Jerry Lawler Says Vince McMahon Never Has Yelled At Him
Jerry Lawler appeared on the most latest Steve Austin Show and discussed Vince McMahon’s reputation for directing the broadcast team through their headsets during shows. McMahon’s habit of directing the commentary booth to do certain things and yelling at them over headsets is legendary, with Mick Foley famously discussing on several occasions how he left the company over being screamed at over the headsets. Lawler recalled other commentary members like Jim Ross having similar experiences of being yelled at but said that it has never happened to him. Highlights from the discussion are below:
On Vince’s reputation for yelling at the broadcast team during the shows: “You know what? I can say with all honesty, I’ve been very blessed. And I guarantee one person that will tell you this for a fact is good old JR. I don’t know what it was — and the person you’re probably talking about is Vince — I mean, you know, Vince McMahon is at every TV show. And he’s in the back, and he’s got a set of headphones on. And Vince has a row of buttons in front of him. And he can punch a button, and he can talk to anybody. He can talk to the director, he can talk to the cameraman, he can talk to the referee. He can talk to any one of the three announcers at any given time. So he has a huge input throughout the entire show. And yeah, I have been in a lot of situations where my partner would really get an earful if he said something that didn’t please Vince.”
On his own experiences with Vince over the headset: “I on the other hand, over all these years Steve. It’s unbelievable. I’ve never — Vince has never yelled at me one time. I would go through, I don’t know, weeks and weeks of shows where I didn’t even hear Vince say a word to me. And we’d be back in break 15, and JR would — they cut our microphones off and he says, ‘Is he wearing you out tonight?” And I say, ‘I haven’t even heard from him.’ He said, ‘Oh, Jesus, he’s killing me!’”
On how Vince is with him now: “But now, you know, now that I’m back on there just this past week. Like I said, all Vince will do very occasionally, is he will see something and you know … if you remember, Vince — heck, right before he started working with you, Vince was the play-by-play guy on all the shows. And I loved when I first started, I was working with Vince. I was doing the color and Vince was the play-by-play guy. I loved working with Vince. He was an awesome play-by-play guy. He really got it, and I loved working with him. And so, that’s still in the back of his mind, and when he’s watching a show, he sees something. And if it’s something that just comes to him that he would say, he will punch a button and he will suggest something for me to say on the show. But he doesn’t do it every often.”
