As a rule of thumb in wrestling, you should always be skeptical when the big promotions reach for the superlatives. Let’s not forget the time that WWE promised us “The Greatest Royal Rumble,” perhaps the most dramatic example of this particular phenomenon.
With that in mind, should we be cautious about what WWE has been relentlessly promoting as a “generational” triple threat match — namely, the main event of the first night of WrestleMania 41?
Advertisement
Advertisement
Like most followers of the WWE product, I get the hype. If someone had told me in January that we’d be getting CM Punk, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns in one ring at WrestleMania 41 — and with questions about Paul Heyman’s loyalty hovering above the whole thing — I’d have been jumping for joy. But here we are on the eve of it happening, and I feel strangely underwhelmed about the whole thing.
Let’s start with the obvious caveat: No sensible person should write off a match before a single haymaker has been thrown. This could still end up as one of the greatest WrestleMania endings in history. But if what happens on Saturday resembles the buildup that we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks — well, we could be in for a frustrating finale to WrestleMania Night One.
Just think about the various times the three competitors have stood in the ring on “WWE Raw” over the past few weeks. How many of those segments can you actually remember? How many have actually made any substantive contribution to the storyline — at least beyond teasing out that whole Paul Heyman favor?
Advertisement
Advertisement
You can sense the lack of direction in the video package that WWE posted on social media on Thursday. After recapping the whole War Games story — which was genuinely exciting back in November — we ended up with lots of slick edits of back-and-forth promos, none of which really amounted to much the first time around. It looks great, but tells you very little.
Sure, we all want to know who Heyman leaves with in Las Vegas. But the rest of this feud is frustratingly undercooked. What has really changed between CM Punk and Seth Rollins since their seemingly decisive showdown on the Netflix premiere, for example? And how does Roman Reigns really feel about Punk riding to his rescue in Vancouver last year?
It isn’t like these questions would be difficult to answer. But the truth is that WWE hasn’t really bothered with them. Instead they’ve just blithely assumed that they can build a “generational” main event purely on the strength of the names involved.
Maybe opting for a three-way in the first place was the problem. It’s true that there are exciting singles feuds at all three points of this particular triangle — Roman vs. Seth, Seth vs. Punk and Roman vs. Punk — but trying to do everything at once has meant not properly exploring any of those promising individual angles.
Seth Rollins, Paul Heyman, Roman Reigns, and CM Punk speak during “WWE SmackDown” at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. (Heather McLaughlin/WWE via Getty Images)
(WWE via Getty Images)
It’s frustrating when you consider what we could have had. Is there any richer rivalry in modern wrestling than Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins? For years, WWE has had fans going crazy with even the slightest hint of revisiting that particular saga. Just remember the response when Rollins rocked up to their last one-on-one match, in January 2022, wearing his old Shield gear. Or when we got that echo of the famous chair shot during last year’s WrestleMania XL finale.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Now we have Reigns and Rollins in the closest thing to a grudge match in three years, and how much of that airtime has been given to their explosive history? Not enough by a long shot. Indeed, arguably the best moment between the two came several weeks before this triple threat was even announced, when both men faced off during this year’s Royal Rumble.
You can say the same thing about Reigns vs. Punk. Injecting “The Second City Saint” into last year’s War Games was one of the biggest surprises in years, and also gave us those excellent cinematic scenes of him and Reigns sitting down like rival mafia dons. But has this year’s WrestleMania 41 buildup come close to recreating those tensions? We all know the answer to that.
It’s true that managing the sheer volume of marquee talent in WWE (Cody Rhodes, John Cena, Reigns, Rock, Punk, Randy Orton…) was never going to be easy. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that Saturday night might have benefited from a more decisive direction — i.e. Reigns vs. Punk or Reigns vs. Rollins — even if that meant having to find something else for whichever of these superstars ended up left behind. Instead, we ended up with a confusing three-way dance without any particular prize — either real or metaphorical — to be won. At least give the winner a world title shot, for example.
With just 24 hours to go, this main event does have one big selling point in that, unlike last year, the outcome is hard to call. In truth, though, even that isn’t enough to stop it from feeling anticlimactic.
Not knowing who will win is one thing. Not caring either way is quite another.
