After watching RAW run through the opening round of the Queen and King of the Ring tournaments, Randy Orton stopped by the backstage area of SmackDown to talk about his forthcoming match with AJ Styles in the opening round of the tournament, with both men looking to rehabilitate their pushes after taking losses in Lyon, France at Backlash.
Pretty simple stuff, right? Well, wait, as it gets far more interesting than you might think.
“Well, Byron, there’s a lot I’ve accomplished in my tenure here in the WWE, but one of those things I haven’t accomplished is becoming King of the Ring,” Randy Orton explained. “Now I am just like everybody else, all the guys in the back, all the fans out there, they know how truly great AJ Styles really is, but man, oh man, it feels phenomenal when I hit AJ Styles with an RKO out of nowhere. So, Byron, stay tuned.”
As Orton went to leave the interview area, he stopped himself, turning back to the camera to send out another message not to the WWE Universe but instead to one man in particular: Tama Tonga.
“Do you know what? That reminds me, this is for you, Tama Tonga: last week, you took out my friend, my partner, my tag team partner Kevin Owens at Backlash. You and The Bloodline took him out,” Orton announced. “You think I forgot about that? No, no, no, son, I have not forgotten about that. I can see this bracket, I can see that you are safe and sound on the other side of this bracket, but something tells me, Tama, that you and I are going to cross paths, and when we do, it won’t just be an RKO out of nowhere for you, no, no, no, no, no, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that your a** sees it coming!”
Fortunately for Orton, both he and Tama advanced in the tournament and will face each other in the SmackDown finals in two weeks’ time if they both advance forward one more round. Considering how their matches went this week, it’s safe to say that feels like the direction WWE is looking to go.
Kevin Owens has the same mindset as Randy Orton.
Speaking of The Bloodline’s brutal beatdown of Kevin Owens and Randy Orton at WWE Backlash, KO stopped by The Bump to talk about his feud with the faction, noting that he’s getting pretty tired of running back the same old matches over and over again with no end in sight.
“I’m just getting real tired of these guys. [There’s] seemingly an endless amount of Bloodline-adjacent people. I’m pretty sure they’re not actually related,” Kevin Owens explained via Fightful. “But yeah, I don’t know. I keep hearing rumblings that there’s a lot more. Look, I’ve been dealing with The Bloodline for about four years now. I’m still reeling from Saturday night, to be honest, and I don’t know. It was an incredible night, and it ended in a way that really pissed me off. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s a problem that keeps growing, and I have to put an end to this eventually because it’s been four years, like I said.”
Turning his attention to the new version of The Bloodline, Owens noted that the current incarnation of the faction under Solo Sikoa is nothing like what he’s used to under Roman Reigns, formally declaring them the “Bootleg Bloodline.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a Bootleg Bloodline. No matter what’s happened between me and Roman Reigns and The Usos and everything, I have an incredible amount of respect for those guys because they’ve been on the road,” Owens noted. “They’ve done everything we’ve done, I’ve been all over the world with them. Tama Tonga, I don’t know him. I know he’s been wrestling for a long time, but I have no idea. Up until he showed up until a few weeks ago, I’d never met the guy. I’d never been around him. I don’t know. To come in the way they did, just a real coward’s way. I don’t know, even Solo, he’s been around for a few years, nothing like The Usos, nothing like Roman. I don’t respect this Bloodline. I don’t.”
Will KO’s statement stick? Will fans and wrestlers alike start calling Sikoa’s group the “Bootleg Bloodline,” or will something like the Mid-Line or the BumLine win out in the end? Regardless, it’s safe to say KO and Orton aren’t done with their battle against the faction, and that will continue well into the future.
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