WrestleMania was full of highs and lows for all involved. We saw the end of “The Streak,” which took WWE fans by storm. The Undertaker’s loss might have been one of the most shocking things in WWE history. If you were the WWE in this moment, knowing that there would be a tremendous shock value, you obviously had to keep everything secret of course.
It seemed that very few saw Brock Lesnar winning. Heck, if you have a guy who never loses versus a guy with a 50-50 chance in most of his matches, it’s easy to pick a winner…most of the time. In gambler terms, it’s a sure thing. Forgive me as I scratch this itch of gamblers attachment.
WWE felt that they couldn’t let many know the result of the match beforehand. So only choice people knew. Obviously, the people involved in the match like Undertaker, Lesnar, and Paul Heyman knew. Then you had the obvious people such as Vince McMahon and WWE managing staff Triple H and Stephanie McMahon. After that, there was no one who knew.
Think about this though, isn’t there someone missing from the equation? The referee!
In the WWE, the ref serves as much as a purpose in a match as one might in a football game. They are just as essential to the match as the men involved in the wrestling aspect of it all. They all know the ending of a match so they can be certain they do not count the wrong guy down. They know every close count as well, as they do not want to mess up a big dramatic moment.
However, in The Undertaker vs Brock Lesnar, referee Chad Patton did not know the ending of the match. All he was told before the match was, regardless of whose shoulders were down, count. The only time he was told not to count was during The Undertaker’s Hell’s Gate submission. Other than that, he was to count like his life depended on it.
There are rumors that Patton was told before the match that, like always, The Undertaker would come out the victor. If this is true, imagine the shock he must have had when Brock Lesnar won. He was just as shocked as the WWE fans in attendance. The WWE has been known to pull shockers on us in the past, but no one thought WWE would end “The Streak” the way they did.
Obviously the WWE shocked us this time around and we were all happy they could do so. However, it is interesting that they went so far to do it that they didn’t tell the ref or anyone in the back. The one constant at WrestleMania, Undertaker winning, is now gone. So WWE’s WrestleMania will now be at an area where you can never expect anything to go as you thought. That is both scary and refreshing.