What are the main differences people should expect dealing with colleagues and management in wrestling as opposed to a more traditional job?
I think the differences are very minimal: I’d have to really stop and think to find the differences in how you conduct yourself in a more normal, traditional job vs being a pro wrestler. Time management skills are essential, reliability, dependability, being trustworthy, honesty… you can’t take any of those traits away in any walk of life. I think sometimes the whole thing is over thought, this idea of the secret society, or secret handshake or the wrestling brotherhood that means you have to do certain things. I think we make the business, rightly or wrongly, more special than it is in that regard.
How can wrestlers balance the need to be confident and assertive against the risk of coming across as arrogant?
The first thing to do if they want to impress people is the fundamental things. Come to work on time, be physically and mentally prepared to do the assignment, have a great work ethic and passion. Being verbose and being assertive and being this gregarious extrovert, if it’s handled disingenuously, can be a bigger harm than help by far. I just think you act normally. How do you conduct yourself on a normal basis? That’s what I wanted to see: I didn’t want to see your showbiz persona, I wanted to know who you are. Again, it comes back to being honest and sincere. And you don’t have to be the loudest in the room to get noticed.
In your time heading talent relations, and the same was true of your successors, you often had to play the ‘bad cop’ role in a good cop, bad cop approach. How important is it for wrestlers to understand they are dealing with somebody playing this role?
Some that are more reasonable and rational understand it readily. Others that don’t want to face reality in their life, or their deficiencies that are sometimes self induced, don’t want to recognise anything but what they want to see in the mirror. Most rational people get it. Some that are just full of their own TV persona and not reality, sometimes they miss the point. My goal was always to be succinct and honest. They didn’t want to hear a lecture from me if I’d got bad news. They wanted me to be sincere and be conversational, not confrontational.
You’ve often been in the unenviable position of letting wrestlers know they were being released. What tips would you give them for maximising their chances of being rehired?
Use common sense. Would you go out and disparage the company and go on a vendetta? You’re not obligated to bury your soul when you change employers. Use your brain: [ask yourself] if I were in WWE’s position would I hire myself back based on my actions since leaving the company? Did I give you any reason to not want to do business with me again? If the answer is no, then you have positioned yourself to have a chance to get back in the game. There’s no magic formula: just use your brain and put yourself in the WWE’s shoes.
Do you think the process of wrestlers dealing with being let go will change now the developmental and competitive landscape means it’s much more likely a wrestler’s major league career can effectively be over at a relatively young age?
I think it’s an individual thing, not a cultural thing or a trend. It’s all about how stable you are as a human being. Did you come into wrestling with a viable plan B as I always suggest and recommend? If you have no education, if you have no plan B, if you have no other skill-set, if you’re one-dimensional, if it’s all or nothing in pro wrestling, and you have been erroneously willing to put yourself in that position, and then you don’t make it, and you react so negatively that it becomes an eyesore, that’s your problem. You haven’t prepared for reality. And the reality is that the majority of people that get into pro wrestling, in a short period of time, will realise that they’re not going to achieve the level of success that they initially wanted. You’ve got to look at how do I approach this? Do I get a day job with benefits and something that I can enjoy doing to some degree and then wrestle part-time? Is that my fix for wrestling? Or do I continue to chase the dream of being discovered and bringing something so unique to the table that I can’t help but be hired by a more viable entity?
How should people in non-wrestling roles deal with the criticism that you have to have been in the ring to understand the business?
I think that’s a little bit of a stretch: you’ve got to be in the business to understand the business. If that was the case then the business would never evolve. You wouldn’t have new people, younger people getting involved. The WWE for example is no different to any other television company: they’re going to hang their hat on talented, reliable, loyal people that are dedicated to pulling the wagon in one direction. Simple deal. Every other CEO, every other major company’s going to say the same thing. We have a product, you need to understand the product, we want you to work hard, we want you to work smart, and we want you to be loyal to the company. It’s not a wrestling thing, it’s just a business thing. You’ve got to be a student of the game to a large degree and you’ve got to be an even bigger student of human nature and how you interact with people. The people that are in wrestling, the performers, some of them are insecure and they have issues in that regard, but that’s the same if you were involved in a team in Premier League soccer. You’re going to get guys that need to be babysat. NFL, NBA, showbiz: you find that. Hollywood, movies, it’s all the same in that respect: you find insecurities because of the nature of the job that’s unconventional and has a relatively short shelf life for most.
There’s usually been a extremely large gulf in pay between headliners and talent lower down the card. Is this a good incentive for wrestlers to shoot to the top or does it risk deterring people from doing things which may be good for the business as a whole but could threaten their own position?
I don’t know what the WWE pay structure is today: when I was there, the WWE Network was not there and there was significant money generated by pay-per-view and that was addressed in payroll and could help make or break your year [as a wrestler]. But any business that can incentivise their employees — or their independent contractors — and create an obtainable bonus system for productivity, I think it’s smart business. I think that what’s not smart business is allowing highly motivated, Type A personalities to get on essentially a salary and then they find their comfort zone. Once one finds their comfort zone, in my view, one stops growing. If you stop growing, then you’re dying. Comfort zones are the kiss of death. Incentivising people is a good thing and I can tell you that talents love to get bonuses, they love to earn more than they perceive they would [otherwise] and it’s always good for management to be able to do that as often as is feasible. I’m a big proponent of the idea that the more you contribute and the more you create, the more money you should make and that was how we managed the roster.
What’s a good example would-be WWE wrestlers should learn about what not to do in dealing with colleagues?
I said to the talent all the time: don’t give the company — any company that you work for — the reason to not want to do business with you, to give a reason that you are not promotable, that you’re just another talent. Show that you’re unique, you bring a unique skillset to the equation. The main thing is that like any job, if you don’t come to work on time, if you’re not reliable, if your word isn’t worth a damn, then all of a sudden you’re chipping away at your legacy and foundation. At some point the foundation gets bare enough that if won’t support you. There’s really no magic thing here: just use some common sense and logic in how you deal with your peers and how you deal with management. Always be professional and polite, be a good communicator: you don’t have to be a kiss-ass, just be a good communicator. You’re going to get a hell of a lot more conversing than you are confronting and that goes for a lot of relationships.
What was the main source of problems with the wrestlers you dealt with?
The bottom line is that big talents, more often than not, as a rule get sideways with a company because of one of the two Cs: cash or creative. That will cover most everything I can tell you about why talent got sideways with a company while I was there. Talent will perceive that they aren’t making enough, which sometimes was the result of erroneous information from their peers with BS about what they earned just to get them fired up, which happened all the time.
How important and useful is it for wrestlers to tell announcers about important elements of the story they plan to tell in the ring?
It’s very important. Any viable nuance that has been included in [your] presentation should be noted. That’s good producing, good TV. How else would the announcers know? If the talent goes out of their way to create a situation, be it a move or a tribute like a piece of attire like Sasha Banks for Eddie Guerrero, then it’s incumbent on the talent to tell them. Sasha Banks having the idea to do the Eddie Guerrero tribute was only completed by her telling the announcers so they could include it on the broadcast. If she had left that off, she would not have completed her goal: her task would not have been finalised. So, smart by her: she gets it without question. The announcers should be informed not of every minute detail but the key things that the match may bring need to be addressed in a succinct fashion. Remember that the announcers have got a lot of information to process so give them yours in a bullet-pointed fashion, but do it.
On a related note, you’ve often spoken about your preference for not knowing about key spots in matches so that your reaction is more natural. Has this ever led to you missing out highlighting something significant?
Never anything significant. I can’t give you any reasons to justify why I would need to know everything about a pro wrestling match before I broadcast it. There’s no “Well, that one time” or “Maybe I would have rephrased that, maybe it’s good to know more than I knew.” Absolutely not. Now, if you’re a beginner and you’re just learning your trade, you might need to know more than an experienced guy would know. But if most announcers understand the philosophy of a match — what are we trying to establish with a match, what is our mutual goal — that’s all you need to know. Not to sound arrogant or egocentric, but that’s the best way for me to tell the story. I was better when I was spontaneous and I saw things evolve. I trusted my instincts, I still do. I think my pro wrestling instincts are still very competitive with anybody’s. I had a lot of confidence in my abilities and the talents we had were very good in-ring storytellers by and large. They write the music, we provide the lyrics — it’s that simple a formula.
Your work is best remembered for the more emotional and dramatic calls of key moments. How did you pick and choose your times to do this without going to that extra level of intensity so often that it lost its effect?
Well, you can’t cry wolf and if you do, people start ignoring you. My emotions were all real: I didn’t play the role of a wrestling announcer, I was who I was, for better or for worse, and there have been instances of both. I always trusted my instincts, but they have been years and years in their creation. I relied on my feel of the game. I wasn’t playing a role and getting disconnected because I fell out of character. It’s an instinctual thing. I was very lucky that I had great teachers and I was a fan of the genre: it’s over 50 years I’ve been a wrestling fan. I’ve studied the business, I’ve lived the business, it’s made up the largest part of my adult life. It’s like drinking scotch whiskey: it’s an acquired taste and wrestling announcing is an acquired skill that you can’t really learn in a crash course or a correspondence course.
You’ve done some solo announcing in WCW and on the Mid-South DVD set. What changes did you make in your approach?
I tried to really be aware of using soundbites and being succinct so it’s not just wall to wall talk. It’s really important that if you’re going solo, it doesn’t mean you need to talk more, it just means you need to talk more strategically. I always cognisant of the volume of words and the layout and try to mentally make notes of where you need to balance the play-by-play and analyst role. It was a concerted effort to monetise and ration my words: I’m not doing radio just because I’m by myself.
Wrestlers getting WWE tryouts often fall into the trap of being so caught up in making a dramatic impact with impressive moves that they forget to demonstrate their grasp of the fundamentals. Is there a similar issue with announcing tryouts?
You can’t make it about you. Even though you’re auditioning, it’s not about you, it’s about how you get the talent over. It’s about how you tell the story that’s being put over on the TV screen. It’s not about you rehearsing by the word or mentioning your name a dozen times. It’s about how you as a broadcaster fit into the concept of describing what is being shown and in the process embellishing the storyline and the talents involved in it. It’s about the business, how you perceive the business and how you present the business. Less is probably more in that regard. You’re not going to get extra credit for talking more or saying more words. They’re going to want to hear timing and delivery and inflection and all that stuff, so less is more.
