Chris Hero was meant to be a part of The Shield, before being replaced by Roman Reigns in the group.
CM Punk revealed that he was the mind behind The Shield, during his legendary 434 day title run. He held the title from 2011 to 2013, but needed help from The Shield to keep his belt on occasions.
The group debuted at Survivor Series 2012, attack Ryback and John Cena to help CM Punk retain the title in a triple-threat match at the event.
They were aligned with Punk for months, with their interference in his matches against The Rock explicitly banned, to make the match fair for The People’s Champion.
The origins of the group were revealed by CM Punk during his appearance on Colt Cabana’s Art of Wrestling podcast.
The former WWE Champion revealed that he was told he needed a heel stable, after he turned heel on The Rock.
Originally, WWE planned to put The Big Show and Daniel Bryan with him. They were both big stars in the company, but hardly somebody who needed the rub of being Punk’s lackeys.
Instead, CM Punk suggested Chris Hero, Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins to e part of what would later become “The Shield”.
WWE agreed, but swapped Chris Hero out for Roman Reigns, and the rest is history.
What happened was, at that time [in WWE] the head writer was Eric Pankowski. He called me up one day and he was like, ‘Okay, uh, nobody knows you’re going to turn heel but we want to stick a stable with you,” CM Punk claimed,
“(I said) I’m willing to do the heel stable thing, but why don’t we pick three guys from FCW that are ready instead of using two guys, you know what I mean?….Ambrose, Rollins and Chris Hero [Kassius Ohno]. They wanted Roman Reigns.
They came to me and they were like, ‘What about Leakee? (Roman Reigns name in NXT)’ It wasn’t my hill to die on. I said, ‘Sure,’ because it made sense to me.””
Chris Hero Denied The Rumours About “The Shield”
Chris Hero recently denied the rumours of him being in The Shield, but confirmed that he was pitched to be part of a trio with Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose.
At the time the idea was pitched, the concept of The Shield had not been fully formed. Hero was sought out by Punk, alongside Ambrose and Rollins, to be part of his group, but the idea never developed past the initial suggestion.
During an interview with ITR, the former WWE superstar (who then was known as Kassius Ohno) denied being a part of The Shield, and noted that the conversation surrounding it only serves to pit him and Roman Reigns against one another.
Okay so, the thing that — a little thing that annoys me about this is people heard the podcast with [CM] Punk and then they put that information out there and it just kind of took a life of its own. When Punk pitched the trio of myself, [Dean] Ambrose and [Seth] Rollins, there was no Shield concept.
It was just, ‘Hey, let’s pair these three guys with me.’ So, technically I was never supposed to be a member of The Shield because The Shield didn’t exist when this was pitched, so that’s a thing that I see on Twitter pretty much every other day. It gets a little annoying because it’s deviated so far from the original source of it.
I found out just when everybody else found out, by listening to CM Punk on the Art of Wrestling podcast. I never had a conversation with him about this and there are — these things happen all the time where you pitch ideas or you talk about things but the last thing you wanna do is get someone’s hopes up by saying, ‘Hey man, I pitched this,’ or whatever. ‘I’m gonna do my best to get this to work’ and then if it doesn’t work, it’s just unnecessary bad feelings.
Not bad, bad feelings but you understand my point. So, listening to that podcast was the first time I had heard that. I never had a conversation with Punk about this, still to this day I have not, because I don’t really know what the point of the conversation would be.
People ask me if I think I could have been successful in The Shield and of course my answer is yes, of course I think I can take anything that’s given to me and make the most out of it.
Unfortunately, people like to pit this as a me versus Roman Reigns thing which is very silly because he’s an incredible performer, he’s one of a kind, he’s got his own thing figured out and there’s really no reason to compare the two of us, especially when I wasn’t pitched for a Shield because a Shield didn’t exist yet so…
Chris Hero had two runs in the WWE, swapping between NXT and NXT UK. He never made it to the main roster, and was fired from the company in 2020.