10 Big Names Missing From WWE Raw 25
These invitations must have got lost in the post.
Raw 25 was an enormous celebration of everything that WWE's red brand has meant to audiences over the course of the last quarter of a century. Spread across two venues during the three hour broadcast, the company served up a mixture of the standard in-ring action audiences expect from its flagship show and quirky nostalgia segments.
As part of the festivities, WWE enticed dozens and dozens of legends from the history of Raw to appear in front of the crowd. Fans of wrestling from any point in history, from the start of the WrestleMania Era to the violence of the Attitude Era and star-making of the Ruthless Aggression Era, will have found plenty to enjoy.
The segments varied from the blockbuster opening in which Stone Cold Steve Austin delivered a series of Stunners to the McMahon family to the reunion of D-Generation X in front of the packed Manhattan Center. There were also brief showcases of Raw's greatest female superstars and general managers, as well as a chaotic backstage poker game in which Heath Slater lost a tonne of money to a table full of returning stars.
Despite the formidable roster of returning talent butting heads with the newbies, there remained a few names that never got the chance to appear on the show. Some were absent for obvious reasons and many originally planned to attend but, for whatever reason, there were some big holes in this festival of nostalgia.
10. Alundra Blayze
Alundra Blayze, also known as Madusa during her in-ring career, should have been an obvious choice to appear in the segment of Raw 25 that celebrated women's wrestling over the years. She was a pioneer of a more hard-hitting women's style in America, aided by her work in the celebrated world of All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
She then became a crucial cog in the Monday Night War and delivered one of the most memorable moments of that period when she arrived on WCW's Nitro with the WWF Women's Championship, which she dropped into a rubbish bin.
She stayed with WCW until Vince McMahon bought the company, then left as a result of their previous issues. It wasn't until her Hall of Fame induction in 2015 that she patched things up with the WWE head honcho.
The fact WWE missed out someone with so much in-ring experience, while including the likes of Maria Kanellis and Kelly Kelly, was thoroughly shocking. This is particularly the case given the fact Blayze is a recent Hall of Fame inductee and has appeared occasionally on WWE programming in the last few years, including on an episode of Table for 3 on the WWE Network.