What’s the key to being a good ring announcer?
You have to realise that you owe it to the fans to be yourself and be good at what you do because they’re going to be watching you every show and you can’t just go in and do the same thing week after week: you have to change it up, change with the times, change with the product. You constantly have to reinvent your work. I would watch Raw back every Tuesday and analyse “I like this, I didn’t like this” and then the next week I would make sure not to do something I didn’t like, or if there was something that I liked that worked, I would do it. Sometimes there were things I had done every week that all of a sudden I didn’t like any more, so it’s time to change: it now sounded weird, or it didn’t fit with what was going on.
Ring announcers often have to give bad news such as no-shows. How can you make the best of that situation?
It was rough. You don’t want to give them bad news, but there are times when something happened: somebody can’t make it or somebody got hurt or somebody got something personal going on. So when you’re the one delivering the news, that’s obviously going to get a negative reaction from the crowd. You try to think about how you could build them up and try to give them something that they will be happy about: maybe somebody being added to the show who wasn’t supposed to be there, a nice little surprise. You try to come up with something positive.
What’s the biggest mistake you made as an announcer?
I watched some of my indy work from when I first got started and I always had a banter with the crowd and in my earlier years it was a little bit too much: “You guys ready for the next match?! Come on, ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEXT MATCH?!” and I would just keep it going and that for me was a mistake. Later on in WWE I didn’t do any of that — wasn’t allowed to do any of that — so it wasn’t an issue.
How do you make the announcements of the big stars stand out without underplaying everyone else?
It’s a thin line. Everybody who’s there was great, but there are certain guys that if you give them that super big introduction, the crowd isn’t going to react as strongly as when you’re introducing a John Cena. When you do that you just give the best introduction you can to everybody else but when the top stars are coming out and you know they’ll be getting the big reaction, you turn up the introduction a little bit. It’s not like it sticks out because the crowd is so loud — you’re just making sure the announcement gets the same reaction. It’s like when it gets loud outside and you have to turn your radio up. You have to turn up the introduction so they can hear you and so it can match the fans’ reactions.
What was your measure of a good night’s work?
To me it was good when the introductions were good, there were no mistakes and the bosses were happy. Not getting any feedback from the higher-ups was a good day for me! I never got positive feedback from the bosses. If it was negative, the most common feedback I got was to tone it down. I don’t know if that was helpful because then I would go out and give a mediocre introduction and say “Hey, was that better, is that what you were looking for?” I knew it was mediocre but they would say “Yes, that’s much better” so it wasn’t really useful advice. I’d just take that and then slowly as time went on try to come back up a little bit with it and give it a little bit more.
What is something people don’t necessarily know or think about with ring announcing?
I was at every single house show for years, every show every single week. I didn’t alternate with anybody: I was at every Monday Night Raw or Smackdown, every PPV so I was at every single show [for the brand I was on]. Now the agents or producers, they alternated: sometimes they were there for a run or off for a bit; the wrestlers sometimes had a weekend off; the referees would swop in and out.
I not only was backstage knowing where the product was going or what was going on behind the scenes, but I sat there at ringside and watched literally every single show we did from beginning to end just the way the fans see it. I got to see all these matches, everything. There were certain producers or agents that I would work with, John Laurinatis when he was booking the house shows would come to me for feedback. I would give producers feedback. Sometimes we’d get a producer and he’d say “This is what they want us to do tonight” and I’d say “That’s what they were told last week and we tried it but this was sort of off, what if we did this or that?” So I would work with the producers just to make sure the fans got a great show.
The wrestlers knew that I had been doing this since I was 16, I had sat at ringside for every major match in the past decade, I’d seen a lot. So when new guys came in, sometimes they were cutting a promo but they weren’t quite sure what to say or do and there were times I could feel where the promo was going or where it should go and I would just throw out a line or a couple of words and sometimes those guys would use it. I know wrestling and I knew the product, so I would help us all work together and it was fun.
How can ring announcers get noticed by bigger companies and is it different to how things work for wrestlers?
I don’t know how different it is. You want to get as much experience as possible but when you’re a wrestler you need to wrestle to get experience. When you’re a ring announcer you could get announcing experience all over the place [not just in wrestling] – I announced anything I could just to get it on my resume and get the experience and the video for my showreel. With wrestlers you can’t go and do a different sport to get experience. But like the wrestlers you need to be persistent, get your stuff out there and promote yourself and not hope that they take notice but rather make sure that you get yourself noticed.
You write a lot in your book about being a huge fan before getting into the business. How do you keep that enthusiasm without coming across as a fanboy?
I’ve put some video clips up to promote the book and they show me jumping up and down in front of X-Pac when he was Sixx on Nitro or standing in the crowd at WrestleMania 13 when Stone Cold and Bret were brawling through the stands. I’m showing that I was a total fanboy: I’m at the hotel videoing these guys or getting autographs. I started working independent wrestling and was still a huge fan but as time went on I became more “OK, this professional, it’s a serious thing now.” I still had the fan in me the whole time and there were many times during my run where if I did something cool that the fan in me thought was awesome I’d put it on my social media for other fans to see and appreciate. But I’d do it in a professional way. Like when Hulk Hogan was around I’d put out a picture and say how excited I was, which was genuine. I never really lost the fanboy in me, I was just professional about the way I displayed it.
What changes and benefits come from being with the same company for more than a decade?
When I was coming in, I was coming in to an existing family and it’s hard when new guys come in. It definitely took a while. In my first few years it was a different atmosphere: there was a lot of bullying and a lot of hazing that went on. It was really rough. As time went on a lot of bad guys went out and a lot of good guys were coming in and things were starting to change. I had just always been there and guys were coming in and knew me from [the start]. I was at the point when I had been around for a long time and had relationships with everybody. When new guys come and see that they look at it and assume “OK, this guy’s a good guy”.
How far should you go with taking ribbing in good spirits and not making it worse by making a fuss, and what’s the point where you need to complain about it?
What I went through wasn’t in good spirits, it wasn’t fun. It was something I took and didn’t say anything. I didn’t go to management. It’s the type of company where management loves that type of thing: they’re not against it and they kind of encourage it. So you couldn’t go to management anyway. So I took it and I took it and I took it and it just never ended and went too far many times, but you can’t do anything about it. You either take it and go along with it, or you could leave: that was basically it. And I got close to leaving a couple of times.
When did the bullying and hazing stop?
JBL was a really really big bully and did that a lot to people. And then Joey Styles knocked him down on a plane and right after that he disappeared. So [laughs] once he was gone and other guys came in, that was basically the end of that!
How do you balance continuing to be a fan of wrestling with working full-time in the business?
It was really hard. I’ve been very vocal and I would stand up instead of just doing my job — I would have a job there for life if I just showed up and did what I was told. But there were so many times where because I saw it as a fan, I would say “Hey, this is awkward” or “Why are we doing this?” or “If you do this then it’s confusing for the fans” but I’ve always thought that management isn’t putting on a show to appease fans, it’s putting on a show to appease certain egos. Because you’re doing that, you’re not entertaining fans the way you should, you’re entertaining yourself. It was hard as a fan to sit there and watch certain shows where the crowd is like “What? What’s going on? This doesn’t make sense.”
It’s hard because you have a lot of really talented wrestlers and producers but sometimes it’s not about putting on what would be an entertaining show for fans, it’s about putting on the show that [management] want or pushing certain guys. The fans want to like certain guys but the company wants different guys to get over. I felt the same way that the fans felt and so I wanted to help that guy as much as I could. When the company was fighting Daniel Bryan it was the same thing: I’d give Daniel Bryan a big introduction. The company was trying to keep him back but the crowd loved him so I would give him big introduction because he deserved it and he should have been getting over in the storylines.
What else did you learn from working house shows?
There are so many guys who are really good and that’s why they were there at the time. They were really good and the crowd loved them. But they would do something that got over and bring it to TV because it got over and do it at TV and it would get over again, but then they would be told “Don’t ever do that again.” So many guys got their wings clipped off because they weren’t supposed to get over. There’s certain guys that the company wants to run with and if you’re not one of those guys then if you’re doing something that’s getting over, they cut you down. That was very common: there were many guys who got over at house shows coming up with really innovative stuff and then brought it to TV and were told not to do it again.
