A Pro Wrestling Conversation about... WWE Raw
Part 1 of 3
I’ve always enjoyed conversing about professional wrestling with other fans and sharing opinions with each other on the latest TV wrestling storylines.
Sometimes I find that the other fan that I am talking with shares the exact same opinions as me on how compelling, or poorly executed, certain angles were. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite. The discourses are always lively, and I’ve been having them since the very early days that I first watched wrestling back in the mid-’80s.
Watching professional wrestling is a very personal experience too in terms of which wrestler(s) a fan connects with the most and why. As any ardent pro wrestling fan will tell you, we can gladly, and passionately, make a detailed case for our favorite wrestler(s), and why they should be your favorite(s) too.
The title of this post, A Pro Wrestling Conversation About…, signifies a new periodic series for The Pro Wrestling Exuberant and something I’ve long wanted to do in the written format, going back to my days in the ‘90s writing for pro wrestling magazines.
The concept is simply that two people discuss in-depth different pro wrestling topics with each other. Wrestlers. Promotions. TV Shows. Current Storylines. Past storylines. Basically, anything pro wrestling related.
I am seeking to converse with:
fans of professional wrestlers, new and long-term
Other pro wrestling writers
Writers who are fans of pro wrestling but have never written about it.
Writers who are curious about pro wrestling and will watch it for the first time for this series.
If you’re interested in participating, send me a Chat message here on Substack.
Now let’s get the first conversation started.
- Russell Franklin
The Pro Wrestling Exuberant: I’m here with
, the writer of Sports Passion Project on Substack. Robbie writes about football.Robbie, I became aware of your writing last August on Substack after you posted a Note about a pro wrestling article you wrote the prior year.
I thought it was a very well-written feature piece in terms of your prose style, so much so that it made me want to read some other writing you did, and it did not matter that the subject would not be pro wrestling.
I think that’s a goal a lot of writers have. We want the reader to like how we write so much that they’re interested in whatever we write, regardless of the subject matter.
That’s how I have always felt about my favorite authors, specifically Mario Puzo who wrote The Godfather book in the ‘70s that I discovered decades after it was published. I then tracked down and read everything else that he had written. It’s his central character-driven storytelling through the written word that has always captivated me.
Perhaps you are influenced in your own writing by known writers you have read multiple works from, in terms of how you take a character-central approach to your narrative storytelling in your stories about football players.
Your stories personalize your subjects quite a bit, and I’ve mentioned this to you in the past, and I don’t recall if it was in a Chat message or in a comment to a post, but I think someone does not need to watch or know anything about football to enjoy your writing. In fact, I think someone who has never watched football is likely to get interested in the sport from reading your stuff.
Writing non-fiction with a character-central approach can personalize the primary subject in my opinion. I aim to take that approach when writing about pro wrestlers. I think we have some parallels in how we both tell stories in that regard on our respective subjects.
In terms of your post about pro wrestling from 2023, I found it to be a very uplifting post and compelling messaging to non-fans to give pro wrestling a chance with an open mind. That’s a challenging narrative tone to take when writing a pro wrestling piece, as I do not think pro wrestling is easy to captivate the interest in of someone who does not have a prior interest or slight curiosity about it.
Here’s that Note last August that captured my attention as a reader and a pro wrestling fan, as well as my comment to it:
Tell me about when you first started watching pro wrestling, what attracted you to it, and what has kept your interest.
Sports Passion Project: First of all, I would like to thank you very much for having me here on The Pro Wrestling Exuberant my friend, and before I begin discussing what we actually came to discuss today, I want to mention a little behind the scenes stuff for everybody reading.
Russell and I have been connected to each other since long before most of the readers became connected to us.
Most of my readership would not know this, but the first thing I did on this website that got any kind of traction was that ‘Pro Wrestling Deserves Your Respect’ article, referred to above. It and my first football post that got any real traction happened around the same time, but I think the pro wrestling community beat the football community by just a few days, so when I sort my subscribers by date, and remove the starter level ones (my girlfriend, my grandmother, etc.), all of the originals barring one (who knows who he is) are pro wrestling people.
This means that myself and all my readers have the pro wrestling Substack community (such as it existed last August) to thank for everything that my Sports Passion Project has become, and one of the members of the pro wrestling community that was there at my beginning was Russell/The Pro Wrestling Exuberant.
Our two publications may not seem like a natural fit for each other, but he was one of my very earliest supporters, and I believe myself to be one of his very earliest supporters. We’ve been connected to each other since he had about 40 subscribers as I recall, and I had about 15. Now here we are, each at multiple times those levels, and we’re finally getting our chance to work together.
I bring all this up to just let all of you know the respect and appreciation I have for pro wrestling, and for what the people involved in pro wrestling have done for me.
As a pro wrestling fan myself, I understand the apprehension that can arise when a writer from the stick and ball sports world sticks their nose into the beloved sport of wrestling.
In my younger days, I hated this just as much as all wrestling fans. Now, I’ve become part of the problem, but I need you to understand that I love pro wrestling as much as anybody. I respect it. I did not come here to make fun of it, and to further attempt to buy myself some credibility, I’m at last going to answer Russell’s question.
Like most lifelong pro wrestling fans, it was a family affair for me.
I don’t want to say I came out of the womb watching pro wrestling, but I don’t want to not say that either. I’m a very young man in the Substack universe. I was born on October 24, 2000, which means that my birth basically coincides with the hottest that the Attitude Era ever got.
Two days before my birth, Steve Austin returned to wrestling at No Mercy 2000, having been off with a neck injury for the last 11 months, kickstarting the build to the biggest wrestling show of all time, WrestleMania X-7.
I was too young to take any of this in for myself of course, but this was the environment that existed for the people who formulated me into becoming the human I am today, so it’s only natural that they formulated me into a wrestling fan.
As such, I do not remember watching my first wrestling show. It was probably being watched by somebody else as I crawled around on the floor, and this is what needs to be understood as a writer of stick and ball sports coming to talk about pro wrestling as an outsider. I have no intentions of treating myself like an outsider. Even though I write about stick and ball sports, I came into them later in life, once I was old enough to decide my own interests. Pro wrestling is part of who I am. I’ve been ingesting it since before I could talk, walk, or even crawl.
My first memory of pro wrestling is an episode of SmackDown from the Spring of 2003 that somebody had recorded to a VHS tape (even a kid born in 2000 is old enough to know what those are), and I remember watching that same episode over and over and over again. I don’t recall what episode it was, but it had to be right after WrestleMania because the main thing I remember from those childhood rewatching sessions is John Cena vowing revenge on Brock Lesnar for injuring his knee, which would only make sense as part of the build to Backlash 2003.
Fitting that the part that sticks out in my mind from the first wrestling show I can ever remember watching is a heel John Cena. More on that later.
My parents would never allow me to watch Raw in those days, as it did not start until nine o’clock on a Monday back then. That was out of the question for a kid as young as I was. They did allow me to watch SmackDown though, because on Thursday nights I had to be at my grandparents’ house, for reasons that the child that I was didn’t understand, and that the adult that I am has never asked, and they would allow me to stay up to watch the show.
As such, this became my pro wrestling fandom for a while. Watching SmackDown with my grandparents on Thursdays. I remember it being a regular point of conversation between them how much my grandfather liked Ric Flair, and how much my grandmother did not like Ric Flair. Oftentimes, he would audibly ‘Woo!’ just to annoy her. I could not get enough of this as a child, and this is indicative of the kind of thing that happens in pro wrestling families.
At some point though, this all gradually began to fade. I got old enough to where I didn’t need to be supervised all night anymore. I didn’t need to go to my grandparents’ house, and my parents had drifted away from wrestling, as the Attitude Era was long gone by this point in time, so I found myself fighting the losing battle that many people fight of trying to be the only pro wrestling fan in a household.
I remember the timeline being something like this. In the midst of 2010, CM Punk had become my favorite wrestler, because of things going on at home that made the Straight Edge Society seem like an attractive idea to a naive little kid like me. By the time the Pipe Bomb happened in the Summer of 2011, I had drifted away from wrestling altogether, but like many forlorn wrestling fans, the Summer of Punk was enough to bring me back, and I stayed watching mostly every week until he lost the belt in early 2013, and at that point I drifted away again.
2010s WWE after the point where CM Punk lost the WWE Championship was difficult to watch. I think we can all agree on that, and to a person who was still a little kid, his favorite wrestler leaving wrestling altogether in early 2014 meant there was really nothing keeping me attached to the WWE product anymore, and I really didn’t know there was any other wrestling out there.
Ontario, Canada is WWF territory. It always has been. There is no culture of watching any other kind of wrestling here. We didn’t get NXT on TV North of the border, so there really was nothing going on to watch. As such, I just drifted away, and this is where I really began becoming a fan of stick and ball sports.
From here, we have to fast forward all the way to 2021, where at this point I am 20 years old, and aware of the fact that there is other wrestling besides the WWE.
I feel no shame in admitting that I am one of the fans that CM Punk brought back to professional wrestling with him when he returned to be a part of AEW. I did not like AEW Dynamite enough to watch it on a weekly basis, but I kept my finger on the pulse, and I watched all the PPVs. CM Punk vs MJF is one of my favorite things to ever happen in wrestling.
I’m not a big internet wrestling guy, I have no idea what happened in AEW behind the scenes, but what I know is that eventually this all coalesces into AEW Collision, which for my money is the best wrestling show of my lifetime for the nine or ten weeks that it lasted. It is the one wrestling show since I quit watching the WWE weekly all the way back in 2013 that has been able to captivate my attention enough to watch it on a weekly basis. Take a guess who was behind that.
When AEW not only pulled the plug on Collision,but spit in our faces for enjoying what Collision was, I vowed never to watch that company again. Never underestimate the fury of a scorned wrestling fan. I haven’t watched one second of AEW TV in the year and a half since that happened, and I truly thought this was straight up going to be the end of my pro wrestling fandom, as I had no intentions of switching back to the WWE show, but then what happens?
My favorite wrestler turns up in WWE, at Survivor Series 2023. Something I thought I would never see again.
Once again, as a man who became attracted to CM Punk due to being a fan of the SES as a nine-year-old, I’m not ashamed to admit to having followed him everywhere he’s gone. This lands me as a fan of the WWE show, all the way up until the present, albeit a fan that has missed everything that happened from 2013-November 2023.
The Pro Wrestling Exuberant: I didn’t start watching Raw until a few years after it came on the air back in 1993.
I had moved a few months before that and the new area I lived in did not have Cable available yet. Prior to that, I had watched Raw’s predecessor of sorts, Prime Time Wrestling, from the initial weeks I started watching pro wrestling back in 1985.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Prime Time Wrestling, but I have fond memories of this show. Bobby Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon were the co-host. They were a great on-camera pairing on Prime Time and also the commentators on the syndicated Wrestling Challenge from that same era. They played off each other very well. Monsoon was the straight man to Heenan’s comedy heel style on the mic and the chemistry between the two was so strong for me a new fan.
Prime Time Wrestling was much different than Raw in that it consisted of the hosts in a studio at a desk and they’d introduce matches from the various prominent arenas of the time like Boston Gardens, Philadelphia Spectrum, Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens and New York’s Madison Square Garden. The matches were from house shows with commentary added in.
This show was where in that era you’d get to see the star vs star matches on a weekly basis. This is where I remember seeing Randy Savage win his first WWE title, the intercontinental title, from Tito Santana.
The syndicated shows, like Wrestling Challenge, were mostly names vs one of a small core of enhancement talent used on every TV show and in opening matches of the house shows, names like Terry Gibbs, Ron Shaw, Jose Luis Rivera, and more.
So, it was a big deal when Raw debuted, an actual show with storylines, competitive matches, and all from one location with a more spontaneous feel to it. I was very disappointed to not have access to the show in its early years.
Over the years, there’s been different times I’ve been very much into Raw, and WWE itself, and other times I have tuned out completely.
I came back to watching Raw and WWE about a year ago after having not seen it for several years.
I was very closed-minded about it, thought the product was bad and had no interest in watching it. I had a subscription to Peacock, so I watched most of the PLE shows, but it was with no urgency.
I would usually watch a show months after it occurred and then it would take me months more to get through it. I was consuming lots of pro wrestling at the time though, a ton of different stuff that was U.S. based, and also some Japanese and European promotions, just no WWE.
What brought me back to WWE and got me curious enough to watch again was Cody Rhodes. I had followed his career since the beginning and was curious to see the next chapter for him after he left AEW.
So, I gave WWE a chance and decided to give it a chance with an open mind. I think sometimes in life, with certain things, we actually want to be proved wrong. That’s what happened to me with WWE.
I watched an episode of WWE Raw and liked it, quite to my surprise. I thought it had a nice mix of talent, re-introducing me to some old favorites like Drew McIntyre, and also the storylines were clear and several got my interest, especially the Cody chase for the world title. Simply put, I enjoyed the show and came back the next week, and I kept coming back after.
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In Part 2, Russell and Robbie discuss John Cena’s heel turn, Cody Rhodes and the build to their WrestleMania 41 main event match.
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