Steve Cook’s walk down memory lane reaches 2015! A busy year for pro wrestling, Cook’s highlights include Kevin Owens’ debut, Lucha Underground, Sting, and more!

2015 was a pretty busy year, one which didn’t give me much time to write about the pro wrestling. I wrote a grand total of one article, the 2015 411 Wrestling Hot 100. Once I did that, I thought that my wrestling writing experience was over. Even if I was still keeping track of things, I didn’t have the time or the interest to do anything other than tweet about the wrestling.

Plus, I had kind of promised myself back when I started that I would be doing very important things by the time I was 30 and would be out of the game barring unforeseen circumstances. So, I was.

Pro wrestling didn’t stop! Here are my top 5 memories from 2015.

5. Kevin Owens’ main roster debut

How do you make somebody seem like a big deal immediately? Pair them with your top star and let them look good. Owens had started appearing on NXT in December 2014 and wasted no time winning that championship and becoming the brand’s top star. May 18 saw Owens make his first appearance on Monday Night Raw, answering John Cena’s US Championship Open Challenge. Owens’ attack on Cena set up a non-title match at Elimination Chamber. Owens won a clean victory over Cena in his very first main roster match, something that not too many people can say. Are there others?

Cena wound up winning the feud because he was John Cena, but it was still a heck of a start for Kevin Owens’ WWE main roster career. As somebody who had seen him wrestling at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds back in the day, it was a cool thing to see.

4. Lucha Underground

For my money, Lucha Underground was the best televised wrestling show during this time period. Some will tell you it was NXT, but I got a lot more fun out of Lucha Underground than anything else going on in 2015. It featured all kinds of talent that are still doing things here in 2020, with the freedom to do some pretty crazy stuff. The storylines were a bit out there, and there was a lot of that cinematic stuff we’ve been seeing more of since the pandemic started.

Lucha Underground’s run peaked with the first season. Not that seasons 2 or 3 weren’t good, they just weren’t quite on the level of the first one. By the time the fourth season finally rolled around, I’d lost interest. It had a good run though, and gave a lot of talented people a start.

3. NXT TakeOver leaves Orlando

Lucha Underground had the best weekly wrestling show. NXT had the best intermittent series of shows going with TakeOver. Every single one delivered with amazing matches that blew away everything else going on WWE television/PPV at the time. Things kicked up another notch when they started taking the show out of Orlando. The first TakeOver event in Brooklyn featured a number of memorable moments:

-Jushin “Thunder” Liger’s first appearance in a WWE ring
-Finn Balor defending the NXT Championship against Kevin Owens in a ladder match
-Bayley & Sasha Banks stealing the show in a match WWE still produces specials about today

People wondered if NXT would be able to draw on the level of Raw or SmackDown. SummerSlam weekend in Brooklyn proved that NXT could sell the arena out too.

2. Sting’s Big WWE Run

Fans had wanted it for decades. The only top wrestling star of the 1990s to never work for Vince McMahon & WWE was Sting. People always wondered what Sting would be able to accomplish under that umbrella. Would he have become an even bigger star? For whatever reason, it never happened. Sting was happy working for WCW, then he became associated with TNA/Impact Wrestling for years.

By the time 2015 rolled around, Sting was ready to go to WWE. Sure, it was at least twenty years after people wanted him to go, but there was still hope that it could be fun. As we’ve seen in recent years, WWE tends to book their older part-timers very well. Sting…not so much. He made his big in-ring debut against Triple H in a match that a lot of people enjoyed because of the nostalgia factor. I hated it because the real New World Order never would have come down to back up Sting. Sting lost because LOL WCW.

Sting’s final match was a WWE Championship match against Seth Rollins at Night of Champions. Sting lost, and also suffered a neck injury on a Rollins turnbuckle powerbomb. All in all, Sting’s WWE run could hardly have gone worse from an in-ring perspective. They didn’t even get to do that Sting vs. Undertaker match that people had asked for for years.

1. Bumps in the road for Roman Reigns

Over the years, many of you have wondered why The Big Dog has never quite become the tippy top guy of WWE on the same level that John Cena, Steve Austin or Hulk Hogan were, even though WWE tells us that he is. For me, it comes back to two key moments in 2015 that didn’t go as well as they could have.

WrestleMania 31. A main event championship match with Brock Lesnar that most people agreed was a really good piece of business. It looked to serve as Roman’s coronation (something that would happen with Roman & Brock time again in the future), instead it served as Seth Rollins’ ultimate moment. Rollins cashing in the Money in the Bank briefcase was an exciting moment in the eyes of most fans, but what did it do to make Roman Reigns a star? Reigns even took the pin because they didn’t want Lesnar to do it.

Reigns got another chance at the Survivor Series, where he wound up in a tournament final for the WWE Championship against Dean Ambrose. The Big Dog got the win, balloons & confetti started falling down and a star was made! At least for a moment, until Sheamus came down, cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase and ended Reigns’ first WWE Championship reign within five minutes. Not the best way for your first title reign to go. Had it been something special, Reigns would have had a much easier time the last several years.