Brock Lesnar and the WWE Championship

For the first time in a long time, the future of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship is in a state of the unknown. It’s often not too difficult to discern who is next in line to hold the coveted championship, but after the events of SummerSlam this past Sunday, its future is very ambiguous.

At SummerSlam, Brock Lesnar – a former NCAA, UFC, IWGP and WWE champion – defeated John Cena for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in the main event. Though, saying that he “defeated” Cena would hardly be doing Brock justice. Lesnar mauled Cena. Lesnar annihilated Cena. Lesnar conquered Cena. For the first time in a long time, John Cena, a 15-time WWE Champion, looked weak and vulnerable – words with which John Cena has almost never been described in his WWE career. Over-rated, maybe. Over-exposed, sure. But “weak” and “vulnerable?” No, I can’t ever really recall a time that the WWE has booked John Cena – their resident Superman – to look so utterly ineffectual and downright powerless.

Brock Lesnar has a unique mystique in the landscape of the today’s WWE. Lesnar was last WWE Champion over a decade ago, in 2003. Since then he’s won the New Japan Pro Wrestling IWGP World Heavyweight Championship in 2005 and the UFC Heavyweight championship in 2008. Not only has he been able to earn gold in a completely different professional wrestling atmosphere but he has proven that he can be successful in the legitimate combat sport of mixed-martial arts as well which lends Lesnar an incredibly daunting aura that almost no other athlete in the WWE or in the world can match up against. 

Brock Lesnar was presented with the brand new WWE World Heavyweight Championship belt last Monday on Raw

If Brock Lesnar and John Cena had a back-and-forth battle at SummerSlam for the WWE Championship, it would be easy to assume that Cena could realistically win the title back at Night of Champions (the next Pay-Per-View) or at any time, really. But Brock utterly decimated Cena at SummerSlam. Their match at SummerSlam, which was about 15 minutes long, consisted of Brock hitting his finishing move, the F5, mere minutes into the match, followed by not one, not two but FIFTEEN German Suplexes on Cena, tossing the champion around like a ragdoll.

This victory follows Brock’s domination of The Undertaker at Wrestlemania 30, snapping Taker’s undefeated streak, which his advocate, Paul Heyman, eloquently reminds fans that he is “The one behind the one in ‘one and twenty-one.’” Beating John Cena as viciously as he did at SummerSlam is not quite as huge in the grand scheme of events as snapping the Undertaker’s undefeated streak at Wrestlemania – but if beating Taker at Wrestlemania is #1 on Lesnar’s list of amazing feats, dominating John Cena in a championship match is easily #2.

Brock doing his best Undertaker
impersonation at SummerSlam

Which leads me to why for the first time, in a long time, the future of the WWE Championship is so uncertain. It’s been a long time since there’s been such an utterly dominant champion as Brock Lesnar is in his current run. He’s dominated every foe he’s faced – which in the past year and a half includes Triple H, CM Punk, The Big Show, The Undertaker and John Cena – in such a convincing fashion that WWE will need to play the next few months of storyline very carefully in order to build a believable contender to Brock Lesnar. He broke the streak and utterly destroyed Cena, pinning him cleanly in a championship match. It will be hard for ANY wrestler in WWE to look like a believable threat to the beast that is Brock Lesnar.

The internet dirtsheets are reporting that Vince McMahon wants The Rock to face Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania 31 and that Triple H wants Roman Reigns to be Brock’s opponent. None of the reports have indicated that those matches would be for the title but with all the evidence stated above, you’d be hard-pressed to find or build a worthy contender to Brock’s championship between now and Wrestlemania.

And while none of the dirtsheets have mentioned this specifically, I would hope that WWE is also considering Daniel Bryan as the man to take down the beast. Since having vacated the title after Extreme Rules, Bryan has been suffering myriad health problems requiring multiple surgeries and extensive rehab. The hope is that he will be able to return by the Royal Rumble, which is slated to take place in January 2015. Using a storyline that closely resembled his run to the championship while opposing the Authority, someone like Daniel Bryan, who has had overwhelming fan support, would be the perfect foil for Brock Lesnar. The “David vs Goliath” story of Bryan vs Lesnar would be almost as good, if not better than his conflict with the Authority which led to his title win at Wrestlemania 30.

It was announced on Main Event on Tuesday night that John Cena will have his rematch for the WWE Championship against Brock at the Night of Champions PPV in Nashville on September 21 and it will be interesting to see if he fares any differently against Lesnar than he did at SummerSlam. But as it stands right now, Brock Lesnar is the king of the mountain in the WWE and it will take some clever booking and a little bit of luck to create a challenger who can take the title from the Beast.