The Royal Rumble is one of WWE’s most anticipated Premium Live Events of the year. It’s the first stop on the road to WrestleMania, and it’s evolved quite a lot from its humble beginnings. Now, both the men and women fight for a title match at WrestleMania. When the Royal Rumble was created, it was just a 20-man Battle Royal. Pat Patterson pitched the idea to Vince McMahon who hated the idea, believing it would “take too long.”
In October of 1988 they tested the match type in front of a crowd of under 2,000 fans. Patterson was not there to help direct WWE officials and personnel, so the event was basically a failure. It was 12 men instead of 20, there weren’t any entrances (which is part of the fun of the Rumble) and the ending was spoiled by the ring announcer.
“It didn’t work because I wasn’t there,” Patterson told CBS Sports in 2017. “The producer was all mixed up and the talent was all mixed up, and they didn’t know how it was gonna work.”
How Pat Patterson Helped Create the Royal Rumble
When they failed to come up with something to counteract Jim Crockett Promotion’s Bunkhouse Stampede, Patterson again pitched the idea. This time to McMahon’s friend, NBC Executive Dick Ebersol. According to Patterson he loved the idea, so McMahon made him produce the match himself. A year later in 1989, it expanded into a 30-man match and officially became the pay-per-view we know and love.
“I was working in the office and my job was to be creative, and I always wanted to do something that’s never been done,” Patterson told WWE.com in 2014. “It’s like, for example, a simple Steel Cage Match. Somebody, somehow, decided to have a Cage Match. Where that started, I have no idea, but somebody came up with the idea. I started thinking about the Battle Royal, but I had it in mind to simply start with two guys and then every two minutes a new guy comes out. When one guy is eliminated, he’s out, and so on and so forth. And I knew it was going to work. I could visualize it, I could see it. There was no question.”
The 20-man Rumble included stars like Bret “The Hitman” Hart, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, Harley Race, Tito Santana, Hillbilly Jim, The Ultimate Warrior, Junkyard Dog, and Jim Neidhart among others.
Tune into ESPN+ domestically and Netflix internationally on January 31 to see who walks out of this year’s Rumble one step closer to WrestleMania.
The post The Origins of WWE’s Royal Rumble: How It Was Almost a Giant Failure appeared first on VICE.
