This has been a weird week. On Monday Night Raw, Roman
Reigns (real name Leati Joseph Anoa’i) blindsided the wrestling world by
announcing that his leukemia was no longer in remission, which was shocking in
large part because his original battle with cancer was not known publicly. It
had already been reported that Reigns was injured and he was off this past
weekend’s live events, so when he showed up to open Raw in street clothes with
his hair up, it was obvious that he was about to announce something meaningful.
Still, nobody expected what was coming, which was both in its form and in its
import far off the usual script. The announcers went from hype mode before the
speech to shell-shocked tears after. Renee Young spoke of how close her
husband, Dean Ambrose, is to Reigns; Corey Graves explained that Reigns isn’t
just a work friend, mentioning that their kids play together. Reigns’ teammates
in The Shield, Ambrose and Seth Rollins, joined Reigns for a long hug before
doing their fist bump pose. Both were visibly in tears.
While the live crowd in Providence stayed lively all night,
it took a good hour or so for the show to feel like more than an unnecessary
and dubiously tasteful distraction from what had come before. To the credit of
the wrestlers and producers, the show came around, eventually peaking with
Rollins and Ambrose winning Raw’s tag team titles from Dolph Ziggler and Drew
McIntyre. It was the happy ending that everyone had been waiting for all night,
and the match itself was pretty damn exciting, to boot.
And then Ambrose unexpectedly laid Seth Rollins out. The
crowd was in shock—the pro wrestling type, this time, as opposed to the more
human variety that opened the night. Ambrose’s turn had been hinted at for
weeks, but nobody expected it to happen on Monday, if only because of the
Reigns announcement. Less than three hours earlier, Ambrose and Rollins had
been crying actual tears about and with their actual teammate, because his real
life away from the ring was about to get much more difficult. By the end of the
show, everything was showbiz again.
At least on Twitter, the immediate reaction was negative,
and for obvious reasons. That the attack was explicitly tied to the
announcement—announcer Michael Cole yelled “Not tonight! Not on this
night!”—struck many people as gratuitous. That it was seemingly being framed as
Ambrose being unable to contain his emotions over Reigns’ illness—Rollins
audibly repeated “it’s OK” while Ambrose beat away at him—made the connection
all the more overt.
The veteran wrestling reporter Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling
Observer Newsletter took issue with the timing on his post-Raw podcast for
subscribers in particularly blunt terms. “They live in a world where their fake
world is more important than the real world,” he said. “And when you think like
that you do things like this. You do things like all of the decisions that they
make, or many of the decisions that they make. It’s kind of sad in that way.”
Later, he added that “I was thinking that if he does get cured and he comes
back it’ll be a wonderful story. But I wasn’t thinking how can we benefit from
this in the next two hours?’”
It came off as especially weird that the same company
clearly made a point of not using Reigns’s announcement as a ratings ploy
earlier that night. (If his beating the first bout of cancer a decade ago was
known within the company, then it was never exploited for its potential
sympathy when fans were vocally rejecting him, either.)
That Ambrose’s turn was eventually going to happen anyway,
and probably within a few weeks, made all of the above much different from the
average exploitative storyline. In the most value-neutral of terms, if the
promotion was trying to maximize the impact of an already planned turn, then
Monday was the time to do it. If the plan was to do it at any point in the next
month or so, it would still have been perceived as something of a tasteless
exploitation of Joe Anoa’i’s cancer diagnosis, and given the strong likelihood
of a backlash as a result, it’s at least mildly understandable how “fuck it, do
it tonight” wound up as the chosen course of action. What matters most, where
the decision to pull the trigger on Ambrose on Monday is concerned, is whether
Reigns was asked and gave the green light. After all, he’s the person whose
life or death illness is at the center of this. Even before the illness, Reigns
was one of the very few people in the promotion that would not have to expect
reprisals for saying “no” to WWE.
The result was an incredibly effective piece of pro
wrestling storytelling, but even in the best case scenario, it couldn’t help
but also feel a little icky. Especially given the context of everything else
that WWE is doing.
If this were not happening at the nadir of one of the most
profoundly soulless moments in WWE history, maybe it would feel different. That
is not where fans or the promotion are, though, as WWE announced earlier this
week that it will continue to do propaganda for the Saudi royal family at next
Friday’s Crown Jewel event. It had also already been reported on Monday that
both John Cena and Daniel Bryan are refusing to make the trip to Riyadh for
that show, which has since been backed up by more reporters. WWE isn’t denying
the story, but is still advertising their presence all the same. There’s a rich
history of deliberately false advertising in pro wrestling, but it’s something
that WWE has largely avoided for years. It’s not nearly the ugliest thing about
Crown Jewel, but it’s another chunk of slime to throw onto a growing pile.
This could all very well be handled on the “go-home”
editions of Raw and SmackDown next week, but as it stands, WWE has done a great
deal to paint itself as an amoral entity in this week alone. It’s easy to group
everything together under the promotion’s larger and longstanding tradition of
shamelessness, and that’s before factoring in other recent black eyes, such as
the promotion’s attempts to freeze contracts (most recently Neville’s)
indefinitely while claiming publicly that wrestlers can terminate their
contracts whenever they want.
It may well be that there is some kind of line for WWE, and
that there are some things the promotion just won’t do on principle. It could
be argued, too, that the Ambrose turn timing didn’t cross it. But in this
moment, it’s impossible to determine where that line is, or indeed whether it
exists. We’re still less than a week removed from them trying to turn the
famously homophobic Ultimate Warrior into an icon of LGBTQ support. If there
really is a line for WWE, it keeps moving further and further out, and down.
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