Busted out the white gear, the notorious white gear.
It's easily my most popular gear of all time, like get questions
about it still to this day four years later when you're gonna bring it back.
But my boss hated it,
hated that the white gear very much so it'll never be brought back.
I think it's in storage somewhere.
[MUSIC]
Myself versus Jinder Mahal, the first ever NFC Championship match was man.
It was a really couple years in developmental in
the making a lot of suffering.
And to this day, I watched the match back and I just I don't love it.
I just thought my performance was underwhelming.
I just didn't feel comfortable yet as who I was,
I was growing into it but I wasn't there.
And I think what saved it really for me and made it feel like a great moment was
the audience, the full-sale crowd there, there's just a special vibe.
And so that was the first taste of it, I think.
Obviously, it had all of the big players there, and
[LAUGH] hearing the Fink say, and new.
And you've got The American Dream, I mean, you've got Triple H out there raising your
hand, and you get those real emotions kinda flowing through your body.
>> And new NXT Champion,
Seth Rollins.
>> The NXT title ranks pretty high in my career just cuz I think that it
was the first time Triple H believed in me.
It was a struggle to get to that point.
Triple H and I butted heads a lot leading up to it.
And that was the moment where I felt I won him over.
And that he felt like he was seeing something in me that was special.
I told him I wanted that moment and
I think I proved to him that I could handle it.
[MUSIC]
Yeah, I mean, there's something about Bray Wyatt, I think.
It's funny because you look at where it came from,
and you look at, some of his previous incarnations.
We don't need to name names, but you know what I'm saying if you know and
you may not have seen it.
It may not have been apparent.
But as soon as Bray Wyatt appeared on the scene,
you knew there was something special there.
And I remember seeing inklings of it down in NXT before it
received this giant amount of production on a WWE scope.
And yeah, there's just something about his mindset when he walks through the curtain
that's different than everybody else.
There's something about that that just captivates people.
And it's a little weird and it's a little funky, but
I think it certainly caters to a certain audience.
Going into an Elimination Chamber with Shield versus The Wyatt Family for
the first time, it was so, so special.
I think you just hadn't seen two factions
be that dominant together in a parallel, at the same time.
And it was one of those, what if, if it'll ever happen?
What would happen?
What would it look like?
Like Marvel versus DC, right?
It's like that.
It's like you put those characters together and you see what's gonna happen
but you just never know, you never it's never gonna happen, not possible.
But in WWE land, it is possible and so
I was really happy that we got around to having that match up.
Because the electricity was off the charts, and
I knew we had it in November, the previous year on a raw in London.
There was some sort of interaction and the crowd was bonker.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[NOISE]
>> Once you've got them there,
[LAUGH] it's cake after that.
And then it was just warfare cuz neither team wanted to go down.
And so that was a blast, that was a really good one.
[MUSIC]
SummerSlam 2015, myself and John Cena Champ vs champ.
I almost thought it was a joke, in a weird way.
I was like wait, WWE Heavyweight Champion and United States Champion, what?
What are we do?
What, how?
What, why?
I busted out the white gear the notorious white gear for that one,
which it's easily my most popular gear of all time.
Like get questions about it still to this day four years later when you're going to
bring it back.
But my boss hated it, hated that the white gear very much,
so it'll never be brought back.
I think it's in storage somewhere, but the match was crazy man.
And I remember, the Jon Stewart involvement in being so
I wouldn't say vehemently opposed to it, but certainly not into it.
I wasn't for the idea.
But then when I thought about, I imagine
beating John Cena isn't cool but having Jon Stewart's help is even cooler.
Imagine all the places this is going to go.
Imagine all of the networks that this is going to be on.
Now it's not just WWE now, it's bigger than WWE and
so Jon Stewart is an awesome dude, awesome human being.
One of my favorite people and
I was so stoke that I got to get to know him because of this moment.
We got to work together before and after this and stuff like that.
I got to go on the daily show and and be around Jon Stewart.
So yeah, it was awesome.
It was it was a really cool moment almost one of those.
It's like it's been four years now for me.
So it's like [SOUND] where does the time go?
[MUSIC]
Money in the Bank 2016, myself versus Roman Reigns.
I believe this is my first match since my knee injury,
like first pay-per-view match.
Came back from my knee injury a little heavier, on purpose.
Which was a little cumbersome trying to move around, I had a knee brace on for
this match as well, which I was not terribly comfortable with.
I was nervous about the pedigree,
just falling onto my knee that way I hadn't done it and like
still wasn't comfortable with not having some of the nerve endings in my knee.
It's like riding a bike in a sense, but it's also not and
I was in a weird place mentally, kinda coming back off that injury.
I'd had tons of time for introspection.
The audience had sort of turned a corner on me while I was gone.
And so they, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
I had to forfeit the title back in November and immediately they were like
no, we miss Seth Rollins [LAUGH], which I wasn't expecting.
And so they had done a great documentary on me.
And they did profile my recovery and really painted me as
more of the person that I am supposed to character I was playing.
And so it was very interesting to come back and try to jump into that character
again, but not feel fully enveloped in it, kinda feel like there's something missing.
I was just in a different mindset.
And so there were a lot of, I guess,
the machinations of that match from a character perspective,
from not having done a match of that length in a long time.
And being in there with Roman who's, now been doing it consistently all
three shield members of the champions in one night, which is really unprecedented.
It was it was nuts man.
There's a lot that goes into that and
I think that Roman gets overlooked to is being a barn burner of the match.
[MUSIC]
So Brock Lesnar and myself are Wrestle Mania 35.
We open the show which was not the original card.
The WWE is crazy and things change.
On a whim sometimes and that was one of them.
The difference between going [LAUGH] on at close to midnight and going on at 7 PM or
6 PM or whatever it is, it's night and day, literally night and day.
When I found out that I was going on first, it was like wow,
cuz you see the card and you're stacked at the end.
And you're like, okay, you get four hours to prepare or
whatever to get mentally set up.
And now you've got 30 minutes, and it's Brock Lesnar, and it's wrestle mania and
it's 80,000 people.
And it's a universal title and [SOUND], so it almost worked in a nice way that I
didn't have time to process all that information.
Sort of for better or worse, it shed all of those layers of pressure that you
usually put on yourself when you have to wait til the back end of Wrestle Mania.
So I don't know, it might have helped.
And I'm just hustling in my gear and trying to get out there.
And a funny story, I was so amped up, so fired up for that match and for
Brock Lesnar, that I legitimately almost passed out on my entrance.
No joke, I don't know if you can ever catch it, but there's a moment where I'm
drifting kind of back to the center of the ramp and I'm just glossed over.
Because when you get so fired up, it's that feeling like when you've been
laying down or sitting down for too long, you stand up and you get light-headed.
That's what I had and
it was to the point where you start kinda going whoa, whoa, whoa.
And I recovered just in time to walk down the ramp and you know beat Brock Lesnar.
But it was, there was a moment [LAUGH] right there when I didn't know if
it was going to happen, they were going to have to cart me off the stage [LAUGH].
Wouldn't that have been a great opening to Wrestle Mania.
>> Here is your winner and
the new Universal Champion, Seth Rollins.
>> I think after talking about these matches,
it becomes very clear to me why I have the name the Architect.
I just think, they're all the way they are by some sort
of design in my head like I can remember how I felt in the lead up to the matches.
I can remember my plans going into the matches,
the execution, and I can see the evolution of it all.
If you lay it out over a timeline, I talked about the NXT match and
how I was so disappointed in my performance.
And I felt like I was kind of saved by the energy of the crowd.
And by the back end of all this we're talking about Wrestle Mania 35 and
the Universal Championship match and Brock Lesnar and everything in between.
And I can see my brain power growing with
each little step to the point where Wrestle Mania.
It's a culmination of all of those years of everything coming together.
And so I can, I'm impressed by
myself [LAUGH], not egotistical way I hope.
I just feel like it's pretty cool to see, to take a step outside,
a different perspective and realize that I've had a really cool career so far.