The Contentious Ten 12.21.09: The Top Ten Worst Raw Guest Hosts

Since this column is a weekly top ten list, I don’t often get a chance to really discuss current wrestling very much. And since, Christmas is this week, and I, like almost everyone else is busy as can be I thought I’d write a short column about the guest hosts. I have to say, I’m not a big fan of the whole guest host idea, and I think this list is pretty good reason why I’m not. Most of the hosts just drag the show down. You can tell they don’t watch wrestling, that they are fish out of water, and that they don’t want to be there. I was going to do a top ten guest host list, but I couldn’t find ten that I felt did a good job. Bob Barker, Jesse Ventura, and Shaq were all pretty good, but everyone else were varying degrees of bad. Freddie Prinze Jr. could have done a good job, so they had Randy Orton take him out (I guess they didn’t want to make the other hosts look bad). Here’s a short list of some of the worst guest hosts.

The Top Ten Worst Guest Hosts

X

Cedric the Entertainer
September 21

Cedric wasn’t too bad, but he’s a great example of why the whole guest host thing is a lousy idea. Cedric can be a funny guy, but on Raw he was a fish out of water. I do think that his ability to make people laugh was severely limited by the WWE’s creative team sense of humor. As we all know wrestling “humor,” is about one step above “knock-knock” jokes, so when you have the creative team preparing the jokes you know they’re going to be bad. Cedric was simply a victim of this. From his clown car entrance to his “wrestling match” with Chavo Guerrero where he donned a mask so different wrestlers could wrestle for him, every segment he was in reeked of WWE’s terrible sense of humor. Once again, Cedric probably could have done a decent job if it was left up to him, but once he stepped onto the set of Raw he was doomed to be anything but funny.

IX

Ricky Hatton
November 9

The truth is Ricky Hatton didn’t do a terrible job hosting Raw. Unlike Mayweather, at least Hatton actually hosted the show. My biggest problem with Hatton is the fact that I’m sure they could have found a bigger British celebrity, like the hosts they had the week before: Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. Instead, they pulled out Ricky “The Has Been” Hatton. Hatton may still be massively popular in the U.K., but after losing to Mayweather, and getting the shit beat out of him by Pacquiao it’s reasonably safe to say that the high profile portion of his career is over. He might still be a draw in the U.K., but he’s a loser in the United States. WWE has a history of making a big deal out of C-list celebrities, but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. As a host Hatton did just fine, the crowd loved him, he participated in some half-way decent segments, played his role well and even participated in a match. But of all the non-wrestling related guest hosts he was unquestionably the least relevant to the mainstream audience.

VIII

Floyd Mayweather
August 24

I really like Floyd Mayweather, I’m not much of a boxing fan, but whenever Mayweather is fighting I always pester my friend (who really likes boxing) to order the fight. In fact, I can hardly wait for his fight with Manny Pacquiao. That said, I was left wondering what the hell Mayweather was doing hosting Raw. Mayweather wasn’t a “host,” he made a guest appearance at best. He didn’t show up until halfway through the broadcast, had a brief exchange with Jericho and his former WrestleMania opponent The Big Show, and was in one backstage segment. That’s it. How is that “hosting” Raw? Mayweather makes this list for simply impersonating a Raw host.

VII

Roddy Piper
November 16

Of all the entries on this list, this one makes me the saddest. Piper used to be one of the funniest, wittiest, and most intelligent minds in wrestling. After seeing him this past November on Raw I know that his age has caught up with his body and his mind. He reminds me now of an old man that has a bunch of crappy old jokes that he tells you every time you see him. He’s just becoming more and more removed from modernity. Eventually we all grow old and out of style, but we’re not showing up on TV and showing off how out of touch we’ve become. I understand that Piper probably had the restrictions of the writing staff to work around, but every segment Piper was in made me cringe a little bit. I wanted to like him, I wanted to find him funny, but instead, watching him just made me uncomfortable. His long segment in the ring was depressingly bad. His rambling on for several minutes about dead and/or bald wrestlers sounded similar to something you’d hear from an old guy who’s had a few too many at a small-town bar at three in the afternoon, or some lame story one of your grandparents tells you about the good old days. You try to look amused, or interested, but in reality you just want to get out of that conversation as quickly as possible. To take a line from the Ric Flair tribute video, “leave the memories alone” Piper. I want my memories of you to be positive. I’m sorry if I sound like a dick, but I don’t want to watch you grow senile and irrelevant on TV, so please stay off it.

VI

Jeremy Piven
August 3

I have to confess that I actually kind of enjoyed Jeremy Piven’s spot on Raw in the same way I enjoy watching infomercial hosts shamelessly plug their shitty products. The difference here was that Piven made it fully known that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing on a show like Raw, and that he simply did not give a shit so long as he got to plug his awful (so say the reviews I read) movie. There’s something about that kind of attitude that I find very amusing. I even enjoyed his sidekick the obnoxious Dr. Ken (at least he seemed like a wrestling fan). Piven actually got off to a pretty good start, coming down to the ring in a low-rider, pulling Dr. Ken (decked out like a pimp) out of the trunk, and setting off a bunch of pyro. Like I wrote I found the shilling of his movie and Dr. Ken’s ridiculousness amusing, but during an exchange with Cena and the Miz Piven dropped the SummerFEST bomb. Now, I understand people can make mistakes, but it was evident that Piven didn’t give a shit about the quality of his work. I know that film actors get as many takes as they need to get a scene right, but the least you can do if you are going to use wrestling as a platform to market your crappy movie is show enough interest in it to convince the audience that you actually kind of like wrestling. You can’t do this if you mess up the name of the promotion’s second biggest show of the year. I will say Piven kind of redeemed himself the rest of the show by (I think) purposely screwing up some wrestler names (as a cover for his earlier flub), and I love the fact that he turned heel at the end of the show and I’d like to see them do that again. I also have to give him credit for his leap off the top rope onto Cena. That took balls for an untrained performer. Also, it was immensely satisfying to see Dr. Ken get press-slammed by Cena. Overall I don’t think Piven was as bad as some people made him out to be, but the SummerFEST mistake and the unending shilling still made him one of the worst hosts of the year.

V

Sgt. Slaughter
August 10

You would think that the night WWE was in Calgary they would have been able to find some Canadian wrestler or personality to come and host the show. I’m not saying Bret Hart should have showed up, but some hockey player or Canadian actor would have connected with the crowd in the same way Hatton connected with the U.K. crowd. Instead, Calgary got a big “fuck you” in the form of American patriot Sgt. Slaughter. Now there’s nothing wrong with being an American patriot, but I failed to see the entertainment value of teasing the Canadian audience. Slaughter made fun of the Canadian flag (boy, that was SO funny), he had Jillian Hall come out to sing “God Bless America” (that should be embarrassing for we Americans), and then had Bret Hart’s music play only to deliver “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan (like something similar to that hasn’t been done five or six times in WWE history). Having Slaughter play a heel in Canada could have worked if they would have done it right by discriminating against some of the Canadian wrestlers on the roster (they could have imported some from the other brands for the night). Instead they just had him do the same tired stuff they do every time they want to tease Canadians.

IV

Al Sharpton
September 28

Al Sharpton is, without a doubt the most divisive host WWE has had for Raw. I’m sure Miller may be close second, but I know about as many liberals who hate Sharpton as conservatives who hate him. I’ll save the major political discussions for the writers of 411’s Politics section. Nevertheless, the crowd hated the fact that he was hosting and booed him every time he showed up on the screen or in front of them. Unlike most of the other hosts it would be hard to describe his appearance on Raw as a “train-wreck,” but that can probably be attributed to the fact that he didn’t want to make a total fool out of himself and refused to almost anything. As a result he was only featured in the opening segment and two backstage segments, one of which saw him channeling James Brown (who he was a tour manger for). You could almost imagine the process in the writing room that day:

Writer 1: “What can we have Al Sharpton do to not make look like a total asshole?”
Writer 2: “I don’t know. What does Al Sharpton do besides piss off about ninety percent of our typical audience?”
Writer 3: “Forget that. What the fuck does Al Sharpton do period?
Writer 1: “I don’t know, but we can’t do anything that could be potentially embarrassing to him.”
Writer 2: “Isn’t hosting Raw embarrassing enough?”
Writer 3: “We’ll just keep him off camera as much as possible and let him dance a little bit backstage. Let’s just concentrate on getting through this as smoothly as possible.”

The most ridiculous part of it was the fact that supposedly Vince McMahon and Sharpton had “serious” talk about stereotypes in wrestling, and McMahon promised not to exploit stereotypes anymore. Has Sharpton ever watched wrestling? The bedrock of wrestling characters are stereotypes. In fact Sharpton would have been hard pressed to pick a show more exploitive of stereotypes than Raw. All around he was an awful choice to host Raw, and he was stupid for agreeing to host it, because it probably hurt his charity more than it helped it.

III

Dennis Miller
December 14

I used to be a fan of Dennis Miller. I had a bunch of his rant books, I watched his show on a regular basis and he will always be my favorite Weekend Update anchor on SNL. Now that he’s become more of a political commentator he’s just as funny to me anymore. He was always fairly politically conservative, so it’s not his politics that have turned me off from him; I just think he takes himself too seriously now. However, I will say that I was looking forward to Miller’s guest spot on Raw. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Miller didn’t seem to give a shit, and was probably actually embarrassed that he was there. For being such a smart and witty guy you would think he could have managed to get through a single segment without gratuitously reading off his note cards. The only time he didn’t have to read off the cards was when he was talking about his charity. Would it have been expecting too much for him to actually have read through his lines two or three times backstage before going out in front of the crowd? Instead he stumbled through his lines, told unfunny jokes about the WWE superstars (these of course were scripted, but had he rehearsed them they could have been mildly amusing), and called Triple H “The Show.” Of course the announcers were required to channel Tony Atlas and laugh like idiots every time Miller appeared on stage. The one bright spot was his rant at Chris Jericho, which was probably rehearsed and took several takes. I will mention that perhaps Miller was ineffective because the crowd was dead for most of the Slammy segments, and that’s not necessarily Miller’s fault. Maybe the bulk of the crowd didn’t know him, maybe the bulk of the crowd didn’t like his politics, and maybe the bulk of the crowd just wasn’t interested in his segments. Whatever the reason, the crowd and Miller didn’t mix and the result was another awful guest host.

II

Verne Troyer
November 30

Not since Floyd Mayweather showed up half way into the show has a guest host had less camera time. Troyer’s role on the show was fairly minimal and when he was on camera he was awful. His exchange with The Big Show and Jericho wasn’t offensive, but the stuff with the Miz and Mark Henry was easily one of the worst guest host/wrestler segment they have ever done. The Mini-Me references made by the Miz were beyond dated, and Troyer’s “comebacks” were almost equally as dated and anything but witty. The fact that he was saved by Mark Henry, and then didn’t give him a shot at Miz’s U.S. Title was sloppy writing. The backstage stuff with Henry, Jillian Hall, and MVP was brutally bad and showed off Troyer’s total lack of comedic timing, granted, he didn’t have much to work with. His final appearance on the show was a brief interaction with Hornswoggle telling him to sue DX for all the are worth. I assume Troyer is a wrestling fan, as he was at SummerSlam, and I don’t recall him plugging anything on the show, but he was completely out his league hosting Raw.

I

ZZ Top
July 20

ZZ Top hosted Raw to hype their then upcoming concert tour. Now I’ll admit, I’m not a fan of ZZ Top, “Sharp Dressed Man” is about the only song of theirs I can name off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure that the bulk of the new “kid friendly” WWE’s audience had no clue who the guys with the long beards were. That, in and of itself didn’t make ZZ Top bad hosts, however, the backstage segments they were featured in were atrocious. They participated in the obligatory disrespecting of Chris Jericho and embarrassing of Chavo Guerrero, but the rumor was the duo were actually afraid to do the sketches live. To their credit, they probably looked at them and thought they were so fucking stupid that they didn’t want to embarrass themselves in person. Nevertheless, they didn’t show up in the arena until the main event. Despite being almost thirty years past relevant, the purpose of their spot on Raw was to hype their concert tour and to maybe pique the interest of some new potential fans. However, I have to question how they thought doing the equivalent of lip-syncing to their greatest hits backstage at a wrestling show with Santino Marela would make anyone want to see them. If having them play their unplugged guitars along to a CD was all WWE had planned for them then they just should dressed up Santino and Goldust in long beards and had them play the parts, because they at least would have displayed some personality.