One of my close friends—I have nicknamed him “Nasty Boy Jon” for the purpose of his Fourth Wall Wrestling appearances, was live and in the flesh taking in Raw 25 at the Barclays Center Monday night.
I decided to invite him on to a special reactionary episode of the Fourth Wall podcast to hear about the show.
Here were some of Nasty Boy Jon’s best insights:
Pete: “You have to feel fortunate to not have been at the Manhattan Center, right?”
NBJ: “Well here’s the thing: when you see the list of guests, you’re excited to see the Undertaker and you’re excited to see DX, which we didn’t get to see here at Barclays. Of course, was it good to see Stone Cold? Sure. Was it good to see Shane and Vince take a stunner, yeah, but that was almost four hours ago. And what happened since then? Not a lot at the Barclays Center, if we’re being honest.”
Pete: “Were people getting disgruntled at Barclays Center?”
NBJ: “Oh yeah. For sure. I don’t know if you could tell on TV, but even Braun (Strowman) at the end, not a huge pop, and for me personally, how many times is Braun just going to destroy everything? Even at the end, it was a mix of modest cheers and people just being like, ‘Was that really it?’ Anytime the Manhattan Center stuff was on, we sat in the dark and watched on the JumboTron, and think about it. What were there, three matches? One of which was Titus Worldwide, and it was nice to see the Dudley Boyz, sure. Then you had the eight-woman tag and then you had the Intercontinental match and that was really it. Nothing really happened, and that’s the thing, walking out—maybe my hopes were too high. I spent the whole weekend watching old Wrestlemanias thinking we’re going to get something HUGE tonight to set up Wrestlemania, we’re going to get something we’d never thought we’d see. We didn’t see a lot. No surprises.”
Pete: “I think maybe the mistake WWE made was jamming everything into one show. Maybe you should have had the Raw 25 special as its own entity because then you could give these guys who haven’t been there for a long time ample time, but instead they had to smush the go-home show and all this old talent into three hours, and then they also had to figure out how to do it across two venues. Maybe what they should have done is said, ‘Let’s eat Raw for this given night, and let’s do the whole thing in the Manhattan Center, I think that would have been a lot cooler.”
We have a great conversation about Raw 25 as a whole and I provide some final thoughts at the podcast’s end as we head into SmackDown Live Tuesday night.
Listen to this episode of the Fourth Wall podcast on the player below or by clicking here.