Matt Morgan On Inner Workings Of The Royal Rumble Match, What Happens Backstage, What Wrestlers Know
Just ahead of this year's WWE Royal Rumble, former WWE Superstar Matt Morgan, talked about the inner workings of the Royal Rumble match on Wednesday's edition of the Wrestling Inc. podcast, which you can check out above at the 33:30 mark.
According to Morgan, who was the ninth entrant in the 2004 Royal Rumble, Pat Patterson called the shots in putting together that year's Royal Rumble match. Apparently, talents would be put on the spot to figure out how their respective eliminations would play out.
"2004. My rookie year. My first full year there," Morgan said. "We're in the locker room, Pat Patterson was the quarterback of it, the producer of it, I guess they would say now. And I remember he had this dry erase board. He would list all of our names and then write out who is eliminating who. And then, as he's doing it, he looked at me and said, 'alright, Morgan, you're eliminating Hurricane Helms' or 'then, you're doing this'. And then, really quickly, I'd have to turn to Hurricane and say what I'm going to do to him, like right there on the spot and have an idea right then and there, so they would know. It was really quick thinking, I remember. It was just like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, when they'd get to your name, what you would do to eliminate your talent or get eliminated yourself. And you had to keep it moving because there are some many guys in that Rumble."
Morgan stated that talents are informed of the Rumble's finish ahead of time, though he knew Chris Benoit was winning the 2004 battle royal the week before.
"Yeah, I think in that locker room, that afternoon, I should say, yeah, we knew Chris was going over. I'm pretty sure I knew that the week beforehand. I could be wrong, but we knew going into this, this was designed for Chris Benoit to go over and then eventually go over to RAW as well."
Additionally, Morgan indicated that some talents work out their spots in the ring
"You could go in the ring afterwards, and say, many guys do that, and say, 'look, this is what I'm going to be doing with you. Are you cool with this? I'm supposed to be eliminating you. Are you cool with me doing this or this or that?' And then, if you want to walk through it, you can. You don't walk through the eliminating part. You generally walk through what your comeback is. I'm sure you already know this as fans, every time somebody comes out, he just blows a comeback for whoever's in the ring and you get all your s–t in and you look like a monster for those 10, 15 seconds. Rikishi comes out; he gives everyone a stink face. A-Train comes out; he gives everyone the gimmick in the corner. It's always like that. So if you want to talk about it, you definitely have to talk about it, but you don't have to really walk through it."