Will A Boise Native Surprise Us At WWE’s Epic Royal Rumble This Weekend?
This weekend is one of Professional Wrestling's most significant events. To understand how important, we'll compare it to football. In football, you have to win a conference championship game to get into the Super Bowl. In the case of the WWE, the Super Bowl is called WrestleMania. It takes place over two nights in April. The conference championship game is the Royal Rumble, and it takes place in San Antonio's Alamodome on Saturday.
The event is fun to watch, even for those unfamiliar with the (sport). It starts with two wrestlers in the ring, and every two minutes, another wrestler enters. There are 30 entrants in the match, and the last one standing gets to face the WWE Undisputed Universal Champion at Wrestlemania.
Beginning in 2018, the WWE added a Women's Royal Rumble match. The winner competes for the Women's Championship at WrestleMania.
Idaho doesn't have a very storied history with pro wrestling. Only three televised events have ever happened in the state. The most recent one was twenty years ago when WWE's Smackdown taped an episode at the BSU Pavillion (now ExtraMile Arena).
There also haven't been many successful wrestlers from Idaho. There was a female independent wrestler named Carla Jade from Boise. She hasn't wrestled since 2013. Jason Jaxson, a wrestler born in Pocatello, worked one tag team match for the WWE in 2015.
The most successful wrestler from Idaho is Boise's, Torrie Wilson. After becoming Miss Galaxy in 1998, she went to World Championship Wrestling, a company that competed with WWE until the early 2000s. In 2001, she moved to the WWE. Her career lasted until she retired in 2008. She may not have won any championships, but her popularity got her on the cover of Playboy in 2003. In 2019, she became a member of the WWE Hall of Fame.
If the rumors are true, Boise-born Torrie Wilson could return in this weekend's Royal Rumble. She has participated in the event before. She was a surprise entrant in the 2018 and 2021 editions. It would be a massive upset for her to win, but seeing our hometown WWE Superstar participate would be great.
You can watch the Royal Rumble on the Peacock streaming service on Saturday at 6pm.