Current WWE Raw ring announcer Mike Rome signed with the company back in May 2016 after having no prior experience with ring announcing.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Rome detailed his WWE tryout experience, and the chaos that surrounded it.
He said:
“I remember it like it was yesterday. So when I finally got the call from a guy named Johnny Greco, he wears a lot of hats, he’s been everywhere. He’s in there and we’re doing this process and Greg is there, and they had me ring announce something. They gave me the stats ahead of time, you memorize them and you turn around… they give you a couple of seconds.
“We did a whole thing where I was [acting like] I was backstage, cause at the time in the PC, they’re doing classes in there so you’re doing your auditions when classes are in there and Triple H is working out in the room next door and he walks out and it’s like ‘Don’t mess up!’ It’s a crazy… during that time, it was kind of crazy because the PC was so small and it was whatever.
“So they grabbed… it was Bull Dempsey at the time and he came over and we did a backstage thing and I was supposed to talk to him about his thing with Tyler Breeze and they’re like ‘Hey, hey, you need to stall.’ So I’m like stalling, trying to ask him questions and then I go ‘Thank you for your time, back to you guys.’ It was that kind of stuff. We did an arena thing where I walked out and went ‘What’s up WWE universe, tonight you’re gonna see this, Intercontinental Championship is on the line, WWE Championship is on the line’ and then kind of putting over the audience before throwing to a video package. It’s stuff like that. I don’t know what the process is now, but that’s what it was when I did it.”
Rome replaced Greg Hamilton as the ring announcer in the WWE 2k23 video game.
transcription via Fightful
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