Ever since his debut, Rusev has been portrayed as the predominant anti- American heel. His heel tactics were mellowed down a lot after facing severe fans from the US and they eliminated the anti-American sentiment from his act. Since 2014, WWE has made Rusev been portrayed as the dominant heel and no matter how hard they tried, he did manage to get the WWE Universe behind him, especially whenever he was in the ring with Roman Reigns.
Call it the unpreparedness of the universe to accept Reigns as ‘the guy’ or plain liking towards Rusev’s character, but he does evict some kind of a reaction from the universe.
Speaking of Rusev, he has been named as the opponent for Brock Lesnar’s return to the ring for a live event at Mexico City on December 3rd. Rusev was also fed to Goldberg this week. This brings us to the rumors coming up. Usually live events are the testing grounds for a WWE superstar’s character and how much of a reaction he generates in his match against Lesnar would decide whether Rusev would continue to be a heel or not.
Lesnar is in the same league as the Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Undertaker to an extent, where no matter what they do, the people will cheer for them. This stems from a report that stemmed recently that Vince McMahon ‘blew a gasket’ at the reaction for Lesnar in Minneapolis, MN. Paul Heyman tried his best to portray Lesnar as a heel, but by the end of the segment, the crowd started ‘Suplex City’ chants and ‘Goldberg sucks’ chants.
As of now a lot depends on how WWE would continue to portray Lesnar. If he is portrayed as a heel at the event, then Rusev’s face turn is confirmed. It appears that the WWE have run out of ideas as to how they can portray Rusev, but there have been numerous reports confirming that Rusev would be having a character change sometime down the line. The last thing one would want was the character to be stale as Big Show or Cena.
- Updated card for the WWE Royal Rumble pay per view - January 28, 2017
- WWE SmackDown Results – 01/24/2017 - January 26, 2017
- WWE RAW Results – 01/23/2017 - January 24, 2017
