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According to a recent interview in the New Zealand Herald (of all places), WWE superstar John Cena reveals that while his neck surgery went well, he’s still six weeks to two months away from an in-ring return.

The interview, which never talked about that time Cena wore baby clothes in-ring, quoted Cena as saying, “The spinal cord is a very touchy thing to start messing with and that was a wake-up call that’s for sure…”

One has to wonder if, with a neck injury like this, Cena’s career might have been shortened and will be limited upon his return, much in the way Kurt Angle’s career has been. Although he can continue to wrestle, one might expect a more careful, less risky style from the former champ upon his return to the ring.

Chris Jericho versus Shawn Michaels is one of the longest-running feuds in recent WWE history, and for good reason; not only can these two men deliver devastating, impressive matches each time they are called upon to do so, but both are so good on the mike and such skilled in-ring storytellers, that even after running for more than six months, the feud doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of aging.

Perhaps that’s because the WWE writing crew is really putting their creative juices to work on this epic storyline; each time you think the feud has reached its crescendo, a new chapter unfolds that reveals something about one or both participants in the feud.

It’s not often that I admire the writing in pro wrestling; too often it’s chock-full of cheap, tawdry storylines meant to inspire the cheap laugh or shock. But Jericho-Michaels has been a fascinating ride, and considering to began during the waning days of the shorter, but still interesting, Michaels-Flair feud, it’s amazing how this thing is still going on.

The last time a WWE storyline ran this long was when Triple H and Stephanie McMahon began the infamous McMahon-Helmsley Era storyline, around a decade ago. This storyline has been far more fascinating. And I doubt it will inspire as many Halloween invitations and Steph masks.

WWE Raw will air its 800th episode tonight and that leaves one wondering what the Fed will dream up to celebrate. Right now, the only announced match is between JBL and Batista.

That’s a promo on diet pills if you ask me; for an 800th episode, they ought to have a lot more than that in store.

And by the time Raw hits the air tonight, I’m sure they will.

Vince McMahon and WWE are long-term experts at taking lemons and turning them into lemonade. The Rock was hated when he first began his WWE career, and not in a good, heel-ish way; he eventually became one of WWE’s most popular wrestlers and certainly, now, the most successful former wrestler ever to move to Hollywood and take on acting. And The Rock is only one such example.

Their latest project could be their biggest challenge, however; some folks will remember Mike Adamle from his days hosting the original incarnation of American Gladiators. After several years of relative obscurity following that show’s demise, Adamle emerged in WWE earlier this year as an interviewer, and eventually an ECW play-by-play announcer.

His stint as announcer was plagued by mistakes and gaffes that showcased his lack of a wrestling background, as well as his unfamiliarity with the WWE roster. His appeal was roughly that of an air conditioning compressor.

However, since being named the surprise new GM of Raw, Adamle seems to be getting a second chance, this time utilizing his weaknesses with the hope to turn them around to strengths. So Adamle doesn’t know the WWE roster that well? Put him in skits that have him directly interacting with members of that roster. Adamle is hated? Make him the heel GM of Raw so that fans booing him fits in with his role.

Smart booking could help Adamle succeed as a heel GM of Raw, and this past week’s Raw did that pretty well, hot-shotting three title defenses onto one night. And if Adamle screws up again and says that a 2-on-1 handicap match against a face champion with title match implications has “never been done before?” Well, all the more reason to boo him.

It’s risky, but it gives Adamle a new shot at finding a niche in the company. It’ll be interesting to watch. And just let me suggest a bit of booking myself: a lot of people wouldn’t mind seeing some WWE talent beat the crap of out Mike Adamle. Whether it’s Punk or someone else, I’m not saying, I’m just saying… what’s good enough for Vinnie Mac is good enough for Adamle, right?

I’m a fan of the McMahon family and their involvement in the TV storylines, but I must admit that their extended absence has been a good thing for RAW and SmackDown.

Sometimes, too much of them on TV is simply too much and their prescence becomes about as welcome as commercial collection agencies at a Debtors Anonymous meeting.

That’s why I hope they don’t rush Vince back to his on-camera roll. The shows are more fun and less predictable now, and I’d like to see WWE run with this concept for a while longer.

Who knows? Maybe when they finally bring Vince back, they’ll even find a way to make his character fresh and unpredictable.

After a five year absence from a WWE ring, D’Lo Brown finally returned to Monday Night Raw last week. Hold your enthusiasm, please. I know, I know, it’s not like The Rock has come back, nor even Chyna…. D’Lo Brown, at his best, was a slightly-above-average midlist wrestler.

But hey, he looked clean, fresh and energetic in a feel-good return match against Santino Marella and maybe he’ll even have a chance to get a bit of a push this time ’round. You never know, stranger things have happened… like Stephanie McMahon wearing religious jewelry.

While Batista winning the Fatal Four-Way main event on Raw to become the number one contender and set up a Punk vs. Batista main event at Great American Bash was a refreshing change of pace, the single weirdest booking moment came after the match, when Kane, among the losers of the Fatal Four-Way, put on a fairly good act of going apeshit, beating up ringside officials and the announce crew to express his disappointment.

I swear, he’d have hit Mae Young with a pella pan if he’d had the opportunity. It was an odd moment.

Odd because it seems to be the centerpiece toward setting Kane up to be a main eventer once again, which frankly doesn’t do a whole lot for me. Kane’s been main-event pushed for well over a decade now, and to be honest, he hasn’t had much mystique since he stopped wearing the mask. Although a faithful and yeomanlike worker, his star just hasn’t shone very brightly … not for quite a while.

Considering that most of Raw was a beginner’s primer, set up to welcome new viewers to the show, rolling out Kane as a monster main eventer in this way is out-of-place with the show’s new direction and certainly won’t help anyone who may have watched 10 years ago feel like much has changed in WWE since the last time they watched regularly.

This week’s RAW got me to thinking about John Cena’s antics and how they measure up to those commited by Stone Cold Steve Austin in his prime. Watching Raw from a new TV wall mount, I was amused by Cena abusing JBL’s stretch limo, with a little help from Crime Tyme, and for a moment flashed back to some of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s trash-a-limo antics in his fued with Vince McMahon.

It’s an easy and obvious comparison, but is it apt? The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much WWE has pulled back from the over-the-top, nearly NC-17 antics that were the hallmark of the WWE Attitude era.

See, when Stone Cold struck out at Vince McMahon’s limo, he left nothing to doubt and no thought uncensored. If he spray-painted anything on McMahon’s limo, it would likely say something like, “Austin 3:16″ or “Kiss My Ass” and then he’d flip off Vinnie Mac and the entire audience while cracking open some brewskis. It was on the surface quite similar, but in execution, much edgier.

Compare that to Cena’s destruction of JBL’s limo. The biggest insult Cena spray-painted? “JBL is poopy!”

Welcome to “Everyone Poops!” your host if John Cena, boys and girls. WWE has arrived safely back on TV-14 territory. Hopefully that will mean more viewers.

As new proof of the roster remix making both Raw and Smackdown must-see TV again, one need look no further than last week’s Smackdown and this week’s Raw. With both world titles around the waist of Smackdown wrestlers after the WWE Draft, it came as a pleasant surprise when C.M. Punk showed up on Smackdown to win out of nowhere and take the World Heavyweight Championship off of Edge and bring it over to Raw, while Triple H stays on Smackdown with the WWE Title.

It’s especially poetic because, both times Edge won the strap as a Money In the Bank winner, he won it in ambush fashion, just as Punk did to him. And to prove it was no trick of indoor lighting, Punk showed up on Raw with the world title around his waist and ready to take on all comers.

The result is that sometthing really important and can’t-miss happened last week on Smackdown, which makes the show essential viewing once again; and the other result is that Raw has a new title, a new champ, and a whole new set of rivalries and fueds to work with.

What could be better, for ratings, in the long term? I mean, what more could they do, give away a million dollars per episode? That’d never happen! Ha!

The ratings are in and McMahon’s Million Dollar Mania didn’t evidence any ratings improvement for the WWE. In fact, the numbers slipped to 3.0 after hovering around 3.1 to 3.2 in recent weeks. So, giving away oodles of money isn’t going to make people watch pro wrestling. That’s pretty much settled, right?

So, quick, before Vince McMahon starts hawking anti wrinkle cream on the air, let’s make this clear one more time: wrestling is what makes people want to watch wrestling. As a recent entry from me showed, with about 90 broadcast minutes to work with on Monday, Raw featured about 30 minutes of in-ring time and over 60 minutes of non-wrestling content.

That mix needs to switch polarities. At the very minimum, a two-hour-plus-overrun Raw broadcast should feature 45 minutes in the ring 45 minutes of other stuff; and wrestling was never as popular as when the mix was 60 minutes in-ring, 30 minutes out.

Actual wrestling matches are what boosts ratings, Vince. Learn it, live it, love it.

The last true “holy sh-t” moment I remember on SmackDown was years ago, when Big Show back body-dropped Brock Lesnar and the ring collapsed. Moments like that create buzz and buzz creates an interest in watching, which boosts ratings. As for RAW, it’s been a while, which is surprising since I generally prefer RAW to Smackdown.

Maybe I’m just in an old-school mode tonight, but last Monday’s RAW was a perfect example of what’s wrong with WWE programming at the moment. Typically, RAW is a two-hour-plus-overrun broadcast, right? Right.

So, in the entire first hour of the program, we were treated to only 17 minutes of actual wrestling in the squared circle. Now, of that, 11 minutes went to a somewhat solid JBL vs. John Cena match. Yet the remaining six minuts was taken up not by one, but two other matches that involved superstars crushing superstars.

In a broadcast hour, minus commercials, WWE has approximately 42 minutes to work with. That means while 17 minutes were in the ring, 25 minutes were spent doing in-ring promos and interviews, wrestler entrance music, backstage interviews and skits, and hyping product for WWE and its advertisers.

Folks typically enjoy wrestling because of the wrestling.

It gets worse; the second hour and overrun ran about 1 hour and seven minutes in broadcast time; of that, only 15 minutes were spent in-ring with wrestlers battling each other, and eight of those minutes were spent on a highly abbreviated main event.

So in the second hour, we had probably more like 49 broadcast minutes with the overrun, and only 15 minutes were spend in the ring. The other 34 minutes was all the same non-wrestling stuff the first hour featured, plus Vince McMahon doing the Million Dollar Mania thing.

So let’s do a final analysis, shall we? In about 90 broadcast minutes, we only got six matches total, ranging in length from two mintes to 11 minutes, totaling 32 minutes of wrestling altogether. The remaining 58 minutes was all promos and extraneous content. We’re getting twice as much “other stuff” as we’re getting in terms of real wrestling.

Something has to change about that, and fast, before so much of the audience goes away, we have to nail closed the exterior shutters and call it a day. On the bright side, if you still have friends who say they don’t like wrestling, now you can honestly tell them, “Don’t worry. Raw doesn’t feature much of that stuff anymore, anyway.”

People washing their hands in a glass sink shouldn’t throw… stones? Whatever; the point is that there are some big changes on the way for ECW that could conceivably improve that show’s standing in the ratings.

Traditionally, ECW tapings have been the “warm-up act” for Smackdown shows, ever since the WWE brought ECW back a couple years ago. However, the company recently unveiled a plan to move ECW tapings from Tuesday nights with the Smackdown brand to Monday nights with the Raw brand.

There are some natural fallouts of this strategy, of course. First, it means curtains for WWE Heat. Second, it means more cameos on ECW tapings by Raw-branded WWE superstars, and fewer by Smackdown-branded superstars.

This is a huge hit against the Smackdown brand; not only is it moving from The CW this fall to MyNetworkTV, a huge step down, but it is losing the extra draw the ECW brand brought to its tapings. While details like two ECW superstars currently holding the Smackdown-branded WWE tag team titles are sure to be worked out before the switch is made, one can only hope that the switch will also means Raw and ECW won’t brand-blend to the extent that Smackdown and ECW did.

For me, that diluted both brands. I’d hate to see RAW dragged down that path. No start-date has been announced just yet.