For decades, the WWE has consistently sought ways to remain relevant in the cultural zeitgeist. From Cyndi Lauper and Liberace at WrestleMania I to Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew 37 years later, the list of celebrities and athletes who have made appearances at big-time WWE shows is extensive. The company even made celebrity involvement an integral part of their weekly programming in 2009-2010, when personalities like Bob Barker, Snoop Dogg, and Seth Green famously took their turns as guest
hosts of Monday Night Raw.
When it comes to actually stepping into the ring and competing, the list of celebrities and athletes who have tried their hands at competing in WWE is a little shorter.
In recent years, social media influencer Logan Paul has even become a full-time member of the WWE roster, a year after making his first appearance for the company in 2021. Around the same time, music mogul Bad Bunny took to the squared circle, eventually winning two matches, including a widely-acclaimed Street Fight against Damian Priest at Backlash: Puerto Rico in 2023. This past April at WrestleMania, social media personality IShowSpeed competed in a 6-man tag team match, a little over a year after being absolutely destroyed by a Bron Breakker spear in the Royal Rumble, and even more recently, rapper Lil Yachty has found a spot as the manager and mouthpiece for one of the hottest acts on the WWE roster in Trick Williams.
Amid all the celebrities the WWE has featured over the years, one case from just a few months ago has left a sour taste in the mouths of WWE fans everywhere.
McAfee-Mania Runs Wild
If you’re lucky enough to have already forgotten about the build to the Undisputed WWE Championship match from this past WrestleMania….. well, I apologize. Back at the end of February, Randy Orton earned himself a shot to become a 15-time World Champion when he won the annual Elimination Chamber match. At the time, Drew McIntyre held the gold, but after interfering in the Chamber and costing Cody Rhodes, the Scottish Psychopath was forced to defend the title against Cody the following week on SmackDown. In a very similar fashion to how Punk won the same title from Sami Zayn earlier this month, Cody would go on and beat Drew to set up a WWE Title match with Randy Orton at WrestleMania.
With nearly two decades of history between the two, a showdown between the former Legacy members seemed fitting of the grandest stage that WrestleMania can offer. To set the stage for their match, the two longtime friends met in the ring on SmackDown a week after Cody won the title to sign their ‘Mania contract. Randy, who notably wore a black “RKO Everybody” shirt instead of the blue shirt he had been sporting for months prior, turned heel on Rhodes, delivering a memorable bloody beatdown of the new WWE Champion.
In the weeks that followed, Randy was seen multiple times on a phone call, teasing that somebody had been in his ear and motivating him to break bad for the first time in several years. There were tons of theories thrown out there, some of them ones that would’ve led to some intriguing results. On April 10th, the mystery caller finally revealed themself to be….. Pat McAfee.
In one of the biggest “What the f&@#!” moments in recent memory, the NFL-punter-turned-ESPN-talking-head spent the weeks leading up to the biggest show of the year cutting awful promos and being Randy Orton’s hype man for a match that had 18 years of history to draw from and most certainly didn’t need the help. Some of us initially gave the angle the benefit of the doubt to see where it would go, but after just a few weeks, finding anyone, anywhere in the IWC, who thought the McAfee/Orton alliance was working was a tall task.
The speculation surrounding the storyline led many to believe that certain TKO executives had pulled some strings to get the next Sylvester Stallone involved in one of the biggest title matches in recent memory. While the WWE creative team, led by Triple H, had taken its lumps in recent months (and deservedly so), McAfee being shoehorned in for a big spot at WrestleMania seemed to be arranged above their heads. For weeks, they tried to do what they could to make the angle work, even having Cody destroy the set of Pat McAfee’s daily ESPN talk show after hours, but for most fans, the ‘Mania main event was tarnished beyond repair.
Since moving their PPVs PLEs to the Worldwide Leader in Sports late last summer, the WWE has been heavily featured on ESPN programming, specifically their morning talk shows Get Up and First Take. It makes sense for both the WWE and ESPN to use those shows, as well as the legendary ESPN staple SportsCenter, to advertise WWE shows in hopes of gaining subscribers to their streaming platform. For WWE’s side of things, getting their wrestlers exposure on the huge platform that ESPN provides is a no-brainer.
But never before had such a high-profile storyline been so effectively ruined by a seemingly random celebrity involvement. Pat McAfee had spent parts of the previous 8 years as a WWE personality, beginning with appearances on NXT pre-shows back when their big events were still called ‘Takeover’. But after a hiatus that lasted nearly 10 months, his return by Randy Orton’s side came out of nowhere and was a wet blanket for a feud that many WWE fans had been waiting years for.
To the credit of everyone associated with the angle, it seems like they all read the room and took the L at the end of the day. The stipulation was built in that if Randy Orton lost at WrestleMania, Pat McAfee would leave the wrestling business forever. While we know how wrestling works, Randy lost to Cody, and Pat hasn’t been seen on WWE TV since. In the early stages of the match, Jelly Roll, another celebrity who was in the orbit of the WWE Title in the ‘Mania buildup, took McAfee out with an elbow drop through the announce table. Later, Pat would return in a neck brace and end up getting an RKO from his supposed ally. They tried their best to salvage their Night 1 main event, but for many, the damage was already done.
Knicks One-off Provides a Happy Medium
Since WrestleMania 42 wrapped, celebrity involvement in WWE hasn’t been as prevalent, with the one main exception being Lil Yachty sticking around to manage Trick Williams. The other connection, though, that WWE has fostered with the sports world in recent months is Danhausen’s cursing and uncursing of the New York Knicks.
For the first time in almost three decades, the New York Knicks ran through the NBA’s Eastern Conference playoffs and made it to the NBA Finals. Their path there, though, got off to a shaky start after Danhausen visited known Knicks-lover, Stephen A. Smith, on First Take and cursed them. After losing two of their first three games to the Atlanta Hawks, a Knicks fan allegedly paid an exorbitant amount of human monies on Cameo for Danhausen to uncurse the New York basketball team. The Knicks would famously win their next 13 playoff games and 15 of their next 16 en route to hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy last month. Over the 6 weeks or so of the NBA Playoffs, Danhausen became a cult hero and was inextricably linked to the Knicks.
Fast forward to last week, and WWE was once again a huge part of Fanatics Fest in New York City, a massive, multi-day event that is kind of like the Comic-Con of sports. As a way to cap off the week, WWE scheduled the latest installment of Saturday Night’s Main Event for Madison Square Garden last Saturday night. This event was announced before the NBA playoffs began, but the consistent Danhausen involvement in the Knicks’ championship run made turning it into a Knicks celebration a logical choice.
With NBA Finals MVP and new Knicks icon Jalen Brunson scheduled for an acknowledgment ceremony with World Champion Roman Reigns later in the evening, Knicks fans got their first bit of excitement earlier in the night when Karl Anthony Towns emerged to take out Dirty Dom and JD McDonagh with huge chokeslams, helping Danhausen win his street fight with JD.
Then, later, as Roman Reigns and Jalen Brunson celebrated their domination over their respective sports, MSG villain Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers entered the Garden to Seth Rollins’ theme music. It was all a diversion, as Seth entered the ring from behind for a sneak attack on his SummerSlam opponent. As Seth wound up for a Stomp, Brunson, who recently underwent surgery on his wrist, stepped in the way, preventing Seth’s attack, and allowing Roman to recover and hit a Superman Punch. Rollins and Haliburton would retreat, allowing Brunson and Reigns to continue their celebration. Once again, just a few months after the Pat McAfee debacle, and with just weeks to go before a big PLE, one of WWE’s top storylines involved celebrities from the sports world being thrown into the mix.
This time, though, was different.
Just 48 hours later, when Raw emanated from Detroit, everything was back to normal. Because it’s WWE, recaps of Saturday Night’s Main Event were shown, of course. Roman Reigns didn’t show up for work, as he is so commonly criticized for doing. And although the show wasn’t the best outing the red brand has put together in recent months, there was no NBA player involvement whatsoever.
The MSG show felt like a one-off, and celebrating the Knicks when the WWE was just so happening to be in New York for the week made sense in several ways. As a non-Knicks fan, the show-closing segment wasn’t really something that I cared about, but I can understand why WWE would book it the way that they did. In fact, the only problem I had with it is that Seth Rollins seemingly aligned himself with a villain after weeks of trying to garner babyface sympathy in his feud with Roman Reigns. Could the Knicks celebration have happened off the air and not had anything to do with one of WWE’s top storylines heading into SummerSlam next weekend? Absolutely. But it was very clear after watching Raw on Monday that the MSG event and Brunson and Haliburton getting involved was going to just be a one-time deal.
Did WWE actually learn their lesson?
Whether the McAfee disaster and the Knicks celebration are linked at all is not something we’re likely to know unless WWE decides to feature it in Season 4 of UnReal. But it’s refreshing that, at the very least, they haven’t turned what happened at the MSG show into the focal point of the Reigns/Rollins feud. For me, and many others, there is still meat on that bone. While WWE has rightfully earned the skepticism that many of us have about whether or not they can make this feud interesting, at least we likely don’t have to worry about their match at SummerSlam being tainted by involvement from athletes that many wrestling fans couldn’t care less about.
Most of us aren’t privy to how the WWE/TKO sausage is made and will never know who’s to blame for the Rhodes/Orton WrestleMania match being such a shitshow. For now, it will remain unclear whether or not any of those people actually learned from that disaster and will actually handle celebrity involvement different going forward.
But for now, I, for one, am enjoying the build to SummerSlam A LOT more than I enjoyed the build to WrestleMania. With WWE locked into a relationship with ESPN for at least the next 4 years, this will definitely not be the last wrestling-sports crossover that we see. Polarizing personalities like Stephen A. Smith and Tom Brady are widely rumored to have some sort of mutual interest with the WWE to appear on their programming, and we’ll find out in the coming months if those rumors ever come to fruition. My hope is that the WWE sees that they can have their cake and eat it too. That they can bring in high-profile stars from other genres without sacrificing some of their biggest storylines.
Then again, there’s always the possibility that this’ll get worse.
After all, Logan Paul vs. Tom Brady for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 43 has more than a 0% of happening.
