Michael Cole Weighs In On the Experience of Having Vince McMahon In His Ear on WWE TV

Michael Cole has been with WWE for a quarter of a century now, and he discussed his work as an announcer in a recent interview. Cole appeared on the latest episode of The Press Box and you can see a couple of highlights below, courtesy of Fightful:

On why he doesn’t push back on WWE storylines while on TV: “It’s funny because you get a lot of immediate feedback on social media and one of the big things I get is, ‘Michael Cole, why don’t you say what you really feel. Why don’t you stand up to the company. Don’t toe the company line all the time. Why are you saying all that garbage?’ I always tell them, I’m a soldier. I have producers and directors that have a vision for this product. I’m an actor, I’m going to do what you tell me to do. I tell people, ‘if you work at McDonald’s and your boss says make a Big Mac, and you make a Quarter Pounder, and you consistently make a Quarter Pounder instead of a Big Mac, what’s going to happen? You’re going to be fired.'”

On Vince McMahon being in announcers’ ears: “Vince is real cool in the way that he produces because he will give you, I don’t know how he is with the other announcers, it’s different with me because we’ve been together for 25 years. We are sort of on the same wavelength sometimes. Vince sometimes only has to give me one or two words and I know exactly where he wants me to go. Most of the stuff is just reminders, getting back to a storyline, at the end of the match, if Becky Lynch has defeated so and so, it’ll be, ‘Remind us of the pay-per-view,’ so it’ll be ‘Becky vs. so and so at the pay-per-view.’ Just little reminders because we have a lot of stuff going on in our mind that we have to worry about where we’re getting next.”

On McMahon keeping the announcers’ energy up: “Another thing Vince is really good about is keeping our energy up. Sometimes during the shows, our energy will wane sometimes. He’ll make sure, ‘Keep the energy up.’ We need our product to have our energy at the same level for every single segment of the night. You want your peaks and valleys, your roller coaster because you have to give yourself somewhere to go, but you also want energy throughout the entire night because it’s not fair to the other matches in the ring if you don’t treat them like you would the bigger matches on the card. It’s not fair to the Intercontinental Championship match if you’re not treating it with the same level of excitement as the main event for the Universal Championship. It’s not fair for the performers in the ring because they’re putting their bodies out there for 20 minutes in that match. It’s not fair to the fans at home who might be fans of the superstar in the ring. We need to try, to the best of our ability, to have the same level of excitement and intensity for every match we can.”