10 Wrestlers Who Had To Destroy Themselves To Get Over
6. Seth Rollins
WWE tried - too hard, and with a direction that was much too scattershot - to get Seth Rollins over throughout a tumultuous post-WrestleMania season.
But they tried.
They tried to get him over as a character adjacent to Stone Cold Steve Austin on the Stomping Grounds go-home RAW, on which he disrupted the opening segment and terrorised the locker room throughout the night with a steel chair. It was more Sheamus than Austin, and so, on the RAW Reunion, he clowned like John Cena, or the Rock, doing an impression of Brock Lesnar that he didn't have the comedic instincts to pull off.
WWE were literally getting "desperate", per reports, and so at the production meeting two weeks removed from SummerSlam, it was decided "Let's just beat the absolute sh*t out of him" was the best way to proceed. And, on the go-home show, "Let's just beat the absolute sh*t out of him," was the plan once more, and it worked, even in spite of that hushed, robotic soliloquy.
Whatever Seth's character was, it was destroyed up to and during the awesome SummerSlam main event, and it's to his immense credit that the aloof (offscreen) geek (onscreen) got over in the end. It took a tremendous, spirited, perfectly-timed performance, and Rollins is essentially back to where he was on April 8.
In WWE, in 2019, that's progress.