I was chatting with some of my bros over the two-night extravaganza, and I explained that no matter how much my level of involvement to professional wrestling ebbs and flows and wavers throughout the passage of time, there’s always a conceited effort to watch Wrestlemania. It always comes back during Wrestlemania, and Mania and the Royal Rumble are the two shows a year that I feel very strongly about watching live.
This year’s Wrestlemania had a pretty stacked card on paper, and I felt that the WWE had done a pretty decent job of building up a respectable card from top to bottom, and wasn’t going to be anchored solely by Roman Reigns and then everyone else. The Rey and Dominic Mysterio feud caught fire real late, and went from a cliché match to one that had some heat behind it, and as much as I hated the relegation of Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens because of the existence of Cody Rhodes, there was still a large amount of interest with their match against the Usos, because the Usos can have great matches against anyone, much less the level of talents that are Sami and Owens.
On paper, I was actually looking forward to night 1 more than the second night, because I thought that the card was better quality than then night 2’s card. But after both shows, I actually thought night 2 was the stronger show, and it really wasn’t even close.
I thought almost all of the matches on night 1 were underperformed by all those involved, which was a little head-scratching considering the level of talent that was on the card. John Cena had a pretty uninspired match with Austin Theory, and was disappointing, Rey and Dominic had too many people get involved with their match which watered things down, Charlotte and Rhea had an uncharacteristically below-par match, and despite it being the best match of the night, I genuinely felt that the Sami/KO vs. Usos match could’ve been better. They were the best by default, because most of the matches prior weren’t as good as they could’ve been.
Night 2 was heavily weighted by the Intercontinental championship match, with Gunther continuing his torrid 2023 defeating both Drew McIntyre and Sheamus in a brutal shit-kicking smack-fest everyone knew it was going to be, and despite my tendency to think that the main event matches are typically predictable and academic, the Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes match served up the drama of genuinely not knowing who was going to win, which made it that much more exciting as it played out.
But speaking of Cody Rhodes, one of the things holding back the anticipation of the show was the almost seemingly inevitably that he was going to be the guy that was going to dethrone Roman Reigns, which as a fan irked the shit out of me, because of all the speculation that he has a world title reign baked into his contract, which is what was a big draw in being able to bring him back from AEW.
So seeing him take the L was kind of surprising to me, because I thought for sure it was going to be the night where the Roman Empire came to an end. Not just because of Cody’s ludicrous contractual obligation to be WWE champion at some point, but Roman had been carrying the company for over 900 days at that point, and Joe Anoa’I probably was due for a long-needed vacation.
No matter though, because unlike a lot of wrestling fans out there, I was over the moon that Roman retained and the greatest championship run since Bruno Sammartino continues on. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m just not a fan of Cody Rhodes, and I’m quite pleased to see him finally lose a match since he returned to the WWE.