[1999-01-24-WWF-Royal Rumble] Royal Rumble

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Russo managed to take a pretty foolproof concept and ruin it through overbooking this time around. I realize this crowd didn't need to see Austin and Vince brawling for an hour and if Vince was going to go into the match, they needed to keep him away from every other wrestler in the match. But they booked themselves into a corner and probably should have found a different way to set up Austin vs McMahon at St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

[El-P]

This is it. I had been pretty much a diehard WWF fan since I stumble onto pro-wrestling sometime in 1990. And during those years, the Royal Rumble was always my favourite event of the year. And Russo killed it for me. It was really disheartning after a super hot 97/first half of 98 which had been the most fun I ever had watching WWF. Not just the Rumble itself, but the whole PPV was a total downer. And yes, after that Rumble, I wasn't a fan anymore. It was a pretty sad time, which would only get worse with the death of Owen a few months later, while at the same time WCW was gooing down the crapper quickly, and even quicker once Russo would also proceed to ruin that too. Yep, this is where everything ended for me after a decade of having fun. I never went back, really.

[Tim Evans]

I'm the opposite of El-P as this was around the time I was really getting into WWF. Of course I was around 14 at the time and thought all this was cool. I hated the Vince character and Stone Cold was my favorite so this was a big letdown seeing Vince win. Watching it now I realise it's pretty stupid. Vince is just huge walking to the ring. Nice to see D-Lo in there with Austin towards the end.

[soup23]

In clip form, this isn't half bad and I actually like Cole's call of Vince winning. The heat here was also great. I did watch this Rumble in full last year and while it wasn't good, I didn't see a huge difference in quality from the 1988, 1995 and big chunks of the 93 and 91 ones honestly.

[Zenjo]

This completely killed the whole idea of the Royal Rumble for me. If an entrant can wait outside until the end then why doesn't everybody do it? Every year?

 

They should've had Vince as the #30 entrant. Except he comes down to the ring from the start and spends the whole time taunting Austin.

[cactus]

Vince and Austin start off and things are going pretty decent until Vince lures Austin into an ambush taking them both out for the majority of the match. We then get treated to an empty ring which quickly fills up with the likes of Droz, Dan Severn, Tiger Ali Singh, Gillberg and Kurrgan. The next vaguely interesting thing to happen is Mabel coming in at number 11, who clears house before being kidnapped by the Ministry Of Darkness. You know a match is bad when you use the words 'Mabel' and 'Ministry Of Darkness' in the same sentence with 'vaguely interesting'. Austin eventually comes back and kicks ass before Vince sneakily eliminates him to win. The main two issues with this match is the lack of star power and the match was build around two people. No one else was even mentioned in the video package. Abysmal Rumble match.

[PeteF3]

Hmmm...the fact that Finkle takes special care this year to explain how going through the ropes isn't an elimination doesn't sound like a massive red flag or anything. Leave it to Russo to try to kill off the Rumble match because gosh darn it, it's just not interesting enough on its own. So we get STORIES, people coming into the ring with no one to fight, Kane eliminating himself because of the presence of asylum orderlies, Mabel being kidnapped, Vince doing commentary on his own match...and yet, with all this ridiculous overthinking and overbooking, we get maybe the most unimaginative ending possible. Surely there had to be a better fuck finish leading to a Vince win than a lame distraction that makes Austin look like a complete idiot. I think the 2015 disaster eclipsed this as far as bad Rumbles, but this is certainly the worst to date and one of the worst ever.