Roman Reigns and Braun Strowman will fight at Fastlane 2017. (WWE.com)
This Sunday at the WWE Fastlane pay-per-view, Roman Reigns and Braun Strowman will go head to head, and this match comes as part of a feud that had its origins on an episode of Monday Night Raw three months ago.
For several months after Braun Strowman was drafted to Monday Night Raw in the 2016 brand extension, he showed up pretty much every week just to destroy some local jobbers in squash matches that made him look increasingly terrifying to viewers. By October 2016, Strowman started demanding that General Manager Mick Foley give him some real competition, and Sami Zayn stepped up to the plate, saying he would be taking on Strowman because nobody else would.
This all lead up to a match between Braun Strowman and Sami Zayn at Roadblock: End of the Line. With this match, Strowman would only have 10 minutes in which to defeat Zayn, and he was unsuccessful, with the time running out and with Zayn being declared the winner. The following night on December 19th’s Raw, Strowman was so upset about what happened at Roadblock that he began storming around backstage demanding a match with Sami Zayn. Unfortunately, Zayn wasn’t there that night, and so Strowman had to let out his rage on someone else.
In the main event of that night’s Raw, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns had a match against Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho, and at the very end of it, Braun Strowman ran out and attacked Roman Reigns out of pretty much nowhere. There wasn’t much of a reason for him to be attacking Reigns specifically except that he is one of the top faces of Monday Night Raw and Strowman needed to unleash his anger on someone.
The following week on Raw, the feud between Sami Zayn and Braun Strowman continued when Zayn attacked Strowman during Strowman’s match against Seth Rollins. Strowman and Reigns would not confront one another again until the January 9th episode of Monday Night Raw. At the very beginning of that show, Roman Reigns was facing Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens in a handicap match when Braun Strowman ran out and attacked Reigns yet again.
On January 16th, just about everyone on Raw involved in the forthcoming Royal Rumble match confronted one another in the ring, but there was particular attention paid to Roman Reigns staring down Braun Strowman. Later that night, Strowman teamed up with Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho to take down Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins and Sami Zayn.
A few weeks later, fans got a better idea of why Braun Strowman may have attacked Roman Reigns: to get on Kevin Owens’ good side so that he would be given a Universal Championship match as a reward. It worked out, as after Strowman attacked Reigns on December 26th’s Raw, Owens thanked Strowman by flat out promising him a title opportunity, a promise Strowman took to heart and brought up a few weeks later. But that night, during Strowman’s title match against Kevin Owens, Roman Reigns ran out and interfered, therefore costing Strowman the championship.
It was at this point that the feud between the two really heated up. The following week, Strowman went to Mick Foley and demanded a match against Roman Reigns, and in that moment, Mick Foley booked the Strowman vs. Reigns match for Fastlane. That same night, Braun Strowman interfered in Roman Reigns’ match against Samoa Joe, which cost Reigns the victory. For a few more weeks, the feud continued back and forth like that, with Reigns and Strowman interfering in one another’s matches and generally pissing each other off.
On March 5th, then, we will see the climax of a three-month long feud that all started when Strowman just needed to beat somebody up and happened to pick Roman Reigns as his target.
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