This week on Monday Night Raw, the ring collapsed during a match between Braun Strowman and Big Show.
Obviously, this was not a spontaneous moment, and the ring did not really randomly collapsed due to the sheer weight of Strowman and Big Show. After all, the ring is totally fine during matches like the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, in which 30 plus wrestlers all compete in the ring at once.
So how does the WWE set up the ring to collapse at the precise right moment? Well, Big Show went into specifics about this during a 2015 appearance on Talk is Jericho; he was talking about an instance in which he had a match with Brock Lesnar and the ring collapsed.
“In that time, Ellis [Edwards, WWE Stunt Coordinator] had airbags under the ring,” Big Show said, according to Wrestling Inc. “So they had lifted the ring a couple inches. When I’m standing on that top corner, that ring is like standing on marbles. Because it’s moving. Of course now I’ve got my fat ass up in the air, 500 pounds on a not very stable surface. So then the ring broke. You don’t know how the stunt is going to look. It was so perfectly timed the way we did it and Ellis did a great job of setting up. That thing collapsed and everybody they bought it so long.”
Presumably, the WWE accomplished this ring effect in a similar fashion. That interview was actually the first time that Big Show acknowledged that the ring collapse effect is staged. For years, he insisted that it was unplanned, as he was devoted to keeping up kayfabe off camera.
Some fans wondered why, within kayfabe, the ring was totally fine when Big Show and Braun Strowman last fought; after all, that match was not dramatically different than the one that occurred this week. Well, it was said on Raw last time Big Show and Strowman fought that WWE officials were reinforcing the ring, whereas that was not said this week, and so we can accept this as the in-universe explanation for why the ring collapsed during this specific match.
This is the second week in a row in which the WWE has accomplished an impressive visual effect live without it being completely obvious how they set it up. There was also the segment last week in which Braun Strowman lifted up an ambulance with Roman Reigns inside of it; obviously, Strowman is not physically capable of lifting up an ambulance, but it sure did look convincing on camera.
