We’re just a few weeks from WrestleMania 33 in Orlando with the card pretty much intact and ready to go. All the WWE‘s top stars will be there and put on display in some effect, but the card seems so jumbled like magnetic fridge poetry has gone awry. Looking at it, you can see each match’s potential, but the problem is several of these match-ups come across as forced and uninspiring.
And that’s the problem.
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WrestleMania should be like Wrestling New Year! It’s the culmination of everything in the past year finally getting some payoff. Triple H and Seth Rollins will finally have their WrestleMania match since last year’s proposed match was cut when Rollins legitimately injured his MCL and ACL. Their feud started after SummerSlam last year, but only in the past month or so has it really gotten the momentum it deserves. Of course, it almost looked like it wouldn’t happen again since Rollins was injured during Samoa Joe’s Raw debut, but thankfully we’ll see the Architect at the Show of Shows once again in what could be the show stealer.
Looking back at past WrestleMania’s of the New Era, starting with WrestleMania XXX, you can see how payoff worked in a big way with Daniel Bryan’s storyline. It took eight months starting from SummerSlam 2013 to WrestleMania XXX that not only was Daniel Bryan redeemed when he reclaimed the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, but from a storytelling point of view, it was also the most logical way to do things. In that moment, though, it was the WWE actually listening to its fans and giving us what we wanted instead of the nonsensical push of a part-timer like Batista (who soon left again after his WrestleMania match).
With Randy Orton winning the Royal Rumble and the build-up to his match at WrestleMania was booked all wrong. It’s obvious now that Randy had no business winning the Rumble if he wasn’t going to turn on Bray immediately. That would have given them time to build their feud, even if Bray didn’t have the championship or not. In addition, I grew bored with the seemingly non-stop flurry of number one contender matches for Bray Wyatt’s newly-won WWE Championship. I’m not going to go into a diatribe about how they should have done it here, but with what they’ve given us, I can’t really feel excited with the finished product.
Everything seems so slapdash and unfinished. The pieces were all there to have a great WrestleMania, but the only two stories that have the right emotional weight are the aforementioned Rollins and Triple H unsanctioned match and the Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens match. That’s not how it should be. There should be suspense and drama built-in to WWE’s Show of Shows, but are you really feeling that with AJ Styles and Shane McMahon? Are you feeling that with the Smackdown Women’s Championship match? Doubtful, and I wouldn’t blame you.
A perfect example of this for the Raw side would be Roman Reigns vs the Undertaker. Now, Taker is far from his prime and we’ve talked before about how Roman should be the one to retire the Deadman. The thing is, Roman eliminated the Undertaker from the Rumble at the beginning of the year and that should have been the spark for this match, all it needed was the right amount of fanning. Does it get that? No. We get a random call out during Raw three weeks before the show. It literally looks like “hey, neither of us are doing anything, let’s go to WrestleMania.” When you have the supposed face of the company and one of the sports’ living legends, you don’t just throw it together and hope for the best; you build to it properly, giving it time to amount to something.
Even with the Goldberg/Lesnar match-up, we’ve already seen this twice and neither times lived up to the hype. It’s obvious they went with marquee names to headline their show, but what is the payoff in the long run? WWE currently has one of the strongest rosters in a long while and nobody really feels utilized. It doesn’t show their confidence that they have in their stars and that’s beyond disappointing.
This is far from the ultimate thrill ride and I hate feeling like that. It’s almost like they don’t know how to properly tell stories anymore because we have this oversaturation of material.
But I hope I can be proved wrong and they deliver something truly for the ages, but when we’re nine days away, it’s headed towards another mundane WrestleMania and that is something it should never be.
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