We all knew WrestleMania was going to be a little different this year. Without fans, and without the circus of professional wrestling that traditionally happens around the biggest date on the calendar, it was never going to be the same spectacle that it normally would be. Many people were surprised that Vince McMahon made the call to go ahead with the event at all, and even more surprised when he turned it into a two-night spectacular. Instead of postponing the most important show of WWE’s year, the company instead tried to make it bigger.
Because the show was pre-taped, a lot of people suspected that the company would have something special up its sleeve for the event. As commendable as it is that the company has been finding ways to continue airing RAW, NXT, and SmackDown every week from empty arenas, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that it just isn’t the same without fans. As annoying as some groups of fans occasionally can be with their inane chanting and disrespectful behavior, they bring energy into arenas and fire wrestlers up. Seven hours of empty arena match after empty arena match would have felt flat, and it would have been hard to keep the audience engaged. WWE didn’t go down that route. Instead, they gave us something none of us thought we would ever see on a flagship WWE pay-per-view show.
Before we get into this, we should note how reluctant Vince McMahon usually is to take risks with WrestleMania. It’s by far and away the biggest wrestling show in the world, and there’s a formula he likes to stick to. WrestleMania is like the company’s online slots machine (an apt comparison, as WWE are in the process of releasing a range of online casino games as we speak). All you need to do to win money from any game on an online slots website is to make the symbols line up in the right order. For WWE, the ‘symbols’ are their stars, and the order is their matches. Play too last and loose, and you’ll get nothing at all. Line them up carefully, and you can be sure of a payout.
There were a few matches on the WrestleMania card that we wouldn’t have seen play out the way that they did under normal circumstances. The one that’s passed everybody by is Edge vs. Randy Orton. It was always scheduled to be a ‘last man standing’ match, but there’s no way that so much of the match would have taken place backstage in an arena. That means we’d probably never have got the questionable Chris Benoit-style strangulation spot, which inexplicably wasn’t edited out of the finished product. It’s also likely that the match wouldn’t have gone forty minutes. Given the format and the near-silent commentary team, it felt torturously long, and it wasn’t the big comeback match Edge deserved after nine years away.
The other notably different match was the Undertaker vs. AJ Styles, which was more like a movie than a wrestling match. It was a little quirky, but most people agree that this may be the best way to present the Undertaker in the future for as many matches as the legend has left. With a recorded format and judicious editing, he doesn’t look like an old man. He can still be made to look like the Phenom of old. It was a little hokey, and we’re at a loss to see how AJ Styles can possibly come back from this, but it was an enjoyable piece of wrestling television, and it felt like an appropriate way to close the first night of WrestleMania.
The big talking point of the weekend was John Cena taking on “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt in what was billed as a ‘Firefly Funhouse’ match. Most of us expected something akin to what we’d seen Undertaker and Styles do the night before. We were wrong. This took the fantasy theme of the Taker -Styles match and took it to the next level. It’s hard even to describe the madness that we saw, but the general gist was that the Fiend used his magical abilities to travel through John Cena’s personal timeline, defeating each version of him, before then transporting him into WCW and defeating him as a member of the nWo Wolfpac. Finally, we came back into the present day, where the Fiend applied the mandible claw to Cena and pinned him to the mat, while a second Bray Wyatt counted to three. At that point, Cena disappeared into thin air. This was not a wrestling match. We don’t know what it was. Depending on who you listen to online, it was either the greatest thing ever or the death of professional wrestling. There doesn’t seem to be an option between the two – people either absolutely loved this, or they absolutely hated it.
We don’t know which camp to agree with. Putting Cena and Wyatt in a one on one contest in an empty arena would be a waste of both men, and it’s unclear that Cena even wants to compete in a regular wrestling match at this point in his career. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all of this is that someone convinced Vince McMahon to sign off on it. Just weeks ago, Matt Hardy was on Chris Jericho’s podcast explaining that Vince didn’t ‘get’ the Broken Universe or the concept of Hardy’s character. All of a sudden, there’s a match on the biggest wrestling card of the year, featuring one of the biggest stars in the history of the business, and it’s taken right out of the Matt Hardy school of creative production. This was an Ultimate or Final Deletion match under a different name. It was Hardy’s contribution to professional wrestling turned into a WrestleMania main event, without Matt Hardy in it. It was bizarre. Nobody will ever forget it, but very few people can agree on whether it was a good or bad thing for the business of professional wrestling.
The answer to that query will probably become clear when viewing figures for the next few weeks or months become available. There are thousands – perhaps millions – of lapsed wrestling fans who tune in once or twice a year for the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania. If they like what they see, they might stick around and watch for a while longer. If they don’t, they’re likely to drift off again as soon as the show is over. Having watched that Cena vs. Wyatt match, they’ll now either think that wrestling has become more fun and more creative, or that wrestling has totally lost its way. We wouldn’t like to predict which way that’s going to go.
