10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About The World Heavyweight Championship

There's ANOTHER championship coming to WWE.

It's called the World Heavyweight Championship... so is it new or not? They haven't told us if it's a continuation of the title represented by the Big Gold Belt, but the new strap they've unveiled looks a lot like it.

Whether you associate it with WCW, Ric Flair jumping ship to WWE, or Triple H's reign of terror, the World Heavyweight Championship is a belt that can be traced back over 100 years. When the 'E got their filthy mitts on it they handed it to The Game and made it the top belt on Raw.

For nearly a decade it stood side by side with the WWE Championship as one of the two (three when ECW was around) biggest prizes up for grabs. With moments like Batista dethroning Triple H at WrestleMania 21, Dolph Ziggler's epic cash-in, and Shawn Michaels getting one last run as champion, its place in professional wrestling history is assured.

That's not to say everything went well...

For every Mark Henry hall of pain run there's a Sheamus beating Daniel Bryan in 18 seconds. WWE has done a great of pretending some of these entries didn't happen, so sit back, relax, and get ready to worry about how they're going to handle the new World Heavyweight Championship by remembering some of the disasters that came with the last one.

For a time, WWE was obsessed with merging the Big Gold Belt into other championships.

It was part of the first ever Undisputed WWE Championship after Chris Jericho beat The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin in the same night. Along with the Big Eagle, it was retired when Triple H was handed a brand new strap. When the goldest belt in the box came back as the World Heavyweight Championship in 2002, it lived on for more than a decade as one of the top prizes in the company.

Jump ahead to 2013 and once again the Big Gold Belt was merged with the WWE Championship. Brock Lesnar, the last physical holder of the belts, was handed a brand new title which had a shiny new WWE logo on it with the words World Heavyweight Champion written below. It made sense. The full name of the title was the WWE World Heavyweight Championship so having the entire name scrawled across the front plate in diamonds highlighted the legacy of both belts.

Except it went back to being called the WWE Championship again in 2016. So what gives?

Nobody would've batted an eyelid if they hadn't just announced the WHC's return. Every WWE fan asked themselves "Is this a continuation of the old belt, or the start of a brand new one?" when they heard Triple H's big announcement. In true WWE form they haven't confirmed anything yet.

Right now the old Big Gold Belt's legacy is a line of text on the WWE Championship. Kudos to Vince McMahon for shrinking the industry's most famous belt, one that was used in the National Wrestling Alliance and World Championship Wrestling, into three words on his company's main prize.