WWE Royal Rumble — January 19, 2003
FleetCenter — Boston, Massachusetts
World Heavyweight Championship
Reading time: approximately 5 minutes

(This match was commissioned by Chef Marco Rances. If you want to know more about how I review and grade my matches, click here)

Wrestling works best when it suspends disbelief and bends conventional logic. It fails when it insults the viewer’s intelligence by failing to deliver on promises made. Case in point: this match is atrocious and embarrassing on many levels, a true dumpster fire of an effort before the term even became a euphemism. You have two veterans, a decade into their craft, crashing hard under the big lights of the Royal Rumble.

Triple H versus Scott Steiner was billed as a contest of physical domination. Triple H was Raw’s reigning champion and tyrant incumbent, while Steiner was WWE’s latest larger-than-life acquisition from the boney remains of WCW. Big Poppa Pump was a fan favorite, a poster boy for the meme that all wrestlers were on roids, and nothing short of batshit crazy on the mic (see: Steiner Math promo). His transformation from the feisty, Joe College, all-American wrestler to some leather-bound Umbrella Corporation bioweapon was one of the more amusing slow-burn changes of the ’90s.

Weekly displays of petty alpha-male energy, including arm wrestling and a bodybuilding pose-down, hammered home the promise of a clash between two physical specimens, with Steiner repeatedly overpowering or embarrassing the Game. This was the sort of meaty car crash that fit comfortably in McMahon’s wheelhouse, although Scott had yet to wrestle on WWE television since his return at Survivor Series. The Royal Rumble would give the wider audience its first proper look at what Big Poppa Pump could still deliver. Or so they thought.

The opening minutes at least make good on the promise. Steiner wins the initial slugfest, mauls Triple H around the corner and sends him outside after an emphatic overhead press slam. The champion tries to buy time, but Scott follows and throws him into the barricade before bringing him back inside with a suplex. A Boston crab (what?! a rest hold this early??) accomplishes very little, and when Steiner shrugs off Triple H’s jumping knee, the crowd perks up, anticipating some of that legendary firepower. Steiner grabs him and, with much drama and suspense, puts him in a…bear hug. A bear hug. Way to ramp up the momentum. Anyway, Flair gets involved and eventually provides the opening for Triple H to take control, but he works Scott with such dreadful pace that whatever anticipation was brewed earlier was killed completely. Like hello! That’s a surefire equation for a molasses of a match: babyface rest holds followed by a Triple H control segment.

When Scott regains command, he already looks visibly drained, so he starts spamming belly-to-belly suplexes and groggily biding his time between attacks. The repetition becomes increasingly absurd because nothing develops from it. JR at one point in this match even notes, “I’ve never seen so many suplexes in my life.” Meanwhile, Triple H sells everything like it’s three Stunners and a piledriver, his selling so disproportionate that it makes you question if that student of the game cerebral assassin thing really is just a gimmick. This match has somehow arrived at the exhaustion phase of an attritional heavyweight fight without giving the audience the actual fight. It reminds me of those Michael Bay Transformers movies where they promise you plenty of Autobot-Decepticon action but then eighty percent of the Decepticons get taken out by humans in jet planes. All that titanic imagery thrown around only to manifest in suplexes and some uninspired clubs to the back. Geez.

An awkward butterfly/tiger-bomb attempt further exposes how little Steiner has left, and the crowd turns on the match as it becomes apparent that no second gear is coming. Triple H and Flair try to walk out, Scott pursues them, and a countered championship-belt attack leaves the Game bleeding. The blood gushing does little to improve proceedings; it actually feels hammy considering how demure the action was. Steiner returns to his fucking suplexes and Triple H continues selling like a Tyson fight. Flair pleads for a stoppage on account of the blood—because of course, the Game has never bled before—but Hebner orders them to continue. The champion then throws the referee outside in another attempt to get disqualified, only for Hebner to stand tall. There’s a point where Hebner yells at them to wrestle each other, and given how asstastic their performance was, my head canon tells me it’s Hebner doing a shoot. A low blow and roll-up fail to secure the pin, so Triple H retrieves his uninvited sledgehammer and openly drives it into Steiner’s midsection, finally earning the disqualification he had been looking for. I get it, they want to protect Steiner in his debut match while keeping the belt on Triple H, but the means to get to that end were really lackluster.

Scott inflicts a post-match beatdown on H for some of that “cathartic justice,” but he doesn’t get any pop. The match reeks something awful, and everyone involved is getting chewed out by the fans. Triple H could broker world peace and do a face turn, and he’d still get booed out the building.

Scott Steiner could no longer wrestle the match they had spent weeks advertising. He spends much of it visibly dragging his lower body around and taking his time between spots, but that didn’t necessarily have to kill the match. I wonder how different this would have been had Triple H and Flair attacked Scott backstage before his entrance. Suddenly, Steiner operating at less than a hundred percent—which is exactly how he moves—becomes part of the fiction, giving the audience a reason to sympathize with his struggle and giving the wrestlers something workable to build around.

And this is where Triple H should bear as much, if not the brunt, of the blame. Steiner visibly can’t go the way everyone expected him to. Fine. Then wrestle the man who’s actually standing across from you. Triple H can surely wrestle and he can work a match, but here he shows very little ability to read a deteriorating situation and adjust accordingly. He does his usual thing while the entire setup burns and collapses around him. With a VETERAN legend in Flair at ringside and a VETERAN official in Hebner already involving himself in the drama, they had enough experience and enough moving parts to call audibles to hide Scott’s limitations. It’s criminal negligence and ineptitude for such a match to have taken place given the body of experience among all the figures involved.

If the ticket price for that year’s Rumble was around $300, the fans should have gotten a free hot dog as a refund.

★.50 — 1.50 — Blueprint Fracture