The Phantom Rant: TKO…Was McAfee Worth It?

Greetings conversationalists all across the world wide web. It is I, the one and only “Phantom Lord” Joseph Davis and this is The Phantom Rant. I was originally going to wait till the end of night two of Wrestlemania to give my thoughts on everything that happened. But leave it to the WWE to screw things up so monumentally, I just had to rant about it now. So as you can guess, Wrestlemania 42 Night one is over and where’s the clip of Krusty the Clown saying “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT” when I need it.

I could go super negative about the show as a whole, but there were probably a few good moments in the show. All of those were over shadowed by the main event. This whole Pat McAfee thing was trouble from the start. I get WHY the suits at TKO did it. It made for some nice corporate synergy between them and ESPN who sunk a lot of money into being the sole provider in America to carry WWE PLE’s. Thank God for VPN’s by the way…just saying. But yeah they spent a lot of money to carry the WWE and damn it they want a return on that investment. So we got Pat McAfee because he’s on ESPN.

Corporate synergy is the name of the game. I mean if you watched ESPN at all in the last two weeks you can see all the damn coverage they gave them. I’m sure it drove “real sports” fans nuts seeing all this rasslin stuff on the network…but they were just trying to make back their investment. So after all that I have to ask. TKO…was it worth it? Was it worth having one of the worst Wrestlemania main event’s in modern history? The match itself was all right, but the story is was drives the match and the story was crap.

Originally I think they were going to go with a story that Randy Orton was talking to himself. I think Orton with a Dissociative Identity disorder could have been some fun stuff to watch. It would have made perfect sense for Orton to be talking to an Alter personality rather than Pat McAfee. But alas that would take true creativity and honestly that is something the WWE hasn’t had in a long time. I know I have praised Triple H in the past for his creative vision…but I think all that praise has run out. Now I know all the McAfee stuff came from above him and he had to make due. I just don’t get how they could drop the ball. Pat McAfee is a very unlikable person. And I say that as someone who does like him. So him being a heel for this should have been easy.

Now, as I said I thought the match was all right. They took care of McAfee being a disruption right away when he tried to attack Cody only for Cody to get the upper hand and Cross Rhodes his ass. As an added bonus if you can call it that…Jellyroll magically appeared and he ended up elbow dropping McAfee through the announce table and they stretchered him out much to the delight of everyone watching. But apparently Randy Orton had an injured back (probably from carrying the load of the entire first night) or he’s really good at acting. Either way Orton was wrestling as the underdog in this match and it felt odd to be honest while watching.

I was happy when we got some blood courtesy of Randy Orton hitting the post. That was a nice little thing this match desperately needed. Later in the match Cody Rhodes got busted open the hard way with a punch over the eye and he was bleeding a ton. He also cracked open the back of his head when he went for that Super Cody Cutter only for Orton to counter it into an RKO. So I was not disappointed with the blood in the match. That’s for damn sure. What I was disappointed with was the ending when McAfee came back out in a referee’s shirt after Orton RKO’ed Lil Nat’ch. They could have stacked the deck against Cody by “corporate” making Pat a special guest enforcer before the match but again that would have taken creativity. It would have made perfect sense for him to be a referee at that point and to try and screw Cody out of the WWE title with a fast count.

But perhaps I’m just being too nice here. I really wanted Randy Orton to win and it didn’t happen. As I said in previous columns, I believe Cody is better at the chase for the title than actually being champion. But if you’ve listened to the crowd for the last few weeks, it’s clear something is turning and people are getting sick of QB1 Cody. He’s getting more boo’s than cheers and a change is needed. I think the problem is the WWE just is not comfortable with a heel being a champion that is cheered for like a face.

The WWE has always been a company where the face stands tall. The bad guy can’t win. People have to go home happy. Well who the hell went home happy after this mess last night? What made the events of last night even more infuriating was Orton taking out Pat McAfee. Does this mean Orton did a double turn. He still ended up beating up Cody Rhodes after the match and standing over him with the title in his hand…just not as the winner. I’m sure NoDQ will have plenty of updates on WHY things happened in the coming day and days, but at this moment I’m just shaking my head at what could have been.

On the plus side perhaps the rumored Backlash main event of Orton/McAfee vs. Cody/Jellyroll is now off. Or it could be worse. McAfee could want revenge and we get Orton vs. McAfee. I’m sorry I put that out into the universe just now. Let’s hope I didn’t will it into happening. My point it is they don’t know what they are doing and honestly I can’t wait till they cover all of this on Unreal just to see how they spin this mess of a show.

I can only hope night two of Wrestlemania is not this bad because if it is, I’ll have another column to write. Punk vs. Roman is a pretty straight forward I hate you…you hate me story so it’s not like it’s hard to screw that up. I still can’t believe we got such a lousy first night of Wrestlemania this year. Short matches and too many commercials. Well like I said there were a couple of positives on this show. The big one was the return of Paige where she came back to the WWE and got a Wrestlemania moment with Brie Bella as they won the Women’s tag team titles. I fully expect them to lose the tag titles rather quickly, but it was great seeing Paige back. It boggles my mind how AEW had her (like they had others who are now in the WWE) and they really did nothing with her. But AEW mess ups is for a different column and right now I am rather exhausted.

So barring anything on a colossal scale of terrible happening that over shadows even the events of this first night of Wrestlemania, I shall be back next week. Until then, thanks for reading and as always you can leave feedback down below, on Twitter or actually e-mail me at phantomlordnyc@gmail.com