The Royal Rumble: Why is #1 The Magic Number?

The Royal Rumble is one of wrestling’s most popular events precisely because it’s one of its strangest. It seems extraordinarily unfair, in particular, that the recipient of a world title shot at Wrestlemania should be decided in such a lopsided and bizarre bout. Your chances of being involved in the most prestigious match of the year depend not on your record over the previous 365 days or so, but instead on whether you are randomly selected to enter late into the Rumble, giving you a colossal, insurmountable advantage over the poor saps who were drawn to start off the match, and will have been wrestling for close to an hour by the time you join the fray.

At least… that’s what you’d think. Yet one of the most curious phenomenons about the Royal Rumble is that, statistically, there appears to be no meaningful advantage to entering at #30, compared to appearing at #1. Indeed, there have been precisely as many winners from the #1 or #2 spots as there have been from the #30. This is a deeply odd anomaly. There have been 29 Royal Rumbles, and in 18 of those, the winning wrestler has been one of the last ten entrants, with John Cena and Roman Reigns also taking the match as the 19th entrant out of 30. #27 is the luckiest number, with four wrestlers winning from that spot, but that’s not particularly surprising. Essentially, the overwhelming majority of Royal Rumble matches follow a logical pattern, with the later entrants having a much stronger chance of winning. This is what makes those three #1/2 winners particularly strange. What is it about that number that gives you such a disproportionate chance of success, relative to your position in the match?

There is a footnote to that statistic, which is that the first wrestler ever to win from the #1 spot, Shawn Michaels, did so in an experimental, sharply truncated Royal Rumble, where wrestlers came out every 30 seconds. This meant that to win the match, he only had to last for 38 minutes and 41 seconds a time that would ordinarily be insufficient to win from #1. 38:41 of wrestling is still pretty gruelling though, and if you seriously wanted to argue that Shawn’s win wasn’t that unusual on account of time, it seems reasonable to bring up Ric Flair’s 1992 victory from the number #3 spot as a counter point, which required him to compete for 59 minutes and 26 seconds. Clearly, it is easier to win from a very early spot in the match than it is to win from, say, a middle of the road entry number.

The best reason for this that I can come up with is that there’s an obvious prestige to winning from #1 that there isn’t from, say, number #11. Almost every wrestler is at heart a show-off, perpetually on the look out for bragging rights, and to outlast every single other competitor in the Rumble is the kind of remarkable feat that would give anyone that extra bit of motivation. Winning from #2 doesn’t sound immediately as impressive as winning from #1, but of course, it’s the same thing, since 2 wrestlers are starting the match. A victory from the 3rd spot is, again, marginally less impressive, but still an outstanding achievement, and when Ric Flair pulled it off in ’92 no one had ever seen anything like it- the most numerically disadvantaged winner before him was Hacksaw Jim Duggan in the first Rumble, who came out as the 13th entrant of 20. Indeed, Flair’s win is still widely regarded as the single greatest performance in Rumble history, and no one really cares that he came from #3.

Still, simply saying that wrestlers are slightly more motivated if they’re assigned one of the earliest numbers doesn’t quite explain why number #1 is such a decent sweepstake pick up. After all, most wrestlers regard the Rumble as the biggest match of the year (the 2nd biggest if you end up winning it). The extra bit of mojo entrants #1 and #2 may have would surely not be enough to carry them all the way past 28 fresher wrestlers. I wondered, perhaps, whether fitness and conditioning would have something to do with it. Ric Flair, after all, would find himself in 60 minute matches with painful regularity during his many stints as NWA World Champion. To him, going for an hour was nowhere near as big an issue as it would have been for other WWF wrestlers at the time, and that, coupled with his magnificent in ring ability and the possibility that other competitors overlooked him as #3, explains to a great extent why he was able to pull off such a miracle in 1992. Shawn Michaels victory, while massively impressive, was, as we discussed earlier, not the marathon feat other wins have been. But then, what to make of Chris Benoit and Rey Mysterio, winners from #1 and #2 in 2004 and 2006 respectively? While both were world class athletes at the time of their victory, and Benoit in particular positively thrived on testing the limits of his endurance, neither had a significant history of 60 minute performances before their wins. Benoit possessed a freakish determination that was probably only heightened when he found out he’d be the number one entrant, whilst Rey felt he was fighting for the memory of his recently departed friend Eddie Guerrero, but, again, it’s not enough to explain how they overcame such a huge barrier to win their match.

Perhaps there is no real explanation. Perhaps Flair, Michaels, Benoit and Mysterio were all simply flukes, anomalies. It is obviously possible for someone to win from #1, #2 or #3, and those men just did it. The fact that a surprising amount of people have done so is a coincidence, and in 70 years time the numbers will have rebalanced themselves and there will be plenty of winners from the 14th, 15th and 16th spots as well. Still, there remains something mysterious to me about the odd regularity of these victories, these gigantic upsets that have happened so regularly that nowadays, many seasoned viewers would not be hugely taken aback by another competitor going coast to coast. Indeed, when the McMahon family attempted to punish Roman Reigns last year by making him start the Rumble at #1, commentators online still considered him a strong favourite for the bout- and, indeed, he lasted all the way to the end, only eliminated by #30 entrant Triple H right at the death. It is all very peculiar, but then, so much of pro wrestling is. Considering that the Undertaker, walking, talking proof of the existence of the supernatural and undead, is also among the Rumble’s former winners, and yet the rest of the world ignores this and continues to contemplate the existence of the afterlife, unaware that pro wrestling has conclusively solved the debate… well, nothing should surprise us as fans anymore. Enjoy the Rumble.