In the carnie-fuelled language of pro wrestling, it’s called getting ‘worked’.
Traditionally wrestling’s attempt to fool the audience saw two possibilities – a work, when something is fake, and a shoot, when something is real. As fans smartened up to the realities of the quasi-sport in the 80s and 90s, worked shoots (fake things which you were supposed to think were real) also proliferated, particularly in Vince Russo’s horrific WCW.
These blurred lines are what makes wrestling fun to follow. Sure, the in-ring athleticism can be spectacular. Yes, the ability to tell a story with the human body is fascinating. But once you’ve watched for a while, as a fan you want to get worked; you want to be fooled, to not know exactly what’s going on, and who or what to believe.
This is what WWE has capitalised on in 2024, with the wild and often nonsensical twists and turns of their build towards the main event of WrestleMania 40 – on a road featuring a major servo stop at Perth’s Optus Stadium, for Saturday night’s Elimination Chamber event.
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FULL GUIDE: WWE Elimination Chamber Perth full card and what you need to know
Cody Rhodes, the back-to-back Royal Rumble winner, is set to face long-time Universal Champion Roman Reigns for WWE’s top title in the final contest of the two-night Mania extravaganza in early April.
But even writing that feels like an assumption, because the last month of WWE programming has been filled with bizarre decisions, big moments immediately backtracked upon, years-long storylines being abandoned and above all else, drama.
Of course, none of the men involved in the main event story – Rhodes, Reigns, currently-injured World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins or The Rock – will wrestle in Perth.
Reigns and Rock won’t even be there, while Rhodes and Rollins will speak on an episode of Aussie wrestler Grayson Waller’s in-world talk-show The Grayson Waller Effect. (It’s likely they’ll take a step towards teaming up against Reigns and Rock in a tag match at Mania, or something along those lines.)
Still, it’s a step towards clearing the still-clouded main event scene. And it’s a storyline that has continued to spark major interest in WWE after a hot 12 months for the company.
Poaching Rhodes from top rival promotion AEW kickstarted a renewed period of growth for WWE, gathering the momentum in the war and bringing back some lapsed fans who had grown frustrated with the company’s frustrating booking decisions and refusal to listen to the hardcores.
Most of those hardcores are now gone, backing AEW or other companies entirely, with WWE’s fanbase now hugely supportive of what the company tells it to support – most notably, Rhodes.
The son of the legendary Dusty Rhodes has become what is incredibly rare in modern pro wrestling: a widely popular white-meat babyface, or in other terms, a good guy who you’re supposed to cheer and everyone actually does.
This is not an easy thing to create. Roman Reigns himself was pushed as the company’s top good guy for many years, and it didn’t work; turning him heel, and starting the Bloodline story, was what finally made him the superstar WWE said he’d been all along.
So while Rhodes stumbled at last year’s WrestleMania, losing to Reigns in the main event because the Bloodline cheated yet again – frustrating most fans, amid reports Reigns had pushed his weight around behind the scenes to ensure he remained champion – he regained his momentum in time for January’s Royal Rumble, which he won by last eliminating the returned (and now injured again) CM Punk.
Punk’s injury threw a spanner in the works for WWE’s plans, as he was set to face Rollins at WrestleMania 40 after winning the men’s Elimination Chamber match in Perth.
This is where the intriguing reality of modern-day wrestling – where fans know plenty, but think they know more than they actually do – was manipulated.
The Rock had returned to WWE television in early January and clearly hinted at a match with Reigns, by asking whether he should be the Head of the Table. This was the match the Bloodline storyline has been building toward for years, because as the biggest-name member of the Samoan wrestling dynasty, only beating The Rock could give Reigns the credibility he desperately craved.
But, unless you did two singles matches, you couldn’t do both Rhodes vs Reigns and Rock vs Reigns at WrestleMania this year. And WWE had booked themselves into a position where they had the chance to do both; a pair of matches that each had their merits, the former what the most intense WWE fans wanted, and the latter the biggest match for mainstream attention purposes.
There has been a suggestion The Rock threw his weight around at this point, pushing for his match to be held at WrestleMania rather than another big event (perhaps one of the big-money Saudi Arabia shows), but this has also become part of the story itself in a strange twist.
The call was made to have Rhodes relinquish his WrestleMania match on Smackdown earlier this month, prompting an enormous outpouring of anger from WWE fans who felt ‘their guy’ was being robbed of his match.
Whether this was intentional or not, WWE immediately turned it into the storyline. Within hours wrestlers were tweeting their support for Rhodes; on the ensuing Raw, it was pushed as if Rhodes was being wronged.
This, of course, made no sense. Rhodes had chosen not to fight Reigns, after trying to earn a shot at Reigns’ title for two years.
But there’s storyline integrity, and there’s getting attention and growing TV ratings. The latter is more important for WWE, and in that way, this story has been successful.
What it appears happened is The Rock realised how bad he was looking, and decided he had to turn heel, actually joining forces with Reigns at the Las Vegas ‘press conference’ that was really just a TV segment.
This, too, made no sense. Rock had come back to finally challenge Reigns for his spot at the Head of the Table. Sure, Rhodes’ years-long story was being torn up, but now they were tearing up a story that’s been in the works for even longer?
That didn’t matter. Nor does it matter if Seth Rollins’ world title was made to look even worse by the way he was rejected by Rhodes. Nor does it matter that a tag match between the four men (as currently expected) is a very strange decision. It’s drama, and as a fan, you don’t know what to believe.
There was some initial concern the twists and turns of the storyline were intended to distract from the horrific allegations made against Vince McMahon and WWE; given they had booked a large stadium for the Vegas event ahead of time, it’s hard to draw a direct link since that suggests some level of pre-meditation. But we’re sure the company doesn’t mind everyone is talking about an actual match instead, too.
So we wait to see what will happen over the next few days, and then in Perth, where the next chapter in the story will be told. Even without wrestling, Rhodes and Rollins’ next step taking place in Australia makes this the most important show the nation has arguably ever seen.
Pro wrestling has a proud history down under, with World Championship Wrestling (not to be confused with the later American promotion of the same name) one of the hottest territories on the planet during the 1960s and 70s.
Most of the biggest stars of the period, like Bruno Sammartino, Andre the Giant, Harley Race, Killer Kowalski and Ray Stevens, wrestled down under because it was an incredibly profitable region – and those profits flowed into the wrestlers’ pockets, as these were the days when they were often paid based on the house drawn, rather than given a salary.
But after promoter Jim Barnett returned to America to work with the NWA and Georgis Championship Wrestling, and once the TV deal with Nine fell apart in 1978, the company folded and only smaller independent promotions have remained locally since.
WWE returned in a big way in 2002, with the Global Warning Tour packing over 56,000 starved wrestling fans into what’s now called Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. This was effectively just a major house show, as while The Rock defended the WWE title against Triple H and Brock Lesnar in the main event – two weeks before losing it to Lesnar at SummerSlam – the card was only released on DVD in the States, rather than being shown on pay per view. Thus it was not particularly relevant to the storylines of the time.
Yearly house shows across major Australian cities followed, but only an NXT taping in late 2016 had any real relevance. It wasn’t until the Super Show-Down event at the MCG, headlined by Triple H facing The Undertaker, that WWE brought an event that somewhat mattered.
We use the word ‘somewhat’ because, other than Buddy Murphy winning the Cruiserweight Championship in his hometown, it was effectively an exhibition show too. Especially when Daniel Bryan, who had won a two-minute match to become the No.1 contender for AJ Styles’ WWE title, chose to boycott the Saudi Arabia show where he was supposed to challenge for the title over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (among other issues).
So while Elimination Chamber will not feature the biggest crowd for an Aussie wrestling show – the MCG event drew around 62,000, according to most credible reports, and a bit over 45,000 tickets have been sold for Perth – it is clearly the most important event in the country since the territory days, at least.
Two featured WrestleMania matches will be determined in the Chamber; the biggest is probably on the women’s side, where it’s expected Becky Lynch will earn a shot at Rhea Ripley’s Women’s World Championship.
The No.1 contendership for Rollins’ World Heavyweight Title is also up for grabs, but it’s hard to get too excited over the secondary belt to Reigns’ legit world title when it was only created because Reigns never actually wrestles. (This isn’t just nerdy criticism any more – it’s actually part of the storyline now, for some weird reason, since it makes Rollins look like a bit of a chump.)
The aforementioned tag match involving Reigns and The Rock, likely featuring Rollins, also means his defence of his championship isn’t even his most important match of the weekend.
Still, all of these factors add up to a show that truly matters in WWE canon, and that’s something Australian fans have effectively never seen before.
It might’ve taken WA coughing up some cash to get the show over there, but hey, we’re the ones cashing in.
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