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What WWE Creative Should Learn From The Rock’s Epic Promo

By Scott Littleton

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The Rock returned to Raw this past Monday and, as usual, delivered an epic promo.  What can WWE’s creative team learn and utilize for other WWE Superstars?

Monday night’s episode of Raw kicked off the Road to WrestleMania in a huge way, the return of The Rock.  The Rock’s return ended up not being one of the most entertaining segments on the night but probably the best segment on Raw in the past year.  Here’s why.

First, the crowd was anticipating his return all night.  Throughout the night, you heard Rocky chants, especially when anyone pulled up in a car backstage.  The moment The Rock pulled up in his truck after the crowd was teased with the Miz, the crowd erupted and that is where the fun began.

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The Rock’s promo began as soon as he got out of his truck as the cameras followed him backstage all the way to the gorilla position.  Along the way he had some comedy gold with The Miz, The Big Show, and Lana.  Interaction with The Big Show was amazing with the comedy being that The Rock really shouldn’t have won the Royal Rumble over the Big Show and that had The Big Show won he would have had the big movie career, causing Big Show to destroy a laptop.  Then The Rock once again walked the TV-PG/TV-14 line with an innuendo-filled discussion with Lana and even wished Pat Patterson Happy Birthday!

Finally once in the ring, The Rock went off the script to address the guys dressed up as WWE Legends effectively shutting them down from distracting from the rest of the promo.  When The New Day came out it was back to as much as the script The Rock has with more Attitude Era-like content.  Then the Uso’s came out as the cousins beat down the New Day to the crowd’s delight.

WWE creative should take away the following from this amazing segment.  First and foremost, let the performers perform.  Give them a story and an outline but let them create the magic to bring out their characters.  Had The Rock just read lines from the script it would not have been as impactful.  Too many of the WWE roster delivers the lines flawlessly but the story often falls flat as you can tell they don’t believe what they are saying.  It is never that way with the Rock, as he is able to ad-lib based on the situation.

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Secondly, the acknowledgment of the guys dressed up as WWE legends who had been trying to distract from the in-ring action all night.  The Rock by taking a few minutes to address them and shut them back down when he was getting back into the planned part of the promo was genius.  It is seemingly a lost art for Superstars being able to react based off of what the audience is doing.  Often when things don’t go the way it was planned you can tell the performer is extremely uncomfortable.

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Finally, the edginess of The Rock’s promo’s takes away from some of the cartoonish characters the attitude era has produced.  Allow language to be more coarse when the story calls for it.  It adds realism to the product and doesn’t insult the intelligence of the adult WWE viewer.  While it is doubtful anything changes soon from a creative standpoint in WWE, letting talent to be more free in their promo’s and interact with the audience could quickly turn around the viewership and quality of Raw and SmackDown.

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