One of the highlights for many fans during the empty arena era has been the work of Randy Orton, who has received praise for his promo ability with no crowds.
Orton has said in the past that he's never thought of himself as a "promo guy," but has learned over the years how valuable the promo can be as a storytelling device.
Speaking on a media call ahead of SummerSlam, Orton was asked what he considers a good promo and shared a story of when he went over time earlier this year.
"I can stumble, I can stutter, I can talk under my breath, but as long as I mean what I'm saying, it's going to be a good promo. A good promo to me used to mean that I hit every word in the script or I hit my time. There was a promo earlier in the year where we went five minutes over, it might have been seven minutes, but the promo was so good and Edge and I kept going and going and the people ate it up. Normally, if you go five minutes over in a segment, you're going to come back to Gorilla and Vince McMahon is going to slap you, but that wasn't the case because 'it was such good shit.' When you have the ability to steal time from other people, which is heavily looked down upon and I don't recommend anyone else doing it, but when you take time like that without asking and it turns out that the boss, Vince McMahon, is happy that you improv and took the bull by the horns and decided to steal those minutes, that means a lot," he said.
Orton is set to challenge Drew McIntyre for the WWE Championship on Sunday at WWE SummerSlam.
Fightful will have live coverage of WWE SummerSlam beginning at 6 p.m. ET on Sunday.
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