There’s probably no better promise I’ve broken than saying I won’t mention AEW when discussing WWE and vice versa. I’m not sure I ever got it right. Not so easy when that’s the main story of today’s wrestling industry. And it’s also inevitable that WWE, on their biggest night, is doing things like this:
So obviously WWE feels the need to point out their new competitors, even if they will never admit that they are competitors. I’ll go see Cody myself tomorrow, but WrestleMania is arguably the biggest show of what WWE has in store for the rest of the business. The scale, the explosion, the sheer enormity of everything around and in Mania was simply something no one could dream of matching. The pop that Cody got when he walked in last night can only be found in one place, which is the main reason he’s coming back to New York.
Tonight’s match belongs to Becky Lynch and Bianca Belair as always. If WWE is trying to show what it’s got to be that no one else does, then the kind of stars they’ve cast Lynch and Belair into is a good place to start. Their treatment of the female division is only better than AEW because sometimes they pay more attention to it than almost never and just above, but the level of anticipation and then delivery from the last two nights definitely prove that when WWE wants to they can get it gloriously right.
But what WWE has for everyone, and simply incomprehensible, is its history. What makes Mania “MANIA” is what came before. What it has been building for over 38 years. This isn’t just the biggest event on the calendar for wrestling fans. It’s the show where Macho Man and Steamboat have redefined the term “classic”. Or Stone Cold and Bret Hart. Undertaker and Michaels. Ice and Ice. Hulk and Warrior. When you attend or watch Mania, the echoes of those matches and so many others are sitting next to you.
So while the skeptics, rightly, point to Steve Austin’s return last night as just a ticketing ploy in Dallas when sales are soaring, WWE can ignore it for the sake of the return. What does Austin’s back mean? They can call it that. Maybe there will come a time when AEW can do the same, 10 or 15 years from now. For now, they’re just trying to recapture the memories of ROH and NJPW and other companies around the world that aren’t so much nostalgia just a wink in baseball. And that worked for their audience.
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It’s the historical basis that made Austin vs. Kevin Owens so great for everyone. It’s not just Austin’s return or his going to the emergency room more than a body donor handing out a collectible disc to Vince like Undertaker was in his previous few years, or Goldberg and how things are his with his malfunctioning forklift. More than that Owens goes to great lengths to make Austin look good and believable, even though that has a lot to do with that.
It’s the fact that through the construction, through his role of playing the cannibal and the asshole, luring the whole state of Texas into this through Austin, Owens hasn’t done much to hide that this is was the ultimate dream come true for him. Every fan who lived through Owens who probably never believed he would be in a match against Stone Cold until it got to him. We all have to experience it. Through Owens’ work, we can feel his utter joy.
That’s what makes Owens by far the best candidate to lead Austin through a game like this. Owens’ appeal is multifaceted. He’s probably the best talker in the company. Although he looks like a civil servant, he is also one of the best workers. But it’s his homage to wrestling in general, its many approaches to telling a story and its history and stories, that always shines brightest. That’s why he’s not afraid to use his encyclopedic knowledge of his wrestling past to influence a match, whether it’s his history or someone else’s. KO just loves it so much we can’t help but do the same with him. He must be wondering how he was going to get to the top last night.
It’s easy to mock WWE going through the storage facility to pull out some longtime stars when they need more tickets to buy or eyeballs on Peacock. And it was wrong in a lot of cases. The difference between when it’s going right and when it’s going wrong is when it’s merely throwing some very sore and very tired guy in his 50s out into the ring for no reason, and when it really builds on its history. Austin in Mania still means something, in a way that Goldberg and Undertaker in Saudi Arabia cannot. Sure, Owens and Austin hit all the notes you’d expect. But so did the Rolling Stones when they played “Jumping Jack Flash”. Don’t make it any less complete.
That doesn’t mean WWE should pull out some legends for every PPV or everything else Original. This is the time and place for it, because Mania is a celebration of WWE’s history like anything else, a history only they have. And they might be the only ones to ever have such a thing. And the buzz they got from last night’s main event will last for weeks, even if they end up (and disappointingly) squander it. It is the agent that activates them, and only they, can pull. And when they get it right, they’ll remind you why they have it.
