I feel like I say this around this time every year, but we have hit the festive period and now thoughts turn to the most frantic hour in sports entertainment, the Royal Rumble. Apparently, I went and reviewed the first-ever Royal Rumble last January and this time, I’d like to do more than just the one. So to get us started and to help us kick off the season, let’s take another trip to the 80s and the first Royal Rumble pay-per-view on January 15, 1989. We head to the Summit in Houston, Texas, the former home of the Houston Rockets, the site where they won a pair of NBA Championships and now the site of a megachurch that had to be shamed into opening their doors to victims of Hurricane Harvey.
Your opening contest is a six-man, two-out-of-three falls tag match between Dino Bravo with the Fabulous Rougeau Brothers and the Hart Foundation and Hacksaw Jim Duggan. This is a very convenient melding of storylines with the mega-face Duggan and the Foundations against the true evil menace of the Cold War, French Canadians. Houston is hot for Hacksaw and the Summit explodes the first time he’s tagged in to face off with Bravo, even if Bravo bailed pretty quickly. You can get a great sense of the chemistry that the Foundation and the Rougeaus had, as there was some really entertaining tag wrestling when those four are in the ring. The Rougeaus pick up the first fall after a Doomsday Device Big Sit kind of thing on Bret. It’s a definitely unique finishing move. Bret continues to get beat on for a good chunk of the second fall, since he was already wounded and had to start the second fall. The heels doing some classic distraction work to keep Bret from making a tag and continuing the punishment with the man advantage. The heels eventually get too cocky and Bret is able to bring in Hacksaw and the brawl kicks off. Duggan gets down Raymond and slingshots the Anvil then the Hitman in on Raymond then drops an elbow to even things up at a fall apiece. Though it did kind of look like the ref had to tell both members of the Hart Foundation that they weren’t legal before Duggan finally went for the cover. We finally get Duggan and Bravo in there in the third fall, with some heavy double and triple teaming beating down Hacksaw. But he’d eventually outcheat the cheats after getting Bret in and blasting Bravo with his 2×4 for the win. And Jessie Ventura is rightfully outraged. I’ll be honest, if Duggan and Bravo weren’t a part of this and had their own encounter, this is probably a must see tag match between the Foundation and the Rougeaus. But the extra man on the teams bogged down some otherwise good tag wrestling.
Up next is our only championship match on the night, as Rockin’ Robin defends the WWF Women’s Championship against Judy Martin. Sensational Sherri holds up proceedings long enough to challenge the winner for a future title match, then joins the commentation station. This is very much an old school women’s match, Martin does a lot of throwing around the smaller Robin. They get a lot of near falls into the mere 6 minutes they’re given. Robin retains with a cross body from the second rope. This match is a great reminder of how far we’ve come in terms of women’s wrestling.
Up next, Vince gets his bodybuilding fetish out and we have the Super Posedown between Rick Rude and the Ultimate Warrior. It does what it says on the carton. Rude challenges Warrior to a posing contest with the crowd to determine the winner. The crowd doesn’t like Rude. Rude attacks Warrior with a piece of workout equipment. We move on to the match at Mania for Warrior’s Intercontinental title. I think I’ve made it well known how I feel about segments on pay per views that aren’t matches. This would have been better used as filler on Wrestling Challenge than 10+ minutes of a pay-per-view.
Next up, our last undercard match as we have a rare heel vs. heel match featured as King Haku faces off with former king Harley Race and Bobby Heenan in between both of them. I did like Race coming down and dumping Haku out of the sedan he was carried down to the ring on. Once the bell rang, it was two of the toughest men to ever enter the squared circle teeing off on each other. Haku retains the crown with a suuuuuuuuuuuperkick off the ropes. While the match isn’t necessarily anything special, it is a cool moment to see a pair of legends square off that you wouldn’t have expected to go one-on-one in the ring.
But now it’s time for our main event…
MUST-SEE MATCH:
Royal Rumble match
The first 30-man Rumble, this was also the first time they tried to work a story into the match. Multiple stories were worked in throughout the match, from the first two entrants being the tag team champions (Demolition) to Andre/Jake and the continuation of the tension between the Mega Powers that would culminate at Wrestlemania V. While the ending was a little anticlimactic compared to the first two-thirds of the match, it’s still worth a watch.
FINAL GRADE: C
I gave the ‘88 Rumble a D and this was definitely a better show than that one. The undercard was stronger, even if some of the matches were meh. I will say this; I’d rather sit through the super posedown again than ever have to stare at the bench press world record thing again. The Rumble was also a much better match with everything coming together and coming out of it.
The Finisher 