Mick Foley voiced what thousands of people watching the Royal Rumble last night felt after it ended. The entire night showcased that the WWE just doesn’t get it. They don’t understand their audience at all or they don’t care what their audience thinks. That is the power that comes with having a monopoly on the marketplace in your line of business. What alternative do wrestling fans have to watching WWE? TNA? Don’t make me laugh. That company is a joke. Going to local independent shows? 95% of those are absolute garbage with untrained hacks. 99% of the general wrestling audience don’t even know those shows exist so even if they were close to one of the good ones, odds are that they have no clue about those shows. So wrestling fans are stuck with whatever the WWE gives them and that means that the WWE doesn’t have to care about the audience. People will complain. They will scream from the all corners of the internet and even take a complete dump on the big returning babyface live in the arena BUT they will continue to watch because if they want to watch wrestling, they have no choice. So HHH can continue to push his cronies to the moon and piss off the majority of the fanbase but it doesn’t matter because everyone will still be watching.

Last night’s Royal Rumble got off on the wrong foot on the preshow. I love Billy Gunn. He’s been in my kitchen. He’s watched Judge Judy all afternoon with my grandmother. He would always ask on future bookings in IWA how my grandma was feeling and if she was ok. We have sang along with Neil Diamond on the radio. We shared a cry the day after Chris Candido passed away. I love Billy Gunn.

I love The Road Dogg. Funny guy. Tells great stories. He was a pleasure to be around in the locker room. One of the few actual matches I had was Ryan Boz & me vs. The Road Dogg Jesse James and Trik Davis. The Road Dogg let me do offense to him during the match. A mega superstar and one of the most over guys from the Attitude Era in WWF and he had no problem letting a fat out of shape manager do moves to him during a wrestling match. I wish I had gotten a photo with him but alas. Either way, I love the New Age Outlaws. I was so happy for them to get another run in WWE. I like seeing them on shows and find them to be entertaining.

HOWEVER, I do not want them as WWE tag team champions…IN 2014! Road Dogg even cut a backstage promo bragging about how they set a record for tag team championships by having 14 years in between their last title reign and now. FOURTEEN YEARS. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if it weren’t for what WWE is doing in the main event picture. Randy Orton is the World Heavyweight Champion. The New Age Outlaws are the World Tag Team Champions. John Cena, Dave Batista and Brock Lesnar are the top contenders for the title. Is this 2014 or is still 2004? The only thing missing is for Undertaker and Shawn Michaels to wrestle again at WrestleMania with the winner getting a title shot at SummerSlam and the time warp will be complete. Again, taken by itself, with no context, I have no problem with NAO wining the titles. I’m happy for Billy and Jesse. But when combined with all the other stale, rehashed, stuck in the past bullshit that the WWE and HHH are doing lately and well it is unacceptable.

Now for the Royal Rumble match itself. WHY IN THE HELL WAS DANIEL BRYAN NOT EVEN IN THE MATCH? HHH and Vince don’t like Daniel Bryan. He’s too small. He doesn’t have the look that they crave. PPV buyrates weren’t great when he was in the main event. On the other hand, there is not one single wrestler that is anywhere near to be as over as Daniel Bryan has been for the past year. Even turning him heel for a couple of weeks and having him join the Wyatt Family didn’t cool him down in the eyes of the fans. 17,000 lost their shit and blew the roof off the building when he turned on Bray inside the cage. The Michigan State Spartans basketball team has stolen his YES! chant to motivate their team. That’s right…Daniel Bryan has transcended the wrestling business and has become mainstream. Like Hulk Hogan, The Rock, Roddy Piper, Stone Cold, John Cena and CM Punk before him.

It would have made the building come unglued and there is no better ending for WrestleMania than having 75,000 people reacting like that video to a Daniel Bryan title win. I get it though…the WWE doesn’t want that. They think they know better than their audience and they do not want that scene playing out. THEY AT LEAST NEED TO HUMOR THE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO HAVE HIM IN THE ROYAL RUMBLE MATCH SO THE HOPE CAN REMAIN ALIVE. The entire wind went out of the crowd as soon as Rey Misterio came out as #30 in the Rumble last night. The crowd turned on the entire show at that moment before the ending even happened. You could see the “WTF, no Daniel Bryan????” looks on every fan’s face. They found room to put JBL into the Rumble for 5 seconds, R-Truth for 5 seconds and a couple of other in and outs but they couldn’t put Daniel Bryan into the match? Were they afraid that the rest of the wrestlers would take matters into their own hands and make Bryan the winner? If Daniel Bryan wasn’t getting the win, then CM Punk should have. They believed in CM Punk enough to give him a title reign that was the longest in recent history…but they didn’t believe in him enough to give him a main event at WrestleMania during the two years that he dominated the company. Instead they brought in The Rock to return and headline against John Cena TWO YEARS IN A ROW. So instead of finally rewarding CM Punk for all he has done and completely wasting his talent for the last year feuding with dead weight like Ryback and Curtis Axel, they decide to go the returning old superstar that has been doing crappy movies route and go with Batista.

Batista got a decent enough response from the crowd when they announced he was coming back just like Chicago Bears fans cheer for old members of the 1985 Bears team that won the Super Bowl. That doesn’t mean the fans want those guys playing NOW and it didn’t mean the WWE fans wanted Batista in the main event at WrestleMania. He had been gone for 4 or 5 years. He made a few crap movies. He failed miserably trying to be Brock Lesnar and go the MMA route. But the “WWE Universe” used to love him even though he had ZERO talent for wrestling outside of having the look that the inner gaydom of Vince McMahon and HHH craves to see. Then again, the “WWE Universe” used to love The Ultimate Warrior too. Batista was the 28th entrant into the Rumble because if they would have had him come out any sooner, he couldn’t have lasted. Even at 28, he was ready to puke his guts out after five minutes of doing relatively nothing before the showdown with Roman Reigns started. As soon as Batista eliminated Reigns, the boos started coming. The entire restaurant I was at watching the ppv (The Squared Circle in Chicago) immediately started chanting “Bullshit” and “Fck You Vince” due to how outraged they were. That drowned out the response of the live crowd but you could see all the fans in attendance were not happy with the result. The internet was immediately filled with the hatred everyone felt for the finish. Then reports started pouring in from the live crowd about Batista losing his mind over getting booed and mocking Daniel Bryan and flipping off fans. I’m surprised he had enough energy left to flip anyone off since he was so blown up from doing nothing in the Rumble. Daniel Bryan has more talent in one of his beard hairs than that steroided up piece of shit who couldn’t wrestle his way out of wet paper bag if you gave him directions. Batista couldn’t spell “professional wrestler” let alone know how to be a good one. He knows how to do steroids and HGH. He knows how to shake the ropes. He knows how to do a powerbomb. He knows how to celebrate unearned victories. We learned that he doesn’t know to get on a treadmill and get into shape to prepare for his comeback. We learned that he doesn’t know how to give so much as a basic spear since he f’d that up beyond belief last night. We learned that he has an amazing amount of overconfidence about how people feel about him based on how he wigged out over being booed out of the building after winning.

The most important thing that I ever learned from my 12 years in the business from talking with others was that the finish is the most important thing. You can have a great 20 minute match full of unbelievable stuff but if you mess up the finish, THAT is what the people will remember about it. The WWE couldn’t have messed up this finish any worse if they tried.

Most importantly about last night, we learned that the WWE just doesn’t get it and that they never will. We learned that cronyism will continue to rule the main event picture and that no matter what the fans want, the WWE will always choose to do what THEY want to do.