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Royal Rumble’s Best and Worst Moments
What happens when you put 30 WWE professional wrestlers together in the ring, at timed intervals, to rumble – with the last man standing declared the winner and champion?
This would surely spell non-stop wrestling action called Royal Rumble. And this has kept wrestling fans mesmerized and glued to their TV sets or gadgets for the entire duration of the matches for years now.
The contestants’ main objective is to bodily remove every other participant from the ring and eliminate him from the competitions. Some are thrown off the rope within seconds, while others remain in the ring from the beginning until the 30th man is called, and the last man standing and champion is declared.
Who goes out first and who stays in the ring, and for how long, keeps the audience in suspense.
The spectacle is intense and violently savage. It’s called the Royal Rumble, one of the most viewed annual special matches of the WWE for wrestling fans across the globe.
Some people, including Royal Rumble first champion Hacksaw Jim Duggan, now 71, tell his tale as if there are no story lines, that you’re watching a real rumble or a gangland riot. In an interview that appeared on betway insider, he claims “it’s like the Wild West out there, with nobody’s in charge.”
Don’t be naïve though. If you still haven’t noticed, everything is scripted to make every wrestler a hero or villain, from the moment each one is introduced in the ring to the time he is viciously thrown out of it. Every wrestler knows exactly when to enter, who to face, and what to do inside the roped arena, and how to time a fall.
These moments are created by a team of imaginative script writers and directors, whose job is to weave as many ring conflicts as possible to cater to man’s insatiable delight for what is grim and gory.
For over 30 years now, they have succeeded in doing exactly that and making people come back to watch for more. Below is a select few of the most bizarre stories of the Royal Rumble over the years:
Sgt. Slaughter pledges allegiance to Saddam Hussein, wins the WWE Championship
Who would openly pledge allegiance to Saddam Hussein before a largely American audience at the height of the Kuwait Invasion and Gulf War?
Well, Sgt. Slaughter, purportedly a former US Marine and a Vietnam War veteran, did exactly this before millions of American live audience and TV viewers at a time when the United States was at war with Iraq.
He said he liked Saddam’s decisiveness and brutality, and hated America’s indecision and softness.
It was a brilliant tactical move by Vince McMahon, a former Wrestler and WWE CEO, to attract more fans and to encourage more advertisers to fund the show, but it bordered on an offensive affront to the sensibilities of most Americans.
After his unpatriotic act, Sarge was hated not just at the WWE community but also in his private life and was reported to have been forced to wear a bullet-proof vest for his own protection.
Hulk Hogan steps up to stop Sgt. Slaughter
With no one to stop the Sarge, a new storyline had to be devised, with the amiable Hulk Hogan taking the cudgels for the United States against Saddam’s most ardent American supporter in the wrestling world.
Hogan, a two-time Royal Rumble champion, was furious that Sgt. Slaughter had supposedly desecrated the American flag as part of his victory celebration for winning the 1991 Royal Rumble.
McMahon had actually wanted Sgt. Slaughter to burn an American flag to draw more attention to his promotions, but the Sarge relented and burned Hogan’s shirt instead.
Hogan offered to fight Slaughter at WrestleMania, WWE’s flagship promotion. The Sarge accepted the challenge, and lost. Hogan’s victory catapulted his career into an all-time high as America’s wrestling hero, champion, and the most recognizable professional wrestler in the 1990s.
Bizarre story of two brothers
How about two feuding, dysfunctional brothers as the storyline?
That’s the way it is with half-brothers the Undertaker and Kane, whose spiel goes like this:
The Undertaker’s mother had an illicit affair with Paul Bearer, a villainous funeral home owner and manager of the Undertaker, resulting in the birth of Kane.
As the brothers were growing up, the Undertaker had always thought that Kane was his full blood brother until Bearer unintentionally revealed on live streaming that he was really Kane’s father. It was during a break on Monday Night Raw when he supposedly thought the cameras were no longer rolling.
According to Bearer’s secret, the Undertaker and his family grew up in the family-owned funeral home until the Undertaker burned it down, killing his mother and scarring the face of his half-brother. Bearer survived the fire and hid Kane in an asylum while Kane was growing up.
In the 1998 version of the Royal Rumble, it looked like all’s well between the two brothers after Kane, also known as the “The Big Red Monster”, came to his brother’s rescue while the latter was being ganged up on by D-Generation X.
But then again, the incident was to be a prelude to an even more bizarre episode when Kane inexplicably attacked his brother, put him in a casket, and with the help of their father Bearer, set it ablaze.
When the fire was finally extinguished, there was no one inside the casket when it was opened.
This set the tone for another storyline: the dead man is destined to come back and take revenge upon his younger brother.
And the saga continues.