Brock Lesnar is the WWE’s top champion. He’s being presented as an unstoppable beast. The story revolves around Lesnar’s willingness to take the title and sit at home with it rather than defend it on a regular basis. We’re heading into a major pay-per-view where the #1 babyface will seek to end the reign of terror that is Brock Lesnar.
If you’re a historian looking back at this years after the fact, can you tell which year this article is being written in? Which month? Which PPV? How about which babyface we’re referring to?
Brock Lesnar initially made his return to the WWE back in 2012. He’s been in basically this role of sporadic big match appearances ever since. With the exception of a string of losses early on, he’s held a world title for what seems like that entire time.
Since Brock Lesnar’s initial return for a match with John Cena at Extreme Rules 2012, a lot has happened. The Shield formed, broke up, and had several reunions until Dean Ambrose opted to leave the company. CM Punk walked out of WWE, never to be seen again. Daniel Bryan became the most popular babyface world champ in years, was forced to retire, came back from retirement and turned into a vile heel. NXT turned from a wacky variety show into an electric underground brand all it’s own. The advent of pay-per-view gave way to a little thing called the WWE Network. TNA went through several name changes as they dropped out of the #2 promotion in the US, ultimately making way for the upstart AEW.
A lot has changed. But Brock Lesnar is still here. Still doing this.
My point is simple: in wrestling, things move very quickly.
It didn’t necessarily always used to be that way but atleast since the 90s, that’s always been the vibe. Wrestling is an ever-changing, ever-evolving industry. As an example, consider the timeframe spanning from November 9th, 1997 to April 1st, 2001. For the record, that would be the date of the Montreal Screwjob up to WrestleMania X-Seven, where Steve Austin turned heel six days after the final episode of Nitro.
Those events and everything that transpired between them happened in three years, four months and 23 days. This is not an aberration. This is just how wrestling tends to work. Time doesn’t move in wrestling the same way it does in the rest of the world, of that I’m positive.
If we’re being very, very optimistic, we might say that Sunday could be the last time Brock Lesnar holds a world championship. For the record, this time it’s Seth Rollins once more challenging him, and the event in question is SummerSlam 2019.
In case it was so long ago that you forgot, this all basically began at SummerSlam as well. SummerSlam 2014 is where Brock Lesnar defeated John Cena for the WWE Championship, and he’s had a stranglehold on world titles basically ever since.
That timeframe is much more obvious than the one I gave above but I calculated the difference anyway. I just think spelling it out makes you feel it a bit more: four years, 11 months and 25 days. That’s what would theoretically separate the beginning of this saga from it’s end.
The novelty of this has long-since worn thin.
I wish I could call this longform storytelling and tell you this was a good thing. A hearkening back to simpler times where Bruno Sammartino held the WWF title for seven years… and then had a second reign where he held it for five more. But no. If that was ever the intention, and it surely was not, then this just goes to show how little the concept fits with modern wrestling audiences these days.
Sure, at first it was sound. He’d appear infrequently, keeping him special, maintaining an allure of exclusivity to everything he did. And so everything he did became must-see. His matches, while usually not long, would be explosive, terrifying, a spectacle in every sense. He was the most effective monster heel to have ever existed, a natural born destroyer who turned anyone, even other killers, into bonafide underdogs.
But then five years passed and the act has really not evolved at all. In fact it’s only devolved, even as the whole industry surrounding it is in the midst of reshaping itself. The world of wrestling is so different now, even compared to 2014.
It’s really only now settling in that it really happened. Brock Lesnar truly killed John Cena as a world champion. He held the WWE title for literally two weeks in 2017… that’s it. That’s his only brush with the top prize since he lost to Lesnar. And now Cena’s faded away so much that he didn’t appear in any capacity at WrestleMania this year, the first time that’s happened since his main roster debut in 2002, the same year Lesnar emerged…
It’s literally part of the story that this cycle never ends.
Wrestling moves so fast, the rest of WWE still moves so fast in a lot of ways… but Lesnar is unmoving. Lesnar is unchanging. In casual conversation, I talk about ‘wrestling time’ the way some might talk about dog years. As in, three months in wrestling time might as well be a year elsewhere. Well God help me, it feels like he’s been the world champion for an entire lifetime.
Imagine a world where Roman Reigns’ push somehow worked in the exact way Vince McMahon dreamed up. A world where everyone laughed and popped huge when he spat out ‘suffering succotash’ and overcoming Kane and the Big Show in 2015 made him a legit contender. With WWE’s current hero, John Cena, vanquished after finally finding a monster he couldn’t overcome, Reigns would emerge as the face of a new era and be the man to conquer the conqueror.
It’s amazing to think this could’ve ended right there under the right circumstances, with Lesnar’s reign of terror diminished to merely seven or eight months. No one knew. No one had any idea what they were doing by rejecting this corporation’s chosen poster boy. To this day, the WWE is still merely reacting to all this, trying to figure out a way that they can make a new ace through Lesnar. It seems motivated by a want to save face and prove he’s worth the millions they’ve invested in him, honestly. Thus, they’ve held off on definitively defeating him ever since.
In the process, Lesnar has effectively jumped the shark.
I’m not talking about him putting the briefcase up to his ear like a Boombox and calling it a Beastbox, though yes, it did make him a fair bit less intimidating. But the period in which Lesnar endlessly teased cashing in said briefcase, used week in and week out to boost ratings on a false promise… finally killed the allure once and for all. Finally, even the promise of Brock Lesnar couldn’t get people to tune into Raw. Hell, the promise of maybe seeing the cash-in couldn’t even get people to buy tickets for Stomping Grounds.
This has run it’s course. If we’re being honest, it did a long time ago and WWE’s just tried to pretend otherwise. It’s time to face facts. It’s time to accept that it just isn’t going to happen. There’s a new wrestling war on the horizon now. WWE can’t allow themselves to still be stuck on this issue.
It’s long overdue. It’s time to slay the beast.
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