How to Make a Monster
The beginner’s guide to Ryback, the WWE superstar who’s headlining Hell in a Cell
Written by The Masked Man from Grantland.com.
Sunday night, Atlanta, Georgia. It’s Hell in a Cell time, kids. It’s a night of gruesome determinism, a pay-per-view built around a match that takes place in a rough cross between the Thunderdome and an S&M dungeon, and the rules are only incidental to the proceedings. It’s a marathon of pain and violence, the only match in the WWE playbook that advertises actual physical peril: Two men enter, one man leaves. Inside that cage on Sunday will be your WWE champion, CM Punk, but facing him will not be his longtime rival, John Cena, nor will it be Sheamus or Randy Orton or Daniel Bryan or any other opponent vetted with wrestling experience and well-crafted backstories. Instead, his opponent is Ryback, and even though there’s something vaguely familiar about this adversary, if you haven’t been following wrestling closely since WrestleMania, you probably have no idea who that is. So how the hell did Ryback end up in such a big match?