5 Worst-Timed WWE Wellness Policy Suspensions
Rob Van Dam's WWE career quite literally went up in smoke.
Let me just preface this by saying that there's no good time to receive a suspension for a Wellness Policy violation (unless you've got some sort of weird suspension bonus written into your contract or something). Not only does it effect your reputation, but it means that you lose out on money as well.
But there's a big difference between a lowly undercard guy like a Konnor or an Adam Rose, two talents that were essentially there to make up the numbers anyway, being forced to sit at home and a guy like Roman Reigns, whom the company is being built around, being slapped with a suspension.
Suspensions are bad any time, but sometimes they come at the worst possible times. Careers have been derailed, with performers being forced to drop titles and miss out on lucrative pay-per-view matches because of Wellness failures. Since the Wellness Policy was implemented in February 2006, many have fallen foul of it, but the following five wrestlers were punished at crucial times.
Let's take a look at these five cases, why they were suspended and what effect it had on their WWE careers.
5. Roman Reigns
Let us start with the most recent ill-timed suspension, and the news that has sent the IWC into overdrive. Roman Reigns, WWE's current golden boy and chosen one, has been suspended for 30 days following his first violation of the Wellness Policy.
The news came just two days after he had dropped the WWE World Heavyweight Title to Seth Rollins (who then dropped it to Dean Ambrose) at Money in the Bank, and a day after a Rollins/Ambrose/Reigns triple threat main event was announced for Battleground, set to take place on July 24th.
WWE will now be forced to build that historic match without The Big Dog's presence and may actually end up changing it to a straight singles match. Whatever course of action they take, this is bad timing for Reigns and it's going to be hard for them to spin this into a positive.
A lot of time, money and effort has went into making Reigns 'the guy', but a very vocal section of the WWE Universe simply haven't taken to him (to say the least) and he's not doing the business on the road. Reigns has had an exceptional year inside the ring, of course, and WWE will continue to book him as a featured attraction but this is a serious setback.
It's just more fuel for the fire as far as the Reigns haters are concerned. They're not going to let him live this one down anytime soon. Odds are that WWE will use this to try and humanise Reigns (his apology tweet would seem to indicate as such), but that has bad idea written all over it given the current climate.
Reigns will also miss the WWE Draft on July 19th. Rumours were that he was going to be the top star on Raw, with Cena being the top star on Smackdown. It's going to be very interesting to see how this one plays out over the coming days and weeks...