Renee Young reflects on her tenure as a commentator for WWE.
Young was this week’s guest on Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia, and she spoke about earning her spot in the commentator’s chair. She says while she did earn it she didn’t always feel like she belonged, and says she felt great initially and had a great support system but ended up wavering after hearing some of the criticisms and being pulled in different directions.
“A lot of times I felt like I didn’t belong there, and I wanted to be like, ‘I belong here. I earned this spot, this should be my spot.’ But I kept feeling like you like hear the background chatter of like, ‘should I be there?’ ‘Why is this woman in here calling this match? She’s never been in the ring. What’s she going to bring to the table?’”
“I just think in general. Say in general terms of me just sort of feeling like, oh my God. But there was a ton of support, an immense amount of support from a lot of people, and that was really, really cool, but you tend to be like, I want to listen to what the negative people are saying because I’m feeling insecure and weird about it. So they’re probably right. Yeah, it’s hard not to feel weird out there. When I went out to do my very first Raw broadcast, when it was like my audition, my trial, I was like, ‘I’ve got this.’ I was so confident. I felt so good about it. I didn’t feel like I stumbled. I was ready to own that spot. It really felt like it was like the time, the preparation, everything came together, and it was my moment to go out there and do it and I felt great about it.”
“Everyone was like, ‘Great job.’ Vince is sending out a tweet, which never happens. I was like, oh my God, this is great. And then finding out that you have the job and then everything else starts to settle in, the nitpicking starts to happen. You start to lose focus of what your voice is supposed to be out there and you’re getting a lot of different feedback of like, Oh, we just want you to be you or we want to hear the fan’s perspective, but we also want you to just be a broadcaster. It was just a lot of different hats and I sort of lost what I was even trying to do or what my tone was supposed to be. You want to hear something different; you were trying to change the way … WWE is constantly evolving.”
