WrestleMania 39: The Greatest WrestleMania Build Ever (Part 1)
8 years ago on a random Sunday afternoon I signed up for the WWE Network (when it still existed.) I happened to be off work from my bartending job and happened to see that WrestleMania 31 was about to start.
I hadn’t sat and watched a wrestling card since at least 2001. It was appointment television for me from about 1997–2001, but then I started High School, figured out quickly that being into wrestling wasn’t going to get me any girls, and stopped watching.
I’m not sure why I got the itch in early 2015, but I started dipping my toes back in the water. Now 8 years later with WrestleMania 39 looming I can’t help to think about how the story of Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns has been being told in kayfabe and out literally since I started watching wrestling again.
Now, I’m no wrestling historian, but I believe that makes this the greatest WrestleMania build ever. So here is a non-exhaustive, fairly autobiographical look at this story that I have been following my entire adult wrestling fan life. Starting with…
Wrestlemania 31: April 2015
Man, I got back into WWE when the getting was good. I may have missed WrestleMania 30, and The Miracle on Bourbon St., but 31 was pretty damn good.
WM 31 also shows us Cody and Roman in very different places than they are these days in terms of placement on the card and fan reaction respectively.
Cody was in the opening match of the show which was an absolutely entertaining ladder match for the Intercontinental Title that ended up being won by Daniel Bryan. However, Cody was rocking the Stardust gimmick, and was mostly just there to make up the numbers.
Roman was on the other end of the card. I wasn’t quite aware of it at the time, but he was fresh off of the most disastrous Royal Rumble win of all time.
It was pretty close to the genesis of McGillicutty… um… I mean a very long run of the WWE Universe absolutely rejecting Roman in the main event. Especially when facing Brock Lesnar.
Luckily WWE had a get out of jail free card that let them escape the corner they had booked themselves into in the form of Mr. Money In The Bank, Seth Rollins.
Seth cashed in, saved WWE from themselves, and hooked me back in as a fan with one hell of a ‘WrestleMania Moment.’
WrestleMania 32: April 2016
My god this show was a slog. This was the start of a run of excruciatingly long WrestleManias, but it was basically a repeat as far as our two main characters go.
Stardust was back in the opening match, which was a multi-man ladder match for the IC Title. I swear I didn’t copy and paste any of this. Shoutout to Zack Ryder aka Matt Cardona for his subsequent 24 hour title reign.
Roman found himself back in the Main Event vs. Triple H and a hostile crowd that had been watching a sub-standard ‘Mania for around 6 hours.
At this point, the crowd was actually rooting for Triple H to win. So Stardust made up the numbers, and Roman was rejected by the crowd in the Main Event. Second verse, same as the first. Again, I didn’t copy and paste any of this.
The To-Do List: May 2016
Less than two months after WM 32, Cody Rhodes was granted his release from WWE.
I saw this at the time, but honestly I didn’t really think anything of it. I had just gotten back into WWE, and had absolutely zero awareness of the pro wrestling world outside of Vince McMahon’s sports entertainment enterprise.
Hell, the only name I even recognized back then was Kurt Angle. And I only knew that he was still wrestling because of following Whatculture Wrestling’s youtube channel (Shoutout Cultaholic as well as the OG Whatculture guys) and seeing clips from the WCPW promotion they briefly ran.
It turns out that this statement of purpose was only the first of many from Cody.
WWE Raw — June 20th 2016 — Phoenix, AZ
Fair warning, this is going to be the most self-indulgent portion of a very self-indulgent timeline. This was my first WWE Event!
I pulled up this show on Peacock to jog my memory, and holy hell I did not realize how loaded this show was at the time. Here’s a rundown of things on that show…
- Dean Ambrose aka Jon Moxley had just become World Champ the night before at Money In the Bank
- The Main Event of the show was Seth vs Roman
- Shane McMahon was still in the honeymoon phase of his comeback. Holy hell I popped when I heard “HERE COMES THE MONEEYYYYY”… simpler times
- Enzo and Cass were molten hot and wrestled The Vaudevillains. Remember those teams??
- Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens had a match. During the match Michael Cole said “They are hoping to end this once and for all.” Narrator: They did not.
- There was a whole ass John Cena-AJ Styles segment that ended in The Club beating up John Cena.
I didn’t realize how absurd this card was. I left things out too! This doesn’t really advance our story, but I felt like it only advanced by once again blossoming wrestling fandom. I guess the crowd did chant “You can’t wrestle!” at Roman. They still didn’t like him. We are about 4 years from that changing.
This is getting long as hell. Part two will be tomorrow! When we go to The Land of the Rising Sun, and ball starts to roll on the beginning of a new promotion…
