5 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Raw 3:16 Day
A surreal night that leaves a lot of question marks for wrestling's near-future.
Well, there you have it: WrestleMania 36 will take place as scheduled on April 5, but it will happen in the same place Raw emanated from Monday night, with the same crowd size: zero.
If Monday night was any indication of what we have to look forward to next month, it’s going to be a very weird time.
Raw was disjointed, mainly because half of the episode was eaten up by WWE airing the entire men’s Royal Rumble match, which with commercials ran nearly 90 minutes. We got one – yes, just one! – match, and it wasn’t that good. We got three legends for in-ring segments, and only one hit it out of the park. And we got The Man, who delivered to salvage the show somewhat.
Monday night taught us one unequivocal thing: Modern-day professional wrestling is reliant on crowd reaction. Not having an audience to boo, cheer or play to really drags everything down. Watching wrestlers walk to the ring, hit their signature poses, and deliver strong promos, all to silence is just mind-blowing.
You almost wish they could CGI an audience into the background and pipe in fake crowd noise. Almost.
But here we are, so let’s check out what could become the new normal – at least in the immediate future – for WWE in this new world of social distancing.
Let’s get to it…