WWE Senior Vice President Bruce Prichard recently covered several topics on his podcast, “Something to Wrestle With.”
One of the main points he discussed was the period in 2005 when WWE aimed to transition away from Jim Ross as the lead voice of RAW. Prichard explained that former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon was determined to change the overall look and feel of the broadcast team.
Prichard said, “It was absolutely all the above. It was the look and — not JR’s fault, but he suffered from Bill’s palsy. And sometimes doing a show starting at nine o’clock at night, he’s tired. It’s more extreme. And you look at JR, and people would say, ‘Oh, man, this guy suffered a stroke or something.’ And I don’t care who you are, there’s a portion of the audience that makes them uncomfortable. And Jim could slur his words, and he wasn’t the Jim Ross of old. But he was good old JR. Then for the Mike Goldberg’s, there were a lot of young people in the studio who knew of him, who thought he was great. And Vince listened to them and thought, ‘Okay, great. Let’s try this. Let’s do something drastically different.’ And when he fell out, Well, who else? And people were fans of Joey Styles. And it became Joey.”
On whether he thinks Michael Cole is WWE’s most underrated commentator:
“100%. I don’t think that people really realize what a hard worker and how prepared Michael Cole is, and how much he puts into his gig, no matter what he’s doing. He — from day one, always wanted to learn, willing to do anything and everything. And thrived to — he didn’t want to replace anybody. He didn’t want to be anybody else, he just wanted to be Michael Cole doing what he was asked to do. And Michael, because of doing that, has his own identity now. But I think Michael has always been very well prepared, and he’s good at his job. And he’s done it for a long, long, long time.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
