Let me tell you what happened at the Intuit Dome on Monday night, and I don’t mean the storyline version.
Raquel Rodriguez took a broken nose during that match, finished the bout anyway, and walked out of Los Angeles as the new WWE Women’s Intercontinental Champion. The SummerSlam go-home show. The building where Raw announced it was going to Netflix and made a generation of new fans. That is the whole picture, and you need to hold all of it at once before you start forming opinions.
First, the respect portion of this column: that is a professional. You break your nose in the ring, a week out from the second-biggest show of the year, on a live broadcast with the whole company watching, and you close the match out? That is not a small thing. Raquel Rodriguez has spent years being positioned as someone who *should* be a main event player, and she just put every skeptic in a headlock and squeezed. Whatever happens next, nobody gets to take that moment from her.
Now the part where I get irritated.
Sol Ruca is twenty-three years old, she’s athletic in a way that makes you forget the camera crew even exists, and she got the Women’s IC Title before she was fully cooked as a character. I’m not here to bury the kid — she was going to be fine eventually. But “eventually” got here before the booking did, and now she drops the title on the go-home show for SummerSlam while Roman Reigns is the one closing the actual television program. You see the problem. The title change that could have breathed oxygen into the women’s division just got treated like the second-to-last segment on a show that had somewhere better to be.
This is the booking habit that drives me absolutely sideways. You have a red-hot SummerSlam weekend in front of you, the Intuit Dome crowd is wired, and you put the title change on the go-home show rather than using the go-home show to make the title match at the pay-per-view feel like something people need to see. The payoff went on free television. Again.
The only way this decision makes sense is if WWE has something significant planned for Raquel at SummerSlam, something that justifies getting the belt on her *now* rather than in a proper match on the card. If that exists, I’ll eat this column. If it doesn’t, Rodriguez just overcame a broken nose for a title run that debuted as an afterthought.
She deserved better staging. So did the championship.
