Thanks to Stephen Gray and F4Wonline.com for these live RAW notes from last night:
– The dark match was Primo Colon defeating Alex Riley. Primo won with a springboard crossbody. The crowd was into this as, “Hooray! Wrestling!” match and getting behind Primo’s comeback, but I can’t imagine this would have gone over well in a different position. Riley cut a very weak promo about how we should all recognize him since he’s the guy that was shoving us in lockers 10 years ago. You know, because all the kids in the audience graduted high school in 1999.
– The Dark match main event / comedy routine saw DX, John Cena, and Dusty Rhodes defeat Legacy. Standard tag match, nothing really interesting to note until Michaels needed to tag out and Cena and HHH were out on the floor. Dusty made himself a legal man, tagged in, and hit everyone with Bionic Elbows. The crowd was pretty hot for this (DX were the stars of the show) and it was a fun match to end the show with. The match itself was maybe about 10 minutes and the post match DX comedy bits – a real treat for the live audience – brought until just past 11:20 pm. Dusty got to do the “Two words for ya” bit. When HHH was doing the “millions at home” line, Shawn pointed out they were off the air, leading to a bit where HHH joked that “at least where we got beat up” made it to air. Say what you will be about DX, but the crowd – young and old – still loves them and they are damn funny to the live crowd.
After Dusty cleaned house with elbows, they did the DX Superkick / Pedigree combo on Orton (with what seemed to be some long stalling on the selling or lack thereof to get from point A to point B) followed by Orton tapping out to the STF. So, yes, after taking a Superkick AND Pedigree, Orton still was awake enough to tap out to the STF. That’s wrestling for you.
– Lots of different music video packages for Mania 25 that closed with an ad for the November 10th on-sale date.
– Lots of kids. This is the most pro-Cena reaction I’ve seen in Detroit in years and I imagine it’s soley due to more kids and women being in the crowd (though there was an adult Cena fan above us).
– The arena was full outside of 1/3rd of the available upperdeck seats being tarped off.
– The biggest pop of the night was DX’s first appearance on the video screen. People were really into the DVD shilling joke. Dusty was pretty over coming out and the main event swerve probably got the most heat that I can recall. The other two DX promos didn’t get a lot of reaction which I attribute to the kids having no idea what the jokes were about. Santino got a big pop, though.
– People were both happy and confused about the Bob Barker announcement.
– I don’t think it was loud enough for TV but a section of the audience tried their best to get a pro Beth Phoenix chant going.
– Honest to God guys, there were at least two people in my section who thought the promo about ECW airing the Mania 25 Taker/HBK match meant they were doing a REMATCH. On ECW. Seriously.
Overall, I’m not sure how it was on TV, but live it seemed worlds better than most Raw shows of late (Jericho vs. MVP and the 4-way US title match being very good TV matches in particulat).
