Roman Reigns: Where Do We Go From Here?

The wrestling world was turned upside down just after 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday night in Providence, Rhode Island. Roman Reigns revealed that he’s resuming a battle with leukemia and had to vacate the Universal Championship. It was a shocking moment, one of the most shocking I can remember. We’re all dealing with it in different ways.

I’d love to believe that the whole thing is a work.

As we all know, if it happens on television it’s a work. Roman Reigns doesn’t really have leukemia. Its a storyline WWE Creative cooked up in order to get people to cheer the Big Dog. Nothing else worked, right? It helps Dean Ambrose become the most hated heel in years, as he had the unmitigated gall to attack Seth Rollins the same night their Shield brother went out with cancer. Its all setting up Reigns to come back as the conquering hero at WrestleMania, main eventing against his former friend.

Its all an elaborate scheme. I would love for that to be true. Sure, it would be incredibly tasteless and lead to people actually giving up on WWE when they say they do. It’d be worse than when Fritz Von Erich faked a heart attack to try & drum up business for his dying promotion. Cancer is not something to be joked about. We’ve all been affected by it at some point of our lives. Either we’ve fought it, or somebody we know has. It sucks. What else can be said about cancer other than it sucks?

It’s tough to overstate the importance of Roman Reigns to WWE in 2018. It’s true that the brand is bigger than everybody and can plug in whoever they want into any slot…but even so, Reigns is the top guy. He sells the most merchandise. He gets the loudest reactions wherever he goes no matter whoever’s on the card. Whether his match goes on last or not, or for a championship or not, it’s the main event of the evening. WWE now faces the task of moving forward without the anchor of their full-time roster and the guy that most of their fans care the most about.

Whether fans loved him or hated him, he was the guy that people had the strongest emotions about. In defense of the haters, I don’t think 99% of them hated Joseph Anoa’i the human being. There’s always that 1% you have to worry about, but most of the haters were innocent. They reacted so strongly against Roman Reigns because he was perceived to be the Chosen One. Anybody who ends up in that slot is going to get the same kind of pushback from a certain portion of the audience. Once they find out who the guy is, they’re going to look for flaws in that guy’s game. Since nobody’s perfect, they’ll always find some flaws.

Was Roman Reigns the perfect wrestler? No. I’ll admit to finding many of his matches less than exciting, especially when they’d go on after 10:00 PM when I’d been up since 4 or 5 AM. He doesn’t have an endless list of great promos like many of the wrestlers pushed as top guys do. These aren’t criminal offenses. It’s WWE in the 2010s.

I will say that Reigns does pass one important test of a viable professional wrestler. He looks like he could kick my ass, and he would have no problem kicking my ass. He’s got a football background that Jim Ross would have constantly mentioned if he was on commentary during Roman’s run. He’s got the Samoan family ties, as the son of a Wild Samoan & brother of a member of Three Minute Warning. You can see why WWE brass fell in love with the guy. I don’t know the man personally, but good luck finding somebody that does know him personally with a bad word to say about him.

Everybody hopes that Roman Reigns is back in WWE rings sooner rather than later. Even the people that don’t like him would prefer that he be around so they have somebody to whine about. As I said on the Twitter, I hope that we can all get back to booing Roman Reigns for no reason very soon.

The question that has to be asked, whether it’s sensitive to or not, is simple: Where do we go from here?

The Universal Championship

If you could possibly feel bad for a belt with some gold pieces on it, you would feel bad for the Universal Championship. Just when it seemed like the title would get a proper champion that would define it with great matches, give it a history & make it something worth fighting for instead of a punchline, it ended. Roman Reigns could have had that great title run that established the Universal Championship as something more than a vanity title for Brock Lesnar or Goldberg or whoever was around at the moment.

Now we’re looking at a Brock Lesnar vs. Braun Strowman match in The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia crowning a new Universal Champion. This is not an ideal scenario under any circumstance. Brock is damaged goods with the WWE Universe because he’s never around. Braun has been damaged by an ill-advised heel turn to make people cheer Reigns over him, and now that Reigns isn’t around it feels really freaking ill-advised.

Oh, and there’s also the fact that it’s scheduled for a show that we’re not even sure is going to happen, that some top WWE names have refused to work, and that a sizeable amount of people won’t watch if it happens, myself included. You almost hope the show is cancelled so they can come up with a better idea to determine a champion. And, well, because Saudi Arabia is run by evil people. But, then, so is my country, so I don’t know how to feel about any of this.

Except, well, icky.

The Turn Heard Around The World

We all knew it was coming. At some point, Dean Ambrose was going to embrace his inner demons and make Seth Rollins pay the price for betraying him back in 2014. Sure, Dean forgave Seth, they did the fist bump and they won the Raw Tag Team Championships a couple of times.

The thing is, people react differently to bad news. Roman going out of action to deal with an illness hit his friends different ways. Seth was fighting to hold back tears throughout the night. His friend’s plight made him sad. Dean got mad. His friend’s plight gave him too many feelings to feel. It re-awakened some negative feelings he had towards Seth, who wasn’t as loyal a friend as Roman was. If Roman goes away, that leaves Dean with Seth, who has already turned on him once. Dean just figured he would beat Seth to the punch.

Seth, to his credit, knew it was coming. Maybe not a double-arm DDT to the floor, which seemed a little excessive, but he knew that Dean was going to kick his ass at some point. Even after Dean forgave him, he knew an ass-kicking was coming. He knows Dean is a crazy guy. A lunatic, if you will. A lunatic that can be set off by the slightest of things, and certainly can be set off by the possible loss of a friend.

The ideal endgame of this storyline is obvious. Roman Reigns returns after fighting off leukemia. The Shield gets back together, and everybody lives happily ever after. I don’t want to think about another ending.

Who could replace him?

I have no good answer for this. I feel like WWE’s answers all involve past stars, which is the wrong direction to go. At least for viewers like me that have zero interest in DX vs. THE BROTHERS OF DESTRUCTION or any of the other crap that draws in Saudi Arabia.

The correct answer is in the Performance Center or the independents. Or maybe not even in the business yet! I don’t think it’s Cody Rhodes or Kenny Omega or any of the other impending free agents, though maybe I’m wrong! I don’t see anybody in NXT that can fit into that slot, though I’m sure plenty of smarks will tell me otherwise. The lack of answers for who could replace Roman Reigns adds to the drama surrounding the future of the wrestling business. We’re ripe for some competition, and we don’t know who the top star really is, if Roman Reigns isn’t around.

I don’t remember a time where the wrestling business has been this interesting since the Monday Night War. We’re heading into a period of the truly unknown. The moves people make now could dictate how the next ten years go, for better or worse.

We all hope it includes Roman Reigns. Hopefully the Big Dog gets well soon so the impending wrestling wars can really get interesting.