The King's Rumble Begins
One o'clock, after lunch.
Every wrestler on the roster had gathered in one place.
The equipment-staging area between the parking lot and the locker room corridor. Fifty wrestlers and ten Divas — yet the atmosphere was surprisingly orderly.
They had assembled for one final rally of fighting spirit before the King's Rumble kicked off at eight.
But Bart, the man who was supposed to fire everyone up, hadn't shown.
With Greg having declined the honor, Taker — standing before the roster — spoke first.
“Bart's running later than I expected. Well, that's nothing new.”
And that was it.
Standing with Cena, Orton, and Russell, I managed an awkward smile.
So Taker's temperament — the man who never liked talking unless he was in the ring — was on full display here too. He was a bit of an old-school sort who preferred showing over telling, and everyone respected him for it.
As a strange silence stretched on, Taker turned to look at me.
“You do it, kid.”
“……Sorry?”
“It's what they all want.”
With that, Taker swept his gaze across the roster again — and just as he said, every one of them was looking at me with expectation written across their faces.
Bart's…… not coming, then.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, Russell gave me a shove between the shoulder blades. I stepped forward naturally and made my way through the crowd of wrestlers.
The King's Rumble script had been written so that all thirty competitors could accept their roles without complaint. Each man got at least one moment to shine — something that had never once happened in the long history of the WWF.
Because of that, my reputation in the locker room had skyrocketed, and word had spread until even the wrestlers not competing in the Rumble regarded me warmly.
“Uh, so then……”
“Give us a presidential address!”
Simmons's shout drew a laugh out of me despite myself, and I quickly followed up.
“Which president should I do?”
Reagan!Bush!Washington! As everyone tossed out a name apiece, I lowered my voice into a thick, gravelly register.
“I want each and every one of you…… to show the world what you're made of tonight, at the King's Rumble!”
The wrestlers reacted exactly the way I'd predicted.
The place erupted in laughter — because what I'd just delivered was a spot-on impression of Bart Maxen.
“Hey, you said to do a president!”
“Bart IS the president around here! Hell, he's our king, too!”
It was common knowledge that when addressing a crowd, you broke the ice with a light joke first. Having lifted the mood, I pointed at Taburi.
“Taburi, when you spit the Green Mist, how does the crowd react?”
“Eh? Well, that is……”
“They lose their minds. Same with Maino's Gore. The Dudley Boyz's 3-D, William Regal's Brass Knuckles — every single one of us, the truth is, is capable of drawing a massive reaction.”
I laid out, in front of the roster, exactly what I believed.
This was my philosophy of professional wrestling.
“Which means tonight's Rumble is going to be spectacular. Because this company is the best in the world — and every one of you gathered here is the best in the world too.”
The wrestlers cheered like a live crowd listening to me work a mic. They even started a chant.
SIN! SIN! SIN! SIN! SIN!
Well, this is embarrassing.
I gave a sheepish shrug — and the next moment, sensing a presence, I turned my head.
Bart Maxen and Paul Hagan.
The two of them had just rounded the corner and were walking out in front of the roster.
The rowdy atmosphere iced over in an instant.
Bart tilted his head.
“What's all this?”
“Over here, boss.”
“Feeding the wrestlers more of your strange ideas again, are we? The mood was certainly good right up until I arrived.”
“No, sir.”
“No, is it.”
With a smirk, Bart turned to the roster and spoke.
“I've got high hopes for tonight's pay-per-view myself. Let's give them hell, gentlemen.”
The wrestlers answered with hoots and shouts of their own, firing themselves up.
But of course, the energy was a little flatter than when I'd been the one talking.
He's the chairman, after all.
That probably explained it — but setting that aside, his words simply didn't get the blood boiling. The King's Rumble had, in every practical sense, been planned and built by me.
Hagan's help had been enormous, but he was a man who read the room; he'd handed full credit for the concept over to me without hesitation.
So in this moment, the wrestlers saw me as a leader they could trust more than Bart himself.
And that would go a long way toward helping me carry the Rumble as its Lead Boy.
The King's Rumble had begun.
A roar from a staggering 150,000 fans.
In the matches that followed the show's opening, the wrestlers performed far better than usual. With the locker room's spirit riding high, everyone was more focused than normal.
Watching them enjoy their matches in an environment where they felt comfortable, I couldn't help feeling good myself.
Maybe this is the pro wrestling Tiffany dreams of.
A show where everyone chased their own goals while still working together toward the greater cause of success. That was what I thought.
The Rumble match was doing tremendous work pulling the roster together as one.
The Rumble was the main event, so in the meantime I watched the early matches at my leisure, chatting with the other wrestlers.
The first thing to air after the opening was a pre-taped backstage segment.
JBL — the Texas-born nouveau riche character in a cowboy hat. The crowd greeted that insufferable face with a huge wave of boos.
The boos rolled in again at that. But JBL on screen, of course, paid them no mind whatsoever. Keeping that same arrogant expression, he pressed on.
As Bart tilted his head, JBL took the briefcase his henchman had been holding behind him and passed it over. It was stuffed full of cash — so full that Bart's eyes went wide as saucers at the sight.
Bart laughed, swelling with confidence. The two insufferable rich men chuckled together like that, sealing their vicious little bargain.
Nice.
That was my verdict. A simple, entertaining piece of foreshadowing. Now the fans would be on the edges of their seats, wondering how it all played out.
And with that, the pay-per-view matches began in earnest.
The opening contest was a singles match between Greg Hart and Batista.
It had come about when young Batista picked a fight with Greg — not a deep feud by any means, but a storyline easy to grasp.
Batista had insulted Greg as a has-been, and Greg had declared that he was still very much an active competitor — and that he intended to hand out an education.
Simple and clean, and with a legend like Greg involved, the crowd heat climbed sharply. It fit the virtues an opener ought to have perfectly.
GREG HART! GREG HART! GREG HART! GREG HART! GREG HART!
The match flowed smoothly, and Batista — along with his manager at ringside, Nick Flair — couldn't handle Greg's technique and took a beating the whole way through.
Watching beside me, Russell spoke up.
“Pretty good, huh?”
“……”
“What's wrong, Sin?”
“Nothing. It's nothing.”
Taken purely as a match, it was a cheerful one-sided affair. But……
Isn't he taking too much of a beating?
Greg should have absorbed some offense at that point — it would have made the match more fun and helped elevate Batista. It wasn't Greg's usual style, and that left me oddly uneasy.
Probably just my imagination.
With that, I kept my eyes on the matches that followed.
After the opener came the tag team championship matches for both brands, one after the other.
Not bad.
The time allotments ran a little short, so the quality was average — but within those limits, they'd done everything that could be done.
After that came the Divas Championship match between Rikita and Trish Stratus.
Women's wrestling in this era was dismissed as “the bathroom break” and treated with open contempt — mostly because the company recruited its women from modeling backgrounds, with no connection to actual wrestling skill.
But these two were different.
Rikita had commanded massive attention from her debut, when she unveiled the Moonsault, a high-difficulty maneuver. Trish Stratus had earned genuine respect through her trademark charisma and a game that grew through sheer effort.
And with plenty of visual appeal to boot, the two of them drew roaring cheers from huge crowds. It was thanks to these two women's efforts that, from the 2010s onward, female competitors with real in-ring ability began to emerge.
Knowing that history, watching their match was deeply moving.
It ended with Rikita taking the title from Trish. Climbing to the top rope, Rikita celebrated her championship win amid the crowd's congratulations.
A title earned after years of toil, the fruit of giving everything she had — of course she'd be on top of the world.
Rikita and Trish had been fierce rivals their entire careers, but in truth they were the closest of friends. The moment the two of them made it back to Gorilla Position, they'd probably be hugging each other through tears.
That's why Rikita's title win looked so beautiful to me too.
Two matches remained after that: the U.S. Championship and the main event.
The WWF Universe Championship in particular was a gimmick match — the Texas Bull Rope Match.
The rules were as follows: a single rope with a bell at its center was strapped to both competitors' wrists. Sensors that could be touched were installed at all four corners of the ring, and the first man to touch all four sensors before his opponent — ringing the bell each time — won.
But it was never as easy as it sounded.
“Ghhk……! Nnnghk!!”
JBL thrashed and clawed his way toward a corner, desperate to ring a sensor — but Taker, facing him, hauled on the rope and dragged him back into an attack.
CASKET-TAKER! CASKET-TAKER! CASKET-TAKER!
Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap! The crowd alternated between applause and chants, but Taker paid them no mind, meting out methodical cruelty — choking JBL with the rope, then casually tapping the sensor in the corner.
The purple lamp — the one that symbolized Casket-Taker — lit up.
The crowd roared its approval. As he turned around with time to spare, JBL countered with a clothesline. Getting to his feet, JBL stretched his hand toward the very corner Taker had touched — and the violet lamp went dark, the yellow lamp beside it coming to life instead.
It looked like the blood feud of giants out of an old myth — and the crowd's reaction was all the hotter for it.
Through it all, Taker's ring leadership was near-flawless. JBL, for his part, played his wretched nouveau-riche character to perfection.
A match built on intricate construction and raw violence ended, in the finish, with a run-in from JBL's henchmen and a JBL victory.
But the man left standing in the ring was Taker. A bloodied JBL fled the ring in miserable disgrace, and the crowd lamented the outcome — which meant, all the more, that they were aching for a new hero to arrive.
And that hero is Sin.
There was no doubt in my mind the reaction would be spectacular.
Every wrestler in that locker room was waiting for what I would do.
My heart pounded.
The 30-man Rumble match — a contest that routinely ran past the hour mark, the longest average match time in all of professional wrestling.
“All right. Let's go.”
With those words alone, I raised the fighting spirit of every man in the room.