Seven Years ago today Roman Reigns won the WWE title on Raw and punched Vince McMahon

This is a script for a video on my YouTube channel, you can find that video here: https://youtu.be/9f_PlWo-XKo

On December 14th 2015 on Monday Night Raw, Roman Reigns would defeat Sheamus to win his second WWE Championship. The whole reason I'm making this video is to acknowledge not just the Tribal Chief, but a bleak point in his career, that he very much came back from. This video isn't as much about Roman through, as it is the way he was booked back then, why the fans couldn't accept him and how strange that feels when watching the Tribal Chief today.

Roman first won the title in the Survivor Series main event just 22 days earlier, in a tournament final against Dean Ambrose, after Seth Rollins had to vacate the title due to injury. Something about those three names rings a bell... Following his win, Roman would promptly lose the title, as Sheamus cashed in his Money in the Bank contract. This would be the second time in 2015 that Roman would be screwed out of the WWE championship because of a money in the bank cash in, as Seth used his contract to add himself into that years Wrestlemania 31 main event where Roman battled Brock Lesnar.

Looking how far Roman Reigns has come and the absolute star he has become, it feels almost bizarre to think about where Roman was in the mid 2010's. He quickly gained popularity as a member of the Shield, but when he began to be pushed as a singles star, he suffered from many WWE fans rejecting him in the same way they had John Cena years earlier. Cena spent years weathering that storm, and eventually would begin to win over a lot of his critics, and Roman seemed to be following this path which is paying off now, but was incredibly frustrating to watch as a fan at the time.

Roman's first title win was Vince's attempt to capture lightning in a bottle twice, as Daniel Bryan suffered a similar fate at Summerslam 2013. On that night Bryan would defeat John Cena for the title cleanly, only to lose it moments later thanks to a Randy Orton cash in and a Triple H heel turn. Bryan was already a fan favourite, but this moment at Summerslam seemed to be the catalyst for fans to really back Bryan, eventually leading to his unlikely but triumphant victory at Wrestlemania 30. Fans saw through this though, and did not appreciate WWE using the same tactic with a wrestler they didn't have as much love for. With Bryan, at the time it felt unfair, but by the end, organic. 

After cashing in his contract and beating Roman at Survivor Series, Sheamus began to build a faction around himself, along the theme of it being an international group. According to Sheamus himself, the group that would become known as the League of Nations was pitched by producer Jamie Knoble, and it would consist of Sheamus, Rusev, Wade Barrett and Alberto Del Rio. Sheamus has since confirmed what was blatantly obvious at the time, that the group was put together for one single purpose, to build Roman. The group was fairly short lived, and by the sounds of it none of the participants wanted to be involved, but it did in the end serve its purpose until it slowly fizzled out by Spring.

I mean no disrespect to any of the members of the group except maybe Alberto for very different reasons, but the entire League of Nations group felt like a lazy attempt to throw some foreign heels at the chosen top star, the way Vince McMahon used to get Hogan over in the 80's. It was all so transparent, and thus did little to endear the fans to Roman. Finally on the December 14th Raw, Vince used the weapon in his back pocket, himself.

Throughout history Vince McMahon has shown an odd quirk where certain wrestlers were taken out of the spotlight before they themselves were ready, because Vince felt they were getting too old. I call it a weird quirk because he seemed to have it with some wrestlers but not others. The most famous example of this would be Macho Man Randy Savage, who Vince relegated to the announce table around the same time as the early episodes of Raw, despite Savage wanting to continue in the ring. This in the end was the reason that Savage went to WCW as soon as he could, and continued to wrestle through the 90's. The reason I'm bringing this up is because by the mid 2010's, Vince appeared to have this opinion about himself, as it was sometimes reported that by this point hated putting himself on television but he would do it if necessary. This led to him only being seen very rarely, so when Vince appeared, it felt important.

Towards the end of the started creating a distraction on the apron. Eventually Roman would have enough of this and he decks Vince with a superman punch, which the crowd erupted for. As rare as it was to see Vince who was 70 years old at the time, it was even rarer to see him get physically involved. After a flurry of Superman punches, Roman would counter Sheamus' brogue kick with a spear, and would win the WWE title with the fans in the Wells Fargo center in Philadelphia cheering like they'd seen the Philadelphia somethings win an insert your sport here.

WWE achieved their goal of making Roman look like a top star on this night, but it would still take several more years and many more attempts to make Roman into the man he is today. I still love the Shield, I acknowledge the Tribal chief, but there was a whole load of shite in between those years.