And so, my friends, we’ve come to the end. The last of the two-hour RAWs, as this would be the year where RAW would permanently bloat itself to THREE HOURS OF TEDIUM that continues to this very day. As I’ve stated in the past, this is as far as I was willing to go and given the sad state of the past couple entries, it’s probably for the best.
For what it’s worth, I actually enjoyed watching these RAW after Mania shows. It’s neat to be able to go back and see what they were kicking off and reflecting on how badly they bungled things… case in point, today’s show.
Show opens with a Rock promo (at least, it’s the first thing I can recall from the show) and it’s a pretty heartfelt promo for the most part; further proof than Dwayne could deliver the goods when he needs to and sometimes even when he’s winging it, he could offer up a fine promo. He then promises to once again be WWE Champion… and we all laughed and chuckled. Oh, Dwayne, you silly boy, you… Little did we know, huh?
And then at the end of the show, John Cena cuts a promo nobody cares about and then out comes BROCK LESNAR. Fresh from his UFC run and having been featured as a valuable addition to the recent WWE video game, Brock comes out and F5s John Cena without getting a word in. Simple, straightforward, give Brock a memorable return with bogging it down, and most of all, we already have a main event program for John Cena at the next PPV. A major hurdle for John to overcome… and indeed, he would, as John Cena would beat Brock Lesnar at Extreme Rules in Brock’s first match back… because CenaWinsLOL.
In other news, Santino Marella retained his US title over Dolph Ziggler and Jack Swagger (fun match, too), Mark Henry got a countout win over CM Punk – your reigning WWE Champion, by the way – and slammed him on the floor after. And then Chris Jericho came out and doused Punk with booze before breaking the bottle over his head… hey, it’s cool to say that Jericho usually has more hits than misses, but this was a definite miss. Go back to Toronto, indeed.
Oh, and Albert of T&A fame (not THAT TNA) made his return to WWE under a new gimmick of Lord Tensai, a Japanese foreigner who was so over with the crowd that they chanted Albert. You know, when they brought Rikishi back as the Sultan in 1997, they at least had the good sense to slap a mask on the guy. All they did with Albert was write some kanji on his face. Come on, guys. We know Attitude was a decade or so ago, but we remember Albert.
All in all, not a bad show, but it was three hours of mostly skipping over stuff and not caring for anything but the important players or close to it. Sorry, kids. But this is where I stop the train because I ain’t doing more of these 3-hour RAW After Manias. I can barely stomach 3-hour RAWs.
We’ll find something else to talk about for next time… maybe more classic PPVs from the glory days of wrestling… oh, who am I kidding? I’ll probably end up catching a shit PPV instead because those are the more interesting ones to talk about… fuck knows why.
I’m out. Later.
dtm666 