Former WWE announcer Jonathan Coachman was interviewed by Chris Van Vliet about his time in WWE, what he’s doing now and why he will never work for WWE/Vince McMahon again.
Jonathan Coachman on what he is doing today:
“I tell anybody who asks me, you can’t believe almost anything on social media. I won’t say everything, but almost anything because I have people tweet me, ‘Oh, where have you been? You’ve done nothing with your career. Oh, I mean, your career stopped in 2008.’ Did it really? I mean, 10 years doing SportsCenter and now at CBS Sports. I work for the PGA Tour. I do all the betting content for the PFL, the only MMA League that has a regular season, playoffs and a championship night coming up in November.”
“The thing that most wrestling fans don’t realize is in their minds, they think everybody aspires to be in the WWE, aspires to be in pro wrestling. I never did. I stumbled into it. I backed into it. I was lucky to even get into it when I was 23 years old, but my dream was always sports, and part of the reason I left ESPN in 2017 is I wanted to do more golf. I knew that after twenty some years of doing things my way, it’s time for me to start helping, and what I mean by that is, that there needs to be diversity in everything, and in the world of golf, especially when you have Tiger Woods, who’s a black man as your most popular golfer of all time, for the last 25 years, but yet, that’s not represented on television or in golf in general. So that’s what I wanted to do and now I’m a big part of what the PGA Tour does and I just love being in the world of golf.”
On leaving WWE and never wanting to return:
“So I went back in 2017. I kind of instantly knew this is not really where I need to be, where I want to be, but it was a nice bridge between ESPN and what the next full-time thing was going to be.”
“So in my personal life, I was moving to California, so I didn’t really know what I was going to do next. So I went back, and it was fun, but the people I worked with on the shows, I don’t know what it was, but didn’t really want me to be there. So when I got switched to the pre-show, that was fun because that was just once a month I had to show up and that was cool. But then I missed, and part of the reason, this is so Vince, when they called me and they said, ‘Hey, we’d love for you to come back’, I said, ‘I’m already doing golf’, so I had five events already booked. I said, ‘I’m missing the shows that week.’ They went, ‘Oh, no problem, no problem’, until it was a problem. I missed one show in 10 years in my first run. I missed five shows in the first seven months of my second run, but I think everybody would agree, and the schedule has changed now, they were running people into the ground. Nobody should be working 52 weeks a year, nobody. They shouldn’t be having new shows 52 weeks a year. Let’s be honest, and everybody inside WWE says it, they just don’t want to admit it, but no company should work that way.”
“But for me what it was, I’ll just be honest with you, is they came to me and they said, ‘XFL 2020, Vince needs somebody there that he trusts that can do it the right way.’ So I was flying from California to New York every week to do the pre-show because they hired a lot of people who had never worked for him before. So I trust Vince, implicitly, like I’ve done so much for him, with him. Everybody knows that.”
“So you turn in invoices. Well, I didn’t turn mine in right away because I’d worked for him for 20 years. He had always paid me. So COVID happens and I have a fairly large check and I hold on to it for a couple of days. I go to put it in the bank and it bounces. So I called or texted a high executive there and I got a response, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of money.’ I said, ‘I agree. Can you just call Vince and let’s take care of this quietly? No big deal’, and ghosted me. Absolutely ghosted me.”
“Vince has that amount of money in his back pocket. You know what I mean, and it really hit me hard. It wasn’t the money. It was the process. You know what I mean? I’ll never forget. I sat there one day and I said, ‘Man, they really bounced a check to me.’ I did get a second text. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s another company. I don’t think there’s anything we can do’, so basically telling me people I’ve worked with for 20 years, ‘Oh, that’s the XFL. It’s not the WWE’, but the same guy owns the two. I mean, everything was a crossover.”
“So that to me was a complete slap in the face. Some people there just don’t care and I’m not gonna name names. It’s not my style. But even to this day, and anybody who watches this interview will agree with me because it’s true, there are certain people, and they’re usually the ones that get the biggest bonuses, that do not care what happens below them. I had literally done everything I had ever been asked to do and this is how you’re going to treat me? Literally, they didn’t care. They did not care.”
“I even gave it months because remember there were no shows. The company’s losing money. I felt for all of that, but then eight months later when you start advertising the biggest year we’ve ever had financially, making all this money, and then you can’t make things right? So again, that’s why I’ve never really talked about it. I’ve mentioned it in a couple of interviews, but I can’t, at this point in my life, I can’t work for people like that. I cannot work for people who do not care about human beings to the point that in a spot where you really need it, because we all lost our jobs during COVID, and that’s when you’re going to decide to now let’s just turn our back on a guy who’s been loyal for 20 years, like to a point, the things that I’ve done for that company, you know, would blow your mind. I was 100% loyal, but they were not loyal to me, and that’s it.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
