4 Ups & 10 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec. 13)

Downs…

10. Another Hometown Hero Bites The Dust

Otis Riddle
WWE.com

Hey, did you know Chad Gable was from Minnesota, where Raw emanated from Monday night?

WWE didn’t allow that to become a focal point, with Gable not wrestling (and thus not having his hometown announced) and didn’t even air him being introduced as accompanying Otis. Then, after the Otis/Riddle match, Randy Orton laid Gable out with an RKO, dropping him in his hometown, just in case anyone thought about cheering for him.

You might be able to overlook this, if not for the fact that WWE seemingly always goes out of its way to embarrass wrestlers in their hometown, either completely downplaying their association with the location or having them lose in humiliating fashion.

Contrast this with AEW, which plays up these hometown connections to spur more crowd involvement, even for wrestlers who are coming into matches as clear underdogs, or for heels who normally would be booed out of the arena. They lean into this kind of stuff to garner more crowd involvement, while WWE evades it desperately.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.