Two things really stood out to me from SmackDown Live. First of all, Triple H did an unbelievable job of significantly twisting the narrative of Becky Lynch’s Royal Rumble victory by claiming that she was afraid of what Ronda Rousey would do to her at WrestleMania. This makes total sense that WWE would elect to portray the story in this way because this is exactly the way Vince McMahon views the Millennial generation, as he told Steve Austin in 2014 on the Stone Cold podcast. He views Millennials as being too afraid of failure to reach up and grab the “brass ring,” and Triple H is doing a fantastic job of making Vince’s viewpoint come to life. The second thing has to do with Daniel Bryan and his intellectual peer Rowan. The new Daniel Bryan is excellent on the mic. Much of his message is fact, but he can be a jerk at times about the way he presents it. I also finally think I figured out why WWE decided to pair the planet’s champion with Rowan. I kind of forgot that, about four years ago, Bryan was a member of the Wyatt Family for a short time, and Rowan was in the Family. I am also very excited for WWE’s move of SmackDown Live to Fox in October of this year. This will be great for the growth of the company, as Fox Sports is rapidly gaining more and more traction as a credible sports network.
I also wanted to talk a little bit about Daniel Bryan’s promo from a couple weeks ago. He was discussing generational politics, and he’s right about a lot of it. He claimed that the baby boomers suck away the earth’s resources while giving nothing back. It was an excellent promo. I’m not going to get into politics (even though I do have my opinions), because that is not the primary goal of this blog. If it was, I would have gone the political route right from the beginning. I really don’t like to get into politics that much because it’s a muddy pool to swim in, so to quote Forrest Gump, “That’s all I’ve got to say about that.”