It’s a good thing that I didn’t have to write this the moment that the Royal Rumble was over. Otherwise this would have just been a long incoherent rambling list of bitter complaints. (And it still might end up being just that. We’ll have to see.) But now with a few days and an episode of Raw between us I can look back fondly on the parts of the rumble that I did enjoy. For all the “insert star here” rumors that the Internet had these past weeks, Jericho was nowhere to be found. So his totally out of the blue return was a moment that justified a true mark out. And it am not have been the full blown feud leading up too WrestleMania match that I wanted, but seeing Cody and Goldust face off was great and the two guys managed to tell quite a cool little story in the middle of the Rumble.
But we can only dwell on the good for so long. And while time may heal all wounds, not nearly enough time has passed since Sunday. The fact remains that the end result of the Royal Rumble PPV left me disappointed, and yes, a bit bitter. But while there’s plenty of Internet outcry that suggests many people share those feelings with me, I haven’t really seen a good explanation as to exactly what it was about the show that rubbed me the wrong way. After all, we knew that Punk’s reign couldn’t last forever and I was fine with the Rock being the one to take the belt. After all, I figured that these two would be able to put on a great match together. So it wasn’t just the fact that The Rock won and Punk lost.
A small part of it may have been that Punk ended up losing to The People’s Elbow, which has never been a favorite move of mine. Like the five knuckle shuffle, all the fancy dancing ahead of time doesn’t change the fact that the actual move is just a standing elbow drop. Who knew that an elbow from a stationary position was all that was needed to end this yearlong title reign? I’ll bet Ryback feels silly now since he kept trying to pick Punk up and throw him. But even that isn’t a real problem.
No, my big problem is WWE’s storytelling of the match. The story that WWE attempted to tell this Sunday was that of The great hero The Rock, overcoming incredible odds to get the title back from CM Punk who has held it captive the past year through scheming and dirty deeds. But that just isn’t the story the way that I see it. First of all, Punk is not the pure evil heel that has stayed champion through constant cheating. For a large part of the past year, Punk was one of the biggest faces in the company. This was a title run that had matches against Chris Jericho and Daniel Bryan. I don’t mind Punk in the heel category and Rock in the face but make no mistake, kicking Punk out of the title scene is in no way saving us from anything.
And what’s more nobody who takes five seconds to look at The Rock, would ever consider him to be the underdog in any match, especially when his opponent is CM Punk. Sure the Shield attack was added to try and make the odds seem insurmountable, but there’s a lot less weight to being told that the Rock went through a table rather than actually seeing it happen.
No matter what the WWE wants, Punk is just not the bad guy that WWE wishes he were. Too many people support him, and even when he’s cutting down a super face like the Rock, he makes just a little too much sense to really be able to dismiss him as just trying to get cheap heat. WWE wants this to be a clear-cut story of good vs. evil but the is too much support of the bad guy in this story.
I’m not saying that the Rock shouldn’t have won. Sometimes people you don’t like will beat people you do like, and that’s just a part of watching Wrestling (and even after all this I still do like The Rock) I understand the financial reasons behind having The Rock as your Champion during WrestleMania season, In the end, The Rock won the championship for all the wrong reasons, for us. If the Rock had returned to be champion just because he wanted to be champion again, that would have been fine. The title is a big enough deal that two major stars wanting the same title is enough of a feud. But Rock came back to get the title back to the people and for that he needed to be a white knight who defeated the evil. And the characters of The Rock and CM Punk just don’t line up into those roles. The Rock rescued us when too many people didn’t want to be rescued.
