Seth Rollins with a sly shoutout for The Shield’s birthday

WWE is celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Shield’s debut all month, but today (Nov. 18) marks exactly ten years from when Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns & Seth Rollins made their main roster debut at Survivor Series.

It was during the Triple Threat WWE championship main event between CM Punk, John Cena & Ryback. The Big Guy hit Cena with Shell Shock and seemed poised to end Punk’s year-long reign with the belt. But then three young men came out of the crowd. Dressed in black, the trio took out Ryback with what would become their signature move — the Triple Powerbomb. Once he’d gone through the announce desk, Punk was able to pin Cena.

We wouldn’t get the group’s name for another week, but The Shield was born.

A lot (and we do mean A LOT) has happened since that night in Indianapolis, some of which makes celebrating the Hounds of Justice and their legacy a little tricky. But we don’t call Rollins a visionary for nothing...

Seth always hated those turtlenecks, as he said when he told the story of the group’s debut on Talk Is Jericho back in 2014 (told you a lot’s changed):

“‘Have you seen your costumes?’ ‘Well, no.’ ‘Okay, go to wardrobe.’ Well, we go to wardrobe, we got these pants, we’ve got these awful turtlenecks, like, I don’t know why we had turtlenecks. They were literally straight turtlenecks, like what your uncle would wear to a terrible Christmas party or something like that. And then we had these shields, like big plastic riot shields. You know, like plastic. Like if you were to stop a riot after the Canadians lost game 7 or something like that, when they were tipping cars over and you had tear gas, that’s the shield. It said ‘SHIELD’ on it and we had the sticks, the clubs, too.

“I distinctly remember we were walking through the path that we were going to run and we had these shields and these clubs, and we’re walking down the thing and Vince is by the ring. He looks over and he says ‘oh, what you can’t kick his ass by yourself?’ And we’re sitting here just looking like doofus’s with these shields and clubs and we’re like ‘yeah, we can’ and we just throw the stuff down. Luckily, that was all gone. We still had the rotten turtlenecks but, yeah, it was just like boom, Survivor Series, you’re off and running.”

At least he didn’t have to tweet “SHIELD shields”.

Happy birthday!