It’s hard to imagine what WWE would have been like over the past few years without Roman Reigns ruling over The Bloodline — and really the entire company — as the Tribal Chief.
Reigns has been the centerpiece of everything WWE has done since before WrestleMania 38, so it’s a wild “what if” to even ponder how things would be different if he wasn’t around. Yet according to Paul Heyman, that possibility isn’t as remote as one might think.
In an interview with Uproxx ahead of the “Biography: WWE Legends” episode devoted to Reigns on March 31, Heyman said that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reigns “considered himself retired” and there was some legitimate thought that he might not come back.
I was executive director of Monday Night Raw, and Roman was assigned to SmackDown. But every week I heard all the SmackDown writers and producers and personnel saying, ‘God, I just wish Roman would come back.’ And I would ask, has anybody talked to him? Yeah, he says he’s retired. He’s not coming back. No way. Thanks a lot. Done. Finished. Goodbye. So the fact that he came back for this run, for what we have accomplished, is nothing short of a miracle because as far as he was concerned, he was out.
Reigns had more reason to be wary of performing the pandemic than most, as he revealed in 2018 that he had long been dealing with chronic myeloid leukemia. As a result of that disease’s effects on his immune system, he was in a high risk group when it came to COVID-19.
That fact caused Reigns, who had originally been heavily advertised for WrestleMania 36 in 2020, to ask to be removed from the card and his planned match against Goldberg. Reigns returned later that year at SummerSlam, attacking The Fiend and Braun Strowman and linking up with Heyman for the first time a few days later on SmackDown.
The rest, as they say, is WWE history, the kind that Reigns will continue to add to at WrestleMania 40. When Reigns finally does retire for real, it will be interesting to look back and see how much of his legacy almost didn’t get written.
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