Bruce Prichard Looks Back On Hour-Long WWE Match Between John Cena & Shawn Michaels

One of the greatest pro wrestling matches to unfold on television happened on the April 23, 2007 broadcast of "WWE Raw," when John Cena battled Shawn Michaels for an unusually long 55 minutes and 45 seconds. That's a lot of TV time to allocate to just two performers, especially considering the number of other WWE Superstars who might have benefited from having their storylines furthered in some way.

On a recent "Something to Wrestle," Bruce Prichard said his booking of this particular "Raw" from London, England drew the ire of some of his colleagues, like fellow "Raw" writer Brian Gewirtz, who saw an hour-long match not as a potential mat classic, but as lazy booking. Prichard said the show was one of many European tour dates WWE was doing around this time, and it was insinuated that perhaps he was spending too much time enjoying the sites around Europe when he should've been writing. When Prichard presented Gewirtz with just one hour of scripted TV along with a match that ran the span of one hour, Gewirtz didn't respond positively. 

"I gave him like an hour of stuff, but I said, this all builds to a one-hour match with Cena versus Shawn," Prichard said. "'Oh, that's bulls***! That's lazy, that's no good! You guys just aren't working!' Everybody at home is all p***ed off at us because we keep pushing this one-hour match ... And that's what we did. And the meeting went from a potentially long, several hour meeting to, 'That's great. Let's do that.' And it was, it was good. Everybody thought it was a way to get out of six segments, but we were there, and it made sense. But it did deliver. And it was good."

The match between Michaels and Cena was won by the former, while the WWE Hall of Famer got another win against Cena a year later as well.