Now this may all be moot come Thursday night, but as it stands right now WWE has created an awful mess out of what should have been a simple situation. Roman Reigns taking on either the Rock or Cody Rhodes could have been set up very simply and easily without fanning the flames of division among it’s fanbase. And that’s exactly what they’ve done by having Cody win the Royal Rumble and the seemingly back off from challenging Reigns again at WrestleMania 40 while teasing a matchup between Roman and the Rock. It makes little sense for Cody to not pick Roman given the outcome of their match at WrestleMania 39, and to go on TV and appear to just hand that match over to the Rock has accomplished the incredible feat of getting the Rock booed at a house show and buried on social media. Under things we never thought we’d see, you can chalk this one up for sure.
It deifies all logic to put maybe your most popular wrestler ever into a situation to become vilified by a section of WWE fans, and the subject of dirtsheet reports that essentially accuse him of pulling a real life backstage power play to steal the match from Cody. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re inclined to believe these reports, which for the record I am not, then it’s not that far of a leap to go full tinfoil hat and see this as the first step of a Dwayne Johnson led takeover of the whole company and a coup d’etat against HHH to remove him and install the Rock’s guy Brian Gerwitz as head of creative. Yes, that may sound crazy but there are people who are pushing that theory and who are also selling t-shirts to capitalize on all this. But what’s really going on? In my opinion, these are the possibilities:
The Rock played bigfoot
If you believe some of the dirtsheets the Rock was pushing for this match for some time, and got what he wanted by way of his new position on the TKO board and him just being the Rock. They’re also saying that the deal was just closed recently and thus necessitated changes in the booking plans. I guess this is possible, even though with dirtsheets I always assume it’s not worth running with, but why on Earth would you book Cody to win the Rumble in that case? Was HHH pulling his own power move thinking that once he planted the flag it couldn’t get pulled up? That’s every bit as plausible as the Rock just thinking he can walk in and change booking plans. It all depends on what you want to believe.
We do know, however, that both the Rock and Roman have talked about this match for years. We know that millions of fans have fantasy booked it for years. And according to the Rock they were in serious discussions last year about doing it. It’s not like he woke up one morning and decided he wanted to do it and that company plans didn’t matter. So from where I’m sitting it’s pretty simple. Until Rock says he’s finished wrestling you should always be ready for that call from him that he’s ready to come in. And if he’s making serious noise about doing it now then you book accordingly. Why? Because he’s the Rock, that’s why.
But if you believe this, he’s not the only one to blame. The Rock first publicly spoke about maybe doing this, back in September. You can’t ignore that and if he was indeed angling for the match then that’s where the clock starts and if you’re HHH then you book for the possibility it gets done but with a way to go forward if it doesn’t. And it looked like that’s what was happening until February 2 on Smackdown. Shutting it down was obviously not an option HHH had but allowing to play out this way is not a good way to deal with it, either.
It’s a work
Maybe this is all an elaborate ruse, and we’re gonna end up with Roman vs Cody anyway. There are also reports out there saying that WWE is doing this to turn Cody into a mega babyface by getting him sympathy. To which I say……that’s just dumb. Cody is a top merchandise seller, his segments almost always pop the TV audience numbers and get good traffic on social media, and he’s one of the handful of people who we have verified reports of increasing ticket sales by being announced for a show. And he already plays a sympathy grabbing role on TV as it is. To go all around the bend to just do what they were gonna do anyway, in an effort to juice his popularity when it’s already at sky high levels, creates a bunch of questions.
The idea that he needs a ‘get screwed by outside forces’ angle to reach some next level of popularity is ludicrous. Especially at the expense of the Rock’s personal reputation. And if that is what they’re thinking then they’ve gone bonkers in my opinion. Tapping into the worst part of the fanbase, the part that always wants to latch onto some supposedly aggrieved party in the name of getting the booker to ‘listen to the fans’, is a thing they’ve done too many times and that flat out makes things less enjoyable. Hearing people hijack shows and seeing them bomb comment sections and replies is not fun and now it’s already spilled over into harassment of the Rock’s daughter on social media, which got so bad that she deactivated her twitter account for now. That’s ultimately where this always leads.
It’s engagement farming
On Monday Night RAW they emphasized over and over how #WeWantCody trended for 3 days (and conveniently ignored that #wewantRocky was trending, too). They mentioned the media coverage of the controversy over and over. And they reportedly handed out #wewantCody signs. It was pretty clear after an hour or so that they’re now doing this stuff on purpose and that their goal is to get maximum interactions and maximum coverage up until their Thursday media event. And in doing all this they provided a content gold mine for podcasters and writers (like me!) to boost their own profiles even more. Why do this? It could be that this is the game now, or it could be the tinfoil hat ‘get Vince McMahon pushed further down the page’ idea that’s been floating around. I think it might be a bit of both.
But stirring up all this angst in the name of engagement is a dangerous game, and one that I grew tired of a long time ago. You’re empowering the section of the fanbase that believes they should be able to complain and get the booking changed instead of voting with their remotes if they’re not satisfied. And that ultimately leads to people going to the extreme, like harassing Ava and wishing illness on the Rock himself. It’s easy to say ‘those guys don’t represent us’ but it’s a reality that these things always end up here. When you give these folks the green light to open fire because they’re not happy it always ends with somebody saying things that should get them a visit from the police.
(Note: if this wasn’t the original plan it sure is now. They’ve jumped in with both feet trying to stir up the hornet’s nest for traffic since Monday.)
And now the final possibility
They just blew it
On Tuesday, two more ‘reports’ emerged, one that said Cody warned everyone that this was gonna go bad, and another that said Cody was told that he would be working with Roman and even got assurances that it was so. We now have an element of a losing political campaign as election day approaches – conflicting stories all pointing fingers in different directions in an effort to absolve certain people and blame other for what’s going on. In one version of events this was always the plan, in another Cody was told otherwise. And now we have the Cody warning story along with another that some people were surprised at the booing that took place on Monday. (Now to be clear at least on TV it sounded pretty tepid compared to past hijacking attempts, but who knows.)
Right now this is the leader in the clubhouse for me. If by some chance everything is true – it was the plan since early January but Cody was indeed told and reassured that he’d be working with Roman, but he warned them that this would backfire – then what are we doing here? The individual pieces are bad, too. If it was always the plan and Cody was aware the whole time, then why have him win the Rumble? If it was never the plan and Rock did indeed insert him into the equation later, then this was the worst possible way to write it into television that didn’t piss anyone off. And finally, if this is just ends up as Cody vs Roman anyway then they dangled a match that millions of us have fantasy booked for a decade in front of us as a red herring, and in doing so will have managed to piss us off. None of the reported pathways make any sense, and right now there’s no outcome that won’t piss off part of the fanbase. They’re banking on none of us having the guts to stop watching no matter what they do, and that is exactly the kind of thinking that we used to eviscerate Vince McMahon for.
Final Thoughts
Any way you slice it, this is dumb. Now they’re gonna do their best to fix it, and then they’ll tell us that the entire thing went out exactly as they planned and that we all got worked. And that’s nonsense. What exactly have we gotten worked into believing? All the talk is about backstage and boardroom machinations instead of what the fictional characters are doing in the fictional story. The only guy who doesn’t look bad right now is Roman. Rock looks like 1993 Hulk Hogan. HHH is doing his best to not look like an idiot, and maybe he’ll succeed, but you can’t exonerate him because at best he came up with a lousy way to facilitate all this stuff. They’ll attempt to clean it up at the Peacock media event but we’ll see how that goes.
Lastly, does HHH intend for us to see him as a victim during his entire tenure as head of creative? First we had all the ‘reports’ of the old man meddling, which were no doubt sourced by HHH or someone close to him. And now we have the Rock as the culprit whenever something happens that you don’t like. Is there always going to be somebody allegedly forcing him to do things he doesn’t want, which will in turn shield him from any scrutiny? Sure looks like it to me.
That’s all I got so far. We’ll see what happens.
Stroke of Genius 