My First (And Probably Last) Live WWE Show

Like anyone who had spent any portion of the last ten years watching professional wrestling, I was floored when I heard of the double homicide-suicide involving Chris Benoit’s family. How? I wondered. How could something so horrible happen? Eventually my thoughts of “how?” turned to “why?” as to out of all the lurid and shady characters working as and for wrestlers, why did it have to be such a seemingly admirable person as Benoit? Recent developments suggest that head trauma damaging Benoit's brain led to a case of dimensia, which may in part explain, well, the inexplicable. Regardless, Congress is gearing up to force WWE employees to testify in Washington while conducting its own independent investigation into the matter—hopefully it goes smoother than whatever the hell George Mitchell is cooking up, or else our government really is that inept.

There are two periods of my life when I closely followed and greatly enjoyed pro wrestling: ages 7-10 during the peaks of Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior’s careers, and 1999 towards the end of 2002, my late adolescent/college years. The early period is easy to explain: wrestling was bright and colorful, and kids enjoyed it tremendously. Eventually, these young boys grew into angst-filled young adults who got a kick out of the fuck-you attitude that Vince McMahon (and to a lesser extent, the NWO in WCW) had conjured with such stars as Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock. The moment that got me hooked onto my latter wrestling infatuation was Stone Cold driving a beer truck out to the ring and dousing the Rock, Vince McMahon and his cronies in Bud Light. I don’t care how silly it sounds; at age 16, it was cool. And so I watched WWF Raw and Smackdown! as often as I could, occasionally catching a pay-per-view at a friend’s house, getting one or two t-shirts featuring D-Generation X, and renting the best wrestling games Nintendo 64 had to offer.

What was the moment that ended my love affair with wrestling? Well, other than wounding the product with the purchase of WCW and then completely destroying that company’s legitimacy and credibility, I was completely turned off by Triple H climbing into a casket and “banging” a manikin dressed up in a cheerleader’s outfit. It was the idiotic storyline to trump all the idiotic storylines at the time, and even worse, these storylines were taking over the actual wrestling, which even during the late ‘90s was still the chief way of identifying with WWE.

I wasn’t alone in reacting to what Vince and co. did towards the end of 2002; the WWE’s ratings, house gates and merchandising fell off tremendously, and they haven’t recovered since. They were on the upswing in 2005 and 2006, but the Benoit situation this summer may yet become a fatal blow, depending on how Congress acts throughout the rest of this year. (Put it this way: if Congress tells Vince directly that his performers can’t use steroids, there goes the company.)

But as of September 2007, WWE is still touring rigorously, and this past Sunday they came to Nationwide Arena for a taping of their Monday Night Raw show. Growing up in Cincinnati, my parents probably would have preferred that I go to a strip bar than a wrestling show, but now as an independent adult with reasonable income expenditures, I was too curious to pass up on a $20 ticket in the cheap seats and finally get to see what the WWE was like in person.

The crowd outside waiting for the doors to open was what you’d expect: mostly white and blue-collar as hell. (and yes, that's a grown man with a title belt; there were lots of those in attendence)

I sent this one to straightcashhomey.net after snapping it. Any time you see a grown man in the #45, you need to showcase it to greater mankind for their benefit.


A supplementary reason for attending RAW was to also get a look at what Nationwide Arena is like. The verdict? It’s a beauty. The interior concourse is very polished and modern, and there are a few interactive game ports for hockey and what not, and the food, while obviously overpriced, looked excellent and there was a good variety to choose from. The seats in the arena are also padded and very comfortable. It's a great venue, and I should come here for a Blue Jackets game sometime this winter.


I won’t lie: I was extremely surprised to see a Muslim family at a RAW taping. Those of you who follow wrestling know the WWE loves its xenophobia storylines, from the Iron Sheik to Le Resistance to the borderline racist character Mohammad Hassan a few years ago. They were into it too! Like most of the females at the show, these girls went nuts for John Cena.


Most people have told me how surprised they are to see that the ring looks much smaller in person than it does on television. I had the same reaction. WWE does lots of weird and controversial things, but their production quality is consistently first-rate.

A sign the company may on the downward spiral again: my $20 ticket was meant for the upper concourse nosebleeds, but upon purchasing it I found myself in the lower bowl in Row T, not very far from the ring at all. Seven or eight years ago a seat like that would have cost me $40-$50 dollars. As it was, the upper concourse was blacked out, save for some fans on the “TV side” of the ring.

Here’s the TV side:


And here’s the blackout side:


The WWE still boasts about selling out its TV shows, but that’s not been the case for a while now. Nationwide holds around 16,000 at capacity, I’d say the crowd was a healthy 11,000-12,000 people, many (like myself) buying tickets an hour before the show began.


I didn't take too many shots of the wrestling and interviews, seeing as you're not going to get anything memorable 75 yards away from everything. (Not even John Cena in a bigass T-shirt.) The wrestling itself was only so-so. The show began with opening matches that would be taped on Sunday Night Heat, including the likes of Val Venis, Super Crazy, and JIM HACKSAW DUGGAN. I’m not kidding, Hacksaw Duggan, who people thought was old when I was ten, was in the house. He is a BIG guy. All in all, the best wrestling occurred on the Sunday Night Heat taping, mostly because RAW these days (as it has been since about the time I stopped watching it regularly) has all these bullshit backstage segments that bore the hell out of you and take away from some good wrestling.


Case in point: the Triple H match towards the end of the evening. Here’s what Triple H’s evening consisted of: about two minutes of introduction while he did his poses and the crowd went nuts for him; a taped segment later on making fun of Vince’s family, and just about a minute of actual wrestling in his handicap match against Umaga and Carlito (the match was quickly a BS DQ when Carlito and Umaga attacked at the same time, whatever), followed by three minutes of beating the shit out of Umaga with a chair and his phallic-shaped sledgehammer. Yeah, Triple H is a huge star and the king of this industry, but Rock and Stone Cold didn’t have their matches only last a minute before posing endlessly, they performed the heck out of shows. Of course, considering Triple H bangs the boss’s wife, I’m guessing he has a little bit of sway in some of the programming.

Speaking of that boss? Hey, you gotta take a picture of Vince McMahon when you get the chance. Like Nixon visiting China, McMahon’s the only one whose personality and philosophy is twisted enough that he can transform what was once just a good ol’ wrasslin’ program into a marketable business conglomerate. Unfortunately, the conglomerate is still in muddy waters with not only the Benoit situation but also with shoddy storylines and programming. A McMahon family confrontation was the final TV segment of the show (they also had Cena wrestle Mr. Kennedy afterwards to entertain the fans, which was a good gesture to give them their money’s worth). Apparently, Vince has a bastard child that’s about Shane’s and Stephanie’s age, and Linda wants to sue him for, well, whatever, I don’t care, they’ve run a hundred angles similar to this one. Anyways, it turns out that the bastard son is a WWE superstar! How did they announce this? They had a lawyer come out just before the show ended—and I’m fairly certain this is a character NO ONE HAD EVER SEEN ON TV BEFORE—and tell Vince this information. Well, he completely killed the show in several ways:

-He was wearing this yellowish cream suit that looked absolutely hideous,
-Obviously a little nervous, he called Vince “Mr. McCann,” which I found hilarious because it reminded me of Tim McCann, an upperclassmen at ND who lived in my dorm and enjoyed tormenting the hell out of me, and
-He pulled out a piece of paper with vital information on it, and then dropped it and was booed incessantly by the fans.

And that was the final segment of the TV taping. I’m not going to bother to watch it on television, but I can’t imagine that final segment coming off very well, unless they do a hell of a job editing out the “McCann” and paper drop parts. So yeah, what a way to end a show. And unfortunately that’s the kind of crap the WWE has used in its programming, and they’ve lost that casual audience that enjoyed both the personalities and the wrestling content.

Why do I keep harping on how great wrestling content still needs to be? Because the most enjoyable moment of the evening was a tag match between The World’s Greatest Tag Team against Brian Kendrick and Paul London. I’d never heard of Kendrick of London, but they both looked to be about 6’ and 175 pounds and proceeded to put on a great match. They were like the Hardy Boys with a higher degree of technical merit. (BTW, Jeff Hardy was in the opening match against Umaga, and he looked bad. It was an unbearably slow match that only picked up, like always, just before the pinfall. Jeff’s best days left him in 2001.)

The crowd responded extremely well to Kendrick and London, and that’s the kind of thing wrestling ought to implement more into its programming, instead of constantly creating silly storylines about Vince’s bastard kid or John Cena’s dad getting his ass kicked by Randy Orton (I’m not going to bother recapping that, it’s stupid). Of course, I’m sure the WWE has more important matters on their minds, like how to get back the audiences that left after what Benoit did.

Those audiences may never come back.