Jesse Ventura wasn’t on the full broadcast of WWE’s Saturday Night’s Main Event this past weekend.
But “The Body” made sure to make the most of his airtime.
After floating a Jake Paul-Mike Tyson conspiracy theory to Joe Tessitore on the event’s pre-show, Ventura joined Michael Cole and Pat McAfee on the call for a steel cage match between Drew McIntyre and Damian Priest during the main card. And apparently, nobody clued the former governor of Minnesota in on the match’s rules, as he was seemingly caught off guard by Priest being declared the winner after he smashed McIntyre’s head with a steel chair and exited the cage through an unlocked door.
“Wait a minute! How do you win it going out the door?” Ventura asked.
“Well that’s the rules,” Cole began to explain as Ventura cut him off.
“I thought you had to go over the top?” the 73-year-old continued. “What kind of B.S. is that? He can walk out the door?”
While it makes sense that Jesse Ventura, who typically favors the match’s heel, would take issue with a babyface like Priest’s tactics, that doesn’t appear to be what was happening here. Rather than letting the WWE Hall of Famer continue with his ranting, Cole appeared eager to push forward and refocus on the replays, while a recap of the match posted to WWE’s official YouTube account cuts out before Ventura’s post-match commentary would have began.
Having an announcer take issue with the company’s rules — and in theory, its credibility — might have been a big deal for WWE under Vince McMahon, but this is a new era for the pro wrestling promotion’s presentation. If McAfee can spend a show in Toronto ranting about the Canadian crowd booing the United States’ national anthem, then the idea of Ventura siding with a heel over a babyface is small potatoes, even if he threw the match’s rules under the bus in the process. For the record, when Ventura was a full-time commentator in the 1980s, he urged a heel Big Boss Man for trying to win a cage match by walking through the door.
If anything, WWE fans should just be grateful that the match in question didn’t feature Ventura’s longtime on-screen (and off-screen) nemesis Hulk Hogan. Had the Hulkster been the one to win the match by merely walking out the door, we may have never heard the end of it.