WWE just wrote an actual legal-sounding rule into a wrestling show: touch your rival first before your next match, and you lose every future shot at the title. That’s not a hype angle so much as a company that didn’t trust two of its top guys to behave themselves for three more weeks.
Nick Aldis laid out the terms in Toronto on Aug. 21, standing between Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton like a hallway monitor with a headset. If either man makes first contact before they meet at Sunday Night’s Main Event, the aggressor never gets another WWE Championship opportunity. Fightful reported the whole exchange, and it reads less like a wrestling angle and more like a workplace memo with pyro.
This whole mess traces back to SummerSlam, when Orton’s SummerSlam return ended with an RKO that cost Rhodes his shot at the title against CM Punk. Add in twenty years of history between these two, Legacy stable days included, and you’ve got a grudge old enough to legally drink.
Then Boston happened. Orton jumped Rhodes at TD Garden right before his match against Sami Zayn, and the fight refused to stay inside the ropes, spilling into the crowd, back to ringside, Orton wedging Rhodes between the steel steps and the announce table hunting for a chair shot before Rhodes flipped it with a low blow of his own. WWE’s own recap cuts away right as security wades in.
A fan in the stands kept the camera rolling anyway.
By several accounts, the fight didn’t actually stop when the broadcast did. Rhodes reportedly went straight to Aldis afterward and demanded the match get made official, and it did: Rhodes-Orton is locked in for Sunday Night’s Main Event on Sept. 6 in Atlanta, which happens to be Rhodes’ hometown. The no-contact rule is the fine print nobody saw coming.
All of that landed the same week word started going around that the Scotiabank Arena taping was reportedly the biggest SmackDown gate WWE has ever drawn in Toronto, well over 15,000 tickets distributed for a card headlined by Punk defending the Undisputed WWE Championship against Kevin Owens. WWE hasn’t confirmed a dollar figure and probably never will, but its reportedly biggest SmackDown gate ever in that building landed the same week Aldis had to legislate the Rhodes-Orton rivalry into an actual rulebook.
Orton, to his credit, played along on camera. He agreed to the terms, rebranded himself Mr. Professional, and came after Rhodes with words instead of a chair, calling him American Daydream and wondering out loud if he’s still got the killer instinct.
Rhodes didn’t blink: “when he comes back to me, I’m the one who kills the Legend Killer. And that is not a prediction, that’s a spoiler.”
Watch Aldis deliver the terms himself, standing on business the whole time.
https://twitter.com/WWE/status/2090954711708967028
That’s a general manager sounding like outside counsel on a show that usually treats consequences as optional. It’s the most convincing thing WWE has put on TV in weeks, and it didn’t require a single finisher.
The no-contact rule only holds up if everybody involved actually respects it, and this promotion has a long history of go-home angles “accidentally” running hot. If Orton so much as brushes past Rhodes in a backstage shot next week, we’ll find out fast how real the rule actually is.
This also isn’t the first time an actual fight has broken out on SmackDown this summer, which says more about the temperature in that back hallway than any script could.
WWE didn’t need a twist. It needed a lawyer.
