Wrestlemania 40: Finishing The Story

In the last year (give or take a couple of days), I have only written twice about WWE, and both dealt with effectively the same concerns - the state of play between Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes, and their story across two years of the WWE’s flagship event.

There’s good reason for that - WWE’s brand of wrestling is, by and large, very much not for me; glossy and over-produced, bombastic and over-acted, in enormous stadia that require the broadest of gestures, it’s almost the exact opposite to the wrestling that excites me, which is contested in small venues, reliant on direct interplay between talent and audience, and allows for stories to unfold in the smallest and subtlest of genres. Put simply, I will take the Resistance Gallery (God rest her and all who sailed in her) over Lincoln Financial Field any day of the week.

This year’s Wrestlemania reinforced that feeling for me - that WWE are undoubtedly the best in the world at the genre of wrestling that they produce, and are as close to firing on all cylinders as they have been in many years, but that it’s a genre that rarely leaves me wanting more, or wanting to watch their TV show to see what happens next. It’s a product that I’m more than happy remaining a twice a year affair, and the extent to which Wrestlemania has now for at least a decade been booked as much to produce a highlight reel and grasp towards some viral moments as to tell or conclude the biggest stories in the company’s weekly episodic drama only serves to encourage viewers like me; “don’t worry”, WWE tells us at every turn, “you don’t need to watch the TV show to understand Wrestlemania”.

I may sound like I’m being overly harsh on what has been a critically well-received event, but I assure it’s a matter of taste, not of quality - I agree that this year’s show was among the best Wrestlesmania in recent memory, albeit something of a Use Your Illusion situation, in which a potentially all-time great show has been watered down by being stretched out to two nights rather than trimming some of the fat, if indeed you can trim fat from something watered down.

Back in February, I expressed my concerns about how convoluted and messy the story between Cody Rhodes, The Rock, and Roman Reigns had become, and how much of an afterthought Seth Rollins felt in that story. I wasn’t sure if WWE would be able to salvage a logical story out of the corner they had booked themselves into, and I’m not convinced that they did, but they managed the next best thing - making people forget how we got here through sheer force of personality, with The Rock and Cody Rhodes’ bravura performances in the run-up to Wrestlemania doing a lot of heavy lifting to distract from the story’s awkward beginnings, while showing how far removed WWE had become from the conventional wisdom of professional wrestling when such rote and simple angles as a heel bloodying up and beating down a babyface to build to a pay-per-view match were praised as something groundbreaking or revolutionary. Professional wrestling, as people seem fond of saying lately, was back.

Many of the plot holes and logic chasms of this feud remained even into Wrestlemania, but the audience were so invested that it didn’t matter. While my preference is that everything should make sense, the golden rule of wrestling is that you can get away with anything if it’s over, and Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns and The Rock are as over as anything in WWE has been in a long time, even if Roman Reigns, the most dominant champion in decades and the marquee star of the last five-to-ten years, was at constant risk of being overshadowed by his more famous cousin, the feud having seemingly shifted focus to Cody vs. The Rock rather than Cody beating Roman for the Universal Championship. That said, it was alright on the night. You can get away with anything when you’re over.

Speaking of overshadowed, spare a thought for poor Seth Rollins. The proverbial third wheel in the Night One Tag Team Match, where at one point, with Rollins caught in a submission hold, the commentary team began loudly exclaiming how if he submitted, the main event of “Wrestlemania Sunday” would be contested under Bloodline Rules - I couldn’t help but think, why does Seth care? It’s not his match. He has his own history with Roman Reigns, of course, but the tag match that carried with it implications for everyone else had no bearing on him, there were zero stakes to whether Seth Rollins won or lost that match in his own right, only as an extension of Cody Rhodes. That’s a spot for Brutus Beefcake standing next to Hulk Hogan, not for the World Heavyweight Champion.

The following night, Rollins’ title defence against Drew McIntyre was the backdrop for McIntyre beefing with guest commentator CM Punk and, by the time Damian Priest had got involved and cashed in his Money In The Bank contract to leave with the title, Seth Rollins was once again reduced to an afterthought, and once again the fourth most important person in his own match. By the time he got involved in Roman Reigns vs. Cody Rhodes, only to get immediately swatted down by Roman - the only one of a string of babyfaces getting involved in that match to not manage a single offensive move on anyone - it had the feel of a running joke.

NIGHT ONE

I won’t go through and critique the show blow-by-blow, but as an overview, I felt Night One was the weaker of the two. Rhea Ripley vs. Becky Lynch was a very strong opener, but followed by a largely forgettable tag team ladder match - no shade on any of the six teams competing, but shambolic spotfest multi-man or multi-team ladder matches have been a part of the WWE landscape for so long at this point that they all blend into one another, and efforts to come up with new or more memorable high spots paradoxically only make every one of them more forgettable as nothing is given time to breathe, everything is reduced to a meaningless stunt show, and, as in any match that lacks pinfalls or submissions, the lack of near falls and false finishes means a near complete absence of drama, leading to a lack of investment as the audience simply wait around while wrestlers rearrange furniture, awaiting the next big bump before one team eventually wins with a minimum of drama. That repetition of high spots, stunts and big bumps was in evidence elsewhere on the show too - one of the most overdone “shock” moments in modern WWE is the spear through the barricade spot, always conveniently in the exact same corner of the arena. When Goldberg first hit that move on Rosey way back when, it was a shocking break from the norm, a genuinely exciting and innovative spot, but it has become so commonplace in the era of Roman Reigns that it’s a go-to spot in the video games, and you can set your watch by it on WWE pay-per-view; there’s no greater justification for a moratorium on this spot that it occurred two nights in a row, both times in matches involving Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns. It would be as if the iconic “breaking the ring” superplex spot between Brock Lesnar and The Big Show were repeated every six weeks.

The men’s tag match of Night One was largely forgettable, and once again lacking stakes - announcing Dragon Lee as Rey Mysterio’s partner, then replacing him before the show with Andrade, made the match feel more of a mess than it should, and nothing seemed to matter. It was so forgettable that I’ve just realised that it all of my notes I referred to it as a Trios match rather than a tag, because there were so many people involved at ringside I forgot who was actually in the match. I would have been happier if it had been a Trios match, ideally one contest under Lucha rules to play to the strengths of the men involved, and offer some different fare. Ideally, it should have some serious stakes - the mask of Rey Mysterio on the line against the hair of Dominik Mysterio and/or Santos Escobar would have been a good start.

The finish played into something I particularly dislike about WWE, and that it's in their genre of professional wrestling, whether a wrestler is a babyface or a heel is in no way related to the rules of professional wrestling, or any sense of fairness. With four people at ringside to the heel team’s three, the babyface tandem already outnumbered the heels, yet ultimately only won thanks to outside interference from two enormous NFL players, members of the host city’s Philadelphia Eagles. It was, in typical Wrestlemania fashion, an exercise in aiming for a mainstream headline, a viral moment, and something to stick in the highlight reel, over anything that serviced the story at hand. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think it’s the good guys who should be relying on outside interference to win matches.

The less said about Jey Uso vs. Jimmy Uso the better - for a match with years and years of build-up, it never felt like a blood feud, and rarely felt like a feud at all. The Bloodline animosity and tension having been cooled off by Jimmy getting drafted to RAW, the feud felt insufficiently heated back up, and the story of warring brothers and split loyalties against the backdrop of a family dynamic that was spanning two nights of Wrestlemania was at times overshadowed by the comedic angle of “Yeet” vs. “No Yeet”. A dud if ever there was one, it never got into third gear, and given the Usos’ involvement in the main event, it’s probably not over - hopefully they can salvage this one with a rematch, though the best thing for the Usos at this point is likely to use the upcoming WWE draft to keep them on separate shows until there’s enough demand for a reunion later down the line.

The women’s trios match is another that I felt wasn’t given the time or the structure to reach that next gear that it really needed, as was largely booked around Jade Cargill, attempting to make her look like a star by limiting her involvement to only the most impactful moments. In reality, she looked like a star - as did her partners Naomi and Bianca Belair - from the beginning of their team’s entrance, and it was all downhill from there; and that’s not a criticism of the match, it’s high praise for the presentation of this team, all three of whom should be given the star power treatment and red carpet seemingly now being rolled out for Jade Cargill.

Sami Zayn vs. Gunther was a story that suffered from WWE’s often circuitous and counter-productive booking, and from a common mistake of theirs - after building to underdog babyface Chad Gable getting his shot at ending Gunther’s record-setting Intercontinental Title reign, the booking abruptly pivoted to Sami Zayn as the babyface challenger. The logic was, perhaps, simple - Zayn has long been an underdog babyface, and for much of the run-up to last year’s Wrestlemania had fans crying out for him to be given bigger and better opportunities, up to and including a hometown title win over Roman Reigns, so Chad Gable was simply a babyface sacrificial lamb for Gunther at the altar of Gunther en route to the real match. The problem there is that, while Sami Zayn is a beloved and respected babyface, Chad Gable is a genuine underdog, who many in the audience rightly feel has never been given the opportunities that his talent warrant, his potentially all-time great tag team American Alpha broken up early in their main roster run, and then forced to endure a series of bad comedy gimmicks undercard storylines. Finally, here was a story that made sense - Gunther is a dominant monster heel, but at his heart is a man who respects the sanctity of professional wrestling as a sport, while Chad Gable is an elite athlete and former Olympian, but who has spent so much of his WWE run goofing around and making a mockery of what Gunther holds to be sacred. The story writes itself; Gunther does not respect Chad Gable, perhaps underestimates him, while Gable endures not only as an underdog but by embodying the duality of professional wrestling - a supremely talented wrestler with legitimate credentials, but also a goofy comedy act with a silly catchphrase, and in doing so proves the heel Gunther wrong, in showing that it’s possible to succeed as a professional wrestler in the purest and truest sense while also having a bit of a daft laugh. Perhaps more importantly to a modern fanbase, Chad Gable can be seen as a wrestler who has served his time as the comic relief, and we can all see that he deserves more - this could have been his coming out party, and in the last ten years it has become something of a tradition for long-term “good hands” to be rewarded for their hard work at Wrestlemania; be that Daniel Bryan at Wrestlemania 30, Zack Ryder’s Intercontinental Title win at 32, or Kofi-Mania at 35.

Instead, the pendulum swung to Sami Zayn. The audience love him, they’re always saying he deserves a push, so why not? There was a risk of the audience turning on him, because he’d had his turn. Thankfully, come Wrestlemania itself, those misgivings were in the rear view mirror, thanks in part to a wonderfully produced match - again, it speaks volumes to how far removed from the simplest and most traditional ways of presenting wrestling WWE had become that a clear-cut story of an underdog sympathetic babyface against a dominant, vicious heel, consciously evoking the Rocky movies in Philadelphia, felt refreshing and exciting, and not simply the way that wrestling works. It was a story of heart and desire winning out over well-honed techniques and soulless, mechanical assault. At first, I thought it was uncharacteristic for Gunther to forego pinning Sami Zayn to continue punishing him, showing the hubris that would lead to his defeat, but on reflection, it shows that even Ivan Drago was human, that there were chinks in his armour waiting to be exploited all along. He’s not a machine, he’s a man. That Zayn won in part by digging deep into his arsenal to pull out a move that, to my knowledge, he has never used during his time in WWE, El Generico’s signature Super Brainbuster, was a great bit of icing on the cake - Gunther may have had everything else scouted, but who saw that coming?

Finally, it was the night one main event. I’ve touched on the story, and on the awkwardness of Seth Rollins’ involvement, and the repetition of that barricade spear spot. What else is there to talk about? Like a lot of night one, in comparison to night two, it was a match that lacked the bells and whistles and flummery you’d normally expect from Wrestlemania, outside of The Rock’s typically grandiose entrance. In format, the early going felt more like a house show tag team bout than a Wrestlemania main event - methodical, kept simple, low intensity, big moves kept to a minimum, the unusual spectacle of athletes saving their bodies for their Wrestlemania matches while main eventing Wrestlemania. Things picked up by transitioning into an Attitude Era-style walk and brawl, complete with announce table bump, but suffered thanks to some essential truths - no matter how good The Rock’s heel work was, there were an awful lot of people who were happy to see him in his first match in years, and were more inclined to cheer him over Cody Rhodes whatever happened, so anointed top babyface Cody was met with boos when cutting off The Rock’s moves, while The Rock was met with cheers for near everything he did. On top of that, the match was to determine whether night two’s main event carried the stipulation that, if Rhodes and Rollins won, the Bloodline would be barred from ringside or, if Rock and Roman won, the match would be contest under “Bloodline Rules”. I’ve already mentioned how it was a stipulation that ensured zero stakes where Seth Rollins was concerned, but it was also a stipulation somewhat undermined during the match itself - with Bloodline Rules heavily implied to mean “Anything Goes” (on Night Two, Paul Heyman was asked in a backstage interview to explain Bloodline Rules, which implies that the largest wrestling company in the world signed a match for their biggest show of the year without knowing what the rules are, which seems irresponsible at best), but The Rock repeatedly breaking the rules in this match in clear view of the referee, with Michael Cole on commentary explaining that The Rock was getting away with because, as a member of the WWE board, he could fire the referee if he even tried to disqualify him. So, in a match to determine whether a future match would allow the Bloodline to act without consequence, the Bloodline were able to repeatedly act without consequence, and break the rules, use foreign objects, and generally get away with murder. It’s a tough situation for the referee to be in, and I appreciate that he didn’t just meekly stand back and allow all manner of shenanigans but at least sold his frustration, but it’s anathema to generating heat. Cheating and breaking the rules creates heat not in and of itself, but because, by evading the referee’s authority, the heel is transgressing recognised norms - put simply, we hate them because they’re getting away with it. The same is true in sports and politics and all other walks of life - we all break rules of one sort or another, and all make our own private justifications for it, but when we see somebody else get away with something that we would have been punished for, it drives us mad. It’s footballers taking dives, it’s politicians breaking lockdown rules, it’s mega-corporations evading tax, and it’s the heels cheating behind a referee’s back because he’s distracted in the babyface tag team’s corner. It’s the getting away with it that creates heat, and you can only get away with something when there’s consequences to getting caught - when The Rock can just punch below the belt right in front of the referee and not even get admonished for it, there’s no longer any consequence to any rule-breaking for the rest of the match, nor is the next low blow going to make me hate the bad guys any more than the first one did. Not to downplay the importance of a good babyface, but the heart of so many good wrestling matches is the dance between a great heel and a great referee, and WWE have long since neglected that - elsewhere over the course of Wrestlemania, babyfaces wrestlers were routinely quicker to cheat than heels, and often celebrated for doing so - but here it was especially egregious.

At King of the Ring 1994, the WWF aired the first video of a marketing campaign launching their “New Generation” rebrand, a youth movement designed to contrast them to the aging wrestlers of WCW, painting the likes of Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, the once top of the tier superstars of the WWF who were now wrestling for the competition, as yesterday’s news. The WWF’s case for being the home of exciting young talent was somewhat diminished by the main event of that pay-per-view being a match between Roddy Piper, 40 years old and synonymous with Hogan’s generation, and the 45 year old Jerry Lawler. Wrestlemania 40 was launched with a promise of a “New Era” - a not-so subtle nod that this was the first Wrestlemania without any involvement by Vince McMahon. What better way to finish off night one of your first Wrestlemania of an exciting New Era than having your heir apparent top babyface and future champion get pinned clean by a 50 year old board member whose first Wrestlemania was a quarter-century ago?

Age in wrestling is a funny thing, as much perception as reality, but this is a “New Era” the WWE is entering with an average male champion’s age of 38. R-Truth, one half of the new RAW Tag Team Champions, crowned in the Night One ladder match, is 52 years old, more than a decade older than Roddy Piper was at King Of The Ring 1994, and has been with the company twice as long as Hot Rod had at that time. His tag partner, The Miz, is 43. There were wins also for a 49 year old Rey Mysterio and, on night two, a 47 year old Bobby Lashley. The up-and-coming future prospect and first-time champion Damian Priest is a spritely 41, the same age as LA Knight, who fought a 47 year old AJ Styles. Hulk Hogan was only 41 when he signed with WCW.

Age isn’t everything, but it is something, particularly when WWE’s much-vaunted Performance Center, now in its eleventh year, has failed to produce a single top level male talent. Only the Street Profits, the Authors of Pain, Logan Paul, Cody Rhodes and Bobby Lashley began their careers in WWE, and in the latter two cases they had to go away and ply their trade elsewhere, proving their worth before returning a bigger and brighter star than if they had remained with the weight of the WWE’s marketing machine behind them. The WWE is perhaps a finishing school, somewhere to shave off the rougher edges of a talent acquired from elsewhere and find the star that was lurking within, but they are not a star factory, and seem to have lost the knack of building headline attractions from the ground up. Perhaps it’s by design, knowing that there’s always an MMA fighter, a YouTuber, a rapper, or a wrestler who already did the hard work of getting over in AEW, they could turn to.

NIGHT TWO

There’s little to say about Drew McIntyre vs. Seth Rollins - a perfectly functional, at times very good, example of the WWE main event style, but it was nothing I will remember within a week. CM Punk’s commentary at times actively detracted from the match, and only served to remind me that, once again, Seth Rollins was at best the third most important person in his own match. Once Damian Priest came along, make that fourth. It’s easy to forget, in WWE’s torturously convoluted championship situation, that the “World Heavyweight Championship” that changed hands here was a consolation prize, a secondary belt introduced and won by Seth Rollins because Roman Reigns was part-time and nobody could beat him for his title, a horrendous bit of booking that served to label this as a loser’s belt from the outset. With that in mind, it feels too early in the title’s lifespan, and too risky for its credibility, to be playing the sort of hot-shotting games that played out here, the first two title changes occurring within a couple of minutes of each other, culminating with a champion who has never really proven himself a main event level performer.

In my early days of following wrestling online, WCW was routinely criticised and ridiculed for how often its championships changed hands, with reigns lasting a matter of days, or even hours. But even they never had two World Title changes within five minutes of each other, yet in WWE we’re expected to celebrate when this happens, as if doing within the presence of a magic briefcase makes it less of a hot-shot, less of a desperate move for a quick and easy pop, or to shuffle the title somewhere without actually having the champion lose directly. The Money In The Bank briefcase is a gimmick that has long since outlived its novelty and its usefulness, and is now an albatross around the neck of the wrestler who carries it, and around the proverbial neck of every World Title defence while they carry it. It’s a lazy booking trope that hurts wrestling more than it helps it, and the worst part is that it’s been around long enough that a generation of fans simply accept it as an innate part of how this nonsense all works, so much so that, in the grand tradition of everybody following the WWE’s lead, practically every other promotion in the world has tried out some variation on the theme as well. It’s time to put the magic briefcase to bed.

You could have given me all day to guess what names might follow the phrase “WWE Hall of Famer” in the roles of guest commentator and referee for the Philadelphia Street Fight, and you’d have still been left waiting for me to land on “Snoop Dogg and Bubba Ray Dudley”, the most “press the random button on WWE 2k24” booking of the weekend. But for a throwaway nonsense match like Bobby Lashley and the Street Profits vs. The Budget Judgement Day, or the Final Testament as they apparently prefer, chucking nonsense at it is fine by me. One of the failings of Night One was that I think Wrestlemania should have a healthy amount of weirdness and bells and whistles to it, old wrestlers, celebrities, cameos, and associated fluffery, to make the show feel bigger and unique, so no real complaints here, other than Bubba Ray Dudley being an atrocious referee, constantly stood on the wrong side of the ring, in the wrong corner, or right in front of cameramen. Bobby Lashley and friends won, if that matters.

LA Knight vs. AJ Styles was a surprise hit - I was a late convert to AJ Styles, seeing him as something of a colourless flippy boy who needed the right opponent to make me care for much of his TNA run while others were already praising him as one of the best in the world, and I remain unconverted on LA Knight, and he presumably has a lot less time ahead of him to win me over. However, wrestling isn’t for an audience of one, and I’d be a fool to deny that LA Knight has a connection and that people love him, even if a big part of that connection relies on the simple truth that audiences like having a simple call-and-response catchphrase they can shout out loud with their mates. It was in this match that, as I alluded to earlier, the babyface cheated before the heel did, but at least they went to the effort of doing it behind the referee’s back. This match was the heated rivalry that the Usos’ match should have been, and even at this late stage in his career AJ Styles still manages to impress me, showing an aptitude for working as a heavyweight bully brawler of a heel in a way I’ve not previously seen from him.

The Triple Threat for the United States Title was some perfectly acceptable WWE wrestling - I assumed Randy Orton’s addition to the match was a means to an end to get to Logan Paul being hit by an RKO from some impossibly ambitious high spot or other, with WWE angling for that ever-desirable “viral moment”, much as they tried to concoct with Ricochet and Logan Paul in an absurd mid-air collision in that one Royal Rumble match. That wasn’t to be, and Logan Paul remains the champion, which may well be the right choice, as neither Owens or Orton feel like they need a secondary championship at this point in their game, while the novelty of Logan Paul as a celebrity guest is wearing thin, so a championship reign at least gives his matches purpose.

Bayley vs. Iyo Sky was, for my money, the match of the weekend. Gunther vs. Sami Zayn comes a close second, and it should come as little surprise that the best matches were those that stuck to what works - there, the heart of the underdog babyface against the unbeatable monster heel, here, the babyface challenger out for revenge against the champion former friend who betrayed her. Throw in some expert babyface selling on the part of Bayley, a superb performance from Iyo Sky - once upon a time rightly heralded as one of the best wrestlers in the world, as easy as that can be to forget once folded into the WWE machine - and a crowd that was fully invested and prepared to bite at every near fall, and this had all the makings of a classic, and one of the better women’s matches in WWE’s recent history.

I mentioned earlier about the flummery and bells and whistles of Wrestlemania, and one think I’ve felt for a while is that new inductees into the Hall of Fame should be better integrated into the show than just showing up to wave to the audience. Those still capable of wrestling could be given a quick showcase match, others could be utilised in backstage promos, giving pep talks to babyface challengers, putting a mouthy midcard heel in their place, or reciting a crowd-pleasing catchphrase. Bayley vs. Iyo Sky was in no need of additional window dressing or extraneous gimmicks, but my fantasy booking would have been for Iyo Sky’s Damage CTRL stablemates to try and get involved, only to be stopped on the ramp by new Hall of Fame inductee Bull Nakano, frightening them off with a swing of her nunchuks. There’s plenty of valid reasons why they didn’t do that, but I’d have liked to have seen it.

Main event time, and finally on to the thing that the only part of WWE that I’ve been writing about for the last year - Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns, Bloodline Rules.

The match started out slow, before evolving into the big match formula of both men, and of WWE - repeated finishers, kick-outs of finishers, stolen finishers, table bumps, weapon shots, that barricade spot - and then it went bonkers, and became the ridiculous, overbooked clusterfuck that, really, it could only ever have been.

The closing stretch was a parade of run-ins and cameos - Jimmy Uso’s attempt to interfere on Roman Reigns’ behalf was cut off by Jey Uso, Solo Sikoa’s interference was met by John Cena, which heralded the arrival of The Rock, who was taken out by The Undertaker. Wrestlemania has long been booked not for the loyal fans waiting all year to see how a story plays out, who will win a match, or what their favourite wrestler will do on the biggest stage, but for a highlight reel, and for the hope of some mainstream headlines on Monday morning, and to that end has often relied on part-timers and cameo appearances from Legends, often at the expense of the full-time roster, expected to play second fiddle to the once-a-year old-timers. It was only a matter of time before that parade of “remember him?” legends actually became integrated into the main event.

It wasn’t just middle-aged men that your Dad’s always asking if they’re still “in the wrestling” getting involved, though. Seth Rollins, in full Shield gear, tried to interfere and got taken out with a Superman Punch before he got a single shot in, once again looking like an afterthought and a bit of a joke. There was at least some narrative significance to it this time - with the opportunity presented to attack Cody Rhodes with a chair, Reigns instead was drawn into an older hatred, an older grudge, and turned to hit Rollins in the back, mirroring Seth Rollins’ own turn on Roman Reigns and The Shield ten years before. This is what the kids call cinema, and I call a complete lack of subtlety or nuance that an audience deprived for years of real storytelling lap up like a man lost in the desert finally stumbling across the shimmering waters of an oasis.

This is not advanced storytelling, it is not “cinema”, it is barely Screenwriting 101. It is the result of an audience who have for so long been expected to accept the most paltry of crumbs from the table of a company that despised them, desperately searching for depth where there is none, in an age of endless content and unrelenting discourse scrabbling to find any deeper meaning in a production that was all surface, searching for subtext in the output of a company who didn’t even trust its audience to be able to read text.

Yet, in spite of itself, it worked. The outside interference and the cameos from The Rock and The Undertaker somehow added to the drama of the match, rather than distracting from it, possibly the best integrated use of old wrestlers to accentuate current stories that WWE have managed in decades. I disliked how John Cena hit his finisher on Roman Reigns, rather than just focusing his energies on counteracting the involvement of Solo Sikoa - there lies the subtle difference between the assorted ranks of babyfaces helping Cody Rhodes even the odds, and the babyfaces helping Cody Rhodes win - yet on a show, and in a company, where babyfaces cheat and bend the rules and do what they like at least as much, if not more, than the heels do, did it really matter? In this match, on this night, in this story, did it matter? Not at all. Once again, somehow, it all worked.

It was Cody Rhodes’ night. And Cody Rhodes has some magical, intangible quality that takes the most absurd tropes of modern TV wrestling and spins them into gold. In AEW, his tendency towards grandiosity and pomposity in promos, and the excessive over-booking and over-egging of his matches, turned the crowd against him, the once golden child began to look artificial, his emotions forced, his ego swelling out of control, and his creative instincts misfiring. Yet in WWE, the same promo style that elsewhere made him seem like a wrestler generated by AI has him sounding like the most genuine human being in the company, and the melodrama and excess of his matches fits the occasion perfectly. For better or worse, he may be the perfect Wrestlemania Wrestler.

POST-SCRIPT

Cody Rhodes may well have finished the story, but that’s not the end of this story. What comes next? Who knows. WWE have crowned many a babyface champion, and fumbled at the first hurdle of setting them up with challengers, and that’s the first on-screen challenge of this “New Era”. There’s a paucity of high level heels in WWE, and with Roman Reigns at the very top of the ladder, Cody Rhodes has had to face most of them on the way up - the one notable exception is Gunther, who, coming off one major loss, shouldn’t be lined up to take another quite so soon. When you build a show around “Finishing The Story”, it turns out that’s not much of a hook to tune in for the next episode, or chapter if you want to drag out the analogy, so what next?

Of course, there’s also an elephant in the room. The self-congratulatory back-slapping of Triple H that began at the Hall of Fame ceremony on Friday and ran throughout Wrestlemania, and the surprise return of Stephanie McMahon, and all the talk of “New Era” carried a simple, unspoken message - this is not the WWE of Vince McMahon, we’ve moved on, and so should you. But with an investigation into not just McMahon, but WWE as a whole, still ongoing, and with Stephanie McMahon named as at best aware of her father’s wrongdoing, as was Nick Khan, who made a rare on-screen appearance alongside Bruce Prichard, himself recently named by Ronda Rousey as the avatar through which Vince McMahon operated, and still plenty of questions around what, if anything, Triple H was aware of, the congratulations seemed both premature and in very poor taste. The case against McMahon and WWE is ongoing, and witnesses and victims apparently continue to come forward, while it’s a near guarantee that either Vince McMahon, John Laurianitis, or both, will be prepared to go scorched earth and throw others under the bus if they feel it can save their hides, so the parading around of McMahon’s family and long-time confidantes and business associates may still age extremely badly.

To many viewers, it doesn’t matter. Vince McMahon was the Bad Man, and he has gone, so everything is fine now. In a culture that has made a religion of Individual Responsibility, where any suggestion of institutional abuse, power dynamics or collective complicity is enough to send people running, screaming and crying the dread word “Marxism”, it would be naïve to expect anything more. If Vince McMahon was the domineering and predatory abuser hiding in plain sight that all the evidence points toward, it brings to mind Jimmy Savile - and I fully appreciate that, in matters of abuse, to invoke Savile is akin to Godwin’s Law.

Even without the unlikely connection that Savile, too, had a wrestling career, there is a comparison to be made - both men were highly public figures, untouchable in their field, with allies in the highest corridors of power, who at times made light of their perversities and in doing so created a smoke screen for themselves. Both were uniquely monstrous, but in treating them as such we risk overlooking the myriad institutional failures to hold them to account - both were allowed to act with impunity because they had constructed a world in which they were untouchable, in which silence was bought and power and influence exerted to cover their tracks, silence accusers, and to ensure that they got away with it. In McMahon’s case, the entire WWE corporate structure could have been built, or at least remodelled, in such a way as to allow him to commit his crimes with impunity. How many of the men and women paraded in front of the camera as the heralds of a new post-McMahon Era knowingly passed his victims in the hallways of WWE’s Stamford headquarters, sat with them on his private jet, or actively colluded to keep his wrongdoings under wraps?

For its entire history, the WWE was Vince McMahon. Now, it is not. That is indeed a New Era, but one in which his family are still front and centre behind the camera and, to an unexpected degree over the past few days, in front of it, and his closest associates and confidantes still have their hands on the controls. Triple H and Stephanie McMahon might have been able to book their own babyface comeback this time, but might it be their last?