WWE Royal Rumble winners: Where are they now? (1988-1999)

6. Royal Rumble 1993 - Yokozuna

Yokozuna

Following the Royal Rumble match where Ric Flair won the world championship, it was determined that there needed to be something to make the Royal Rumble relevant as far as the current stories being told went. So, it was decided that every year, the winner of the Royal Rumble match would go on to wrestle for the WWF Championship at that year's WrestleMania.

It's kind of like how Major League Baseball decided to award home field advantage of the World Series to the league that won the All-Star Game. Otherwise, those All Star Games would go on forever because none of the players gave a tookus about it. Before 1992, the Royal Rumble was kind of like the MLB All-Star Game of wrestling matches.

Also in 1993, WWF presented their newest Final Level Big Boss Bad Guy, Yokozuna. At the time, the relations between Japan and the United States were a bit frosty, as the economy in the US wasn't so great and the economy in Japan was awesome and how dare they!? So, WWF found a Samoan guy who looked to be the size of a Sumo wrestler, said he was from Japan, and made him a bad guy.

Like a lot of stupid ideas the WWF came up with at the time... it worked...

Yokozuna would go on to defeat Bret Hart for the WWF Championship at WrestleMania IX - and then immediately lose it to Hulk Hogan right afterwards. Of course, the Hulk Hogan reign didn't last very long and Yokozuna would eventually get the title back, and Hogan would end up on Thunder In Paradise before ending up in WCW.

And we all know how that ended.

Unfortunately, Rodney Anoaʻi - after a career that saw him also win Tag Team gold with Owen Hart and even a short-lived face turn that saw his manager, Mr. Fuji, wave the American flag as opposed to the Japanese one (and is something I still consider one of the coolest things ever) - would pass away in England in 2000. He would go on to posthumously be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.