Ernest Miller Compares His Pay in WWE to WCW

In an interview with The Spotlight (via Fightful), Ernest Miller spoke about how much he was paid in WCW and how that compared to his time in WWE. Miller worked in WCW from 1997 to 2001. He worked as an announcer in WWE for Velocity from December 2002 to August 2003, before briefly wrestling in 2004. He was released that same year.

He said: “Those four or five years I was in WCW, I made a hell of a lot of money. I made enough money to where I said, ‘This is enough, I can leave wrestling now.’ When they decided to sell to WWE, I got paid another three years just to sit at home. I had three years of payment. That was enough money from wrestling to where I could go back in, teach karate, have money set aside for retirement and everything. Out of nowhere, Johnny Ace gave me a call and said, ‘You need to come up to WWE. There is an opportunity up here. I think they’ll like you up here.’ I said, ‘I don’t know if that’s what I want to do. If they like me, they know who I am.’ Johnny Ace [John Laurinaitis] said, ‘Vince [Vince McMahon] doesn’t know who you are.’ ‘Vince knows who I am.’ We talked a couple more times. They offered me a real kind of low-ball, wasn’t a lot of money, not enough money to make me come there and be happy. It was about $220,000 a year. I was making that in one month in WCW. I said, that’s bottom pay, but you get pay-per-view and all this stuff I used to get in WCW. If you hit this rating, you get a bump up and they give you a little more money. He talked me into it. I said, ‘I’m going to go up there so I can say I worked in the two largest companies in wrestling.’“