We'll Miss Missing the Champ

by Sam Everett, @readsameverett

In two reigns and 426 days with the WWE Championship, AJ Styles has defended his title on 15 occasions. Since signing with WWE on a part-time basis, in his two reigns and 728 days as either WWE or Universal Champion, Brock Lesnar defended his title 11 times. Before he claimed the Universal Championship from Goldberg at WrestleMania 33, the title was defended once a month like clockwork; once Lesnar got a hold of it, it wasn’t uncommon for two or three Dwayne Johnson movies to premiere between title defenses. If new champ Roman Reigns, fresh off his victory over Lesnar at SummerSlam, is to be believed, those days are over. He will be, he assures us, a Fighting Champion.

And it’s too bad.

WWE touts itself as sports entertainment, and when it comes to title defenses on its Raw brand, it’s been taking cues from both sports and entertainment. The UFC Heavyweight Championship (the one, incidentally, that has drawn Lesnar away from scripted fighting) was defended by Stipe Miocic four times between late 2016 and July of this year (current champ Daniel Cormier has not yet made a defense); WBC Heavyweight Champion Deontay Wilder has defended his title just seven times since 2015. Meanwhile, in episodic television (and as lead announcer Michael Cole can be heard muttering in his sleep, WWE’s Raw is “the longest running weekly episodic show in television history!”) writers and showrunners typically build up storylines to culminate at their season finales. If WWE can be said to have season finales, pay-per-view events like WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Royal Rumble would qualify, and in his most recent reign Lesnar was coaxed out of his secluded Saskatchewan tannery to defend his title on those cards. A Lesnar title defense has been rightfully treated like an event.

It’s brought to mind the Hulk Hogan Era of WWE, when even with only four pay-per-views on the calendar the Heavyweight Championship still wasn’t defended at every event. When not only the champion but nearly the entire upper-card might appear on television every week in a pre-taped interview segment, but rarely in a match, and certainly never in a match against another top star. We shouldn’t pine for the days of old just for the sake of nostalgia, but it’s undeniable that a Hogan title defense was not to be missed. A Hogan interview segment was not to be missed. And, indeed, thirty years later these matches and segments are still among the most monumental moments in WWE history. This can be attributed to many factors, not the least of which is that it must be difficult to create a memorable segment or match worthy of the world champion every week.

One might counter that the Stone Cold Steve Austin Era saw title defenses more often than in even the current product, and pro wrestling was never more popular than during this time. And it’s true, and these title defenses didn’t even devalue the title--but only because the world championship wasn’t of much value anyway. No championship was. Vince McMahon, a fifty-four year old at the time with no formal wrestling experience, held the WWF Championship. Stephanie McMahon, with even less wrestling experience than her father Vince, was the Women’s Champion. The Hardcore Championship was meant almost specifically to change hands on a nightly basis. It was held together with duct tape. Shane McMahon (guess how much wrestling experience he had) got a run with the European Championship. There was a European Championship. In a time when Jerry Springer was among the most popular figures in America, the spectacle was the thing. Moreover, the at-the-time WWF was embroiled in a weekly ratings war against World Championship Wrestling, and both companies had to pull out all the stops, including main eventing episodes with title defenses. That’s no longer the case.

We understand world championships are more or less props, but each and every character in WWE would tell you he or she eventually wants to win the big belt in his or her division. In the scripted narrative of sports entertainment, the world championship is the most valuable prize imaginable. The scarcity--even the false scarcity--of opportunity surrounding the title is powerful, be it our opportunity to watch a championship match, to imagine what upheaval will come to this fictional world after the count of three, or the wrestlers’ opportunity to compete for the championship.

In just over a year on SmackDown Live, Shinsuke Nakamura has fought for the WWE Championship seven times, as a face and as a heel, and against two different champions. And now it seems the audience and the writers have moved on from him for the time being. In contrast, in four years on Raw Braun Strowman has challenged for the Universal Championship three times, and the audience is starving for him to win it. Prior to defending against Samoa Joe at SummerSlam, AJ Styles put his title on the line against Rusev, seemingly because he was fresh out of heel challengers, having convincingly defeated Nakamura over the course of four months and countless matches that only seemed to decrease in quality as they went on. Styles is one of the best in-ring performers in the world right now, but even LeBron James has middling games, and much like writers can’t realistically create compelling storylines around the title every week, Styles can’t be expected to put on a match worthy of the WWE Championship every month. Even if he could, the Law of Diminishing Returns is a real thing.

(We won’t miss Brock Lesnar himself. He is a naturally compelling personality but that’s just it--it’s natural. He doesn’t have to work to display it. The parts of professional wrestling that do require effort--travel, putting together entertaining matches that last longer than eight minutes--have never seemed to interest him. He does throw around four hundred pound men like bags of sand, but you get the sense that if he never made it big in sports or entertainment, he’d still be in South Dakota charging locals $5 to watch him throw steel beams across the parking lot of the highway bar. There are no more dream matches for him, unless you can’t live without seeing Finn Balor or Daniel Bryan take an admirable beating before succumbing to a sudden F5 in about the time it takes No Way Jose to dance to the ring.)

But in the midst of the inevitable whirlwind of title defenses and title changes coming Raw’s way, as Reigns and Strowman and Owens and Rollins and Ambrose and McIntyre trade the belt around so often I'm considering breaking into the nameplate engraving business, we’ll wish there was some part-timer holding the belt. We’ll wish the champion wasn’t always fighting.