The Real Reason WWE Raw SUCKED This Week

But a little bit of history before we return to how it's yet again being repeated.

In a 1999 edition of Raw Magazine (before burnout, ego and a huge raise lured him to WCW where he'd make and break his name within a matter of months), Vince Russo published an article in the fabled monthly that told the tale of a Vince McMahon infuriated with the state of the show the company had just produced two years earlier.

Blowing his own trumpet (or getting one of his staffers to do it for him) Russo used the piece to tacitly give his side of a story later fleshed out by various sources that lived through it - following a particularly rank post-WrestleMania edition of Raw from South Africa, a raging Chairman tossed a scintillating edition of the magazine on the desk in front of his subordinates and asked why the moribund Mondays didn't look or feel half as captivating as they sounded in the worked shoot publication.

It was Russo's finest hour, effectively. His creativity lauded in the face of McMahon's existing experts. It solidified his spot on the writing team and foreshadowed his ascent as the Attitude Era exploded, but it spoke volumes about how detached The Chairman was from the product he'd shaped almost entirely in his own image in the 1980s.

Physically he was there. He was always f*cking there; the mad b*stard only sleeps two hours a night and he didn't have a football league and a few billion dollars to think about spending back then. But mentally, he was out of touch, and almost out of time. The desperation drove him back into battle, the itch helped him win a war we've not heard the end of ever since.

As per this week's Wrestling Observer, he might not even have that anymore.

CONT'D...