Several weeks ago, Wrestlemania 25 was looking bad - perhaps historically bad. Even though no matches had been announced, you didn't need a Ouija board to guess where the storylines were headed. Randy Orton won the Royal Rumble and earned the right to challenge for the world championship at Wrestlemania. That made sense on the surface. Randy Orton is the most hated villain in wrestling. He inspires such an instinctively hateful reaction in fans that their eyes narrow and their jaws tighten every time he opens his mouth He could make a donation to a food bank and people would boo. If you want millions of people to shell out forty dollars for a wrestling pay-per-view just tell them that Randy Orton is going to get stomped into marmalade. Since the WWE champion is John Cena, the baby faced poster boy of the WWE, hero of children and lover of women, he was Orton's obvious opponent and that made sense. Classic wrestling logic says Cena should fight Orton in the main event of Wrestlemania.

There's just one problem with that match: It sucks. We've seen it. A lot. In fact, it was two thirds of the main event of Wrestlemania last year. Cena and Orton routinely bump into each other on RAW. A John Cena vs. Randy Orton main event has about as much appeal as Home Alone IV or a sequel to Titanic where Jack's alive and trapped on another sinking ship with Rose. Sometimes it's best to just let these things go.

In the 1980s the WWF only had four pay-per-view events all year. A year in advance you could set Hulk Hogan's greatest opponent aside for Wrestlemania and slowly build to that all year. Hogan and his destined opponent wouldn't be allowed be matched up all year, so when Wrestlemania rolled around the main event seemed groundbreaking. It was the match you'd been waiting for all year. Then again, Hulk Hogan rarely wrestled on free television, if ever, so just seeing him was special.

Today John Cena wrestles on free television every week and he wrestles in the main events of ten or twelve pay-per-views a year. There's almost no Wrestlemania rivalry he could start up that wouldn't taste like reheated Chinese food. You know, the kind with the rice that‘s been drying out in the refrigerator all night? Ugh.

According to widespread Internet reports Triple H was politicking backstage to get the other world title match at Wrestlemania but there the writers faced a slightly different problem. I didn't care who won. Triple H was a twelve time world champion. For him to win another one was, by definition, not a once-in-a-lifetime special event. It wouldn't have been like the time when Eddie Guerrero and someone-we-won't-mention finally won the world titles and posed together to end Wrestlemania XX. It wouldn't be like the time Shawn Michaels fulfilled his boyhood dream by beating Bret Hart in an Iron Man match. It would be like the time Triple H defeated Chris Jericho to end Wrestlemania. Which Wrestlemania was that? Anyone? The fans expect more.

A notch below that, Shawn Michaels looked set to battle John Bradshaw Layfield in the culmination of a month's long feud that still failed to make me want to watch the match. The outcome was too predictable and the match itself sounded ordinary. When The Undertaker and The Big Show eliminated each other at the Royal Rumble and brawled in the crowd that too looked like a likely pairing. The Undertaker has already built his winning streak against slow, lumbering heavyweights and super heavyweights like Giant Gonzales, King Kong Bundy, Diesel, Psycho Sid, Kane, The Big Bossman, A-Train and Mark Henry. All of those matches were tedious. Did we need another installment in the series?

Mickey Rourke's likely match with Chris Jericho struck me as the most intriguing. The idea of Rourke winning Best Actor at the Academy Awards this Sunday and then showing up on RAW the next night to jaw about it was so off the wall that I had to see it. I wasn't even sure I liked the idea but that was a unique storyline worthy of Wrestlemania. Then he backed out.

With No Way Out the writers apparently flipped the script, erasing almost all of the matches that seemed imminent and replacing them with new possibilities. In almost every case the new version was more appealing than the old one. Triple H now looks to defend the World Heavyweight Championship against Randy Orton - a match that would seem a little retread and predictable if it weren't for a great new spin. The WWE will help Triple H a lot by introducing him as Stephanie McMahon‘s real life husband and the father of her child. Suddenly, a character who we thought we knew well, one who can often seem remote in his silent strength, has a fresh and sympathetic story that I, for one, want to hear. You just know that Triple H is going to get ridiculed up and down by guys like Orton and Jericho for being a family man and Vince McMahon's son-in-law. That makes him more human and recalls a lot of fond memories from 2000 when Triple H and Stephanie were first dating on screen. Now we find out that as characters they never broke up but hid their relationship for eight years while they were both on screen together. Fascinating.

Much more interesting, though, is Shawn Michael's re-assignment to challenge The Undertaker's Wrestlemania winning streak. Michaels and The Undertaker are two of wrestling's oldest, most popular characters and they've both for years laid claim to being the centerpiece of any Wrestlemania. That's big time. That's Wrestlemania quality.

Then there's the question of where this Chris Jericho storyline is going. With Jericho continuing to blast Mickey Rourke it's hard to believe the Best Actor nominee will simply be an observer at the event as he currently claims. The WWE would have no commercial interest in continuing to promote The Wrestler if they weren't expecting a big payoff in return. It's not like they promoted College Road Trip last year when Raven-Symone was a guest. So what's this leading to? Will Jericho be fighting Rourke after all? Will he be fighting Ric Flair, who made an appearance two weeks ago on RAW but who swears he's never going to wrestle again? Will he be wrestling “Stone Cold” Steve Austin? Wrestlemania is in his home state, where he's wildly popular, and Austin will be inducted in the Hall of Fame the night before. But his old friend Jim Ross recently stated on The Ross Report that Austin is physically unable to wrestle again. Who does that leave?

Tampa radio host and a close associate of Hulk Hogan's says he knows the answer but he can‘t say. Bubba is a self-promoter but he's also a blabber mouth. He's gotten in trouble for leaking backstage information before. If Hulk Hogan is, as he's implying, the legend who can't hang up the boots - the one Jericho has been taunting for weeks - a confrontation would be Wrestlemania quality and coincide perfectly with the upcoming Legends of Wrestlemania video release. I guess we'll all have to watch RAW on Monday to find out.



Henry Jenkins, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(photo credit goes to the World Wrestling Entertainment)