by Eric Szulczewski

What lessons can we take to heart from this year's Royal Rumble? Let's check and see...

1) The WWF is a finely-tuned, well-oiled machine working in synch for one purpose and one purpose alone. That purpose is to get Stephanie McMahon over.

There was no conceivable reason not to blow off the Angle/Trip program at Royal Rumble and get on with the actual Road to Wrestlemania by giving Trip a good-length title reign. Right now, his character is in complete flux. Obviously, Austin's not going to be positioned as a heel in Texas (or anywhere else, for that matter), so Trip has to take the role of heel in their battle. Lately, he's been changing from heel to face and back in the same promo. So why was his program with Angle continued? Because of the sub-angle involved in it. The WWF apparently needs to get a longer lifespan out of the Steph/Vince/Trish incestuous menage-a-trois because God knows the audience finds it interesting (yawn).

But that introduces other complications, like the fact that Steph is the face in that little battle. And if Steph is the face, that makes her in-ring avatar Trip a face as well. Except when he's cutting heel promos. Because behaving like a dick is no longer heel behavior in today's sports entertainment; you have to back it up by cutting heel promos on a consistent basis. At least through the end of the promo. And my head's starting to spin from the use of conjunctions at the beginning of sentences.

Just to summarize, since there was no real purpose to Angle winning that match other than to have Austin interfere and try to build up heat to a match between him and Trip that, let's be honest, doesn't need any additional heat, that means that the reason why Angle won has everything to do with Steph. This has been the case for the past year in the WWF, so I don't know why I'm surprised about it.

2) Anyone can wear the Intercontinental Title, as long as he's a Canadian named Chris.

Sorry, Eddy fans, but it's time to face the truth: Guerrero didn't do jack with the IC strap. It was used simply as a tool to get more out of the Chyna angle than to elevate him. The only two guys who have done justice to that belt lately are Jericho and Benoit. A lot of the smarks out there are treating the secondary belt as more interesting than the primary belt, and this isn't a good sign if your promotion is in the creative doldrums like the WWF is right now.

Going up against Jericho has apparently drilled the lesson into Benoit's head about the importance of cutting a good promo, because he's up against one of the WWF's best in that department. Benoit finally learning how to do an effective heel promo elevated this whole program and made it one of the more interesting that the WWF has done in the last year. Let's see how long they can keep this going.

3) Regal is more important to the WWF than even they realize.

The lack of a Regal/Test Euro-strap match due to Regal's nagging back injury was like a missing front tooth. A lot of the year-end columns that were done on the Net focused on the resurrection of Regal. I didn't mention it because I don't like to comment on things still in process. But I was at Pillman, and I saw the man pull himself up out of the grave he'd dug for himself. That match against Benoit that he had was one of the few times I'd ever seen perfection. This is a guy who knows how to be a classic old-school heel and has what can only be called a Presence. He doesn't have size or mass, but he can dominate the ring just by the force of his own will should he choose. He's as good at that as anyone since Shawn Michaels. Test has the potential to become that as well, and if he can pick up tricks from the master during this feud, then all the better. Come back soon, Steve. They need you.

4) Edge and Christian as Bill and Ted is played out.

I was getting sick of them about two months ago. There's only so much faux stupidity I can take, only so many made-up words. This is a classic case of getting what you wished for. Earlier in their careers, everyone wanted them to start doing promos and get off of this mysterious kick they were on. Then they started cutting promos. The problem was that they wouldn't shut up. There's nothing that wears thinner on an audience than amusement. Let's hope that the loss to the Dudz will be the catalyst for a refocus for E&C. A driven team without the allegedly amusing sidelights, with the promo skills they developed in the process, might just cement their position as one of the great teams of the 00s.

5) It's fine to poach any beltholder in the competition, even if it's the WCW hardcore title holder.

Ah, the first shot across the bow in Bischoff versus McMahon, act three. So now that he's here, what do you do with Meng/Haku? There are a number of ways they can go. The easiest and best way is to team him with Rikishi. Rikishi doesn't belong in the upper-card; even they should realize that by now. Setting them up as a new version of the Wild Samoans would help revitalize a stale tag division.* They could even program it as part of Vince's whole mid-life crisis thing, attempting to relive some glory days. You could feud him with the returning TBS in the mid-card ranks, but that'd kill any heat either might be able to establish. Personally, I'd team him up with Kaientai. Three Count was never more enjoyable when Tank Abbott was involved with them, so we've seen it work on a lesser level.

* - This article was originally written at about 5AM on Monday morning during a bout of insomnia and revised due to an error Jeremy spotted in it at about midnight Monday/Tuesday. Thus, I had a chance to see a prophecy come true for once. On Raw, Haku and Rikishi hooked up to take on the Dead Boys in a little extracurricular big-man tag thing. This seems to be the direction in which they're going.

6) The Big Show is God.

Thank you, Mister Wight. Your check is in the mail. It would have been more if you put him through every table, you know.

7) Bye, bye, Joanie, it was good to know you.

In my final, unprinted, submission to RantCrew about a year ago at this time, I posited the WWF of 2005 and what people would be doing then. I stated that Chyna had left the WWF in 2001 in order to become a regular on the new Star Trek series. Anybody wanna argue that she'd make a perfect Romulan? Anybody wanna argue that she's already been signed for it?

This is a good way to free her up to do the book promotion tour, but it seems to me that it might just be more final than that. There's really nothing left for Ms. Laurer to do in the WWF. She's a three-time IC champ, she's done about every angle they could think of for her, and she's descended into the depravity of working with Billy Gunn. It's about time to cut bait for her. She's going to have more staying power on the outside than ol' what's her name, you remember, the blonde with the overinflated yabbos. Chinchilla or Mink or something like that.

8) The relevancy of the Royal Rumble is on a downhill slide and has been since the advent of twelve PPVs per year.

This is the point that traditionalists, smarks-who-would-be-marks, and other assorted riff-raff will argue until the cows come home, and then they'll argue with the cows (and I thought this particular argument would have been settled when Vince won the Rumble). This is a corollary to my long-held argument that no PPV should be considered "special" anymore, a point I drove home after last year's Wrestlemania. Royal Rumble is still being treated by those riff-raff as the line of demarcation, the beginning of the Road to Wrestlemania. How can it be the beginning when you have a PPV between the Rumble and WM? You still have to fill that card. No one is going to buy a PPV that they know in advance is going to be a holding action. So they have to leave elements of uncertainty in place.

The big one this year, of course, is exactly who will be facing Austin at WM. The only thing for certain is that it won't be Angle; there's no way they're going to expose themselves to the fragile egos in that locker room by having someone main-event the biggest PPV in wrestling with less than eighteen months of TV experience. We know it's going to be one of two people, but that still leaves a match between two faces or a face and someone who doesn't know what the hell he is right now. The better wrestling match, and the more compelling story, is Austin/Trip, so we can assume they're going to be booking in that direction. But where does that leave the rest of the upper-card? There's no feud right now for you-know-who, so let's assume he'll be plugged in with UT in a match that I'd watch only if someone put a gun to my head, and even then I'd probably vote in favor of death. That leaves Kane with who? TBS, maybe? Angle, more likely. All in all, this isn't building up to a Wrestlemania that I'm particularly excited about. There's nothing on this card right now that would make me go out and buy it other than a combination of Austin/Trip and Benoit/Jericho Hell In A Cell.

So if Royal Rumble wasn't particularly special or memorable, why am I doing this column? There's one area for me that the Rumble is special: it was last year's Rumble that cause my first spasm of infamy when I burst out of the closet and became a flaming Rock hater (the fact that I'd also felt that the Trip/Foley match wasn't up to standards didn't help). It was me defending my views that last year's Rumble match was a piece of unmitigated crap that caused me to get attention among various and sundry webmasters and get writing slots at websites like this one.

So, if you hate my writing and, in some cases, hate my guts, you know now where to place the blame.