Seth Rollins tried to Irish-whip Sting across the ring after delivering a second Buckle Bomb of their main-event match at WWE Night of Champions Sunday night, but Sting wasn’t able to play along with whatever was supposed to happen on his return trip.
The six-time WCW champion fell to all fours, and in moments was in the corner being looked at by ringside medical personnel.
We still don’t know exactly what happened to him, but in an interview with WWE.com, Sting confirmed that he suffered a whiplash-like injury on both of the Buckle Bombs, and his in-ring future is uncertain.
This after the big WWE news from a few weeks back, when Rollins hit U.S. champ John Cena with a flying kneesmash that got way, way too much of Cena’s grill, breaking his nose and putting their match at SummerSlam in serious jeopardy.
Which brings up the obvious question: is Seth Rollins too dangerous to be WWE champ?
Before you think the notion a ridiculous one to even consider, think about it. How much does WWE invest in building up any particular match, much less a match involving its champ?
By and large, Rollins is the main event, or at the worst the match before the main event, as at SummerSlam and the upcoming Hell in a Cell, which are being headlined by Brock Lesnar and The Undertaker.
The match involving the WWE champ either sells the show on its own merits, or plays an important secondary role in selling the show.
In that context, Rollins has single-handedly put at risk the past two monthly special events. Remember that Cena wasn’t cleared to wrestle Rollins at SummerSlam until the week of the big show. If Cena hadn’t been available, creative would have had to have winged something together on the fly at the last minute, not exactly the best booking going into one of the three biggest events of the year on the WWE calendar.
What happened with Sting is just as bad, if not worse. Consider the build-up to having Sting in the main event of a WWE pay-per-view for the first time in his storied career, and how that match almost ended with Sting slumped in a corner in a huddle of medical personnel trying to determine his ability to go.
Based on the accounts that we’ve seen after the match, it appears that Sting put himself in jeopardy by sucking it up and finishing out the match, which ended with him putting Rollins in a Scorpion Deathlock, and Rollins countering with an inside cradle that forced Sting into an awkward position rolling onto his injured neck.
But he went through with it, because Sting is old school, and old school ethos says you finish out the match if it kills you.
John Cena wrestled Rollins at SummerSlam despite an injury that should have kept him on the sidelines, and good on him for doing so.
How many more times does Rollins’ sloppiness have to put WWE in danger of either having a storyline blown up before a pay-per-view, or right before before a live worldwide TV audience?
Not many wrestlers get the third chance that Rollins appears to be getting. A fourth one will not be in the offing.
– Column by Chris Graham
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