5 WWE backstage stories we learned this week: John Cena's WrestleMania idea, Vince McMahon helps top star
On-screen, the biggest storylines in WWE right now revolve around Seth Rollins and Braun Strowman on Raw and Roman Reigns, Daniel Bryan and Erick Rowan on SmackDown Live.
Off-screen, meanwhile, regular followers of the WWE product will know that the real-life stories involving the company’s top Superstars can sometimes be just as interesting as what we see on Raw, SmackDown Live and NXT on a weekly basis.
This week, for example, we have learned that Vince McMahon kicked staff out of a meeting in February 2019 to reassure one of his top stars about their future, while it also emerged that John Cena came up with the idea for a WrestleMania match that happened over a decade ago.
In this article, let’s take a look at the full details behind those stories, plus three others, as we count down five backstage revelations that have been made over the last seven days.
#5 Vince McMahon’s 45-minute talk with Braun Strowman
Between the summer of 2015 and the summer of 2018, Braun Strowman had a dominant three-year run where his monstrous character gained enough momentum to warrant him finally receiving a reign with the Universal Championship.
However, after failing to win Raw’s top prize on another two occasions in late 2018 against Roman Reigns at Hell In A Cell and Brock Lesnar at Crown Jewel, “The Monster Among Men” lost a lot of credibility as a title contender and, for the first time in his WWE career, it felt like his character had become stale.
Speaking on Notsam Wrestling this week, the former Wyatt Family member revealed that he was “miserable” about his on-screen role in WWE shortly after the 2019 Royal Rumble, so he interrupted a meeting with the company’s decision-makers two hours before an episode of Raw in February.
Instead of reprimanding Strowman, Vince McMahon kicked everybody out of the meeting and had a 45-minute conversation with the two-time Raw Tag Team Champion to reassure him that he is one of his top guys.
Strowman described McMahon as his friend, as well as his boss, and said he stopped worrying about his storylines after the meeting with the WWE Chairman.