Former WWE Star Went Off Script After Vince McMahon’s Promo Rewrite

Former WWE star Ryback recently looked back on a memorable moment from his career. He revealed how a last-minute change forced him to throw away an entire promo script given by Vince McMahon, just minutes before RAW went live.

The segment took place on the May 20, 2013 episode of RAW during his feud with John Cena. Ryback was ready to deliver a promo that he had previously prepared. But about 45 minutes before the show started, he went into McMahon’s office. McMahon informed Ryback that the promo had taken a new direction.

Recalling the moment in his latest post on X, Ryback wrote,

“What most people don’t know is that I had originally been given a completely different promo earlier in the day and spent hours memorizing it. About 45 minutes before RAW went live, I was called into Vince McMahon’s office with the head writers and told to forget everything. They were rewriting the entire promo from scratch.”

Things only got more stressful from there. Officials handed Ryback several pages of new material and then loaded him into an ambulance for the show’s opening segment.

“I was handed multiple new pages and told this was the new script. With only about 8-10 minutes before Raw started, I was rushed out of the office and loaded into the ambulance for the opening shot of the show. I’m sitting in the back of a pitch-black ambulance trying to read pages under my phone light while hearing the show begin,” he wrote.

At that point, Ryback realized there was no chance he would be able to memorize everything in time. Instead of trying to force it, he made a bold decision.

“At that point, I knew there was no way I was memorizing any of it. So I made a decision. I tossed the papers aside and told myself, “Just go out there and talk,’” he wrote.

When the segment aired, Ryback came out of the ambulance and cut the promo largely off the top of his head. Standing on top of the vehicle, he challenged Cena to an Ambulance Match at WWE Payback.

Ryback told the crowd that while Cena had retained the WWE Championship in their previous encounter, the rivalry was far from over. He explained the rules of an Ambulance Match. Moreover, he predicted that Cena would be the one leaving the arena in the back of an ambulance. The promo also had insults aimed at the crowd, as Ryback leaned fully into his heel character at the time.

Looking back, the former WWE star still considers the segment one of the proudest moments of his WWE run.

“Looking back, it felt like a setup for failure. But sometimes what feels like a setback is really an opportunity to prove to yourself what you’re capable of. Thankfully, it all worked out, because bombing a live promo while standing on top of an ambulance in front of millions of people—and then having to climb down afterward—would’ve been a long night. Pressure doesn’t build character. It reveals it,” he wrote.

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