I didn’t watch The Royal Rumble, because I’m too cheap to get subscribe to the WWE Network despite the fact that I probably have way dumber monthly expenditures, but it doesn’t take a genius to find out means to get the gist of every show, even if you don’t actually watch it.
From what I can hypothesize, there are probably a lot of people that are salty over the fact that Triple H won the Royal Rumble, thus making him the World Heavyweight Champion, because the roster is full of younger, more deserving talent that probably deserved it more, but deserving is only part of the equation to what makes champions. I don’t care. HHH as champion is fine with me, because ultimately Creative doesn’t want to crown a champion, only for him to lose it in three months at Wrestlemania, when a non-long-term guy like HHH can transition it instead.
I’m pleased to see Kalisto win back the United States championship, because it’s the most valuable belt in the company and Kalisto being relatively fresh and new to the upper-tier scene, has a chance to really revitalize and freshen up a lot of mid-card storylines, even if it will probably a rehashing of a Rey Mysterio Jr. storyline.
Becky Lynch losing to Charlotte was kind of a no-brainer, because no matter how over and how much the fans wanted her to win, the WWE always errs on the side of “deny the fans to keep them coming back” or a little more than that, rather than cave in and give the fans what they want, on their first try. Besides, this was a feud that was more or less a holdover for Charlotte to have something to do until Sasha Banks came back.
If there was any match that I wished that I had seen, it would probably have been Kevin Owens vs. Dean Ambrose; from what I understand, it basically stole the show, and I think both guys are tremendous workers, so such a claim probably was well-deserved.
But among one of the bigger surprises of the night, was the debut of AJ Styles; a wrestler long-coveted by smarks to come to the WWE, but didn’t, and honed his craft in second-tier promotions like TNA, Ring of Honor, as well as throughout Japan, until now. Personally, I think his prime years are behind him, but I still think there’s probably a good bit left in the tank for him to fulfill several fantasy feuds, like with Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, and maybe guys like Daniel Bryan and even John Cena.
However, I simply couldn’t get over the way he looked coming out of the curtain. The first time I saw him, was in TNA, where he was basically a lookalike of Jamie Noble while wearing a puka shell necklace. He was in the midst of a typical embarrassingly bad TNA storyline, but the talent was unmistakable.
But these photos from the Rumble showed this guy with long hair and a scraggly beard, that had me thinking “is that really AJ Styles?” and thinking that he basically looked like a young version of Hacksaw Jim Duggan.
Really, this post was an excuse to make a comparison picture between AJ Styles and Hacksaw, but the resemblance is there. Considering they’re both from Georgia, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that one was straight up the younger version of the other.
