Seth Rollins is a fighting world champion.
The WWE superstar spoke about his title, which was introduced back at Night of Champions, during a recent interview on the Out Of Character podcast. The Visionary has done his best to defend the title on every occasion, but understands that the belt still doesn’t have the same prestige as Roman Reigns’ Undisputed Universal Championship. That being said, Rollins believes a true world champion defends the title as often as they can.
I’m under no illusions that this title is the same as Roman’s title. That title has been around, there’s been so much equity put into over the past few years, it means a lot. You can’t just come in and pretend that all of a sudden this title is that important, no one’s going to buy that crap. The way I always saw champions that I looked up to and that I aspired to be were the champions that took the title to every territory or every town and defended it and then over time, people believed that it was a big deal.
Rollins adds that he grew up watching Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels be fighting champions and came into WWE when John Cena and CM Punk were world champions. This plays into his belief that he can make his new title a big prize for the rest of the roster.
I came in when Cena was a world champion, and CM Punk was a world champion. I grew up watching Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, Triple H, these are the people who they did that for the world titles that they were wearing. So, I’m trying as I might to, kind of, fill those shoes and make this new World heavyweight Championship as big as it can be for myself and the rest of the roster.
Some have called the new WWE world title a consolation prize. This is what Rollins had to say about that.
I just believe it was a necessity so I wasn’t offended, I wasn’t annoyed or anything like that. If you watched and followed and saw how Roman has built up the title that he has, it only makes sense, I guess, for you to use the word consolation prize but for me, again, it didn’t feel that way, it felt like a big deal. Like I said, it felt like a big deal because there are so many guys who are able to be in the shoes that I’m in right now and the fact that it’s me makes it feel like a big deal to me and I feel a lot of responsibility to represent them and the industry as well as I can.
Elsewhere in the interview, Rollins spoke about Reigns not defending the title as often as he probably should. You can read about that here.
(H/T and transcribed by F4WOnline)