Prior to Monday’s episode of WWE RAW, it was known that Vince McMahon had his fingerprints on the show, a week after making significant alterations to last Monday’s RAW and last Friday’s SmackDown.
As PWMania.com previously reported, McMahon’s influence over creative was expected to rise as the Endeavour Group’s acquisition of WWE approached.
Dave Meltzer discussed McMahon’s influence on the show further on Wrestling Observer Radio.
“Yeah. Even more. This was Vince. Vince has taken more and more interest in this as we, actually talked about this the other day and today was another example of that. Yeah, this was Vince McMahon’s show. In some of the other shows, like a lot of the changes were, you know, they hurt as far as the continuity and everything like that. Something would be built up and then would just be dropped. Tonight’s show. I just felt that there were…it was just kind of boring. I just didn’t get excited about hardly anything on the show. And a couple of the results were, uh, very counterproductive.
“Well, it depends on what’s going on. It depends on what goes, it depends on what’s going on. I mean, these were matches and some of this is the crowd too. But I mean, there were a lot of matches that, you know, especially, compared to everything that’s been going on for the last week. Not a lot of crowd heat for the matches. I mean, other than Dominik. Well, Dominik got heat as always, But yeah, Dominik got heat, of course, but, a lot of the stuff, and it was just like, what happened? What was good on the show, Kevin Owens and, I mean, Sammy Zayn and Gunther had a good match. I thought they had a very good match.
“The Finn Balor video package was good, but the, but that match had a really weak finish and when it was over, it was kind of like, well, what happened? What were the highlights? You know, it was like, man, I can’t come up with too many highlights on the show. It just kinda was there.”
Meltzer stated that Tommaso Ciampa dyeing his beard was an indication of McMahon’s influence because McMahon dislikes anyone with grey hair on television.
“Notice Ciampa dyed his beard? Well, that’s another sign of Vince McMahon. You know Vince hates gray, and Ciampa came back with a gray beard like he usually has and dyed it.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
