The following is an excerpt from our new feature, Inside The Royal Rumble 2. Please check it out in its entirety, and see our video feature at the top of the page
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Producing Moments, Big and Small
A lot has changed about the Royal Rumble since its inception. From stakes, to intervals, to who can be involved in the match itself, and who helps out with it. Originally Pat Patterson cooked up the concept, and in recent years, others have taken responsibility for planning it all out.
Jeff Jarrett served as a producer, and had a little bit of experience in helping set up Rumble-style matches prior to rejoining WWE.
"As we get into the TNA years and we call it Gauntlet for the Gold and the ins and outs, and the ebbs and flows. Chris Park—The Monster, Abyss—he had a real good mind. There’s certain guys that have the ability to step back and look at all thirty, or twenty competitors, or forty competitors, whatever. That’s really what you have to do, is take a step back and look at the big picture and make sure that—whether it’s a one on one match or a triple threat or a tag or six man tag—you gotta have the ebbs and flows, the rollercoaster—if you will—the ups and downs that really tell the viewer, the consumer, the right story. It’s a real fascinating thing that when people hear it for the first time they’re like, ‘I never really thought of it that way," said Jarrett.
With 30, and sometimes many more competitors in the Rumble match, one would imagine the undertaking is quite difficult. We were told how exactly to navigate yourself if you're just a member of the pack and not getting quite the shine others were.
Chuck Palumbo reminisced, saying "You kinda knew what number you were. I remember always—‘always,’ it was only a couple of times—I remember just trying to remember who was going out before me. You got a lot of guys, right? Royal Rumbles are tough, and dangerous—number one.. It’s dangerous, there’s too many guys in there. Number two—they’re all over the place. Then some guys are trying to get high spots off in the ring when there’s all these guys. It ends up just being a lot of punching and kicking, unfortunately. I get it. I get the whole gimmick."
Not being the top guy doesn't mean that you won't get SOME shine. Specifically, Palumbo remembered one Royal Rumble All-Star trying to help him look as good as possible while he was in the ring.
"At MSG when I was doing the biker gimmick, I believe Shawn Michaels was in it. I remember Shawn, who I always respected as a worker—great talent—I remember he told me, ‘Hey, give me an overhead press.’ I remember at the time I had a super nagging rotator cuff injury. So, I don’t know if he was punching me or what, we were talking in there, but I was like, ‘I can’t, my shoulder’s messed up.’ But, I was thinking, ‘Gosh, here’s a guy that’s way over and he’s asking me to do an overhead military press.’ Which I thought was cool. That basically builds my character. I couldn’t’ do it ‘cause my shoulder was shot. So, unfortunately that’s one of my memories. The other one was, I don’t know if Austin threw me out of the other one when I was doing the Billy & Chuck character—we didn’t say much, I don’t remember. Yeah, I just remember they’re kind of a cluster," Palumbo said.
The Rumble shine is essential. When you look at specific Royal Rumbles, the match serves as a first impression of some characters for many fans. When Johnny Gargano made that surprise appearance, he got to toss out Jinder Mahal, a much larger, former WWE Champion.
Gargano told us, "Luckily enough, I'd been with NXT and the company long enough to where I have a decent reputation, so it's not just a random guy in a Royal Rumble. Everyone was on the same page and wanted to make the best of the situation, and make a cool moment happen. He's a big dude, but I've been in the company long enough and everyone is a big dude compared to me. I love the fact that we've gotten beyond that and size doesn't matter as much anymore. Daniel Bryan kinda kicked that door down for us."
For the Olympian, eventual Hall of Famer, and well... almost every championship holder Kurt Angle, eliminating a mastodon like Bill Goldberg was pretty simple.
"I didn’t work with him much. All I did was snuck up behind him and threw him over the top rope. So, it wasn’t that difficult. Sorry, Bill. I didn’t mean that you were hard to throw over the top rope. It was an easy spot to do. I just had to show up, throw him over the top rope and continue on," said Angle. "The Royal Rumble matches aren’t that difficult. You do your spots and you pretty much just hang out in the ring and try to chop wood for a while. You wait for the next guy to come in to do his little comeback on everybody and then things calm down a little bit. Then somebody gets thrown out, then another guy comes down the aisle and they get in the ring, you give them their shine. So, it’s a continuous process throughout the whole match. It’s pretty easy psychology. You just have to know when you’re supposed to be feeding the individual and when you’re supposed throw the individual over the top rope."
The opposite of Bill Goldberg and Kurt Angle was probably Curt Hawkins and Titus O'Neil. In 2019, Hawkins was deep in the middle of an all-time losing streak that played a huge part in his career. Titus was just a few months removed from that infamous sliding incident. O'Neil would follow that up by being eliminated in mere seconds by Hawkins. Brian Myers, who portrayed Curt Hawkins, says that he wished he'd been able to play up his losing streak more in the year prior.
Myers told Fightful "That was really fun, actually. I was always jealous. Even though he’s one of my best friends, I thought the year before I should have had Heath’s spot ‘cause I was doing a losing streak. He was on the ramp. I thought that was an awesome spot. But I was doing the losing streak thing, he really wasn’t doing anything on TV. But Heath’s so lovable and has that role in history in WWE. So he can fill that role whenever.The best and he cried all through that. ‘Man, they’re jobbing me out!’ We’re like, ‘Dude, this is one of the coolest spots you’re ever gonna do in your career.’ I think now he thinks of it like that, but back then, I think, he was hoping to be champ. I was real jealous that he got to do that. ‘Cause my losing streak deal, in that spot, keep getting drilled by guys on the ramp would have ruled. To finally be in a real Rumble, but in a massive baseball stadium was so cool and to have a cool spot, that wasn’t forgettable, I thought it was great. I got a nice little pop. That was right when the losing streak was so deep that the crowd was starting to turn for me, too, so I got a nice little reaction, I thought. It was a pretty cool moment."
Lovable losers have etched their place into regularity in the Royal Rumble match. Just today we've heard about Santino Marella's near-victory and Curt Hawkins' big elimination. One of the most memorable in the early years of the women's Rumble happened in 2020. Before he was the Alpha Academy Tree Trunk, Otis was vying for the affection of future NXT Women's Champion Mandy Rose. As Mandy faced a sure-elimination--Otis rolled from under the ring, letting Mandy land on him.
As inconsistent as the Royal Rumble rules can be, the "don't let both feet hit the floor" has become quite literal. Mandy stood on a prone Otis and made her way back in the ring. For Mandy, it remains a career highlight years later.
"That was probably still top two, now I have obviously the women's champion moment and that's number one, but that was definitely one of the top moments of my career. Just getting that crowd reaction. You see it in the video when I finally stood back up on the apron and the crowd erupted. Obviously, the fans were really behind Otis and our storyline. It was that Beauty & The Beast and they saw a different side of me as well, which was kind of cool. The process of being involved with Dolph and Sonya, there were so many parts of the story and we were really involved in that storyline, the creative aspect of it. Sonya and I were really on top of things because we really wanted to make this storyline and feud be amazing. Obviously, in the end, it didn't turn out the best because of the situation but overall, it was during the pandemic, and WrestleMania with no fans, but we had the biggest social reaction of the year and it was a lot of fun. Otis is so much fun to be around and so great to work with," she said.
Mandy also said it's a heavily collaborative effort these days, as opposed to decades prior when only one or two people masterminded the Rumble.
"That spot, specifically, I don't remember but I know it was a collaboration with a few of us. It might have been TJ Wilson, Michael Hayes. John Laurinaitis too. It was a bunch of us that came up with it and it worked out perfectly, thank God. It was awesome," Mandy remembered.
