10 Awesome WWE Promos You Probably Don't Remember

The greatest wrestling performers of all time aren’t necessarily the greatest wrestlers. Really, the only criteria for determining whether a character, performer, angle or promotion is a success is by the time honoured metric of money.

Does it draw?

And of course, drawing power is all about engaging the audience and getting over. Well, if you’re one of many characters on a TV show and you don’t get any dialogue, it becomes much more difficult to get noticed. If you get dialogue but it’s terrible, or you can’t deliver it convincingly, it’s actually worse as you get noticed for all the wrong reasons.

But the ability to cut a great promo can lift you out of the gutter, transform a journeyman mid-carder into a star, a main eventer. A promo inspired the 3:16 t-shirt that sold 12 million units (give or take) for ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin - and everyone knows how a single worked shoot promo letting off some steam made CM Punk a wrestling icon.

You know all about the earthshaking promos, the ones that changed wrestling history, but how about some of the lesser-known mic classics, the in-ring interviews and rants to camera that only true wrestling obsessives still recall?

Time to test your memory, and your fandom - how many of the following ten freakin’ awesome promos from the annals of WWF/E history did you know about? And, for extra Internet Points, how many did you watch on their first go-around, rather than on YouTube years later?

Smackdown April 10th 2009

Is his long running grudge with Edge the best ongoing rivalry that John Cena’s ever had? Probably. Cena and Orton were never the nemeses for the ages that WWE thought they were, and Cena and CM Punk was just getting exciting when Punk retired from wrestling.

The Rated-R Superstar first got on Cena’s hit list when he cashed in the very first Money In The Bank briefcase on a shattered WWE Champion at New Year’s Revolution in 2006. Ever since then, their feud had a shoot vibe to it. Edge was so very good at displaying pure, animalistic emotion like hate and rage that it seemed as though he genuinely loathed Cena.

This amazing promo is a perfect showcase of that talent. It would end up being the final time Edge and Cena would have words together: it came in the same week that Cena had pinned the Big Show to win Edge’s World Heavyweight Championship in a triple threat match at WrestleMania XXV, and in anticipation of their rematch at Backlash.

At that event, Edge defeated Cena in a Last Man Standing match to regain the title after the Big Show interfered and threw Big Match John into a giant spotlight. The pair tangled less and less after that, and Edge was medically forced into retirement two years later.