Jonathan Coachman on the Infamous Katie Vick Angle, the Things He Should’ve Said No to in WWE

– During a recent edition of Insight with Chris Van Vliet, former WWE broadcaster Jonathan Coachman discussed working in WWE, the infamous Katie Vick storyline, the pressure of working under Vince McMahon, and more. Below are some highlights provided to us by Insight:

Jonathan Coachman on wrestling Ric Flair in Afghanistan: “That one happened in Afghanistan, and I’ll never forget they needed an extra match. They said, ‘Hey Coach, we need you to go eight minutes with Ric.’ Ric was so respectful of everybody. I walked up in the locker room and I said, ‘Hey Ric, they need to add a match, so it’s going to be me and you.’ [Ric said] ‘All right, cool. We’ll just call it out there, figure four.’ I stopped, there was a couple other talent in the room and they were laughing. I said, ‘Ric no offense, I’m not Shawn Michaels, we can’t just call it out there. I need to know exactly what you are doing.’ My figure four that I took was so bad they had to edit around it. You never saw it. They started teasing me on the plane ride home, and they called it the figure two. True story.”

His thoughts on the Katie Vick storyline: “I’m telling you right now, and anybody will tell you this, if it was Michael Cole sitting here, that if Vince was still involved, people are still terrified of him. I’m not proud of the fact that I never told him no, this is one of the things that I’ve told you on and off camera. There’s a lot of things I should have said no to. That was one of the most repulsive, disgusting storylines of all time. During that time, Vince would go down a road and everything he was doing was hitting, whether it was the milk truck, whether it was the cement truck with the Corvette, all of that stuff. So let’s just keep going. Let’s do shock TV. I can tell you this, because they shot that off-site so nobody had seen it until it ran on the show. And backstage, you could hear people just groaning because it was so incredibly bad. And if you put a lie detector on Triple H today, he would probably tell you the same thing.”

Jonathan Coachman on Pat McAfee: “Pat McAfee is a unicorn, and he says stuff without any fear of repercussion. Michael Cole, the reason you see that reaction from Michael is because if somebody’s gonna get yelled at for something McAfee says, it’s gonna be Michael. So he’s like, oh geez, whether it’s swearing, whether it’s saying something out of bounds, whatever it is. They’re not yelling at McAfee, because they’re like man, we love McAfee. We love all the things he does. He does the football, he does the show, he does ESPN. That’s who he is. I mean, last week for God’s sake, he admitted to drinking 30 Guinness beers and 18 of them were on camera. He took an edible that was 100 milligrams, admitted to it, and everybody laughed. Every video I saw they go he’s a regular dude, and I’m sitting there going when I was at ESPN, I couldn’t even turn left out of the parking lot, if I was supposed to go right I would get yelled at. Man, it’s so different now. Also, these networks have realized that they can pay guys less, not McAfee, he makes a lot, but pay guys less and allow them to do other things. So if a guy wants to make a million dollars, instead of paying them a million dollars, they could pay them $600,000 and they can go get the $400,000 somewhere else. That was not the case when I was there.”

His thoughts on who John Cena’s final opponent should be: “Well, I think it’s gonna be Randy Orton. I really do. Because when you look at the fact that they’re both basically at the same number of World Championships, Randy has come from the kid I knew at 19 years old to where he is now. I’m so incredibly proud of what he’s done and the maturity that he’s had. But Cena, I traveled with him for many, many months. I know that if you watch whether it was the two hours he sat down with you, whether the interview that he just did where I thought he was ridiculous for talking about Roman Reigns being the GOAT, but that’s what he believes. And when he believes in something, that’s what he’s going to do. I believe that he’s got everything mapped out to the opponent for WrestleMania. When he announced it, because we were doing a live watch along, I thought to myself, so it’s all going to end at WrestleMania, he can’t have another title run, and then what does he do at the press conference?”