wrestling / Columns
The 8 Ball: 8 Ways to Make Seth Rollins’ Title Run Memorable
Seth Rollins is about to have a very good two weeks. At Payback this Sunday, he’s going to pin Dean Ambrose, then he’s going to survive seemingly impossible odds in the Elimination Chamber. While it is possible the WWE could surprise us (and I’m for that), Rollins most likely is putting the Good Wrestling Seal of Approval on his championship run. That said, while wins are nice, they don’t elevate a performer by their lonesome. How you win matters, as does what you do in between your wins.
The previous Authority champion, Randy Orton, routinely stepped up to get big wins when they counted, but the rest of the time he was getting his balls cut off. Rollins has been on that track ever since his WrestleMania win. Simply put, the WWE needs to do something more creative with him than make him Randy Orton 2.0. This is a guy who should be a central player in the WWE drama for the next decade. His first championship run should stand out. It should garner him some respect, even if it’s grudging respect. Most of all, it should leave us hungry for more Seth Rollins in the main event.
So that’s the task set in front of the Magic 8-Ball this week: make Seth Rollins’ championship run awesome.
This one almost should go without saying. It’s that obvious. Rollins had one of the most over finishers in the business and he’s been shorn of it. Makes no sense to me. The whole head protection rationale for dropping it seems bizarre, It’s fake, right? I mean, he’s not really stepping on another guy’s coconut. The opponent puts his hands on the ground and then pretends to drive his face into them. It’s as dangerous as a superkick, which the Usos hit half a dozen times a match. I would assume that causes less head trauma than any single suplex variation (which invariably causes your brain to rattle around inside your skull). Something’s fishy in Denmark with the whole “Curb Stomp is dangerous” line of reasoning. I’m not a conspiracy theorist by nature, but it seems plausible Vince McMahon didn’t want a heel champ to have a popular finisher. Rollins was in danger of becoming a fan favorite after pinning Roman Reigns at WrestleMania. Taking away his finisher might have been an attempt to create the good/bad alignment the company desired. Yet Rollins’ Curb Stomp was the sort of decisive weapon a true champion needs, a move that can beat you on your best day. Time to put it back in Rollins’ arsenal.
Lots of problems with the current Kane-centric main event storyline, chief one being that no one gives a rat’s ass about Kane. Yet it goes deeper. Rollins supposedly formed the top faction of the 2000s in the Shield. Why isn’t he bringing in another badass talent to be his heavy hitter? Imagine Cesaro in that role? That’s main event-caliber protection. In fact, if Rollins had Cesaro as his enforcer, I’d have the champ work nothing but tag matches in between major events. First off, it would solidify the notion that a 1v1 against the champ is a rare privilege you’ve got to earn. Second, it would keep challengers getting their hands on the champ to a minimum. On the most recent Raw, Rollins ate finishers from Ambrose, Reigns and Orton and it didn’t really feel special. Why? Because laying out the champ happens way too often. Third, it would create intrigue as to who exactly is the top challenger. In most cases, only one of the faces vying against a Rollins + enforcer tag team is going to get the next title shot. It would allow the champ to sow dissent in the ranks of the challengers. Fourth, this applies the NBA measure of greatness. Are you so good that you make the other folks around you better? If Rollins could put a guy like Cesaro over the top, he’d get a rub from it. He’d be the guy with the golden touch.
A decade ago Travis Pastrana became a worldwide phenomenon when he did a double backflip on a motorcycle and it went viral on YouTube. Exponentially more people saw it after the fact than when it aired live on ESPN. We’re even further down that road now. 2015 virality comes in the form of Vines, Instagram, GIFs and memes. Seth Rollins is kind of built for this universe. Think about what he’s done in the past year: the suicide dive from the stands at Extreme Rules 2014, his turn on the Shield, the Ambrose Curb Stomp onto the cinder blocks, his near cash-in at Night of Champions, the cage fall at Extreme Rules, the flying elbow onto Brock Lesnar at the Royal Rumble, the Phoenix Splash at the Royal Rumble, taking the best RKO ever at WrestleMania, his WrestleMania cash-in. The man is a human highlight film for a world with a short attention span. Turns out that the WWE, which has an increasingly aging audience, desperately needs to reach the teens and twentysomethings for whom social media is a second skin. Seth Rollins’ latest mind-blowing stunt is going to resonate with them a lot more than yet another “never give up” promo from John Cena. Let Rollins continue to deliver must-see moments, sending the viral message that the WWE has a must-see champion.
File this under “must be done.” You’d think that with all those marketing folks on the WWE payroll, they’d have started calling this the Network Era last year, but it hasn’t happened. When Rollins emerges victorious from the Elimination Chamber he should stick his face in a camera and shout “Welcome to the new era of the WWE, my era, the Network Era!” Simple thing to do, but sometimes you need to underline the obvious. Rollins is the first of what should be a wave of new champions. He’s the guy planting the flag for his generation. Don’t do it quietly. Don’t assume we’ll all take notice and understand that a changing of the guard is underway. Have him make it crystal clear. How we watch the WWE has changed and who rules the roost in the WWE is changing too. You only get one first and, for better or worse, Rollins is at the head of his class (next youngest former WWE/WHC champion is Jack Swagger). Let the world know the future has arrived.
Somewhere in the mind of Vince McMahon is the dictum that all heels must be chickenshit. I know that’s how it’s classically worked in the wrestling business, but it doesn’t work in a modern, televised world. There should be a difference between Rollins being calculating and him being fundamentally afraid of every face who challenges him. What got him over is that he was a bad guy with skill. The Shield didn’t tuck tail and run. When Ambrose came after him last year, Rollins beat the guy at every turn. When he had the chance to supplant Orton as the Authority’s chosen one, he took out Orton. When he got a shot against Brock Lesnar, he (kayfabe) broke Brock Lesnar’s friggin’ ribs. This Orton 2.0 act, where they take a guy who has established himself as legit and then saddle him with regular losses and a never-ending crisis of confidence, has got to stop. Heel or face, this guy is supposed to be the best in the business, not some bullshit pretender who lucked his way into the belt. I’m assuming they put Rollins over at WrestleMania instead of Reigns because Rollins felt more like the guy who had earned the spot at the top. Well, keep with that train of thought and save the chickenshit for mid-card heels like the Miz. The WWE need look no farther than NXT to see how to book a strong heel champ. Kevin Owens is driven, opportunistic, devastating in the ring, and exudes confidence rather than arrogance. Sends the message that you need to be a man to hold that title.
More than ever, we live in a brains-driven world. We always have to a degree, but it becomes even more pronounced in the Information Age. You can see the effects everywhere. We celebrate the mad geniuses who made their millions with brilliant ideas more than the frat boys with family money who bullshitted their way into slightly larger fortunes. Geek culture has gone mainstream. The valedictorian is taking the prettiest girl in school to the prom. In the Scooby-Doo van of life, Velma has become the alpha. Time for the WWE to get on board. Rollins plays a “smart” character. He’s calculating, manipulative and improvisational. Great. Now recognize how truly dangerous that makes him. Seriously, a guy thinking two steps ahead of the competition is an infinitely tougher opponent that a big bag of muscles. The wrestling business in general doesn’t book smart all that well and the WWE in particular has the habit of making “smart” synonymous with being a pussy. It shouldn’t be. Smart is scary. Smart won’t just beat you, it will eradicate any future threat you might pose. When smart is coming after you, you might not even realize it until you’ve already been laid low. In this case, instead of having Rollins constantly try to avoid title matches he knows are inevitable, have him pick fights more than they pick him. Have the champ chasing his opponents more than they chase him. On top of everything else, it sets up a cool story when someone finally outmaneuvers him. As it is right now, he’s getting outmaneuvered on a weekly basis. Not very smart.
Generally speaking, in the wrestling business when you want to climb to the top of the mountain, you’ve got to knock someone else off of it. John Cena nominally was the guy on top for most of the past decade. Yet ever since SummerSlam 2014, that perch belongs to Brock Lesnar. And since then, no one has done more damage to Brock Lesnar than Seth Rollins. He stepped on Lesnar’s skull at Night of Champions and we didn’t see Brock again for months. He “broke” Brock’s ribs at the Royal Rumble. Finally, he took Brock’s title at WrestleMania. That’s an impressive run against the WWE’s current indomitable monster. Only thing left is getting a clean, or at least semi-clean, win over Lesnar. That’s how you elevate Rollins to the higher rungs of championdom, making it all the more meaningful when someone else takes the belt from him. Plus, Rollins did some great work on the mic matching wits with Paul Heyman prior to the Royal Rumble. Seth is ideally positioned to be a guy who can fight Brock in the ring and play head games with Heyman out of it.
The storyline most begging to be done in the WWE is WWE vs. NXT. Being the original NXT champion and current WWE champion, Rollins would make for a fascinating central character in that drama. Maybe he’s a double agent. Maybe he rightly wants to stem the tide of future challengers flowing in from NXT. Maybe it causes him to break from the Authority, since NXT is HHH’s baby. So many directions he can go there, almost all of them good. The WWE needs to do something dramatic to shake things up. A wrestling war with constant carnage would do the trick. Along the way you’d get matches like Rollins-Zayn, Rollins-Owens and Rollins-Balor. Or how about Shield vs. NXT? Wipe your chin, you’re drooling. Do it right and Rollins goes down in history as the guy who was champ when the WWE set off the story the defines this generation. It’s the perfect time to up the stakes and Rollins is the perfect champion for it. Earlier I mentioned that Rollins should be the guy to label this new era, but WWE vs. NXT would touch off a new era and Rollins would find himself with a perfect star vehicle.
I take requests.. The purpose of this column is to look forward. What could be? What should be? What is and what should never be? What would make more sense? 411 has plenty of columns that count down and rank things that happened in the past. This is not one of those columns. The Magic 8-Ball is here to gaze into the future. If there’s someone or something you think should be given the 8-Ball treatment, mention it in the comments section. I might pick it up for future weeks.
