WWE WrestleMania 36 Results: Brock Lesnar’s Loss Transforms Drew McIntyre Into A Huge Star

WWE has a new top star on its hands, and his name is Drew McIntyre, who defeated Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 36 to win the WWE Championship for the first time in his career.

McIntyre beat “The Beast” with four devastating Claymore kicks to cap off a short but sweet main event match, one that marked the second 2020 pay-per-view that was designed to utilize Lesnar in order to transform McIntyre into a bona fide star. The first, of course, came at Royal Rumble when Lesnar dominated the first half of the Royal Rumble with a whopping 13 eliminations only to have his dominant run ended by McIntyre, who also went on win the entire thing. That booking decision was widely praised as a true star-making performance and a prime example of why WWE should continue to pay Lesnar exorbitant sums of money even though he’s rarely actually around.

There are very few superstars—if any—who possess the sheer star power that Lesnar has, which explains why John Cena recently labeled him as “the greatest in-ring performer ever.” Although WWE has swung and missed on two previous occasions when trying to utilize Lesnar to establish a top star as the face of the company (see: Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns), Lesnar’s feud with McIntyre has been an undeniable success that has helped transform McIntyre from overlooked midcard heel to beloved babyface champion.

McIntyre, after all, had previously had a rocky run in WWE when he was signed with the company from 2007 to 2014. Despite initially being pegged as Vince McMahon’s “Chosen One” and being positioned for a massive push when he was still in his early 20s, McIntyre fizzled out, eventually became a comedy performer in 3MB and was eventually out of the company altogether. When McIntyre was released six years ago, McMahon reportedly told him to “reinvent himself” and then return down the road. McIntyre just did that in only three years, turning himself into a world champion in Impact Wrestling before returning to WWE in NXT in 2017 and quickly becoming NXT Champion.

A year later, McIntyre was promoted to the main roster the night after WrestleMania 34, but he’d spend the better part of the next year and a half being plagued by start-and-stop pushes the way so many other stars have suffered a similar fate in recent years. Despite that, McIntyre had a few huge supporters in Vince McMahon and Triple H and, eventually, Paul Heyman, and in late 2019, WWE began planting the seeds for a full-fledged babyface turn for the Scottish superstar. At Royal Rumble 2020, WWE went all in on that babyface push when McIntyre won the 30-man battle royal and shed any remnants of his heel persona by positioning him against the loathed Lesnar.

For all the criticism Lesnar has taken in recent years due to his lucrative part-time schedule (and even though there isn’t much to suggest that he consistently moves the needle), the one thing that makes Lesnar so important to WWE is his unparalleled aura, which can’t be imitated or duplicated no matter how hard WWE tries. While fan resentment of Lesnar remains strong, he has been generating the type of heat WWE wants. It’s not the “go away” heat that some heels, like Stephanie McMahon and Baron Corbin, have generated at times. Rather, it’s the type of heat that elicits a legitimate reaction from fans and has helped make McIntyre the star he has become today because of it. Even McIntyre himself said prior to WrestleMania that Lesnar was “going out of his way” to transform him into a bona fide main eventer.

Although Lesnar has historically had better matches with smaller opponents, his WrestleMania 36 match against McIntyre was a simple but hard-hitting “hoss fight” that accomplished its goal of portraying McIntyre as an equal to Lesnar and one of the biggest stars in all of WWE

McIntyre, of course, deserves much of the credit for that, as does Heyman and the WWE creative team.

But rest assured that Lesnar is one of the only stars—if not the only star—who could have helped McIntyre reach his true star power potential.