Paul “Triple H” Levesque appeared on this week’s Monday Night Raw and revealed WWE’s new World Heavyweight Championship. He confirmed that when Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns gets drafted as part of the 2023 WWE Draft, he’ll stay on whichever brand selects him. The other brand (most likely Raw, if recent reports are to be believed) will then get the chance to compete for the World Heavyweight Championship. The new champ will be crowned at Night of Champions on May 27 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
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The original World Heavyweight Championship was introduced in 2002 and was typically on the opposite brand of whichever show the WWE Championship resided. Randy Orton unified the title with the WWE Championship in December 2013. It’s unclear as of now if the lineage of the old title will be reflected with the new championship, though the title resembles the original “Big Gold” design.
WWE booked Reigns to unify the WWE and Universal Championships in the main event of WrestleMania 38, with “The Tribal Chief” beating then-WWE Champion Brock Lesnar. Reigns then announced he had signed a new contract that required fewer dates, making his TV appearances less frequent and his title defenses even more rare. The company had a few opportunities to have someone beat Roman for the undisputed championship and split the titles between the two brands again with the likes of Cody Rhodes (at WrestleMania 39) and Drew McIntyre (at last year’s Clash at the Castle) but always opted against it. The decision to have Reigns beat Rhodes was particularly controversial among fans.
“Where do you want to go with the story and how do you want to get there? In the moment, you think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe.’ If you’re watching a movie and you thought every scene in the movie was the last scene in the movie, ‘I can’t believe they did that, worst movie ever.’ Oh wait, there’s more. How much do we weigh that out? Every single moment of every single day. Some days when I’m trying to sleep and I can’t sleep, it’s because I’m weighing that out in my brain and I wish that I could sleep. It’s all you think about and it consumes your every moment of everything you do. You feel it. Sometimes your feeling is wrong and sometimes your feeling is right. I do know that it always continues and the story doesn’t end here,” Levesque explained in the post-WrestleMania press conference regarding the decision. “Some people will look at it and say, ‘if you did this, it would have been better.’ You don’t know that, do you? You’re never going to know because if you did the other thing, it might not have worked out the way you wanted to. People might not have reacted the way you wanted to. It’s always feel and where you are at that moment, honestly, it’s the right place to be and that’s where you have to be and bank on what’s next. If you continue to tell the story and if I didn’t feel like we had a compelling story on the other side, it wouldn’t be the decision.”
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