After the mess that was WWE Crown Jewel, a lot of fans were wondering why Braun Strowman lost the Universal Title match to Brock Lesnar. After all, Braun’s been extremely popular in the past year, and was just turned face again after Roman announced his departure, which seemed to set him up as the next top hero of WWE. Meanwhile WWE spent months this year telling fans that Brock Lesnar doesn’t care about the business enough to show up (something a lot of us already believed, for the record).
One possible explanation for the Monster Among Men’s surprising lack of a championship push emerged via PWInsider Elite Audio, where Mike Johnson reported that there’s more going on with Braun than fans are seeing (transcript via WrestlingNews.co).
“One of the things that I heard from multiple people – we’re talking 4 different people. There are times where Strowman is negligent when it comes to showing up on time. He has a reputation at times for leaving a little early and sometimes he makes mistakes in terms of etiquette in the backstage in the locker room. Sometimes, as one person put it, he’s his own worst enemy and his worst advocate. They would be high on him and just when he gets to the point where you would think the next step is putting him into the centerpiece position for the company [then] something happens and he makes some sort of misstep backstage and people within management kind of cool on him and they take a step back.”
Braun’s not been in wrestling all that long, so it does seem feasible that he might not be conducting his business the way WWE management expects business to be conducted. He comes from the world of strongman competitions, which I don’t know that much about, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things are more casual there. He’s such an entertaining performer, that I do hope he and WWE come to see eye-to-eye so he can get his chance at the top. Even if he sometimes leaves early or shows up late, he’s already around more than the guy they put the title on instead.
