Any time WWE goes into a notoriously “smart” market, there is always the risk that the crowd will attempt to hijack the show. This is especially true of the annual Raw following WrestleMania, which is usually such a colossal crowd wankfest that WWE generally just says “f*ck it” and lets the chips fall where they may.
On Sunday night, the “smart” Brooklyn crowd was extremely well-behaved for the first half of the SummerSlam pay-per-view, but things took a drastic turn when the WWE Universal Championship was unveiled for the first time. The crowd showered Mick Foley and Stephanie McMahon with boos for simply pulling a sheet off a belt, then proceeded to spend nearly the entire first half of the championship match between Seth Rollins and Finn Bálor chanting disparaging things about the belt.
After the event, Rollins took to Twitter to let his feelings be known about what went down in one concise tweet.
More important than a title's appearance is what it represents for the men fighting over it. You really let me down tonight, Brooklyn.
— Seth Rollins (@WWERollins) August 22, 2016
Extremely well said, Seth.
My own take is this: it’s stupid to distract from a match because you think you’re clever. It’s beyond stupid to hijack the first half of a title match to crown a new champion — featuring two men that you claim to care a whole lot about and are constantly terrified that WWE will “waste” or not use properly — just because you think the belt their fighting for is somehow not as cool as you wanted.
Every belt looks stupid at first. We thought the current title looked stupid at first, but they made some tweaks and now we’re all used to it. We somehow put up with the John Cena “spinner” belt for eight years, during which time it actually became normal to us. Is the red leather weird? Sure. Did it warrant even a single chant, let alone entire minutes directed at Rollins and Bálor, who had nothing to do with the design? Of course not.
