Hey Nerds—Stop Booing Roman Reigns

There are reasons to hate Roman Reigns the character. Not being a good wrestler isn't one of them.

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Complex Original

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“YOU STILL SUCK! YOU STILL SUCK!”

Such rang the jeers from a sold-out Newark, N.J. crowd at Sunday’s Extreme Rules pay-per-view, and they were clearly directed at Roman Reigns. Of course, this isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to WWE for the last year and a half; Reigns is Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of many WWE fans who revile him for a variety of reasons (some misguided, some painfully accurate). Whatever their reasoning, it seems that a vast majority of the crowd came to the Prudential Center on Sunday with dreams of booing Reigns into an early, metaphorical grave.

Which is a shame, because what crowds haven’t caught onto yet is the fact that Roman Reigns is doing some of the best work in recent WWE memory, both inside the ring and out of it. It’s time for the WWE Universe to face it—Roman isn’t a bad guy nor is he a good guy. He’s an awesome guy.

Let’s not get it twisted, though; for a while there, it really did feel like the Roman Reigns Experience was doomed. Ever since winning the Survivor Series WWE World Heavyweight Championship tournament in November, Reigns had been caught in a whirlwind of horrible booking, cringeworthy promos (written, no doubt, by the increasingly out of touch Vince McMahon), and wooden character work. His feud with the Authority’s Triple H made little sense outside of the meta “we must get Roman Reigns over” sense (why would the real-life chosen boy of the company feud against the Authority?), and his performance as the defending champion in the Royal Rumble did him no favors. This all culminated in a WrestleMania main event that wasn’t memorably bad or offensively terrible; instead, it was just boring, which might be a worse indictment. And so, during his crowning moment, all Roman Reigns could hear from the biggest WWE crowd of all time was apathy.

No chant in WWE has been more inaccurate than the weekly 'YOU CAN’T WRESTLE' screams directed at Reigns from a frustrated populace.

But then, a magical thing happened: Roman (and, maybe more importantly, Vince) decided to steer into the skid. Coming out at the most hostile Raw of the year, the night after WrestleMania, everyone was expecting a bloodbath of boos and stuttered promo work from Reigns, but instead  got the genesis of the now-overused-but-at-the-time-awesome “I’m not a bad guy, I’m not a good guy, I’m THE guy” line. This new cocky attitude arrived at the perfect time, as his feud with AJ Styles would allow Roman to play a tweener role much better suited for his talents than the “one versus all” babyface he was trotting out before. He may not have performed a full heel turn, but there was no doubt that he was playing the antagonist to a guy the fans really wanted at the top, and it did wonders for everyone involved.

What followed is both the best feud of Reigns’ short singles career AND the best main event storyline since Daniel Bryan was YES-ing his way into our hearts in 2014. Ambiguous, mostly-silent badass Roman Reigns worked like gangbusters, and timely inclusions from both The Usos and The Club (Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows) kept the storyline charging forward with momentum that possibly would have stalled if everyone involved didn’t elicit such strong reactions from the crowd. And at the top of the heap stood Reigns, still getting booed to everloving hell, but now at least with a purpose.

That led to Extreme Rules, which was easily the best singles match of Reigns’ career (not counting the WrestleMania 31 main event, which was both a triple threat match and a Brock Lesnar showcase). Most people would look at that and say “Well he’s with AJ Styles who is a top-three worker in the world.” And while, sure, Styles bumped his ass off like a madman, Reigns wasn’t exactly carried. Just rewatch this brutal Black Tiger Bomb that really should become Reigns’ finisher, or the vicious way he slammed Styles into the LED screens on the side of the ring. Reigns is a guy who understands that the best WWE matches need to be intense affairs, full of melodrama and violent retribution, and it showed on Sunday.

The dirty secret of this match, however, is that it didn’t come out of nowhere. No chant in WWE has been more inaccurate than the weekly “YOU CAN’T WRESTLE” screams directed at Reigns from a frustrated populace; at least since early 2015. Ringwork has never been his problem. He’s been in many so-called four-star matches with a wide variety of wrestlers (short list: Daniel Bryan, Brock Lesnar, Bray Wyatt, Sheamus, and the damn Big Show), and it would be fantastically shortsighted to call him a bad worker. Hell, even that boring WrestleMania 32 main event suffered more from poor pacing and booking than it did for underwhelming work inside the ring.

And yet crowds are convinced that in order to hate Reigns’ standing as the “top dog,” they have to hate everything about him. That’s why a wicked back body drop that drove AJ Styles straight through the beleaguered announcer’s table elicited not an appropriate “HOLY S---” chant or a “THIS IS AWESOME” call-and-response, but instead a "YOU STILL SUCK” chant. As WWE fan reactions go, this is especially deluded because there are legitimate reasons to hate Reigns the character. His tendency to win with disproportionate amounts of offense is frustrating (for example, at Extreme Rules, he popped up to hit a winning Spear after multiple chair shots, two Styles Clashes, and a Boot of Doom tag finisher from The Club), and his mic skills could use still some more work (although they have thankfully gotten away from the “suffering succotash” promos of yore). Additionally, they just paired him up with the returning Seth Rollins, who is going to get cheered way harder no matter how many fan mail letters he claims to have burned during his seven-month injury absence. So that might be a problem.

But, regardless of his flaws, it’s clearly time for the WWE Universe to realize that Roman Reigns, fantastic wrestler and arrogant asshole tweener, is here to stay. This isn’t to say crowds should turn him into the next Daniel Bryan (which, hilariously, WAS something WWE tried to do last year) and cheer their faces off for him—Roman will never be that guy. But Reigns is a special talent in his own right and, no matter how bad the storylines get, he will almost always deliver inside the ropes. So while Roman may never get a unanimous “YES!” chant or even a “LET’S GO ROMAN” that isn’t immediately followed by a louder “ROMAN SUCKS” back-and-forth, it could be about time for the debut of a new chant directed at The Guy:

“YOU’RE GETTING BETTER! YOU’RE GETTING BETTER!”

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