WWE Hall of Famer Jerry Lawler recently did an interview with USA Today’s Commercial Appeal where he spoke about various topics.
The main discussion of this interview was WWE holding their weekly television shows – RAW, NXT, and SmackDown – from the WWE Performance Center in front of no live fans. Here are the highlights:
The biggest issue with no live fans:
“That’s our obstacle [now],” Lawler said. “How do you entertain when you don’t have a live audience? That’s how you judge whether you’re being entertaining or not — the crowd response. When nobody’s there, you can’t tell.”
WWE piping in crowd noise:
“That may have been the very first empty-arena match,” Lawler recalled about his match with Funk. “Of course, ours was done intentionally. It was at like 1 o’clock in the afternoon. It was classic at the time. When I go back and think about it, I do remember, right in the middle of the match, I thought, ‘This feels stupid.’ He’s throwing me into empty chairs and those sorts of things. There’s no fans screaming, no background noise at all. It just made you feel kind of dumb.
“I’ve been to [football] training camps where the players go through their practice sessions with loud music or crowd noise piped in. I don’t think it would hurt anything at all if they piped in some crowd noise behind the matches. And even explain it to the fans. It’ll make the matches more entertaining and it’ll make it easier for the performers themselves.”
