The Stupid Greatness of the Royal Rumble

I can't speak critically about the Royal Rumble any more than I can objectively analyze a plate of nachos. Which is to say that I can't do it, at all. I like nachos too much. If they have gooey molten Velveeta instead of melted shredded cheddar, or if the chips are buried so deeply in the refried beans that they crumble when you try to pull them out, or if they're vegan or whatever, I might get annoyed, but I'll still eat the entire plate and sit there doing that beaming faraway/satisfied-with-the-world look until the check comes. And even if half the Rumble consists of fat guys halfheartedly pushing each other against the ropes and then Vince McMahon for some reason books himself to win the thing, I'll still sit there enthralled. I like the Rumble too much. I like it even though I know it's bad for me.

In the Rumble, the WWE has its most satisfying piece of entertainment. At any given moment, the WWE employs 50 or 60 wrestlers, many of whom almost never show up on TV. The Rumble gives 30 of them something to do, even if it's just to play cannon fodder for a more dominant character's big moment. It also keeps a single storyline running for an hour or more while still taking time out for all these little eddies and tributaries of narrative. And even when it drags, you can still look forward to the five-second countdown before the next wrestler emerges and, you hope, roars into the ring to clear out all the chumps. It's always fun, even when it's terrible.

On Sunday, this year's Rumble went down in St. Louis. And if you listen to the internet-wrestling cognoscenti (and yes, there is such a thing), this year's installment was a bloated, underwhelming affair. Maybe it was. I don't know. But I was completely entertained throughout. As always, plenty of great things and stupid things happened over the course of the big Rumble match, and it was all too varied and chaotic to talk about as a coherent whole. So I picked three great things and three dumb things from the match. This being wrestling, all the great things were pretty dumb, and the dumb things were sometimes great in their own way.

Also, there was a moment where Mick Foley and Santino Marella, two wrestlers known for hitting finishing moves while wearing socks over their hands, had a dueling-socks moment. I couldn't decide whether to put it in the great list or the stupid list, so I left it off altogether. So:

Great Things

* The end. Leading up to the Rumble, everyone assumed that Chris Jericho, a veteran star who'd just returned from a year-and-a-half absence, would win the thing. Jericho's been back for a month, working a weird and weirdly great performance-art angle in which he refuses to speak into a microphone or perform actual wrestling moves. (I wrote about it here.) Jericho ended up being one of the last two wrestlers in the ring, along with the translucently pale Irish bruiser Sheamus, who has been good-naturedly clubbing his way through the midcard without any evident direction for a while now. These things usually end quickly, but the two of them went on to have a great little five-minute mini-match, full of big moves last-second escapes. And Sheamus ended up winning the thing, decisively booting Jericho in the face a couple of times and leaving him destroyed on the floor. Sheamus is suddenly a star in ways that he wasn't before. It's always fun watching someone actualize his potential.

* The emergence of Ricardo Rodriguez. Here is another case of potential actualized. Last year's winner was Alberto del Rio, a sneering former champion who works a haughty Mexican-aristocrat character. He drives down to the ring in a series of absurdly expensive cars, with Ricardo Rodriguez, his tuxedoed valet, giving his introduction speech in Spanish. Rodriguez gets involved in matches but fucks things up every time. On the last pay-per-view, he got a plate of food shoved in his face, and then he was thrown from a ladder through a table during del Rio's title match. Del Rio was injured a couple of months ago. A third of the way through the Rumble, his music hit. But instead of Del Rio, we got Rodriguez, dressed like Del Rio, driving a 1985 Datsun with missing hubcaps and a garbage bag over the busted-out back window. He didn't last long in the match, which went full-on slapstick comedy for a few minutes after his arrival, but his weirdly innocent starry-eyed hopeless-loser shtick was a joy to behold.

* Kofi Kingston's handstand walk. One of the plot-points of the Rumble is that you have to be thrown over the top rope to be eliminated, and both of your feet have to touch the ground. So every year, one wrestler will pull some outlandish stunt to keep that second foot from landing. During last year's Rumble, the since-fired midcarder John Morrison barely escaped elimination after he was thrown from the ring and landed Spider-Man-style on the barricade. He then ran across the barricade like a balance beam, leaped to the steps, and reentered the fray. This year, the even-less-interesting fake-Jamaican good guy Kofi Kingston was thrown from the ring, but he walked across the floor on his hands, never letting his feet touch, until he found the stairs and got back in. It was utterly contrived, and he didn't do much once he got back in. But that ridiculous, amazing stunt will show up in highlight-clip montages for at least the next few years.

Stupid Things

* All the announcers join the fray. There were three announcers at this year's Rumble: Mostly-retired wrestlers Jerry Lawler and Booker T and unbearable sniveling bad-guy non-wrestler Michael Cole. At different points in the match, both Lawler and Booker entered the ring, doing a bunch of their old moves, getting tossed quickly and then heading back to the announcing table. Both times, Cole acted frankly appalled that these guys were trying to relive past glories. And both times, it was even more strange unconvincing than the usual for Cole, since both Lawler and T were obviously wearing their wrestling trunks under their suit jackets, and Cole presumably would've had a hard time not noticing that his broadcasting partners weren't wearing pants. Unless, I guess, they're never wearing pants; this gets complicated quickly, obviously. Eventually, of course, Cole's number came up, and he joined the match, ripping off his suit to reveal a wrestling singlet before the powerhouse female wrestler Kharma scared him out of the ring. This whole running joke was just stupid, although I'll cop to laughing when it happend. This, again, is the magic of the Royal Rumble. Even the awful things are fun.

* Road Dogg returns, for some reason. Every year, we witness the return of one or two ancient relics who get big crowd-roars on surprise-nostalgia alone. This year, the first of them was Hacksaw Jim Duggan, who won the first-ever Rumble in 1998 and who looks exactly the same as he always did. This was fine. The other was the Road Dogg, half of the dominant late-'90s tag team New Age Outlaws, who was more famous for his long catchphrase-soliloquies and  white-guy cornrows than he was for actually wrestling. Even though his peak came a decade later, Dogg looked older than Duggan, has pretty effectively balded himself out of the cornrows, and didn't have time to yell any catchphrases. There was no reason to involve him in any capacity.

* The general existence of the Great Khali. Khali is a gigantic Indian wrestler with a misshapen face who came into the company as an all-destroying monster a few years ago. During one Rumble, he cleared out a crowded ring entirely by himself. But he can't hit even the most basic moves, and walks like he has bombs in his knees that will explode if he ever bends them, and is, in his oversized fragility, pretty discomfiting to watch. But he's still around, which means that, at every Rumble from now until those knees finally dissolve completely, he'll get a chance to hobble down to the ring, casually toss a couple of chumps, and then just sort of fall out. It would be pretty nice if this stopped happening. But, for good or bad, or good and bad, there's no negotiating with the Rumble.