wrestling / Columns

Fool Me Once, WWE…

February 9, 2015 | Posted by Wyatt Beougher

Introduction: Last week, in my article about TNA’s move to Destination America, I mentioned that I would probably be writing about the Royal Rumble in some capacity at some point. After the events of this week’s RAW, it turns out that point is today and that capacity is in what would appear to be WWE’s plan for the Fast Lane main event.

A little personal backstory here – I have a group of five friends who I watch wrestling with. Not every RAW or Impact or whatever, but we get together and watch the PPVs (or go to them), watch the NXT Live Specials, I got them hooked on Lucha Underground, and we are going back and watching a ton of NJPW right now with NJPW World. Out of that group of six of us (myself included), I would say that there is one guy besides myself that I would call a hardcore wrestling fan, meaning he has watched wrestling since he was a kid without any major breaks and actively enjoys stuff that isn’t WWE (prior to Lucha Underground, because we all enjoy that immensely). One other guy watches pretty much everything else that my first friend watches by virtue of them being roommates, and the other three guys are casual fans who watched a lot of wrestling during the Attitude Era/Monday Night Wars, lost interest at some point, and, for the most part, got back into wrestling around the time of CM Punk’s “Pipe Bomb” promo. For the most part, we have similar tastes (Daniel Bryan, Bray Wyatt, ECIII, BNB, and an irrational love for midcard guys who are never going anywhere, like The New Day).

On the other end of the spectrum is my family – my father and two of my aunts have been watching professional wrestling since before I was born, and while they’ve all acquired a degree of computer savviness, none of them have any ideas of the inner workings of the WWE or storyline tropes or anything like that. For instance, my father is a huge fan of both John Cena and the Undertaker, and he was livid when Lesnar broke the Undertaker’s Wrestlemania streak. Another friend who likes wrestling but wasn’t in the group I mentioned earlier asked me how I like the Royal Rumble, and I replied that I was glad to see Wyatt do well, though Reigns winning wasn’t something I was particularly happy with. My aunt commented about how she doesn’t like Bray Wyatt and absolutely loves Reigns and was glad to see him win.

Between my friends, the older members of my family, my nephew and my cousins’ kids who watch wrestling (who range in age from two to fifteen), and this and other sites around the internet, I see a pretty broad spectrum of responses to this business that we love. I mention this because while I would consider myself relatively well-educated about the business and how it is booked, there are times where I allow my fandom to cloud my better judgment.

This year’s Royal Rumble was one of those instances.

As we gathered at my friends’ house to watch the Rumble (I have the Network, but we tend to congregate at the roommates’ house because it’s a bachelor pad and they have a 70” television), one of the friends who is a casual fan asked who we thought was going to win the Rumble. Without hesitation, the other hardcore fan and his roommate said “Reigns” because they know the rumors about Reigns’ upcoming push. One of the casual fans who hasn’t watched much wrestling in the past year because of a new job actually suggested Bad News Barrett, another one said he had no idea, and the friend who asked the question said he thought Sting would win. I considered the options, and I said that there were three Superstars who I could see winning the match, two who had a legitimate chance and one who was a dark horse. Reigns was obviously the former, and I lumped Daniel Bryan in with him, because I thought maybe the WWE was smart enough to realize the error of their ways last year and give the fans what they wanted this year, and Dolph Ziggler was my dark horse candidate because of how strongly he had been booked at Survivor Series and also because he was embroiled in an angle with Authority where it would have made sense for him to go to Wrestlemania and take on the Authority’s beast incarnate.

I think in my head, I knew that Reigns was going to win (as I think pretty much everyone who currently finds themselves reading this column did as well), but in my heart, I was hoping that one of the guys that I wanted to win would pull out the victory. (In a side note, we each put five dollars in and drew five numbers out of a hat to correspond with Rumble entrants. The guy who said “Sting” got Reigns, and we started congratulating him as soon as Reigns made his entrance.) The title of this column is in reference to a famous phrase that states “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” At the Royal Rumble, the WWE fooled me, as I thought that they had learned from last year’s mistakes (Bootista and CM Punk’s exodus) and would use this year’s Rumble to give a huge boost of momentum to one of the guys who the fans would love to see main event Wrestlemania. Instead, what we got was one of the worst Royal Rumbles in the history of the event, a match that did nothing to make the winner look strong (in spite of the edict regarding Reigns to do just that which has become so much fodder for the internet in recent months), while also eliminating the fan favorite entrants unceremoniously and upsetting the crowd. Even the guy who dumped Daniel Bryan, Bray Wyatt, who was made to look as strong as anyone by lasting the longest of any entrant and tying for the most eliminations in this year’s Rumble, was eliminated offscreen by the Authority’s goons, Big Show and Kane. No, this year’s edition of the Royal Rumble is widely considered to be one of the weakest installments in the history of the match, and that is a reputation that is well-deserved; the Rumble match itself was so bad that it completely deflated my friends and I (and, from what I have read, a great deal of the fans who watched the show) after what was a truly outstanding WWE World Heavyweight Championship match. However, for as bad as the Rumble match was, it did manage to accomplish one thing:

I will not be fooled again.

And I am sure that I am not the only fan who is in the position. In this week’s 411 Fact or Fiction Wrestling, the first statement that Larry Csonka posed to us was a simple one: “You are looking forward to Daniel Bryan vs Roman Reigns at Fast Lane.” I answered Fiction and apparently that was enough to sway at least reader’s vote to my opponent, but I remain solidly behind my sentiment: I cannot get excited for the Bryan vs Reigns at Fast Lane because not only is the WWE continuing to push a wrestler that most fans feel is not ready for the position that he is being handed, they are trying to use to wrestler that belongs in that spot to get him over. Earlier this week, Reddit user MetsFan4Ever, who has a pretty good track record at leaking information that proves to be factual, stated the following:

“I was also told the only reason this match was made was to quiet the “marks” for a few weeks while they try to get Roman over. Regardless of the reaction in the next few weeks, Roman is the man and will be headlining WrestleMania and defeating Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship.”

Obviously, that could be completely wrong and/or disseminated by the WWE to keep the ending of Fast Lane unpredictable, and please do not take this as an indictment of Reigns’ talents or abilities, as I think he is a perfectly acceptable professional wrestler and is capable of drawing the crowd into his matches. I simply feel that the WWE is skipping too many steps in his ascension to the throne, as he has yet to hold a secondary title or really find his bearings as a character. Moreover, using arguably the most popular performer on the roster as a simple stepping stone when he is clearly the performer that the fans want in that role seems fundamentally wrong and simply the latest in a long series of decisions that illustrate just how clearly the WWE does not care what its fans want.

Triple H, in his appearance on Stone Cold Steve Austin’s podcast this past Monday night, referenced how Vern Gagne ignored the wishes of the fans and kept the AWA World Heavyweight Championship on Nick Bockwinkel. This led to Hulk Hogan leaving the AWA for the WWF and the rise of Hulkamania and the Rock’N’Wrestling boom of the 1980’s. While McMahon does not have to worry about losing his biggest stars to a rival promotion, what he fails to realize is that promotions like Lucha Underground, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and even TNA are actually listening to fans unhappy with the WWE’s current product and giving them alternatives. While there is little chance any of those promotions can provide true competition for the WWE (outside of NJPW in Japan, obviously), they can capitalize on McMahon’s continued and stubborn refusal to listen to fans and provide them with wrestling to watch that does not leave them feeling unsatisfied and undervalued.

I have said repeatedly in the Facebook wrestling groups that I am a part of that 2015 is a golden age for wrestling fans, as there is currently more high quality wrestling available through a wide variety of means than I think there has been at any point in the history of the business. More fans need to take advantage of that and stop watching a program that repeatedly tells them that they do not matter. Am I advocating a full-on boycott of the WWE and cancellations of the WWE Network en masse? Not at all. Realistically, Vince is correct – those of us that are still watching RAW are pretty much always going to watch it, no matter how many times he tells us that we are irrelevant. What I am saying is that rather than give any additional money to the WWE in the form of merchandise sales or live event tickets, take that money and subscribe to NJPW World, or add Destination America or the El Rey network to your cable or satellite package (if they are available; if not, find other ways to watch those shows), or buy tickets to an Indy fed that is running near where you live.

Stop settling.

Wrestling fandom does not have to be this frustrating, unsatisfying slog that it has become for so many of us over the past few years. When I started writing for 411 Wrestling immediately after Wrestlemania last year, I was optimistic about the direction that the product seemed to be headed in; that optimism proved to be completely unfounded and for a time late last year, I was on the verge of giving up on wrestling altogether. Thankfully, Larry asked me to cover Impact a handful of times in the summer and fall and the passion of the TNA fans who frequent this website reminded me that watching wrestling is much more enjoyable if you actually latch onto the things you like about a show or a promotion or even just the sport in general, rather than focusing on what you did not. Then Lucha Underground and NJPW World came along, NXT proved that the WWE is still capable of producing a babyface wrestler that the fans can actually rally behind, and Daniel Bryan ended up coming back from injury and making what would otherwise be a multi-car accident on the Road to Wrestlemania actually worth tuning in for.

So while I will not be going into Fast Lane with any of the optimism that surrounded Royal Rumble, I will be going into it with the knowledge that there will be a handful of shows within a few days before and after Fast Lane that will remind me why I am a fan of wrestling in the first place. I strongly suggest that other long-term fans do the same – figure out what it is that you love about professional wrestling and find a promotion that is doing it, because I will almost guarantee that there is one. As my colleague Len Archibald wrote earlier in the week, do not give up on wrestling.

So even if Bryan is simply being used as fodder for Reigns’ climb to the top of the WWE, because that is the result that I have prepared myself for, I feel like I will be better equipped mentally to enjoy whatever comes before that on the card, and when Fast Lane goes off of the air, I will not have to make the drive home feeling dejected. Will it still suck that a less-talented, less-deserving guy is taking that main event spot at Wrestlemania? Absolutely. But, thanks to the Rumble, at least now I am prepared to follow the 2014 Royal Rumble winner’s advice and “Deal with it”.

Wyatt Beougher is a lifelong fan of professional wrestling who has been writing for 411 for over three years and currently hosts MMA Fact or Fiction and reviews Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

article topics :

Royal Rumble, WWE, Wyatt Beougher