AEW Star Jon Moxley has revealed something that Shield did in the WWE that he absolutely hated.
The trio of Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns took the wrestling world by storm in 2012 when they debuted at Survivor Series in 2012. They destroyed John Cena and Ryback, handing CM Punk the victory in the WWE Championship match and establishing themselves as main eventers right out of the gate.
Over the next two years, they made six-man tag team matches must-see, main eventing Raw on multiple occasions. They also help title gold, with Ambrose holding the United States Championship and Reigns/Rollins becoming Tag Team Champions.
The team split up in 2014 when Rollins attacked his former brothers. They feuded amongst themselves for the best part of three years before they were brought back together to fight a common goal (although Roman Reigns was replaced by Kurt Angle due to illness). This reunion wouldn’t last long as Ambrose would soon turn heel and feud with Rollins whilst Reigns was out of action due to cancer.
Ambrose would get sick of his WWE career by 2019 and announced his intention to leave the company later that year. His contract ran out after Wrestlemania that year, with his last match being a Shield reunion show that he was only paid the minimum wage possible for wrestling on. He now wrestles in AEW as Jon Moxley and is much happier and more creatively fulfilled than when he was a part of The Shield in the WWE.
During a recent appearance on Talk Is Jericho, the former WWE Champion revealed something about The Shield that WWE Chairman Vince McMahon absolutely hated. He revealed that Vince McMahon hated the masks the trio wore at Wrestlemania XXX and cancelled any plans to sell the cool looking paintball masks after the fact. This drew the ire of the trio and the merchandise team as a whole, with all involved missing out on some good money because “Vince just hated those masks”
Speaking with Chris Jericho, Jon Moxley said;
“They know who frickin Roman Reigns looks like. They know what I look like. They know what The Shield look like. They already know. We don’t need to show them a picture of it. I went screw it, we’ll go the opposite direction. We won’t have a picture of The Shield. I found like my one old SWAT vest they had and a pair of boots a The Shield mask that we wore for big shows that Vince hated, even though we would have sold millions of them. We had these cool Sub Zero ninja masks. We busted them out at WrestleMania, and we looked cool as f*ck, I’m not gonna lie.
“The next night Vince was just furious. He’s like, ‘They can’t see your faces! Get rid of the masks!’ And the merchandise guys were mortified. They’re like, ‘They’re already coming up with designs. We’re gonna sell millions of these.’ Vince was like, ‘No, you can’t see their faces!’ We did it in Australia again just to piss him off, and we didn’t tell him, like years later, and boy, they got pissed again. Vince just hated those masks. So I put my Shield gear, basically, on the floor of my garage and lit it in a artistic, stylistic way, and that’s the only picture of The Shield, just a picture of my old gear.”