During an appearance on The Bump, Shawn Michaels spoke about the Royal Rumble and his realization of how important the match truly was.

“I can say this, the first time that I really , it was watching Mr. Perfect, Curt Hennig out there in the Rumble and just everything he did and how he made everything look so spectacular. He didn’t win, he never won a Royal Rumble, but he was the first guy that I watched to where I realized, ‘Oh my goodness, even in this event with 30 other people, you can become the focal point.’ When I saw him do that, that’s when I looked at it from a standpoint of ‘The Rumble can now be a performance engineered type event where you can really get yourself over in a way that I thought was pretty challenging with 30 other people and so much else going on on the show. But after watching Curt that night it just stuck in my brain forever. It wasn’t so much about winning, it was about everything else you did in the duration of the time you were out there.”