This week’s Monday Night Raw marked the first episode in WWE history where Vince McMahon wasn’t calling the shots as the promotion’s head booker. And while there were a couple of tweaks to the usual presentation, the show overall still felt like a typical night for the Red Brand. That’s because, according to The Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer, most of the show was approved by McMahon prior to his sudden retirement announcement on Friday.
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“This is probably not the show to judge anything by because this show was largely written before Vince left,” Meltzer said. “It was written a lot on Thursday…nobody ripped up anything. There are a few minor changes is what I was told. Essentially, this was the show that had been approved. They’re not making any big changes or anything like that just yet and of course, they’re going to SummerSlam with the ideas in mind. The interest in this show was gigantic, they sold out.”
One of the most notable differences in the episode was how it began mid-brawl between Logan Paul and The Miz. This was apparently done to help prevent fans from booing Paul at the start of the episode (which they still wound up doing when Paul hosted his talk show segment later in the night)
“The reason they did this was because they figured that the people were gonna boo Logan Paul when they first saw him a lot,” Meltzer later added. “So, they would have him come to the ring and do all this with no cameras on so you don’t see it. His coming to the ring with no music happened off screen before Raw started, and he was, in fact, booed very heavily.”
WWE’s stock actually saw a noticeable improvement in its first full day of trading after McMahon’s announcement. The Wall Street Journal then broke the news later in the day that McMahon’s departure from the company was “hastened” by the SEC and federal prosecutors launching inquiries into the millions of dollars McMahon had paid in hush money to allegedly cover up a handful of sexual misconduct scandals. WWE announced via a new 8-K filing that $14.6 million directly linked to McMahon had not been properly recorded, meaning that the company will need to re-release financial statements from as far back as December 2019.
