WWE Botch of the Week: The Never-Ending Promo from Brock Lesnar on Monday's Raw

As I was watching the conclusion of last night’s episode of Monday Night Raw, my Twitter timeline was blowing up with fellow wrestling fans slamming Brock Lesnar for his promo that seemed to go on for like 37 minutes. 

I defended Lesnar by saying that he was doing alright, but I got a ton of backlash for it. On second thought, I probably should have clarified that Brock was doing okay for Brock’s standards, but that’s neither here nor there. 

Truth is, we all know that working the mic was never Lesnar’s strong point, which is why he was flanked by an excellent talker, Paul Heyman, for much of his first WWE run. 

This was perhaps one of the best examples in recent memory of the WWE hiding a great wrestler’s weakness (his lack of verbal skills) by doing the right thing and using a manager. 

But Heyman is no longer with the WWE, and thus, he’s no longer able to do Lesnar’s talking for him. 

So, the WWE did an excellent job of working around Lesnar’s lack of mic skills over the first few weeks by limiting the amount of talking that he did and by running that awesome pre-taped video package that he could have taken 100 times to get right. 

For some reason unbeknownst to me, however, the creative team put Lesnar in the center of the ring last night for one of the longest promos I’ve ever seen. 

I would have been fine with seeing Lesnar talk for a minute or two before being interrupted by John Cena, but creative gave him a 10- or 15-minute monologue that only someone like The Rock could have pulled off effectively. 

While I don’t think Lesnar deserves all the criticism he’s getting (do you realize how hard it is to talk for that long and keep the audience’s attention at the same time?), I think it was a terrible booking decision to put Lesnar in front of the live crowd for that long. 

Lesnar is a monster. He’s a bully. In his own words, he’s an ass-kicker. 

He is not some master public speaker who can hold the audience in the palm of his hand for 15 minutes, so why would you try to turn him into one? 

I don’t blame Brock for this—he was never a good mic worker to begin with. I blame the creative team. 

Creative knows who can talk and who can’t. Brock can’t talk, so limit his talking as much as possible, and then let him spend the rest of his time beating the crap out of people like Josh Mathews. 

Why do we watch wrestling? To see two guys rip each others’ heads off. 

Not to see a 6’3”, 265-pound monster talk for a quarter of an hour.

Drake Oz is the WWE Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. You can follow him onTwitter and ask him any wrestling-related questions (to be answered in the B/R Mailbag) on Formspring.