Steve Carrier on January 28, 2018
Christian opens today’s show by speaking about his experience at RAW25 last Monday. He informs that he hadn’t been backstage at RAW in a long time, but after arriving there and talking with everyone he felt like he never left. It was nice to get out in front of the crowd and get some closure on that side of his career.
He really enjoyed his segment, even though he knew going in that it was going to be short. He loves that Jason Jordan is developing a character, and the audience is eating it up right now. Edge informs that he wasn’t sure about the Jordan/Seth Rollins tag team initially, but they’ve been proving him wrong over the last couple of weeks.
Edge and Christian welcome Corey Graves to the show.
Edge asks Graves how he deals with his hefty WWE schedule. Graves says he doesn’t mind the busy schedule because he’s always preferred to be busy his entire life. Even nowadays when he’s home for 3 or 4 days on an odd week he nearly goes crazy. Edge points out that when you’re gone your family has a way of doing things, so when you get home you become a huge “fleshy wrench” that’s been thrown into their plans.
Graves informs that he had an awesome experience calling RAW 25 last Monday. He admits that he became a kid again during the Steve Austin/Vince McMahon segment. Graves was sitting ringside when Austin’s music hit, and he says that was probably the loudest he’s ever heard an arena.
He admits that there was a weird vibe in the Barclay’s Center occasionally throughout the night when the action would switch between the two buildings. He felt that when the action would switch to the Manhattan Center, there was a feeling in the Barclays Center of frustration, as the audience waited for the live action to return.
Graves says that he’s very comfortable in his current role and he has fun doing it, but he doesn’t look at himself as carrying on the legacy of guys like Bobby Heenan. It’s nice when people say those things, but he’s just worried about working from one day to the next and hopefully many years from now people will think he did a good job.
He admits that he took the news pretty hard when he was told that he’d have to retire from in-ring competition. Triple H personally broke the news to him a few days before the official news was made available to him, and this lessened the shock somewhat. He quickly started paying his dues all over the company because he still had a family to take care of, and he knew that WWE wasn’t mad at him.
Cole heard about Graves’ short stint in radio years prior and suggested that he try commentary. Graves started training and he was very bad initially. He says that commentary is such a hard thing to do well and WWE struggles to find good commentators. Eventually he improved and was given an opportunity to commentate on NXT programming.
He admits that it was a big transition moving from NXT to WWE. On the main roster there are so many more people in your ear at all times, and there are other things to consider such as countdowns to commercials breaks.
There are also a lot more rules when you commentate on the main roster. Edge asks him when it’s okay to talk about what the crowd is doing during a show. Graves’ rule of thumb in that case is if it shows up on his monitor, it’s fair game for him to talk about.
Christian asks Graves about the differences commentating Smackdown versus RAW. Graves points out that Smackdown is much faster paced than RAW, and it feels like they’re always rushing to throw to commercial or cue video packages. He has more fun on RAW because he can tell stories, whereas Smackdown feels more like an informercial sometimes.
Speaking about his occasional on-air criticism of Booker T, Graves informs that he actually loves Booker T, and Booker T has helped him tremendously during his young commentating career. Regardless, he doesn’t have a clue what Booker T’s saying sometimes.
Edge asks Graves how he’s able to make it through WWE’s lengthy broadcasts without urinating. Graves jokes that he has a terrible diet and he’s dehydrated most of the time. RAW and Smackdown are no issue for him anymore but the real tests are longer PPV’s such as the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania.
Graves just hopes to keep getting better everyday, and he hopes to be a voice of a new generation, much like Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler were for him. He knows that if you do this job well your calls will live forever, and you’ll be heard for decades to come on the WWE Network.
That sums up today’s episode of E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness. You can listen to the show yourself anytime here, and I’ll catch ya next week for another recap!
January 28, 2018 11:44 pm
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