7 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Jan 16)

1. Snuka Gets Warm Sendoff

jimmy snuka
WWE.com

WWE Hall of Famer Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka passed away over the weekend and received a hero’s sendoff on Raw Monday night.

And it was the wrong call.

Snuka, 73, had only recently been deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial in the 1983 death of his then-girlfriend Nancy Argento. He was finally charged with her murder in 2015, and was removed from the online listing of Hall of Famers on WWE’s website. His name was never mentioned on WWE television. Essentially, he was treated as a pariah in a similar vein to Chris Benoit.

Granted, nothing was ever proven and the case never went to trial – it simply was a grand jury indictment – but it still felt somewhat eerie to hear the hero worship lumped on top of Snuka Monday night. Probably a better – and less controversial – way to honor Superfly would have been to simply toll the bell or display a graphic heading into commercial, but not the entire video package with JBL, Seth Rollins, Mick Foley and Triple H gushing about him.

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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.