9 Ups And 4 Downs From WWE Raw (Feb 3)

1. Orton Does All The Little Things

Randy Orton rightly gets a lot of criticism when he’s clearly mailing in a performance for being duller than dishwater. And there’s good reason for that: when he’s on, he’s good. So it shows when he dogs it.

Case in point, Monday night, we saw Orton deliver fewer than 20 words of a promo – several fragments and really only one sentence – before leaving, and it was tremendously effective. All of the impact came from the crowd reaction and how Randy played into it perfectly with his mannerisms.

Fans loudly booed everything Orton did, which only makes sense in light of his heinous attack on Edge last week. But once in the ring, Orton did fantastic little things like standing against the ropes and looking pensive, starting to go into his corner pose, only to stop and contemplate it as fans rained down boos. He cut his sentences off as the boos started, which only made them louder.

Finally, Orton gave up, put the mic down and hopped out of the ring. It was tremendous and just makes you want to boo him more, but it also makes you want to hear from him to learn why he did what he did. (Although we’ll probably get the WWE trope of “I don’t owe you an explanation,” which will be an immediate “down.”)