JBL spent multiple years as a color commentator in WWE under the production of Vince McMahon, and he believes that his former boss gets a lot of undeserved criticism for how he produces broadcasters.
The WWE Hall of Famer recently appeared on GAWTV and opened up about his time as a commentator. JBL explained that although CEO of WWE Vince McMahon may get heat over the way he produces, he personally loved it:
“Vince [McMahon] gets a lot of heat over what he produces, and I loved it. By the way, Vince was never rude to me. Not one time, did not yell at me one time. Jerry Lawler says the same thing. Booker T says the same thing. Now he yelled at Michael Cole and he yelled at some other guys, but I think it was the old guys who had been in the ring for him. He just treated us differently. Even when I made mistakes, he was very kind about it,” JBL noted.
“But I loved him being in my ear because he was very succinct,” he continued. “He’s a great producer. He would tell you just a short little phrase. He wouldn’t tell you a whole paragraph. Usually I’d be one word behind it. I’d just repeat exactly what he said, because he knew what was coming up and he also knew what he was feeding somewhere else. So, sometimes he’d feed me something, but he’d [Michael] Cole something different and it made sense after Cole said it. He (Vince) had access to everything. I enjoyed Vince being a producer. A lot of guys, I think it’s fashionable to say they hated it, but I thought he was terrific at it.”
JBL went on to address “sensory overload” in regards to his role as a commentator:
“Even in my day, you had guys who had too much movement and not enough emotion. As Vince would explain it, you gotta have a move and you gotta have some type of break. Enough break for the guy sitting next to somebody to say ‘hey did you see that?” and talk about it, and register it. Otherwise, it gets lost. And if you’re a commentator, and they go from one thing to the next, you literally can’t talk about it. You can’t go ‘it could have hurt him and did this and did that’ because they’re right to another move. So to me, it does hurt, but to me, every generation has had a problem with that–with too much movement and not enough emotion.”
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If you use this transcript, credit GAW TV and h/t WrestleZone and link back to this post.
