might have informed the decision to trot Dean Ambrose out from #14 in 2019.
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