WWE Royal Rumble 2015 Report: The fall of Roman Reigns

Roman Reigns won the 2015 Royal Rumble. He will wrestle in what has to be his, and any pro wrestlers, dream match: the main event of Wrestlemania for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. He even had his cousin, one of the biggest superstars of all time, The Rock, come out and give him a huge rub to help jump-start him on the Road to Wrestlemania. This should be his career-defining moment.

Instead, it could very well be the beginning of the end.

Roman Reigns now represents everything that drives WWE fans crazy about the WWE and the way they operate. He represents the disconnect between Vince McMahon and the fans. He is the man that we are being told to like instead of being worked into liking him.

And that’s the big distinction that the WWE seems to have completely forgotten. Yes, we, the wrestling fans. are all marks. We aren’t and shouldn’t be in charge of booking. We can’t see the big picture. We don’t want to manipulate our own feelings and have the patience to let a program play out. We’d rather have a big payoff now.

Big moments in pro wrestling come from that delicate dance, that manipulation of emotions, that longing to see a certain outcome, having it teased and taken away relentlessly. Then, finally, we receive that huge, big emotional payoff to make it all worth it. So, yeah, I understand that we can’t always get what we want and why.

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But that isn’t what’s happening here. This is more like a declaration of war than a delicate dance. It felt as if the WWE went to great lengths to squash what may just amount to a fan rebellion in their eyes. Daniel Bryan came back, but his role is to help promote Smackdown! on its new night, not get another chance back at the belt that he never lost. So in just a few minutes, Bryan found himself unceremoniously tossed from the ring, followed by a cavalcade of people that no one wanted to see in the ring, including the eventual winner of the match. Dolph Ziggler came in as a final beacon of babyface hope only to have that flame quickly extinguished.

We were even robbed of an acrobatic Kofi Kingston spot. Instead of some kind of craziness showing off his incredible athletic ability, he was carried around by the Rosebuds. That spot could have been done by any superstar. It was like we weren’t even allowed that moment of happiness.

So instead, we get Roman Reigns, the babyface we are forced to like. In hopes that the WWE can shove him completely down our throats they brought out the Rock to give him a rub. That failed miserably. It’s a shame too, that moment should have been the passing of a torch, but it was nothing more than a last-minute gambit in hopes of basically stopping the crowd from a full-blown riot.

Next: Power ranking all 28 WWE Royal Rumble winners

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not upset because a guy I didn’t like won. I’m upset because I, like seemingly many other wrestling fans, are nowhere close to any kind of emotionally invested in Reigns as they are into Bryan, Ziggler, or even Cesaro. This business is built on both working fan reactions as well as having your pulse on them when things simply don’t go according to plan. The WWE seems to have stopped checking our pulse months ago and that will cause them to flat-line.

I’ve said it many, many times before in these articles, but the WWE roster is simply too talented to have this happen. Case in point: Seth Rollins, John Cena, and Brock Lesnar put on a match of the year candidate. That effort has been completely buried by the WWE remaining as stubborn as possible into forcing their vision on to us.

The fans don’t deserve this. The roster doesn’t deserve this. Roman Reigns doesn’t deserve this either.

Perhaps it is fitting that Roman’s wrestling alias is a play on the Roman Empire. While there are certainly a multitude of reasons why Rome fell, the fall of Rome serves as an example in popular culture as how even the largest and mightiest of all empires could fall to something as simple as a barbarian horde.

Roman Reigns could very will be Vince’s ideal superstar of the future, but instead of that name trending through Twitter throughout the evening to create buzz for his biggest event of the year, this was:

Vince, the barbarians are at the gates. Pay attention.

A Farewell

Typically, I would use this spot for five general takeaways from the night; however, this time, I bid y’all farewell.

No, this nothing to do with the way this event went down. In fact, I was supremely hopeful that the exact opposite would happen and I would be able to leave FanSided on a high note as the Royal Rumble is usually the one can’t-miss, impossible to botch booking event of the year. So much for the best laid plans…

No, the reason is much simpler. FanSided is a side-project of mine and is actually one of many. However, my day job has gotten quite crazy as of late, making covering the WWE every Monday Night quite hard. Putting out both the RAW Report and the new DVR Guide, both of which I love doing, has become more of a time-consuming, and sleep-depriving, endeavor every week. Further, I will join the ranks of parenthood this summer, meaning my free time will see an even further reduction.

Sadly, multiple things had to give and this was one of the things that did not make the cut.

I want to take this time to thank everyone at FanSided, particularly Mike Dyce who helped get my foot in the door and Jack Jorgensen who has been a spectacular editor to work for. FanSided has been nothing short of a very special place and one that I hope I can return to some day.

I will still watch the WWE, but perhaps not live every Monday. I will still certainly watch NXT which is probably the main reason I will never cancel my WWE Network subscription, so as long as I have that, I’ll certainly tune in live to the PPVs. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and chat me up about the WWE or anything else related to wrestling, sports, and video games.

Finally, I want to thank each and every one of you that have taken the time to read my work. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it–even if the product the WWE put out every week fell short of what we would have liked.

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