I took advantage of the given opportunity to attend RAW tonight at Staples Center. I had good seats and enjoyed the night. Here are a few notes I thought I would mention.
– It seemed like a pretty loud crowd for the most part. Staples Center was definitely not sold out with very little wait time to get into the arena, lots of open parking, and a completely tarped off top sections. All the lower sections, however, were filled up and seemed sold out. I would guesstimate at least 8,000 people were in attendance, possibly more. They did a promotion all night long with Lillian Garcia announcing it during commercial breaks that if you took your RAW ticket stubs to the box office, you can buy tickets for SmackDown! at half price, which shows you had bad SmackDown! was doing with ticket sales. This offer was good only for tonight during the show and right after it.
– During the Santino Marella/Vickie Guerrero talking segment, a pretty big guy from the main floor seats was getting escorted out by three security guards (no idea why or what he did), who had to drag him out. He fought back and being so large it got ugly so the security guards had to defend himself and tackled him down. He ended up hitting his head (on the floor or on a seat, or on a step — again, no idea), and laid down for quite a while before he got up and walked off with the guards following behind. WWE did a good job of not showing any of this on camera, but they got lucky as Vickie Guerrero was on stage anyway, and they used close-ups of Santino that wouldn’t have gotten any of this.
– Only celebrity present was Michael Clark Duncan who got on Kiss Cam during one of the commercial breaks. He was pretty funny, as he showed a gum pack to the camera, opened it, took a gum in and then kissed his date.
– In case you haven’t seen it yet, matches taped for Superstars were Jack Swagger over Fit Finlay in a decent bout, and the Colons over Shelton Benjamin & Charlie Haas in the opening dark match with the help of Cryme Tyme which had A LOT of heat as the first bout of the night. The after-show main event was John Cena over The Miz in a long match where Miz got some offense in.
– Speaking of, without a doubt the two most over guys were John Cena and The Miz. The fans reacted very strongly to every Miz segment, and he was great in most everything he did. I’m not sure how much of this got on TV, but Miz cut a pretty long promo talking about the Cavs, LeBron James, and other anti-Laker topics which was over huge. Cena was the usual stuff. Batista got a loud ovation as one would expect. The Colons were really over as the first act out, but even later on when they came out for commentary, got a bigger ovation than anyone expected which probably explains Carlito’s good mood tonight.
– There really is nothing like watching Maryse. Few people seem to care about the divas these days which only shows how bad women’s wrestling has gotten here, but Maryse is something else. From the moment her music plays, to her strut down the ramp, to her facial expression, her hand gestures, hair flip, and constant giggle on her face, this woman breathes charisma. She blows most guys on the roster out of the water when it comes to presence, character, and charisma.
– The L.A. crowd had a lot of fun with the main event, pulling chants from Laker games such as “Defense!” and “We Want Tacos!” (If the Lakers win at home and score more than a 100 points while their opponent doesn’t get above 100, they give out free tacos to everyone). I’m not sure what this does with WWE in the bigger picture, but it probably served as a great way to hype up the NBA, so David Stern should thank Vince.
