The last time the Royal Rumble was in Philly was the most surreal live event experience ever

By Nick Tylwalk | Jan 27, 2018

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You can’t really destroy the Royal Rumble, but WWE came as close as it ever has just three years ago in the same building it’s going to be held this year.

Despite what you’d think from listening to a passionate subset of WWE fans sometimes, it’s not really possible to ruin the Royal Rumble for good (the same goes for WrestleMania, by the way). Some years the show and the Rumble match itself are better than others, and occasionally a few are downright bad.

The 2015 Royal Rumble, though, put that assertion to its greatest test. And it was crazy to experience that in person.

I know because I was there, and it’s not just the way the mind can play tricks on you with memories to suggest that there was a palpable feeling of something different in the air even before you entered the Wells Fargo Center. It wasn’t the fact that this was the hardest-drinking WWE pay-per-view crowd I’ve ever been around, though from the line of cans and bottles on the ledges outside the building when they finally let fans in, it could have been a factor.

Instead, it was a weird mix of anticipation and anxiety that seemed to hang over the whole arena. I was there solo, so I got a chance to talk to the strangers in my section before and during the show, and everyone seemed to be a little on edge. The crowd was live, as Philly fans almost always are, but you couldn’t shake the idea that they were waiting for something. Or more precisely, hoping that something wouldn’t happen.

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As it turns out, their worst fears were realized in the harshest possible way. Daniel Bryan, so over at the time, didn’t even make a deep run. In hindsight, his early elimination was way worse than who eventually won, because if Bryan had made it to the final four or even been the last man thrown out, well, the fan favorite doesn’t always win the Rumble. But losing him early set off those fans, and it was astonishing what happened the rest of the way.

Chants for Bryan interrupted the entrances of other wrestlers. Roman Reigns, naturally, got booed to high heaven when he won, despite being booked as a face at the time. The Rock, for goodness sake, got booed when he arrived to help Reigns. Think about that for a moment. The Rock typically doesn’t get booed unless that’s the reaction he’s seeking. When even The Great One loses the fans, you know something’s up.

People near me were also in disbelief, even as they could see what was coming. One guy seated to my left kept going “no, no, no …” to no one in particular, and then said as plainly as possible once the show ended, “I can’t believe they did that.”

The anger continued as the fans were filing out and into the parking lots as well. Again, that’s not a new thing for a WWE PPV where the ending isn’t what the masses expected, but the breath and depth of the displeasure was something I had never witnessed in person. These people weren’t just disappointed, they were mad.

It’s been suggested to me that WWE creative was somehow unaware the way the Rumble match was booked might not go over well, but The Rock’s presence is pretty big evidence there was at least an inkling the WWE Universe might be bent out of shape. I’m not sure they could have expected it would be as bad as it was, though, and Bryan’s popularity always seemed to catch them off-guard.

Here’s the thing: It definitely wasn’t the end of the wrestling world. The show went on down the Road to WrestleMania same as always, and it’s easy to forget that the consensus opinion was that WrestleMania 31 ranked right up with some of the best ever. One great and sometimes overlooked aspect of the unfailingly relentless WWE schedule is that the next chance to recover from a misstep is always just a few weeks away.

Next: WWE Royal Rumble 2018: Preview, prediction and picks

Yet every big live show, especially the Royal Rumble, creates its own peak or valley on the graph of fan satisfaction with WWE programming, and the 2015 Royal Rumble was a weird and wild ride downhill. Whatever happens this year is almost guaranteed not to create the same surreal experience, and that’s probably for the best.