WWE Going All-In On Reigns Vs. Lesnar As Biggest WrestleMania Match Of All-Time

Mania title unification match getting full-court press from Heyman, announcers.

by Scott Carlson
Brock Lesnar Roman Reigns WWE WrestleMania 38
WWE

In case you missed it, WWE has upped the ante yet again on its billing for the WrestleMania match pitting Brock Lesnar against Roman Reigns.

We've seen this match - the third Mania bout between the two - grow in stature and significance during the past month, but now the hyperbole is ramping up to meet it. Fightful Select notes that "The Biggest WrestleMania match of all-time" is a message that was to be "hammered home" in production and commentary on SmackDown last week.

Lesnar won the Royal Rumble last month and immediately challenged Reigns for the WWE Universal Championship. Then three weeks later, he won the WWE Championship at Elimination Chamber, making their match a champion versus champion bout. Initially, the match was billed as "winner take all," but that has since been changed to "championship unification match" in WWE programming.

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During SmackDown, the phrase "biggest WrestleMania match of all-time" was used most prominently by Paul Heyman, who said Brock/Roman would be bigger than Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant or Steve Austin versus The Rock. That's quite the mountain to top, as Hogan/Andre was literally the biggest professional wrestling match ever to that point (and well beyond it), and Austin and Rock were the two biggest stars during WWF's hottest time as a company.

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While Lesnar and Reigns undoubtedly are the biggest male stars in the company right now and are fighting to unify the two world titles, those circumstances don't automatically make it the "biggest WrestleMania match of all-time." There are intangible factors that elevate matches like this.

Huge match, absolutely. Biggest match on the card, sure. Biggest match in recent WWE history, quite possibly. But biggest Mania match ever?

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.