I just finished watching Royal Rumble 1999 and I can’t get it out of my mind.

So in wrestling there’s this thing called “heat”, which is when someone doesn’t like someone else. Heels (bad guys) are SUPPOSED to have heat with the crowd, the crowd is supposed to hate them and want them to lose. A good heel knows how to build heat, they know how to say and do things that make the crowd hate them and most importantly MAKE THE CROWD WANT THEM TO LOSE A WRESTLING MATCH. That part is important, wrestling is about fake fighting in a ring, so If you don’t make the fans want to see you wrestle and lose then your heat is worthless.

Different from heat is fire. A Babyface (good guy) has “fire” when the crowd loves them, wants them to win, and lives vicariously through them. Fire is important because without fire the crowd doesn’t care about you, and why should they cheer you if you’re just some guy? Babyface fire makes sure the whole crowd is cheering and chanting for the babyface even when they’re getting their ass kicked. This is fake fighting remember, it’s not a test of skill, so crowd involvement is paramount and crowd disinterest is death.

So heels have heat and babyfaces have fire and that’s the fundamental dynamic to wrestling. Heels will do and say things to make themselves hated and faces will do and say things to make themselves loved. The important thing is that these qualities wear off after a while. If the heel always loses then he can lose his heat because the audience won’t be invested in his matches, “everyone knows that guy always loses”. The Babyface can lose their fire in the same way, but there is a twist: people love an underdog. Sometimes losing a few matches can make a Babyface even more beloved especially if they are cheated out of their rightful victories

So how basically every wrestling storyline goes is that a Babyface and heel will have a confrontation. The crowd will side with the Babyface and the feud will begin. In the first match or two the heel may cheat his ass off to defeat the Babyface, but eventually good triumphs over evil and the Babyface will win a massive victory. The audience goes home happy and everyone buys tickets to the next wrestling show.

I can only assume this is what they wanted to do when McMahon won the royal rumble. McMahon and Austin were feuding and to his credit McMahon had a lot of heat on him: as the evil corporate owner he had screwed over Austin at every turn, taking his title shots, trying to fire him, trying to do everything in his power to make Austin’s life miserable and therefore rob the fans of their favorite hero. He had now declared that Austin would NEVER fight for the WWF title again, and this obviously made the fans mad. But WWF has its own lineage of arcane rules and working that lineage into the plot makes everything much more sensible and dare I say it “real,” so there was a ready-made storyline for how Austin could still pull one over on McMahon and get a big win that would make the whole audience happy.

The important rule here is that whoever wins the Royal Rumble gets a WWF title shot at WrestleMania, so although McMahon hates Austin and want to prevent him from ever winning the WWF title, he can’t actually deny Austin a title shot if Austin wins the rumble. And so the story began, McMahon would do everything in his power to deny Austin his victory at the Royal Rumble, while Austin would do everything in his power to win and spite McMahon which would make the audience happy. McMahon first forced Austin to enter the Royal Rumble at number 1 (the hardest position to start from) and then added that McMahon himself would also enter the Rumble at number 30 (the easiest position to start from) as a final effort to deny Austin victory.

Obviously for McMahon, forcing Austin into number 1 is a good idea, but the entering the Ruble himself even at number 30 is a very stupid idea . In kayfabe and reality Austin is a trained and fit wrestler whereas McMahon is an untrained dad on steroids, McMahon should be no match for Austin if they ever step into the ring together. But this ploy was to show just how much McMahon hates Austin and so it gets McMahon a lot of heat and that’s all well and good. Here’s the thing though, I don’t wanna see McMahon in a match. He is not a good wrestler, his wrestling looks terrible and fake, and for as hateable as he is him being in a match looks dumb and stupid. Austin on the other hand has fire, he is ON FIRE, and he’s the most popular wrestler that ever was and possible every will be so much so that I still see people on the street wearing a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirts 25 years later. Austin winning and getting his title shot at the rumble is the perfect story for McMahon to lose (making the audience happy) and Austin to win (making the audience even more happy). Just don’t let McMahon actually try to wrestle (which he is very bad at) and everyone can go home happy with how things played out in the Royal Rumble.

But, heat. McMahon seems to have decided that he needed more heat and so he had to win the Rumble himself even though he is a terrible wrestler and Austin is super duper popular. I guess he thought that if Austin wins too much then he’ll become a boring invincible super hero and no one will buy wrestling tickets anymore, and to some extent Austin was on a downslope at this point with a lot of the brilliance and fire that characterized his run last year having wanted. But still it would have been awesome to have Austin win and I feel Austin SHOULD have won, the whole storyline would have made perfect sense in that McMahon had done literally everything in his power to remove Austin’s title shot but through sheer badassery and determination Austin still won the whole damn thing. But no, McMahon wins the Rumble and the crowd goes home deflated.

Even then, the worst part is that McMahon winning didn’t even change anything.  If Austin wins then Austin gets a title shot at Wrestemania.  If McMahon wins then Austin gets no title shot, instead McMahon does.  Well at the very next Raw after the Royal Rumble, even though McMahon won, the storyline gave Austin the title shot at Wrestlemania and removed it from McMahon, so the Rumble was completely pointless to the long-term storyline. What a waste of what could have been an amazing Rumble. Honestly most of the joy of 1997/1998 WWF is just watching Steven Austin himself, and much of the remaining card isn’t up to his level so Austin losing actually makes me feel worse about the entire show even though it was actually super cool in many respects. But I can’t change the past, so whatever.