The WCW Conspiracy Iceberg EXPLAINED!
11. Our’s Is Bigger
The WWE Royal Rumble, quite famously, is the most effective and successful gimmick match ever created. As an annual event spanning decades and decades, it has generated an absolutely eye-watering cumulated sum of money. That’s directly; indirectly, a great Rumble winner is very well-equipped to draw yet more money when they headline WrestleMania after the big show of faith in January. It’s thus nigh-on impossible to calculate precisely how lucrative the show actually is, but a reasonable estimate is: f*cking massively.
The match, a multi-seated storytelling vehicle, is also incredible when it peaks. That doesn’t happen too often these days. The format was already showing its age before the introduction of a second Rumble in 2018 diluted and exposed the attraction as a collection of very familiar tropes first devised in the 1980s and 1990s. But the Rumble will endure, probably for all of our lifetimes, because it’s essentially a Greatest Hits now: the Diesel run, the Iron Man stint, the novelty entrant, the surprise debut, entrants #1 and #2 sharing some sort of storyline connection…
The Rumble is so highly anticipated that it’s considered automatically great, even though it often isn’t. Every other attempt to tweak the traditional battle royal format simply can’t compare, which Eric Bischoff learned to his cost when, in 1995, WCW launched the World War 3 pay-per-view. The titular match wasn’t just better than the Royal Rumble - it was three times better! Or was that six times better?!
Because there were sixty guys in three rings. Scott Steiner can calculate that math, but most anybody else can figure out that this was Bischoff’s latest attempt to further position WCW above the WWF. It’s not exactly the moon landing of wrestling conspiracies, admittedly, but it did reek of a very suspect desperation.
It also flat-out reeked; this was the worst, mass-of-bodies-doing-nothing part of a battle royal performed three times simultaneously and thus even more difficult to keep track of.