In the last couple of years Roman Reigns seems to have overtaken John Cena as the most divisive figure in the WWE. In part, I think that is because Cena has been moved out of the bona fide main event and into more of a special attraction territory and away from the championships themselves. He pops up there occasionally but while in 2010 and 2011 he’d routinely wrestle 6-7 PPV world title matches, he’s had that many since 2012. Super Cena has rarely bested the likes of Lesnar, Reigns and Rollins in the last couple of years, and his most memorable work since the Summer of Punk has probably been over the US Title. Sure, the duelling chants and the hijacking of his theme music still occur, but you get the sense that this is much better natured than it used to be, and it contains less of the vitriol than Reigns receives.
Given that Roman has become that one figure who splits the audience, and has been for such a long time now that it is hard to imagine any way of taking him out of that position should of turning him heel, I wanted to sit down and assess not only why this has happened, but also what my own thoughts are towards Reigns: to see where I fit in compared to what I can see going on around me. That's only been intensified with his high-profile recent mistakes and the slight knock that he seems to have suffered in terms of his position on the show.
In a sense, I think it is kind of telling that I chose to begin this by linking Roman Reigns with John Cena, because I get the sense that the parallels between the two go quite deep. Immediately, you’d say that Reigns has been identified as the natural successor to Cena by the company and catapulted into that position. And more than anything else, I suspect that is probably the biggest part of the problem.
I don’t really believe that the audience on the whole is naturally contrarian, just as I don’t believe that there is any real thing as the ‘IWC’ in the west anymore. You don’t have to be a nerd to be on the Internet in the way you did in the 1990s and if you’re a wrestling fan, there’s probably going to be some level of online engagement with the industry. If you don’t believe me, consider the effort WWE put into developing their social media, and that John Cena has nearly eight and a half million twitter followers. Roman Reigns has nearly two, so still has a long way to go to catching up. But to put this into perspective more people follow those guys than buy Wrestlemania. So while there are people that would cheer Kevin Owens if he were working a child molester gimmick and would boo Roman Reigns if it were proven that he was the second coming of Jesus, Buddha and fucking Odin rolled into one, I believe they are in a minority. The issue with Cena, which Reigns seems to have inherited, runs deeper than just being something knee-jerk.
The evidence that I’d point to for that comes because what I think the two have in common is that they’ve both been so clearly selected by the company to run with the ball, and elevated to a position for which they were not yet ready. In the case of John Cena, I can only speak for myself but I remember feeling as if the whole push was rushed. Sure, his supporters could point out that very few others were stepping to the plate, and when Eddie Guerrero’s title reign didn’t go to plan and Brock Lesnar bowed out of the company then there weren’t an awful lot of alternatives. But even so, Cena found himself at the top of the card and looked like a second-tier player. It would the summer of 2006 before I remember any of his main event work fondly. If you were being hypercritical, you’d point to the fact that he was working with Edge – an after a few false-starts of his own by this juncture Edge had become one of the company’s more reliable hands. But even if you aren’t going to give most of the plaudits to his Canadian dance partner and argue that it takes two to tango, you could still point to the fact that by the time this rolls around Cena was a two time world champion, with a combined spell of 413 days, and he was still as green as goose-shit (for the record, I’ve no idea if goose-shit is green, but I’ve always loved that phrase). Someone who had achieved very little as a main event player (based on in-ring terms at least) had spent more time as WWE Champion than Superstar Billy Graham, Ric Flair, The Undertaker, The Rock, Shawn Michaels, Kurt Angle…. in essence someone who had proven nothing at the top level was being pushed so hard he was bypassing legends of the business like it was nothing.
My theory is that many of the people who’d supported Cena as an entertaining upper-midcard wrestler began to resent this over-push, this decision to go too early, and that it became very difficult to break this. Improvements in his in-ring ability didn’t seem to ever win people over. His run with Edge produced some excellent bouts. He wrestled for the best part of an hour with Shawn Michaels in London in the PWI match of the year. While it’s probably the worst of the Ironman matches he did go for an hour with Randy Orton, which tells its own story. And yet while Cena was still at the top of the card he seemed to represent something that people felt was wrong with the direction of the company – not a PG/R-rated division, although that also became a stick to beat him with, but a corporate versus grassroots distinction. No matter how many times they booked Cena against the McMahons, it was undercut by the ever-present knowledge that Cena was their guy, and not ours.
Now, Randy Orton had a similar trajectory in a sense. You go back to Evolution and the break-up of the stable and you can see that Orton was selected for the main event push before Cena. It bombed massively, if you’ll remember, and it took them several years to really trust Randy to run with the world title again, it coming in 2007 by which point he’d had time to build up a certain resonance with the fans that wasn’t there before. While I was one of the big advocates for Orton during his Evolution days I tend to think he’s never really become a must-see performer and is generally better working when there is less pressure on him (often my favourite Orton matches come half-way up the card and most people would consider them forgettable), but while Cena was pushed to the moon, Orton’s push was stalled, and restarted at a later date. He’s still been given far too many chances to get to the top level and so many of his, uh, ‘mistakes’ have been overlooked, both in-and-out of the ring, but he’s never been subjected to the kind of hate that Cena has. Put simply, Cena and Orton were both earmarked stardom way before the average member of the audience ever saw them, but only one of them was developed in such a way that it caused resentment.
Roman Reigns has the same kind of issue as Cena, but he has the added misfortune that the thing that put him over the top in the first place now highlights his weakness. He was placed with two more seasoned workers, given the enforcer role, and encouraged to make the most of his size and his brooding presence by coming across with a highly laconic promo-style. This definitely helped to cover most of his downsides in the early days. But I can remember even back then having discussions about who would be the breakout star of The Shield. I always stated that I thought it should be Rollins, but that it would be Ambrose. I’m happy to admit that I got that wrong and Rollins reached the top of the mountain first. But I was stunned that even then that some people – admittedly a minority – were picking Roman. He couldn’t wrestle anything like Rollins, and that’d be shown up in singles matches. He couldn’t talk like Deano, which would be shown up the minute he stood alone in the middle of the ring with a microphone. It made little sense.
And yet, they were right: Roman was the chosen one and he was pushed to that level. But we were right too, because for a long time nothing clicked with him. The matches weren’t there, not helped of course by the inevitability of his winning pretty much all of them. The promos hadn’t developed, and neither had the characterisation as he steered as close to his Shield persona as he could, while the other two renewed or reinvented themselves.
I’d never been a Roman guy, as you can tell from this. I’d always preferred the other two – I was impressed with Ambrose’s talking from day one, while I’d caught some Tyler Black matches in Ring of Honor and thought that Seth looked like top-tier material even then. And I’ll admit that I fell into the habit of disliking Roman in that period – not least because as a Daniel Bryan fan, Roman’s meteoric rise seemed to come at the expense of my favourite. Keep that in mind, because it’s coming back in a second.
Now, Roman has obviously come on quite some distance since then. He’s had some terrific matches, including the one with Daniel Bryan, and plays his part well. But much like with Cena it almost doesn’t matter anymore – he is tainted with the aura of the ‘chosen one’.
There is any number of ways in which you can divide wrestling fans, but one that seems to exist now is between a very traditional type of fan, and what I’d suggest is a ‘fan-led’ mentality. The traditional type of fan basically watches the product and reacts the way the story suggests that they should. John Cena and Roman Reigns don’t alienate the audience after all, they just split it. You go to some towns and they are heroes.
But on the other side are those who believe that they should be steering the show. They’ll resist what they see as any attempt to manipulate them into feeling or thinking a certain way. They certainly aren’t going to be told who to like by anything as tawdry as a storyline. And they will resist any kind of narrative coercion. These are the people who shouted Daniel Bryan regardless of who was entering the Royal Rumble in 2015.
I used the word tradition a moment ago, but although this is a new way of thinking about it there is an element of harking back to older days as well. Because in the past the main event was determined by fan reaction, and if you didn’t get there and maintain it then your push was terminated and they’d turn to someone who could sell the tickets. There was no progressing with a babyface who got booed for months and months until people turned around. The fans, essentially, told the promoters who was best for the spot. Over the last 30 years or so the WWE haven’t really had to abide by that. They went out and got Hogan, already the hottest wrestler in the US, and on a couple of occasions they had to be steered by fan reactions – Bret Hart in 1992, Steve Austin in 1998. But these were dictated largely by exceptional circumstances. In the case of Ultimate Warrior, Shawn Michaels, Yokozuna, and even Triple H to a degree, they’ve been able to choose who they want to take the mantle because they were either the only game in town, or so far clear of any competition that they don’t need to worry about alienating the fans. They can follow their own ideas and instincts rather than taking the pulse of the audience.
It’s telling, though, that when they have broken with that they’ve hit more memorable points. The Summer of Punk, in many respects, marks the creative high point of the last few years. Say what you like about CM Punk, but I maintain that at that point, had the angle been handled correctly, he had a better chance than anyone since Austin and The Rock of becoming a genuine break-out star. Unfortunately it was botched, and royally. Daniel Bryan and the Yes Movement was another point where they seemed to pivot away from their natural instincts and follow a more organic current, and one has to wonder how that might have ended had Bryan’s injuries not ended things prematurely. And Dean Ambrose, now, seems to be potentially the third instance of this in this decade, benefiting from Reigns public misstep with the Wellness policy.
Ultimately, Reigns will never win over those people in his current guise – not for what he is or does, but for what he represents. I personally have no real problem with the guy anymore, and think that the worst of the criticisms he receives are ridiculous and downright ignorant, but due to the associations that were built up when I felt that he wasn’t ready for such a prominent role it is hard to really get behind him. Even when I think other people are piling on unfairly I don’t so much support him as feel sorry for him. Staying on current course will never change things up because he’ll always split the crowd the way Cena did, only more so.
But there are a couple of ways to mix that up a bit and produce different results. One is to accentuate his positives and minimise the negatives. I’d reduce his promo time, go back to his ‘laconic’ style, and probably always make sure that there is someone like a Michael Cole or backstage interviewer in there to minimise the amount of time he needs to be talking. Play up the tough guy image, and make him a man of few words: give him an air of mystery to go with the obvious intensity. That, along with a few shifts in presentation to show an evolution of character, could go a long way.
The other thing you could do is throw your hands up and turn him heel. Such a public signal that you’ve abandoned the idea of Roman Reigns as top babyface ad infinitum would inevitably shake up notions of the man which are already kind of set. This last wouldn’t necessarily be my solution – but it would work.
The short and long of this, though, is that it’s another time the McMahon’s have chosen a top babyface, and completely misunderstood what it is that a huge portion of their fan base want to see. And if they are that out of touch, it’s going to be difficult for anyone thrust into that role in the future. So if you’re a McMahon favourite in the midcard, you’d better hope that Seth and Dean work out long enough for you to be a star on your own merit.