EDITOR’S NOTE: Another bit about Jelly Roll, so as to best convey the sheer amount of Jelly Roll on this show.
Another week of “WWE SmackDown” came, and Jelly Roll was here once more, wrestling Kit Wilson and embedding himself further into the WWE Championship feud between Randy Orton and Cody Rhodes. Jelly is the latest in the long line of wrestling fans who became celebrities and appealed to the latent clout-chaser within a promoter, leveraging their fame and talent in one industry to yoink someone’s spot from beneath them despite the fact that it is their chosen vocation. They’re the ones with stacked medical bills because of it.
Oh, and they’re also normally much better at it. And with Jelly, endearing as one may find him, that is most definitely the case. His match with Wilson was as good as Wilson is in the ring and as not bad as Jelly could be. He didn’t drop Wilson on his head, and he knows how to do the moves. It’s just doing the stuff in between the moves that he doesn’t excel at, and he’s also just not believable at all.
Then he won the match, which, sure, he is the more popular guy, objectively speaking. But then he returned in the main event… why? Like seriously, why is Jelly Roll embedded within the WWE Championship program? It’s Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton feuding; they have plenty of well-known wrestling friends and third parties that you could bring in if you really needed to. But aside from that, they didn’t need anyone else.
This was supposed to be one of the best feuds, the easiest stories to tell, and it’s being presented as Orton and Rhodes face one another, but first, what does Jelly Roll think? In the middle of a brawl between Orton and Rhodes, a really, really long brawl between Orton and Rhodes, Jelly Roll came down to the ring to get between them and, I guess, try to stop them from fighting – because that always works, doesn’t it? And then he got hit with a terrible-looking RKO and melodramatized the rest of the show with his face on the mat.
Great effort on his part, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the very fact that there is a celebrity embroiled in a feud set to main event WrestleMania. Especially when they’re nowhere near the level of a Bad Bunny, or even a Stephen Amell – and maybe he would have even more of a reason to be involved with Rhodes.
At the close of the show, the focus was more, “Oh, Jelly Roll got RKO’d,” rather than what was going on beyond the two men who will be fighting for the industry’s top title. And that becomes quite damning for the industry, the more one thinks about it.
Written by Max Everett
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