Former WCW announcer Scott Hudson recently spoke to the In Your Head Wrestling show about the current state of wrestling commentary and more. You can check out the interview here and read some highlights below.
WWE not having stars:
“Actually I like all the guys in The Shield, the Wyatt Family guys are entertaining to watch, but the guys out there now, to bring this whole show full circle, it’s all promos. When we had WCW, we had the Power Plant and we brought in the bunch called The Natural Born Thrillers: [Chuck Palumbo], [Mark] Jindrak, [Shawn] Stasiak, Reno, Mike Sanders; all those guys, with the exception of Sanders, they were all horrible promos. I mean, terrible. But, they were great athletes… I mean you go back and watch that stuff they were incredible workers, but they couldn’t cut a promo if you had a gun to their head. And it’s like The Natural Born Thrillers are now the entire roster of the WWE top to bottom: great looking guys, average to fantastic workers, no promo ability; none. I think I mentioned on some discussion the other night that I had online that listening to Roman Reigns cut a promo has all the fire of a Dr. Ben Carson haiku reading. And that’s probably being kind to both of them.”
Wrestling commentary nowadays:
“Well first, Michael Cole sucks. That guy couldn’t call a one-horse race. Unfortunately, the best announcer they have on RAW is Byron Saxton, and they don’t let him show his stuff. JBL…he’s terrible, he’s horrible; Tthey don’t know what to do, but then again I’ll give Cole at least a little bit of credit in that he’s doing what he’s told. If he wasn’t doing what he was told, he would be working for Joey Styles at the dot com office. And that’s sad, is that they’ve got the best announcer in the last twenty years on staff not announcing. The guy for New Japan, Mauro Ranallo, he’s the best announcer in wrestling and it’s not even close. He’s fantastic. The guys on Ring of Honor, Kevin Kelly and the rest of that bunch, they’re good, too. But the announcing on basically every WWE product across platforms is atrocious.
I’ve gotta say this, I’m a huge mark for [Jerry Lawler]; he could read things out of the phone book and I would listen. So I love The King, take him out of that equation, otherwise the announcers there are worthless. But, to their everlasting credit, they’re doing what they’re told. And [McMahon] is happy as a clam, watching ratings… and viewership and everything else and gimmick sales go right in the tank.”
The invasion angle:
“Keep this in mind, when they bought us out, should there ever have been a bigger angle than the Invasion angle? Because you had [ECW] thrown in there, too. That angle, start to finish, should still be going today, fourteen years later. And the problem is one person’s fault, and that’s Vince McMahon. He would not in his dying breath put over a WCW talent or an ECW talent. Now, some guys got over in spite of Vince trying to bury them, but Vince’s whole idea was to bury both companies. It wasn’t to make money by saying “Oh my God, this is WCW versus WWE versus ECW”, it was, “This is WWE, stop. WCW and ECW guys are job guys.” That’s all he wanted, that’s all he saw, and he did not care that he was sitting on a 20-million dollar profit. He was comfortable with a 2-million dollar profit because he got to bury WCW and ECW.”
