Window-Shopping on the Road to ‘WrestleMania’

By Nick BondFeb. 2, 2023, 5:25 pm UTC • 19 min

When someone says there’s nothing new under the sun, it should generally be assumed that they’re talking about professional wrestling. In roughly two centuries of performances, nearly every match and every outcome in the squared circle has been attempted and executed in one form or another, certainly before the first time you see it on television. If sports are a weighted random number generator around which we can build narratives, wrestling is a weighted random narrative generator to which we can apply numbers.

There’s no greater microcosm of that than WWE’s Royal Rumble, which was held for the 36th time this past Saturday in San Antonio and saw Cody Rhodes and Rhea Ripley both winning their first Rumble matches to earn the now-standard WrestleMania main-event spot for a championship (at least in Ripley’s case) of their choosing. Along with having an all-time great angle to end the show and a … less-than-all-time great experiment in glow-in-the-dark wrestling, the Rumble itself also continued the hot streak Triple H has been on since taking over for Vince McMahon ahead of last year’s SummerSlam and was a solid rebound from last year’s disappointing show.

Which, given the Rumble’s importance to WWE’s event calendar, is probably a good thing. After its basic (cable) beginnings in 1988, the Royal Rumble has in the last three-plus decades received a level of genuine reverence and affection that has made it essentially every WWE fan’s favorite show of the year. It is also the single safest way each year to ~~indoctrinate fresh blood into our death cult~~ introduce new people to the wonderful world of professional wrestling because of the Rumble match’s consistent quality, deep well of history, and traditional importance as the start of the Road to WrestleMania™.

But when it first came onto the scene, the Royal Rumble match—part Pat Patterson innovation, part McMahon marketing subterfuge—was simply a fresh new idea that had (at the very least) never been seen before at anything close to the scale of what was then the WWF. This is remarkable, as battle royals are maybe the oldest “gimmick” in the entire medium of staged fisticuffs outside of the singles match, and “pretending to fight for money” is presumably the world’s fourth-oldest profession behind sex work, murder for hire, and beating someone up for money (with “pretending to fight for money” having been invented, you’d figure, at roughly the same time someone saw a fist coming at their face that belonged to the someone else who was hired to beat them up).

The basic foundation for this kind of match happening in any kind of promoted or sanctioned way reaches as far back as early 1700s London, with battle royals most prominently featured on cards by one of the first combat sports promoters (and one of the fathers of modern boxing), James Figg, as part of the “boxing” shows at his amphitheater. Boxing at that point was closer to “free-for-all shit show” than “sweet science,” with “rules” that—as John S. Nash explained in the first half of his excellent two-part piece on the origins of battle royals—were essentially the equivalent of modern prison etiquette, which means Dominik Mysterio probably would have done as well then as he did on Saturday. (And yet the whole thing is somehow still less gross than Everybody Loves Concussions!)

Jack Broughton—who succeeded Figg as the city’s most prominent boxer and boxing promoter and established a precursor (“Broughton’s rules”) for the Marquess of Queensberry rules—brought an air of relative legitimacy (and his advertisements for “THE NOTED BUCKHORSE and SEVEN or EIGHT more”) to the world of battle royals. But even with this cultural cachet (and THE NOTED BUCKHORSE) behind them, boxing battle royals were eventually seen as (and presumably were) so barbaric that they were banned from England entirely.

Following their expulsion from England, battles royal became a noted pastime among enslaved people in the antebellum American South before evolving into, essentially, commercialized human cockfighting starting in the Gilded Age. (Unsurprisingly, like most of American history from this time, this chapter of battle royal history is wildly racist and incredibly depressing, as covered by Nash in Part 2 of his series. From a broader pop culture perspective, battle royals have played a significant role in African American literature, including a seminal role in the life of the unnamed main character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.) Clearly a meat grinder powered by, at best, the indifference to the suffering of others at the core of structural racism (and some would argue capitalism, but I’ll save that for my upcoming guest appearance on Just My Opinion), boxing battle royals also became a way for talented and tough fighters to establish themselves as legitimate, bankable stars of the sport.

From these incredibly dark times would also come Black sports legends like Joe Gans, a lightweight who would become the first Black world champion; fellow lightweight champion Beau Jack; and one of the most important athletes in American history, world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. But as boxing (and more important, the athletic commissions that governed it) became more rigidly structured to prevent the deaths of its participants, many northern states—where these matches didn’t have the cultural cachet they did in the South—began banning boxing battle royals as early as 1911.

Certain parts of the country allowed these kinds of spectacles on boxing cards until the 1960s (lasting long enough for James Brown to take part before becoming the Godfather of Soul), but as early as the mid-1930s, wrestling promoters had begun selling the spectacle of these battles royal. Not as opening acts, as they had been on boxing cards, but as the main attraction and headline act to finish the show.

By featuring numerous competitors and nonstandard win conditions (i.e., “throw the dude over the top rope”), the battle royal almost perfectly split the difference between including as much star power as possible on a card or in a given match and minimizing consequences to the reputations (or egos) of stars on the roster while still involving them in a match with a definitive result that wasn’t in their favor. This chaotic nature lent itself to prominent contenders having built-in excuses about a loss in a battle royal, and, conversely, the distributed focus of the event allowed mid-card performers to come up with (less than sturdy) justifications when they were able to cheat their way into positive results or timely eliminations.

This stage of battle royal evolution would reach its peak (and physical embodiment) in the form of Andre the Giant.

Although he’s now most well known (in a wrestling context) for WrestleMania III’s main event, he became the Immovable Object that Hulk Hogan’s Irresistible Force had to body slam in his work in battle royals. For any number of entirely valid business and storytelling reasons, Andre was often thrown into battle royals, and they account for a disproportionate number of his career matches—nearly one of every 12 of his matches was a battle royal—even relative to other big men. He had more battle royals (236) than the Big Show, the Great Khali, the Undertaker, Omos, Kane, and Haystacks Calhoun combined.

Andre became, almost literally and definitely figuratively, a platform to showcase stars in different territories without forcing them to convolutedly (or worse, cleanly) lose. But because the matches began with everyone in the ring at the same time, getting someone over in a meaningful way during a battle royal would require that performer to either do something so spectacular as to stand out from the rest of the match entirely or last in the ring for longer than you want them to.

Which is, presumably, what Patterson had in mind when he first developed the Royal Rumble concept. Simply by staggering the entrances, Patterson solved the “everybody in the pool” problem and, in doing so, turned the battle royal from a cost- and time-effective way to get over contenders in your territory into a star-making machine that could quickly push a performer to the very top of the card, in a way we’ve started to affectionately refer to in the Palace of Wisdom as the Rumble Rocket.

But the aim of the Rumble wasn’t always to create tomorrow’s WWE stars today.

“Hacksaw” Jim Duggan won the first Royal Rumble, but it was only barely a Rumble, as it followed nearly none of the rules that would come to define the Rumble—aside from the two-minute Rumble onboarding process. With two-thirds the normal participants and no defined prize for winning, the match was just a gimmick in search of a reason, and it found its purpose with a National Wrestling Alliance pay-per-view—the Bunkhouse Stampede, a gimmick PPV with its own caged battle royal variant and named for the funny outfits competitors wore to the ring—happening the same night.

McMahon’s goal in putting on the Rumble show—for free on the USA Network—was to divert attention (and money) away from the Bunkhouse Stampede happening in his home territory (at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, the most magical place on earth), and he accomplished that. So while the match is mostly meaningless, the show was a success and the next year became a PPV. It had one year of adjustment (when Hogan was eliminated by Akeem the African Dream and the Big Boss Man, allowing Big John Studd to ultimately claim victory in one of his last appearances on WWF TV or in wrestling) before becoming the State of the Union (and the actual Super Bowl) of WWE.

That began in earnest in 1990, when Hogan won the first of his two consecutive Rumbles. With the stipulation of a title shot at WrestleMania not yet in play, the Rumble match at that point mostly served as a means to make Hogan look as strong as possible while also setting up his eventual WrestleMania VI match against the Ultimate Warrior. It is, to date, the only time the reigning world champion entered the Rumble, won it, and then lost the title at that year’s WrestleMania. As always, we do not weep for Hulk.

Hogan would come back the next year (without the title), won the 1991 Rumble match, and was named the no. 1 contender for the WWF title, which he fought for in the main event of WrestleMania VII against Sgt. Slaughter (who won the title from Warrior at the same Rumble after interference from Randy Savage, eventually leading to a match between Savage and Warrior at WrestleMania VII that ended up being the second best of the night). Hogan would then beat Slaughter to win the championship for a record third time.

The Rumble win didn’t turn Hogan into a star or award him a championship or even, really, an opportunity at one. But in “reviving” (or, probably more accurately, reinforcing) Hogan’s standing in the company with a win in what had already become the most anticipated match on the WWE calendar outside of the WrestleMania main event, the Rumble revealed its most important function. The Rumble match is one of the few (and when it started, it was essentially the only) single events or matches that allows WWE in one night to organically open someone’s “championship window” wide enough for them to get through it, by giving them either their first opportunity or second chance to use one of the promotion’s “high-leverage” moments to make themselves into a centerpiece star of the company.

As an idea, and unlike in unscripted athletics, a professional wrestling championship window is how long a company sees a performer as a high-level (if not always highest-level) attraction around whom it can build shows and top-of-the-card story lines. As a statistic, a championship window is literally the time (measured in days) during which a performer is a viable candidate to be made world champion by the company, which is based on, oddly enough, the number of days between the very first day of their very first world championship (or in our case, Rumble) win and the very last day of their very last world championship reign.

What the colored bars represent is the amount of “window” left open after a Rumble win. As you can see, Hogan’s window after the Rumble win was surprisingly somewhat lengthy—as his second Rumble win happened roughly seven years after his window was first opened and he left the company less than three years after his second Rumble win. In other words, winning the Rumble allowed Hogan to get to the highest levels of Hogan-ness he’d reached for roughly a three-year period (from WrestleMania VI until WrestleMania IX, which, well, we’ll get there in a minute).

But what may come as a shock is just how many times winning the Rumble didn’t do anything like that for the performer.

Ric Flair’s Rumble win was a singular piece of wrestling art, but it didn’t help all that much in making him a major star in the company. He’d “co-main-event” WrestleMania VIII but left the end of the show to Papa Shango (and, sure, Sid Justice, Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, and Harvey Whippelman) and was out of the company before the spring of 1993.

After the Rumble worked as a world title match in ’92, and in an echo of Hogan’s 1991 path from Rumble winner to WrestleMania headliner, for the 1993 Royal Rumble, the WWF had actors portraying Julius Caesar and Cleopatra announce the “Rumble winner gets a ’Mania main-event” stipulation for that year’s “Showcase of the Immortals” at Caesar’s Palace before the Rumble match.

This is probably why we think of the Rumble (especially after 1993, when the ’Mania stipulation was introduced) as the domain of pure contenders unsullied by disappointing past title reigns marching stridently into WrestleMania to claim their rightful throne. The reality is that there was just one year when that was the case, with Yokozuna the very first person to win the Royal Rumble match and then go on to claim the WWF title at ’Maniae. Yoko, who won the Rumble in 1993 and then the WWF World Championship at WrestleMania IX (and then lost the title to Hogan—at WrestleMania IX—before swiping the title back at the first King of the Ring PPV that June), was also the only performer to do so on his first try for the next 10 years.

As opposed to the paint-by-numbers piece from ’93, the next four years are, instead, best thought of as an art installation called What Sticks: Throwing Shit at the Walls of Society. In 1994, there were infamously two winners of the Rumble match, Lex Luger and Bret Hart, who tumbled out of the ring onto the floor at the exact same time (or at least close to it), leading to a convoluted work-around at that year’s WrestleMania X, where both men were given a chance at defeating then-champion Yokozuna. While Bret went on to have perhaps the best individual performance in the first 29 years of WrestleMania at WrestleMania X, Luger (poor Lex) failed in his attempt to become the embodiment of the American dream or win the WWF title and instead fell ass-backward into a tag team with Davey Boy Smith called “the Allied Powers” before he found his smile again in WCW.

In ’95, Shawn Michaels—on the heels of his own legendary WrestleMania X performance with Razor Ramon in their ladder match—would win the Rumble as a heel, only to lose his title match to his former best friend Diesel in what was largely considered the best match at the absolute worst WrestleMania of all time. But it was not the main event, as that honor would go to Bam Bam Bigelow and NFL superstar Lawrence Taylor in a match whose story line began at, you may have guessed it, that year’s Royal Rumble.

Even with this setback for Michaels, the Rumble (both the show and the match) was firmly established as the narrative bridge to the Road to WrestleMania. The role of the biggest match of the year in setting up the biggest show of the year became even more pronounced. With it, however, came a number of increasingly odd occurrences that increased the stakes and kept fans guessing about what would happen between the Rumble and ’Mania to shape what we’d see on our screens in late March.

Michaels pulled off the Yoko in his second try with his win at the ’96 Rumble, which was followed by his first world title win, against Bret Hart in a 60-minute(-plus) Iron Man Match in the main event of WrestleMania XII. In winning the Rumble, Michaels opened up his (objectively long but still surprisingly somewhat short) championship window for the next six years of his career, proving the theory that a win at the Rumble could help propel a star in the same way that battle royals had helped sustain the career of someone like Andre.

However, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin would become, in his first two wins (1997 and 1998)—despite essentially just repeating the same steps Michaels had the previous two years—the catalyst (as he so often was) for making the Rumble the framework through which we look at both the build to WrestleMania and what kind of “push” someone is getting.

While Flair’s 1992 performance is rightfully considered a masterpiece, at the Institute of Kayfabemetrics, it is our firm (possibly mathematical; it’s all very complicated) belief that the single-best showing in a Rumble match is Austin’s 1997 tour de force. The match involves him doing push-ups, getting his ass beat by Bret Hart, and eventually winning in such a shitheel way that it turned Bret Hart heel against America. It also forced WWE to create a PPV special to address in-kayfabe concerns, more or less, about the integrity of the Rumble match (and the attendant WrestleMania main event).

Which, wrestling can be real dumb sometimes, but if Austin hadn’t somehow re-entered himself into the Royal Rumble and won it because no one was paying enough attention, he almost certainly would not have had perhaps the most important non-title match in WWE history—his legendary submission match against Hart at WrestleMania XIII. Even after breaking his neck, Austin rode the momentum of his towering performances in two of the biggest PPVs to that point in WWF history to the following year’s Rumble match and WrestleMania main event. This was the moment when Austin, in the buildup to the match, achieved megastardom on a scale that had never truly been seen before (and perhaps hasn’t been seen since, give or take a Daniel Bryan).

Austin essentially won the 1999 Rumble despite being the last man eliminated (shockingly, at the hands of his greatest rival, Vince McMahon) and again wound up in the WrestleMania main event. But then neck surgery would put him out of action the year after that. McMahon would also manage to win the WWF title later in ’99, creating one of the cutest little championship windows ever at 280 days, which he followed up with a spot in the main event at the next year’s WrestleMania alongside seven other people, only four of whom were actually working the match (with Vince, of course, not being one of them).

WrestleMania 2000, while a great video game, was far too chaotic and, ironically, ’90s of a show to even be “watchable”—the only one-on-one match was a “catfight” between the Kat and Terri Runnels, with Val Venis as guest referee. It had a four-way elimination match at the end of it that was precipitated by the Rock and Big Show attempting to recreate the Hart-Luger spot from 1994 but ending up going way too Luger (and not nearly enough Hart) in the execution.

Austin’s still-record third victory in 2001 established him as the greatest Rumble performer ever, while the next year’s winner—Triple H, as part of his revenge tour against his wife, Stephanie McMahon, and Chris Jericho—would mostly serve as a placeholder before the Rumble reasserted itself with a string of first-time winners who were looking for exactly the kind of foothold that a Rumble win can provide.

(And, yes, before anyone asks, we did omit the ’04 Rumble winner from our chart. But for those desperately wondering what their championship window was, they were a replacement-level champion with the smallest championship window of anyone we tracked who ended up winning a championship.)

Brock Lesnar’s championship window is the longest of any Rumble winner’s and the longest in WWE history both in totality and starting from their first Rumble win—with even Goldberg (who won his first championship in WWE in 2003) not having as much longevity (in his case, largely by accident). This makes sense, as Lesnar was also the youngest world champion and Rumble winner in WWE history. Though, much like Hogan’s window, his was just as much a result of his longevity as of his having gone away for several years, only to come back as the prodigal son and conqueror of whatever tired babyface act was the face of the company at the time.

Perhaps most interesting is that (and this is something that you may recall from the concept of reign inflation the last time we spoke) it becomes clear that, after Rey Mysterio in ’06, the company had lost its patience for using the Rumble to build stars, essentially having failed three of the four times it tried. (Batista was the only one who was both still with the company and a viable championship contender within two years of winning his Rumble.)

This was why over the next few years, we would see winners who not only had previously won a world championship but, at least in the case of John Cena and Randy Orton (though the Undertaker would also have a nice run in the back half of the decade), were also the already established main-event stars of the company. With the rise of the Money in the Bank contract, the Royal Rumble turned completely from a star-making tool into a semiotic means to a narrative end, with the machinations of the Rumble match shifting rather explicitly from a coronation and announcement of a new main event star to a deus ex machina designed to help determine who could be involved in one of the main event (or at least world championship) story lines on the way to WrestleMania, though perhaps they would not even make their way to the show itself.

Over the next 10 years, this would not change much either. Edge, at that point well established in the main event scene for much of the past five years, would win the 2010 Rumble, only to lose the title match at the next WrestleMania, becoming the first Rumble winner to do so since the Rock did exactly 10 years earlier, though with significantly less McMahon involvement this time around.

And although there would be attempts to build some new stars—well, Alberto Del Rio and Sheamus winning in consecutive years at least felt like attempts—by the fourth Rumble of the decade, the company would by and large be back to using a win in the match as a way to lock up one of the two championship matches in WrestleMania in the brand-split era.

Although Roman Reigns would win the 2015 Rumble (much to the chagrin of the Philadelphia crowd that night), his win would, essentially, be the only such victory that seemed to explicitly position the winner as a future, but not quite fully established, company centerpiece (which, it seems fair to say, they got right) in that 10-year span. Although both Seth Rollins and Shinsuke Nakamura were first-time winners near the end of the decade, Nakamura never made anything of it (which breaks my heart in a real way), and Rollins hasn’t had nearly the title success after the Rumble that he had before. With the introduction of the women’s Rumble match in 2018, the opportunity arose to reestablish the importance of the ’Mania title shot stipulation. Sadly, it was not really meant to be, with only Becky Lynch coming close (and she had, at that point, been a multiple-time women’s champion and was already clearly the biggest star in the company, man or woman).

This decade has been, well, an almost biblical clusterfuck from a historical context perspective. But at the very least—with Drew McIntyre’s remarkable run in the match and his subsequent coronation, albeit at the worst possible time in the history of wrestling to be anointed as the future star of a company—2020 saw a real attempt (on the men’s side, at a minimum) to return the Rumble to its former position as the lead indicator of the company’s feelings toward a particular performer.

That year’s other winner, Charlotte Flair, would take perhaps the most interesting tack of any Rumble winner in the “choose your own adventure” era of the match, deciding to take her talents down to the Performance Center with a challenge for Rhea Ripley, the then NXT champion.

In 2021—the only “ThunderDome” Rumble—WWE attempted to split the difference between a semiotic means to a narrative end and a golden ticket, with Bianca Belair and Edge coming into the match with very different résumés and leaving WrestleMania in very different positions following the championship matches they earned with their victories. Belair became the brightest star in the WWE universe, while Edge turned into the “angriest dad who still sits on his porch listening to Wilco” possible.

Which brings us to, maybe, the worst Rumbles of the modern era. While the worst men’s Rumble—won by Lesnar as part of McMahon’s very public cry to be relieved of his booking duties throughout the first half of last year—was bad on every conceivable level (and was nearly single-handedly sabotaged by Shane McMahon’s ego), in its own way it led Lesnar to try to overturn a wrestling ring with a piece of heavy equipment. And that’s as much as any person can ask for.

When it comes to the worst women’s Rumble, the entire idea of Ronda Rousey winning after a comically late entry (no. 28) stank, essentially from beginning (or almost end) to end, and never really got any better—except that Rousey losing at ’Mania gave us brief hope they’d decided not to force her into an ill-fitting role as champion—until a few days before the end of the year.

But this is a new year, and Saturday was a new Royal Rumble. Cody Rhodes’s win—although he was also given a free pass with the 30th entry, he then worked something like a 10-minute match against Gunther, our beefiest boi, before eliminating him—fit him perfectly into the role of surging, righteous babyface on a mission to achieve greatness, like Michaels in 1996 (minus the Iron Man bit, of course).

With the result of Rhodes’s WrestleMania match seemingly a foregone conclusion (he’ll win at least the WWE championship, if not the unified belt), most of the interest in his story will come from the way he interacts with all the moving parts that go into telling a WrestleMania main event story (the pinnacle of which can be found here, featuring, of course, the dulcet tones of one Mr. Fred Durst).

It is a nice story, and one that may lead to the coronation of another generational talent, but it could just as easily tie Rhodes’s story up so well that whatever momentum he gained from his showing at this year’s show may end up being lost after he achieves his goal and the dream of his family.

As for Ripley, given her immense talent and the fact she is just 26, her victory almost feels like a mix between the Lesnar win in 2003 (in part because she’s diesel, but also because she had a run with a world title before winning the Rumble) and the Austin win in 1998, at least as far as what awaits her at WrestleMania.

Her choice (which she made this week on Raw when she chose to face Charlotte Flair for the SmackDown Women’s title) was between—as I put it on Wednesday Worldwide—one of the best wrestlers any of us have ever seen and a supernova, both of which would be worthy of a WrestleMania main event match and story. And that, ultimately, is all that a Royal Rumble winner can ask for.

Nick Bond (@TheN1ckster) is the cofounder of the Institute of Kayfabermetrics and provides weekly updates to The Ringer’s WWE Power Board.

Nick Bond

Window-Shopping on the Road to ‘WrestleMania’

Window-Shopping on the Road to ‘WrestleMania’

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