Watch Bad Bunny Enter The Royal Rumble

Watch Bad Bunny Enter The Royal Rumble

The Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny is a longtime wrestling fan who’s always been public about the stuff. He puts wrestling references in his lyrics and wears Eddie Guerrero shirts in his videos. He cast Ric Flair in his “Chambea” video in 2017. He goes backstage at WWE shows whenever he can. Last year, Bad Bunny released El Último Tour Del Mundo, the first all-Spanish album ever to hit #1 on the Billboard album charts. On that LP, Bad Bunny included a track named “Booker T” — named for the late-’90s/early-’00s WCW and WWE Champion. A month ago, Bad Bunny dropped the video, where he performs the track in an all-black hallway while the still-imposing Booker stares down the camera.

Last night was the Royal Rumble, the second-biggest WWE show of the year. This year, the show was virtual — held in a baseball stadium, but with a “Thunderdome” of fans on video screen surrounding the ring. It’s hard to turn something like that into spectacle, but WWE tried. As part of those efforts, the company brought in Bad Bunny to perform “Booker T” with Booker T himself — essentially recreating the music video on the Rumble stage.

But Bad Bunny’s involvement in the Rumble wasn’t limited to that. In the middle of the show, there was a skit where the bad-guy tag team of the Miz and John Morrison — egocentric Hollywood fame-whore types — tried to convince Bad Bunny to record a song with them. Bad Bunny rebuffed the team.

While an embittered Miz was on his way to enter the ring to join the Rumble later in the show, he used his Money In The Bank briefcase to smash up Bad Bunny’s DJ rig, which was still up on that stage for the express purpose of being smashed. Shortly thereafter, Bad Bunny came out to yell at Miz and Morrison, and while they were yelling back at him, the wrestler Damian Priest came up behind Miz and Morrison, clotheslining both of them out of the ring and thus eliminating them from the Rumble.

This wasn’t enough for Bad Bunny. He still wanted vengeance. So he climbed up to the top turnbuckle and then dove onto Miz and Morrison on the outside. The headline above is admittedly a bit misleading. Bad Bunny was not one of the 30 wrestlers vying for a title shot at Wrestlemania. But he did enter the ring while the Royal Rumble was happening, so I think it counts. Here’s his big moment of wrestling glory:

This was a standard WWE thing — trying to get press attention by bringing in a famous person and having him do a wrestling thing, usually at the expense of its own wrestlers. But I was OK with it because it’s always fun to see someone who loves wrestling get to take part and because Bad Bunny really did the turnbuckle dive. Have you ever been up on a top turnbuckle? It’s really high up there! It’s disorienting! Bad Bunny isn’t a wrestler, but it still takes a certain level of heedlessness to climb up on that thing and throw yourself off. Good for Bad Bunny.

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