7 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Oct 22)

1. Leukemia Sucks

No matter how much griping this writer has done about Roman Reigns during the past couple years, it has always been directed at his booking and position on the card, not him personally or as a performer.

So it was really hard to hear Reigns announce Monday night that he is relinquishing the WWE Universal Championship because his leukemia has returned. There’s never a good time for this sort of thing to happen, but for it to strike when Roman was finally being booked as the guy on top with the title makes it sting doubly so. There’s no timetable for his return, so despite not calling it a retirement speech, we might not see Reigns for a good while.

You could see how hard the news hit the performers, as Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins were visibly shaken, as did the announcers, with Corey Graves looking look he was going he was going to tear up.

Reigns has been a top guy in WWE for several years now, and much of the booking on Raw has been around him and The Shield as the central figures of the show, so this will certainly present challenges. But those are the least of our concern as fans and for the people working in the company.