Jimmy Smith speaks about the first Monday Night Raw post-Vince McMahon.
This past Monday’s episode of Raw from Madison Square Garden was the first episode of the weekly program now that Vince McMahon is no longer CEO and Chairman of WWE. The show featured the likes of Roman Reigns, The Usos, Seth Rollins, Bianca Belair, Ronda Rousey for those live in attendance and more as WWE inches closer to SummerSlam.
Monday Night Raw commentator Jimmy Smith spoke about the post-Vince McMahon edition of Raw on his ‘Unlocking the Cage’ show.
Smith feels that the episode is not indicative of what things will be like now that Vince is no longer running the show. He claims that some of what took place at MSG was planned while Vince was still in charge. Smith said after the show, he and a producer talked about how people would overload the value of this show following the news of Vince’s retirement.
I’m walking the streets [of New York] with one of the [WWE] producers and they were saying that everybody’s gonna say, ‘Wow, this show’s so different’ and they’re kind of gonna overload the value and the importance of this show as the first show of the post-Vince McMahon era. I wanna make something abundantly clear, no matter how you feel about Vince McMahon and him leaving the company and all this stuff and blah, blah, blah — more came out by the way in the Wall Street Journal about Vince McMahon and payments and all this stuff and finances — the MSG show is a big deal. It’s planned for a long time. The talent that is booked on the MSG show, obviously it had Roman Reigns, it had The Usos, it had Seth Rollins, it was the lead up to obviously SummerSlam which is this weekend… All of this stuff, this wasn’t planned after Vince stepped down as CEO, doesn’t work that way. For a big show like Madison Square Garden, this is not put together last minute. So we were laughing in that everyone will see this as — and by the way, this in my opinion was a great show… Really good show, really great matches, all the pacing was very good but people who take this as this is how it’s gonna be without Vince McMahon, they don’t understand that this talent was booked for a long time. This wasn’t thrown together. This was not [Monday] they put this card together or the day before. It doesn’t work that way with a big show like MSG. So this really isn’t indicative of, I don’t know, any direction you see Raw going post-Vince McMahon. That’s not what we’re gonna see here because this was planned, not necessarily written all the way through but planned during the Vince McMahon era. So, people who see this as some kind of radical departure and blah, blah, no. No. I’m not saying things won’t change, I’m not saying there won’t be big changes, that’s not what I’m saying at all. This show is not indicative of that because it was already planned while Vince McMahon was there.
People are taking an MSG show as an example of how things are gonna go without Vince McMahon and they’re just confusing a couple of things that don’t go together. This is an MSG show. That’s why it was big, that’s why it had big talent on it, that’s why it was paced a little differently. It’s right before a big pay-per-view which is why we had the number of promos, wrestlers coming out and talking. That’s why we had so much of it because we had a pay-per-view.
On the latest ‘Nubian Wrestling Advocates’ podcast here on POST Wrestling, Vince McMahon’s exit from WWE was discussed at length and to hear that conversation, head over to this link.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit ‘Unlocking the Cage with Jimmy Smith’ with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
