On Saturday, Feb 1, 2025, World Wrestling Entertainment held its annual Royal Rumble. For 36 years, the Royal Rumble has been a pinnacle event in the wrestling world. Thirty wrestlers come in one at a time, in two-minute intervals. Wrestlers are removed by being thrown over the ropes with their feet hitting the floor.
Over a dozen giant men are fighting simultaneously at the heights of its chaos. Yet the biggest story from this year’s Rumble was the creator IShowSpeed.
Celebrities are a common sight at WWE events. Heck, John Mellencamp even made it to this year’s Rumble. But creators were specifically featured this year. KaiCenat, a Twitch streamer with 16.1 million followers, was invited to attend. IShowSpeed, a streamer with 35.8 million followers on YouTube alone, was directly asked by WWE COO Triple H to stream the event. That’s why he was backstage on Saturday.
Following an in-storyline injury during the fight, Triple H grabbed Speed, and told him to enter the Rumble. Let’s be clear: while Speed is not a trained wrestler, he is an incredible athlete. Speed ran into the ring, got a loud cheer from the crowd, and was promptly destroyed with a spear by wrestler Bron Breaker. The moment has now been streamed 300+ million times across social media.
Celebrities joining in the Royal Rumble and wrestling itself is not new. Heck, Cindi Lauper was in a WWE faction during the height of her ’80s pop career. The Rumble has seen figures like Drew Carey, Johnny Knoxville, and Bad Bunny enter the event with varying levels of success.
But none have reached the dizzying levels of awareness that Speed brought to Saturday’s event. Carey, Knoxville, and Bad Bunny are all mega stars in their own right. But they’re tourists in the world of professional wrestling. Entertainers who stepped into kayfabe, a world where the lines between reality and story are blurred one punch at a time.
Creators have more in common with pro wrestling. They live in a state of kayfabe themselves.
Kayfabe is a pro wrestling term for treating what happens in the ring as real. It’s an acknowledgment that wrestling is often staged and scripted, but for the magic to happen, everyone needs to treat it as real. After all, even if the winner is predetermined, the match needs to feel like anything can happen.
When someone like Drew Carey enters the Rumble, you know he’s going to be protected. That’s an actor. But Speed is different. He narrowly lost a race in 2024 to three-time Olympic medalist Noah Lyles, the fastest man in the world. He helped make a name for himself by jumping over moving cars.
IShowSpeed’s life is already a lot like professional wrestling. Heightened reality mixed with real danger and comedic storytelling.
In kayfabe, Speed was asked to hang out backstage to stream. That set up the storyline that allowed him to enter the Rumble. Speed knows what it takes to turn a few minutes of screen time into a star-making moment. That’s because that’s how he built his career as a creator. He understood the assignment. Partly because plotting out long-term content requires an understanding of storytelling. Of kayfabe.
Speed isn’t the first content creator to explode into the pro wrestling world. The Costco Guys are regularly featured in AEW. Logan Paul has found a second life in the WWE, becoming one of its fastest-rising stars and winning the United States Championship in 2023. Paul hit the ground running in the WWE, largely because he was already one of the biggest stars in the world.
However, Paul flourished while other celebrities floundered. Like Speed, Paul has incredible athletic ability. Sure, Speed might have been wrecked moments into his in-ring time. However, his athleticism helped him survive an NFL-level tackle. Similarly, Paul is a fantastic athlete who trained his ass off learning wrestling to be ready for his moment.
But stars in pro wrestling aren’t made in a match; they’re made on the microphone. Logan Paul, from the moment he first spoke in WWE, has proven himself a star. The crowd boos him incessantly, and he insults them right back. Everyone smiles because they understand it’s kayfabe.
Paul might be the best example of real-life kayfabe. Someone who sent a lookalike to be interviewed by the BBC. Who fought a boxer who showed up at his house. Hell, there are conspiracy theories that his actual fights are rigged. Paul is, like Speed, someone who has lived their entire adult life performing. Every day of his life, he plays the character of Logan Paul. That doesn’t mean he isn’t a real person. Just that he’s a real person living in a state of unreality.
For the WWE, creators like Paul and Speed are a mouth-watering proposition. Athletes with millions of fans of their own who might not already watch wrestling. More importantly, these are athletes who understand a viral moment. People who know you can sometimes make a bigger splash in two minutes than in half an hour. Creators understand that something doesn’t have to be completely real to be enthralling.
So, if you keep an eye on the creator world, you should start keeping tabs on pro wrestling as well. With 300 million views in just a few days, a company like WWE will seek more creators to help them make viral moments. It may just be kayfabe. But kayfabe is already our reality in our world of viral characters and creators who talk behind avatars.
– John-Michael Bond, Deputy Editor
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