During an interview with Peter Klein on Coach Potato Diary, Adnan Virk talked about his brief stint as the lead commentator for WWE RAW:
“The biggest thing for me is, I loved wrestling as a kid but I didn’t watch as much as I got older. I got offered this opportunity to audition and why not, of course I’d love to do this. They sent me a few matches to look at and I’m kind of like an actor, so you give me a few scenes and I studied really hard and I nailed those three scenes, but then you actually have to do the whole play on Broadway. That’s a much different thing than doing a scene study of three scenes. The biggest challenge for me is that, it’s hard to be really well-versed in the sport when you’re trying to catch a freight train that’s already going 100 miles an hour. I’m running alongside the train trying to catch up. It’s hard to make up for that gap in time.
One thing that helped is, unlike baseball or other sports, you don’t have to say, ‘Remember three years ago at WrestleMania and what happened,’ you actually never do that, which is very different from normal sports. When I was broadcasting on Raw, you’re only looking at what happened the previous week or two weeks. That’s it. It was never about six months ago. In that instance, you don’t really need to know the history of wrestling, but as a play-by-play guy, you have to know the moves and mechanics and I think, in all honesty, I struggled to adapt to that. Ultimately, I wasn’t good enough for that position. The big thing I missed with conventional sports is we have incredible researchers. In baseball and MLB Network, NHL, and ESPN, you have people who will hand you notes and there are five notes on each person and stats. In wrestling, you don’t have that. You just go there and you’re calling Charlotte Flair and it’s up to you to do your own research and all that stuff. In hindsight, maybe if I hired Peter Klein to say, ‘give me all the notes you have,’ I maybe would have had a better idea with storylines.”
Virk also gave praise to the people he worked with:
“Everyone there is awesome. Corey Graves is phenomenal, I think he’s a huge talent. Byron Saxton is a huge talent. You never want to be in a situation where you’re the weakest link and I knew I was. That’s never a good feeling. Those guys were such good teammates because it’s like a baseball team. ‘We know you need some help, we’re here to help you out. You’re new, just lean on us and we’re good to go,’ which was so generous of them. Kevin Dunn is a great producer. Michael Cole was very very generous. Michael is not only the voice of SmackDown, he’s the on-air conglomerate and oversees the talent. He was so helpful every week. I would do the show, I would watch the show, I’d call Michael on Thursday and we’d go through stuff and go through notes. I would try to make as many notes as I could. Everybody there, I have such respect for because they work so hard. It’s a huge commitment. Vince McMahon is obviously a very demanding boss, he knows what he wants and is a super smart guy. He’s built up an enormous business, but they are hard workers.”
