Spike TV Executive Recalls WWE Raw’s Final Episode On Network: ‘It Turned Ugly’

Spike TV executive Kevin Kay speaks in a new book about his conversations with Vince McMahon and McMahon taking shots at the network during their final Spike TV episode of Raw. Guy Evans sent an excerpt of his new book BEYOND NITRO: Untold Stories from the WCW era (NITRO Book Collection 2) to Fightful that features WWE’s relationship with Spike and how McMahon’s attempts to promote Raw’s move to USA on on the show’s last episode with Spike led to Spike censoring the show, including “frequent audio dropouts and a makeshift graphic declaring ‘technical difficulties’ to be at the root of the problem.”

That led to McMahon issuing a statement on WWE.com in which he admitted that WWE “went overboard. But we did it in a very entertaining fashion. What we did was not mean spirited in any way. What Spike did, however, was mean spirited. At no time leading up to Monday night did Spike TV ever call us and say, ‘Okay, this is what we won’t allow.’ We had no warning whatsoever. So for us it was business as usual.”

Kay says in the book, “It turned ugly. First of all, we never saw anything until it was delivered to the NOC [Network Operation Center] out of Hauppauge, Long Island. They basically did the show live, so we didn’t know what the hell they were going to do. We had a standards and practices person sitting out in [Long Island] who would bleep stuff, but that was the extent of our creative involvement in WWE. They just did the show – and it happened [just like that].”

He added, “Every once in a while, I would go up to see Vince in Connecticut, just to be a good partner and basically…have him tell me that I didn’t know what I was doing!”

You can see the full excerpt at the link.