If you’ve ever been lucky enough to attend a real live WWE wresting match, you’ll learn a few things about the sport that you can’t exactly pick up from watching Raw on your HDTV. For starters, those arenas are extremely loud! Secondly, you’ll learn to keep your mouth zipped shut unless you want a back hand from some uber fan rooting for every wrestler like he’s kin to them.
Most importantly, however, you’ll learn that the ring looks a lot smaller in real life than it does on TV. And if you think it’s a small space with only two large wrestlers in there, try fitting 40 people in there and then imagine how cramped things will be!
That’s exactly what’s happening on January 30th at the TD Garden in Boston – the WWE is going for another unprecedented move by stuffing 40 of the biggest, boldest and bulkiest wrestlers into one ring for the crème de la crème of professional showboating, the Royal Rumble.
The odds of picking a winner here are in all likelihood about as good as guessing right while you play roulette online. You never know what types of twists and storylines McMahon is working on in his version of the Fortress of Solitude.
However, out of the 40 entrants, here are a few I think we can rule out and be pretty safe in the assumption. Darren Young, Mark Henry, Primo, Rey Mysterio, Tyson Kidd, Yoshi Tatsu, Zack Ryder and David Hart Smith will probably all hit the canvas early, and expect Primo and Rey to make a huge show out if it (I smell some twisted metal).
Going over all 40 in detail would take up 10 posts, so here are the three men we think stand the best shot of winning and why.
Yeah, it might be a little like cheating to you. Hedging bets for the Royal Rumble like it’s an online video poker game is the chicken way to go out. But who has ever predicted these things correctly? For all we know, Steve Austin will appear out of the rafters like Sting redux and win his fourth!
First up, CM Punk is holding good odds of winning. We’ll throw him a nice bone with 8:1 due to the “new” persona of a cult leader he has working and the brewing feud with John Cena. Don’t be surprised to see some possum from this slippery dude, or even some Ric Flair over-the-turnbuckle magic and a last-minute dash for the win.
Next, Alberto Del Rio has been getting massive exposure on Raw lately. They’re forcing him down everyone’s throat and hoping to up his star quality in a hurry! Nothing says star power like winning the first ever 40-man Royal Rumble. So we’ll go as high as 6:1 on this.
Last up, we think the odds-on favorite for winning is wrestling’s biggest international star at the moment – John Cena. With a few movies to his credit and a series of Gillette commercials making every man scared to use the urinal, Cena can find that meeting up with The Miz at Wrestlemania is made easier with a win in the Royal Rumble. We’re going 4:1 on that, making John the top pick.
