Between The Rock & A Hard Place, The Rhodes To Wrestlemania
Last April, I wrote a piece I named “If Not Then When?”, expressing my concerns with WWE’s booking of Roman Reigns and, in particular, his defeat of Cody Rhodes in the main event of Wrestlemania. In short, it questioned the logic of further extending a title reign past what seemed like the ideal time to end it, and how holding out for a perfect moment can often be indistinguishable from being afraid to strike while the iron is hot.
Now, WWE is deep in the build to Wrestlemania 40 on April 6th and 7th 2024, and despite Cody Rhodes having won the Royal Rumble to earn himself a title shot at said event, it’s still not entirely clear that he will be granted the rematch with Roman Reigns that seemed all but self-evident upon his defeat last year. Reigns, for his part, has wrestled only eight times since his and Cody’s first encounter - only five of those on a televised/pay-per-view event, and only three of those matches being title defences. By means of arbitrary comparison, the 74 year old luchadore El Satanico has wrestled at least twenty more matches than the WWE Champion in the same period.
In the year since last year's Wrestlemania, Roman Reigns as absentee champion has become a sticking point both on and off-screen, and it’s caused WWE’s internal logic to tie itself up in knots and contradict itself at every turn. During Reigns’ own matches, WWE’s announce team - the authorised, largely neutral voice of the company - celebrate him as a dominant, record-breaking competitor, the longest reigning champion “of the modern era” (a phrasing that always sticks in my craw, as it effectively means “the longest reigning champion since there was one who reigned longer”), and one of the most significant stars in WWE’s history. When Roman Reigns isn’t on-screen, however, the likes of Cody Rhodes, Seth Rollins, and Drew McIntyre criticise him as a master politician who requires the help of his family and lackeys to cling to the championship gold - so much so that the title currently worn by Rollins, the World Heavyweight Title, was expressly introduced to WWE because Roman defended his championship so infrequently, and because thus far nobody had been able to defeat him for it. Despite Rollins’ best efforts in recent weeks to have his belt recognised as the “workrate” title of a fighting champion, it has been battling against understandable perception as a consolation prize since day one. As ever, WWE’s narrative problems are invariably of their own making.
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There were simpler solutions to all of this. The entirety of last year’s main event booking would have made more sense had Cody Rhodes simply defeated Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania 39. Prior to the introduction of the World Heavyweight Title, Roman Reigns already carried the two top titles in the promotion - the WWE Universal Title, and the WWE Title - and introducing a third World Title was only necessary because WWE have ceased to treat Reigns’ two championships as separate entities. With Wrestlemania having moved to a two-night affair in 2020 and staying that way ever since, and with one man holding the two top titles, it’s long been assumed that the end-game was for Reigns to defend one title each night of the flagship super-event, but that has yet to take place; indeed, WWE have really yet to make any narrative use of the two-night format at all.
If you’ll indulge the retrospective fantasy booking, here’s the alternative. Cody Rhodes defeats Roman Reigns for both championships at Wrestlemania 39, and his subsequent post-Wrestlemania feud with Brock Lesnar is driven by the obvious catalyst that Lesnar had, as per a previous stipulation match, been barred from ever challenging Roman Reigns for the title again - meaning that the moment somebody other than Roman gets their hands on the WWE Title, Lesnar would be quick to challenge them. Instead, we got a passable feud designed to rebuild Cody’s credibility after a major loss, but which offered no justification or motivation on Brock Lesnar’s part. Brock Lesnar could have cost Cody Rhodes one of his two titles, as Cody - wanting to prove himself a fighting champion in every way that Roman Reigns has not been - insisted on defending both titles in separate matches or, to protect Cody from losing so soon after his big Wrestlemania victory, he could have vacated one title, saying that both belts deserved a fighting champion, and putting it up in a tournament. Champions willingly handing over titles can be a hard sell, but Cody Rhodes in his current form could be one of the few able to get that idea over.
As for Roman Reigns, his rare TV appearances post-Wrestlemania were coloured by the growing disintegration of The Bloodline, his control over cousins The Usos becoming ever more desperate until Jey finally walked out on the family, and his rule as Tribal Chief becoming ever more despotic. Would this desperate, paranoid Roman Reigns, losing his authority over those around him, not have made far more sense if he no longer had the championship that justified his position? Once again, the stories coming out of last year’s Wrestlemania make so much more sense with Reigns not as champion that it smacks of a last minute change of decision, and not even bothering to update the running order for the subsequent weeks and months of shows to reflect it.
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Fast-forward, then, to this year’s Royal Rumble. Cody Rhodes was the favourite to win, as audiences largely assumed that his loss at Wrestlemania 39 was all to add some adversity to his tale, and to set up for a rematch at Wrestlemania 40 where finally Cody could emerge triumphant. But a lot can change in a year, and come the Rumble, that victory wasn’t quite so certain - seeds had been planted for a possible win by Gunther, who pledged to challenge Seth Rollins, or by CM Punk, returning to WWE for the first time in a decade, his heart set on securing the Wrestlemania main event that had so far eluded him.
Nevertheless, Cody emerged triumphant, and commentator Michael Cole screamed joyously that we all know that he would be challenging Roman Reigns. The Wrestlemania main event was set, and we were off to the races.
But instead, the following Friday night on SmackDown!, after coming up to two years of promising to “finish the story” and win the championship that eluded his father Dusty, and to avenge his own loss to Roman Reigns last year, Cody Rhodes declared that, actually, the story didn’t need to end at Wrestlemania, and he passed up his title opportunity against Roman, handing it over to The Rock.
The Rock has been the shadow cast over Roman Reigns since he first declared himself the Head Of The Table, and the Tribal Chief. Every time Roman Reigns has presented himself as the dominant male, the biggest star in the vast Anoa’i family galaxy, it has been with one eye on Dwayne Johnson, with WWE angling for this potential familial feud for the last four years at least. I predicted, in the aforementioned “If Not Now Then When?” post last year, that Wrestlemania 40 might finally be the show where WWE finally manage to put together that blockbuster main event, and that it would be at the expense of Cody Rhodes. What I didn’t expect was the convoluted and ham-fisted way they attempted to get there, and that it’s still unclear if they’re ever going to stick the landing.
In the hours, days, and weeks after The Rock’s return and staredown with his “cousin” Roman, WWE received a backlash the likes of which they must have thought they had long since outgrown. That episode of Smackdown currently sits on a Cagematch rating of 1.90 - meaning that it is currently rated lower than such exemplary shows as an episode of Wrestlicious that only featured one match, most of WCW’s offerings in 1999-2000, and a show built to showcase Dennis Rodman’s wrestling career, while a video of the offending segment quickly became WWE’s most disliked YouTube upload ever, with a six-figure sum of disgruntled viewers clicking that little thumbs down icon.
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It was clear that, concurrent to the very real groundswell of disappointment from WWE’s fans, the company itself realised that they had made a mistake, and began trying to play damage control (I couldn’t come up with a punchline about Bayley here, answers on a postcard). WWE wrestlers used the hashtag “#WeWantCody” on social media, and suspiciously similar looking signs bearing the same mantra appeared in the audience alongside the genuine article, just as reports had confirmed that WWE had begun planting signs at their events, particularly in NXT. On RAW, Seth Rollins had the peculiar task of trying to talk Cody Rhodes into challenging him for his World Title, even though you would think that decision was self-evident, given that Cody had already passed up on a match with Roman Reigns. It was nothing more than a stalling tactic, a company spinning its wheels while it tried to figure out how to get out of the mess it had created for itself.
By leaning into and acknowledging audience discontent, Cody Rhodes’ dilemma started to draw comparison to the “Yes! Movement” that willed Daniel Bryan from Royal Rumble afterthought to Wrestlemania 30 main event, when - stop me if this sounds familiar - a bald wrestler-turned-Hollywood-star returned to television and was rewarded with a Wrestlemania main event. Ten years later, is history repeating itself?
Well, quite simply, no it isn’t. The WWE of ten years ago was a promotion with a contentious relationship with its own fanbase - its on-screen management avatars openly ridiculed their audience, just as the company in reality seemed to relish making decisions to spite its most vocal fans. Since the early 2000s, WWE had booked themselves into a position where the company itself was the biggest heel there was, where the easiest route a wrestler had to a cheap pop was to criticise the quality of the TV show they were appearing on, or the booking that put them there, and where to be seen as the “corporate” or company-endorsed chosen champion or top babyface was a poisoned chalice - John Cena was dogged by boos and chants of “Cena sucks” throughout his main event run for the sin of being WWE’s choice of top star, and that was an attitude that followed through to Roman Reigns’ babyface run, and to the choice of Dave Batista to win the Royal Rumble in 2014. That antagonistic relationship with its own audience is something that the WWE spent twenty years having to navigate, and it’s only in recent years that it finally changed, thanks to the ostensibly more fan-friendly Triple H taking the reigns of creative control from his disgraced father-in-law Vince McMahon, and thanks to the rise of AEW as a serious rival promotion, meaning the WWE’s most hardcore of supporters are more inclined to talk up the most rote and mediocre of matches and promos to talk up their favoured product against the new enemy than they once were to apply their vitriol to the only game in town.
By offering up a much-anticipated main event and then taking it away in the next breath, replacing it with the bane of every Wrestlemania season of the last decade - a guest star, part-time wrestler walking into a spot that somebody else had worked for - WWE are running the risk of upsetting the apple cart and undoing everything they had done to claw back some not entirely well-earned goodwill, and opened the floodgates to more outright rejection of their booking. Mired as they are in the elephant of the room that is an ongoing lawsuit and federal investigation into allegations of sexual abuse, coercion, assault, and sex trafficking by Vince McMahon and other WWE executives, the last thing WWE can afford is to turn even their most ardent loyalists against them - though it must be said that I don’t buy the suggestion that all of this is an intentional distraction, designed to take up headlines and social media trends to distract from the scandal and get people talking about something else; fans may be fickle, and social media may move on quickly, but it seemingly comes as a surprise to some of wrestling’s online commentariat to hear that courts and federal investigators aren’t generally distracted by wrestling booking, and the ongoing investigation into Vince McMahon and company’s crimes isn’t going anywhere, regardless of whether news aggregating clickbait merchants are talking about it this week.
But, by design or through panicked course correction, are WWE right to aim for a repeat of the grassroots movement that brought Daniel Bryan a Wrestlemania main event? Frankly, no, because it doesn’t make sense. Aside from the dynamic between WWE and its audience having shifted significantly in the intervening decade, so too has the balance of power on-screen changed - WWE’s visible authority figures today, Nick Aldis and Adam Pearce, are box-ticking middle management types, largely generic suits to trot out when an angle requires a “General Manager”, because WWE have long since forgotten how to book wrestling stories that aren’t mired in kayfabe bureaucracy. They aren’t the domineering and corrupt bosses that Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, or Vince McMahon before them, were, throwing their weight around and placing obstacles in the path of babyfaces, and a story of the underdog hero battling against corporate malfeasance doesn’t work when there isn’t a viable avatar for the corporation. What’s more, while The Authority’s dismissal of Daniel Bryan as a “B+ Player” who didn’t belong in the main event was a reflection of well-known preconceptions about how WWE do business and of their history of the kind of wrestler they thought warranted the spotlight, there’s no on-screen analogue for Cody Rhodes’ story of being seemingly denied his Wrestlemania event. Indeed, it’s quite the opposite - on-screen, Cody is the only person responsible, because he was the one who introduced The Rock and willingly passed up his chance to face Roman Reigns, and far from being the maligned underdog who got over in spite of the odds, Cody Rhodes is the heir apparent, who has had the red carpet rolled out for him since his WWE return.
As a result, to pivot to Cody and his supporters fighting to get the match back is only to paint Cody Rhodes as either uncertain, or petty and petulant. That’s only a slight improvement on painting him as somebody who would willingly pass up a match we’d been told time and time again was the most important of his career, and barely a cut above such babyface push-killing moments as Lex Luger celebrating a count-out non-title victory over Yokozuna as if he’d just become World Champion - there are some things a babyface simply cannot recover from, and while Cody Rhodes in WWE has so far had a Teflon quality that eluded him by the end of his AEW run, sooner or later something has to give.
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A recent Wrestlemania media event added more drama to the situation, by having The Rock follow up on a teased match with Roman Reigns, complete with the staredown clearly tailor-made for the eventual pre-match video package, by stressing the importance of family, and of The Bloodline, and siding with his cousin, seemingly turning heel in the process. Seth Rollins and Cody Rhodes got involved, and in the chaos it seemed like a tag team match was brewing. To confuse things yet more, Triple H followed up the event by Tweeting that Cody Rhodes had “made his decision” and would be fighting Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania after all. While Daniel Bryan’s struggle on and of-screen was typified by him not even being booked to enter the Royal Rumble that would have earned him a title shot, giving him kayfabe justification to argue that he had been robbed of an opportunity, Cody Rhodes had no such struggle - the boss could just step in and point out that, as the Royal Rumble winner, Cody had already earned the match and he could have it, less than a week after it had first been suggested that he wouldn’t. In spite of this, WWE and Dwayne Johnson writer Brian Gewirtz, and legions of WWE die-hards, insisted that this was all a masterful exercise in storytelling. Chinny reckon.
On RAW last night, the "story” continued, with Seth Rollins now offering his services to Cody Rhodes in his battle against Roman Reigns and The Rock, encouraging Cody to defeat Reigns for the championship, and predicting hyperbolic dire consequences for the WWE as a whole should he fail to do so. In the process, Cody reaffirmed his commitment to challenging Roman Reigns, suggesting that the fan backlash to the announcement of The Rock’s involvement caused him to change his mind, though not really addressing why he was content to pass up the match in the first place.
There’s nothing wrong with a wrestling promotion changing direction and pivoting to a new idea if what they had in mind doesn’t necessarily get over, in fact, in many cases its admirable, and preferable to sticking with bad creative of sheer stubbornness, but there’s course correction and there’s course correction. The secret to good booking isn’t to always give the audience what they want, but to make audiences believe that they really want what you’re giving them.
It’s too early for WWE or their audience to be doing victory laps, celebrating that they fixed the problem and got back on track, and not least of all because it was an unforced error, a problem of their own making - most reports suggest that the plan was for The Rock to wrestle Roman Reigns even before Cody Rhodes won the Royal Rumble, rather than it being the result of, for example, the injury to CM Punk forcing their hand. For one, those fans that Dwayne Johnson named “Cody Crybabies” may well be happy that their preferred main event is back on track, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a reason WWE wanted The Rock in that spot first - he’s one of the biggest stars in wrestling history, a bonafide Hollywood A-lister, and it’s a match that’s been teased for years, and is likely to be his last. How many fans could take or leave a Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns match, but were looking forward to seeing The Rock vs. Roman Reigns? If WWE’s sin was to bait-and-switch on an announced match, have they not done the exact same thing again?
The proposed Rhodes/Rollins vs. Reigns/Rock tag match, presumably the main event for Night One of Wrestlemania, raises other issues. While Seth Rollins will presumably be called upon to defend his World Championship on Night Two, by busying him in the storyline centred around the other, more important, championship, it only reinforces the World Championship’s position as a secondary trinket, a consolation prize next to the real gold. And speaking of wrestlers potentially doing double duty, after only eight matches since last year’s Wrestlemania, it’s a shock to the system to have Roman Reigns working two nights in a row - in kayfabe terms, it raises the question of why, if WWE are perfectly capable of booking him to do that, he’s wrestled so infrequently in the first place; we’re told of non-specific politicking, but what’s the actual explanation? It comes down to the audience knowing, outside of kayfabe, that he doesn’t wrestle very often, and simply applying that criticism to the television show without joining the dots.
In my book, Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling, I explore the role that “kayfabe” has played in shaping, and being shaped by, the unlikely history of professional wrestling, and one of my central arguments is that the death of Kayfabe has been grossly overstated; Kayfabe doesn’t die, it mutates and reshapes itself to fit new media landscapes, and new audience expectations. The Kayfabe of 2024 relies on the assumptions of audiences who follow wrestling behind-the-scenes, and fold that back into the on-screen product - the story of Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns and The Rock makes little sense without acknowledging frustration at the booking of the show, rather than the actions of the characters within it, and without the awareness that The Rock recently returned not merely as an on-screen performer, but as a board member, one of the most powerful men in WWE. A good booker can expertly sew doubt in fans’ assumptions, or exaggerate and embellish them, to create compelling narratives, but that isn’t what’s happened in WWE - here, it’s a mea culpa, a rare admission that they got something wrong, and a desperate attempt to pivot to something new. With Cody Rhodes already poking fun at The Rock’s dated ‘90s edgy comedy mode of promo, and with The Rock yet to return to TV in his current heel role, there’s likely more worked shoot insider barbs to come, and these things have a tendency to miss more often than they hit.
In the grand scheme of things, it may not matter. Wrestlemania builds being convoluted and underwhelming, then completely forgotten about by the time we get to the pre-match hype package, is no new phenomenon - forget about Debra, she’s a non-factor - and it may well be that WWE manage to spin gold out of this, convince people they had it figured out from the beginning, and put together a hell of a sizzle reel come Wrestlemania.
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But I have to ask, as I did last year, what next? Looking at the fallout of last year’s Wrestlemania, I predicted that Roman Reigns wouldn’t lose his championship until 2025, and it’s still a prediction I feel somewhat confident in.
If The Rock returned for a match with Roman Reigns, is he going to be content with a tag team match alongside him? Is the man who seemingly had a public meltdown over the box office failure of Black Adam, and has it written into his movie contracts that he can’t lose on-screen fights, going to be happy with his perhaps final in-ring moment coming as a despised heel, accused of taking a spot from a more popular star? I doubt we see The Rock’s heel run lasting beyond the RAW following Wrestlemania - he will be back on the babyface side of the bracket the moment this mess is over.
That match, Roman Reigns vs. The Rock, is still in the chamber, and WWE are still going to want to pull it off sometime. In many ways, it’s the biggest potential match they have available to them. So I think it’s a safe assumption that one of the two turns babyface after Wrestlemania to challenge the other, and while a Roman Reigns babyface turn has to be in the offing in the future, I don’t see it happening against a heel Rock. Would The Rock’s return to singles action take place anywhere but the largest stage? When Roman Reigns already wrestles as infrequently as possible, would WWE really book his biggest ever match for Summerslam, Crown Jewel, Backlash, Great Balls Of Fire, or In Your House: Beware Of The Dog? No, Roman Reigns vs. The Rock has “Wrestlemania” written all over it.
But, of course, Wrestlemania 40 is accounted for. Which leaves us Wrestlemania 41. By that point, Roman Reigns, if he still holds the WWE Title, will have surpassed Hulk Hogan in the rankings of longest reigning champions of all time, placing him behind only Bruno Sammartino (to beat Bruno’s record, Roman would have to hold the title until May 2028, and even I aren’t expecting them to try and pull that off). Of course, The Rock vs. Roman Reigns doesn’t need the WWE Title to make it worthwhile, it sells itself, and has the in-built family drama story of the “Head Of The Table” and the “Tribal Chief”, but WWE have a tendency to over-egg these things, and to make it as big a match as possible - this is the company who, after all, once billed Edge vs. Randy Orton ahead of time as “THE GREATEST WRESTLING MATCH OF ALL TIME” - they’re going to want championship gold in the mix. And, in a match with Roman Reigns for the WWE Title, do we expect The Rock to win? I expect not.
So there’s every possibility that Roman Reigns not only walks out of Wrestlemania 40 as champion, but of Wrestlemania 41 as well. Then what? Is it finally Cody Rhodes’ time at Wrestlemania 42? Is Cody kept hot and relevant for that long, or does the bloom wear off the rose? Does a shiny new toy come along - CM Punk returning from injury, another exciting new signing, or another veteran of the Attitude Era tempted back for one last big payday?
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It may all be nothing - a cheeky bet on Cody Rhodes winning at Wrestlemania wouldn’t be your worst choice - but WWE have written themselves into a multi-layered mess that, for now, it seems like they’re managing to work their way out of, but it’s a delicate balancing act of kayfabe and contrition, of turning to their fans, cap in hand, protesting that they have changed. Perhaps only the outcome of Wrestlemania 40 will tell us whether we can believe them or not.
