Welcome to the “Raw is Madison Square Garden” edition of The Wrestling List. I really enjoyed tonight’s Raw and it kept my full attention throughout. It also was a show of storylines of everyone needs anger management and security can’t handle anything. LOL. Tonight, we had Cody and Stephanie, Punk getting revenge, Pearce getting abused, security getting destroyed, Roxanne Perez returns, Gunther returns, WrestleMania matches being announced, new tag champs, IShowSpeed still cursed, and more.
The show opened up tonight with a surprise with Cody Rhodes. Cody goes to start talking and we get an even bigger surprise of Stephanie McMahon making her way to the ring. The story of this segment was Stephanie trying to give advice telling Cody that this version of Cody doesn’t have the edge needed to be able to beat this version of Randy Orton. Cody says he knows all about Randy saying isn’t the student and that he was Randy’s babysitter back in his early days there when Randy was in the car “drooling all over himself”. She talked of how Dusty had the edge of being able to go up to that level if need be and Stephanie said you aren’t your father. Cody fired back saying you want to bring up fathers, with all due respect, you aren’t yours either. That got a slap out of Stephanie. Stephanie tells him unless you can think like Orton, you’re going to lose the title. She goes to leave and Cody grabs her arm spinning her back around. Cody says I’ve got two words for you……”thank you” and walks off. It was a pretty awesome and intense segment. To close the show, we had CM Punk and Roman Reigns with their segment. No talking this week. Roman started to talk. Punk’s music hits and he’s walking to the ring with a purpose of a fight. The brawl starts. Pearce and security arrive to boos. They continue to fight. Security is getting taken down including Roman missing the spear on Punk and nailing Petey Williams instead. Punk goes for payback for last week and power bombs Roman on to the table. Punk then got on top of him with punches as he sang the Roman Reigns song to him. LOL. Continuing to try and break up fights tonight, Brock Lesnar was ready for another fight with Oba Femi. Pearce walks out getting ahead of things saying nope, not happening cause I’m not jeopardizing one of my main events. The crowd boos to which Pearce says that’s fine, you can boo but it isn’t happening tonight. Oba walks out anyway and proceeds to just destroy security. He picks up one guy and full launches him in the air sending him crashing to the floor. I wish I had a pic of my face when I saw that bump. Good grief. LOL. Pearce tries to stop Oba and Oba knocks Pearce over to the floor so he can get to Brock. Oba and Brock face off in the ring to a huge reaction from MSG and then boos as Triple H rolls in the ring getting in between them ensuring nothing is happening tonight with them. Brock starts grabbing stairs and then I’m pretty sure he F5’d the same guy that took the Oba Femi launch into the air. Pearce had more to deal with in trying to talk to Paul Heyman all night. Had Heyman checked his email that Pearce had sent? Clearly not. Pearce told Heyman that all charges against Rollins had been dropped by the police…..and Rollins was cleared to wrestle as of that moment. Rollins music hits and we get a repeat performance of a few weeks ago where Rollins ends up behind Heyman giving him the chair shot to the back. There has been a ton of talk of where has Gunther been and after the year he’s had, does he just not have a WrestleMania opponent??? Well, tonight he showed up and attacked Seth as he was about to stomp Heyman again. Then, Gunther declared the two of them for WrestleMania. When the crowd started popping as Seth was about to lay out Heyman again, I said there is Bron making his return. Nope. Wait, Gunther? I kept wondering if Bron might get cleared before WrestleMania. I wondered if WWE was waiting on it too. Looks like a no. Then, you have Bronson obviously out. Logan and Austin are now the tag champs. Sooooo, Seth really doesn’t have anybody to take on from The Vision for WrestleMania cause they’ll surely have a tag title match for Logan and Austin. Enter Gunther. Is it random? Full yes, absolutely. Will it be good? Yes, it should be. Liv Morgan cut a promo talking trash on Stephanie Vaquer. She mentions Stephanie’s mom and boom pyro. Stephanie comes to the ring with a purpose. She’s getting the best of Liv and grabs a chair from ringside. As she is about to use the chair, Roxanne Perez makes her return helping Liv as they both beat down Stephanie. Glad to see Roxanne back after her health issue! Welcome back! The women’s fatal four way for Mania was made official tonight as it was clear that this was what they were building up to for weeks. Bayley and Lyra get their tag title shot taking on Nia and Lash. Of course, we get Alexa and Charlotte along with the Bellas arriving. They all just randomly interfere for no real reason other than well, this is what happens every week. LOL. With the news that Nikki Bella had hurt her ankle last week on Smackdown, I was watching her closely seeing how they cover her here. The brawl is on. Nikki gets picked up by Lash who puts Nikki into the post back first horizontally and then sets her flat on the apron by the post. I said well done everyone on covering her injury. She takes the back bump and then just gets to lay there selling on her back while the others brawl and her ankle is completely left alone. Smart way to work around that injury. The Usos lost the tag team titles to Logan and Austin after IShowSpeed got involved involuntarily. The match was a street fight. Logan goes over to his mom in the crowd who starts to hand him the brass knuckles. LA Knight who was on commentary goes over and gets involved. Knight starts to pull on Logan and Logan is clinging to Speed who gets dragged over the barricade with him. Speed has the brass knuckles. Knight walks up from behind and puts his hand on Speed who reflex action turns and nails Knight with the brass knuckles. Speed immediately has a face of oh no, I didn’t mean to do that. Logan tries to use them and misses. However, Jimmy goes for a dive but Logan nails him with them. Austin who is out of it then just falls on Jimmy and gets the win for the belts. Logan and Austin celebrate with Speed who is still not into all of this not liking how that happened. Penta took on Kofi Kingston who was clear to Waller that he didn’t want his help. Waller tries to help and Kofi tells him no and then gets nailed while Waller is like “see”. LOL. Waller walks over on the floor saying you might need my help. Then, Waller gets nailed with a Canadian destroyer on the floor. Kofi gets pinned shortly after as Penta wins the match. Afterwards, he cuts a promo where he announces a ladder match at WrestleMania for the Intercontinental title which will be a multi man match. Iyo Sky took on Raquel Rodriquez. Asuka and Kairi made their way to ringside. Well, Kairi reluctantly went but mostly getting yelled at. Iyo tries to help Kairi as Iyo nails Asuka with a dive. Scary bump as Iyo took a lot of the worst of that. After Iyo returns to the ring, she gets nailed by Raquel and takes the loss of the match.
Other notes from Raw. Pearce was taking shots left and right tonight. LOL. He took the shove down from Oba and then he caught an elbow from Punk during the brawl in the final segment. Did you notice that Stephanie line of this was the house that her grandfather built? I also loved the nod from Cole mentioning later on that MSG is the house Bruno built. Love that era getting its recognition. New Usos theme song debuted tonight. It’s a mix of Jey’s song with it playing off the two of them. Not as catchy as the other so we’ll have to see how it plays as time goes along. IShowSpeed was still playing off of Danhausen cursing him last week trying to get uncursed but he didn’t like Danhausen’s negotiation wants.
Remember when I said last week that WWE only had one sympathetic play of something Orton could do to get boos and it was RKO’ing Jelly Roll? Well. LOL. We get to the final segment last week on Smackdown. Orton cutting a promo. Cut to the outside and we see Cody walking out of his bus. As Cody gets halfway down the ramp, security all runs out. Can I point out that we just watched Cody walk for like five minutes through the back during a picture in picture commercial break and nobody did anything? He gets halfway down the ramp and thennnnnnn security full tackles him but they just had five minutes of knowing where he was going. LOL. I always think they make security look ridiculous from a storyline perspective. The fight is on between Cody and Randy and security is battling. In walks Jelly Roll to try and calm things. I say, well, here we go. LOL. Here comes their one shot to try and get boos. Randy RKO’s Jelly Roll….and the crowd pops huge chanting “Randy, Randy” so the cheers got louder. LOL. Hey WWE, the fans aren’t going to boo him. Just not going to happen.
WWE announced that John Cena will be the host for WrestleMania.
I’ve mentioned the WWE Vault You Tube channel in recent weeks but I have two big recommendations of things they have posted. One is raw footage from March 26, 2001 in Panama City at the last night of WCW Monday Nitro. Awesome behind the scenes footage of people reacting, promo outtakes, WCW talent watching monitors of Vince speaking on Raw, and different views of Shane walking out at the end of the show. It’s such a raw look at what was such a crazy and unbelievable night not knowing what was going to happen from there. Another video is a series of outtakes from the 80’s and early 90’s of various promos and segments being recorded and raw footage being recorded. It’s awesome to see Andre The Giant out of character which is something that we just don’t have much footage of. There is footage of them doing take after take of the darts game of Mr. Perfect trying to throw a perfect shot. Great Gene Okerlund outtakes. Rick Rude in the gym with Heenan cutting promos on the Warrior. Fun stuff of different things watching WWE set up how they are going to produce things and doing multiple takes. It’s an adventure into an era that we haven’t seen much out of character footage of cause it was all obviously very kayfabe at the time.
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