Chael Sonnen Calls Monday’s RAW A ‘Rotten Piece of Garbage’

WWE tried their best with a bad situation on Monday night, airing RAW from an empty NXT Performance Center as the Coronavirus forced them to cancel their previous plans. However not everyone was a fan, and that includes retired MMA fighter Chael Sonnen. In a clip from Beyond the Fight, he called RAW a ‘rotten piece of garbage’ and one of the worst things he’s ever seen.

He said: “Who here watched Monday Night Raw? Now I got to tell you, my fandom of professional wrestling is grossly overstated. I don’t know the last time I watched Monday Night wrestling, it has been rotten garbage for such a period of time and the last show that I ever saw I saw live. They came to Portland and I actually went. So I haven’t seen it on TV in a period of time, but I watched on Monday and I watched on Monday because my phone was lighting up with people telling me ‘Hey you got to turn this on, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen on TV.’ And I’m going ‘I don’t know if you could make Monday Night Raw any worse than Monday Night Raw has already made itself…but I’m in.’ And I’m the guy that will look at a train wreck…that’s true, I’m the guy who logged on and watched Joey Diaz’s podcast because Front Row Brian sent me a text and said ‘Joey Diaz just fell asleep while filming his podcast.’ So I turned it on and watched Joey sleep and snore for two hours just because I wanted to see if Joey was ever gonna wake up.

At any rate, I had a very similar experience watching Monday Night Raw. This was so bad. Now I have to tell you: good for them for pushing forward, good for them for doing their best and bringing a level of entertainment…absolutely. But here was the mistake, they ran this out of the NXT training center. This place is state of the art, from sound to lights to a ramp to the ring to the built in seats, just an absolutely beautiful arena. The problem that you have…let me ask you guys this before I go any further, how do you think it would be produced? How do you think it would be presented to the audience? If you were the producer, how would you present it? Pause a moment and think. Okay, great. Let me tell you what most of your answers were, most of your answers were I would’ve either dropped a curtain around the whole thing and blocked it off and put all the lights up right over the camera and the action. I would have done what is called shooting tight, or I just would’ve blacked out the arena, put the lights over the ring and filmed it that way.

There is boxing events that I could name, there is mixed martial arts events that I could name right now where they will over dark an arena. I don’t agree with their lighting package. It will be a sold out arena and it will look like nobody’s there because all you can see is the lights that happen to be on the apparatus…the ring or the cage. I don’t agree with that, but there are ways to do it that are happening right now and that’s with twenty thousand people live. The WWE, for reasons that are never going to be understood by me, decided to light the arena the exact same way. The same lighting that was on the ring was the same lighting that was on the first row, second row and the twentieth row. They did not dim it in the least, they steered into the fact that nobody was there…it looked ridiculous.

I had no idea until watching this rotten piece of garbage…I always assumed the performers were the star of the show. I now know it’s the fans, if you have no fans at a wrestling event…you’re in a hard spot. So the performers would come out and we get this wasn’t their fault and this was everybody’s first time. This is one of the problems you have with live TV, I’m only voicing it to you because there was a lesson to be learned here and I’m hoping this was learned. It looked as though that this was a dry rehearsal, now it’s okay and it’s gonna be a success in the long run. If for Wrsetlemania, which by example they’re gonna run out of this exact same training center and only stream it live with absolutely no audience. If they used this disaster known as Monday Night’s Raw as a dry rehearsal for Wrestlemania and they dim the damn thing and they let the action be fully on what’s happening in the ring, they’re going to be okay.

But this was a mess to the highest of levels and the performers, who never done it before in their defense, didn’t know enough to know what they didn’t know. For example they would come in and start addressing the audience. One performer did for those in attendance and for those watching around the world on television. What? There is no fans in attendance and you didn’t even fool me on that fact because you’re showing me the crowd! There are things happening right now in the world of production that just get very poorly attended. There’s a way to hide that. There’s a way to make it look like two people are 2,000 people or to make 2,000 people look like two people! For reasons unknown they didn’t understand any of these concepts.”

He also ranted about being able to hear the wrestlers call the match and continued to defend Vince McMahon, while still hating the episode. You can see the full video below.

If you use any of the quotes, please credit ‘Beyond the Fight’ with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.