Ask any WWE fan of a certain age to start listing their favorite announcers and chances are they won’t get very far without naming Jim Ross. Good old JR, alongside Jerry “The King” Lawler, provided commentary for most of WWE’s most famous matches during the Attitude Era boom period in the late 90s and early 2000s, but apparently, things could have been very different if it wasn’t for a “trainwreck” mid-90s PPV that led to Ross being re-hired by the company.
Ross reflected on the disastrous night during the most recent episode of Grilling JR With Jim Ross. During the convo, his co-host Conrad Thompson asked JR to expand on a section of his book where he talked about getting rehired by WWE after he was let go in the early 90s. Apparently it all had to do with King Of The Ring 1994, which he called a “trainwreck” from a commentary standpoint in his book. Vince McMahon had to step away from announcing duties because of the infamous steroid trial, and the company was struggling to find the right combination for a new era. McMahon ultimately elected to go with Gorilla Monsoon, Randy Savage and former NFL player Art Donovan, who fit together like “oil and water.” Here’s a portion of JR’s reflection…
(Art) didn’t know come here from sic’em. I felt so bad for Monsoon because Monsoon was not a big fan of Randy Savage, just personality clashes, two strong willed guys, two of the most famous personalities in all of wrestling ever. For whatever reason, it was like oil and water. They just did not blend well together. I know Monsoon called me the next day, the next morning, and said, ‘Did you see that shit?’ I said, ‘I sure did, Gino. I sure did.’ He said, ‘My God. Was it awful?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I want to say it was awful, but it wasn’t up to your standards. I can tell you that.’
It wasn’t long after the PPV that Jim Ross, who had done some work for WWE in the early 1990s, was called and asked to return. McMahon continued fiddling with the booths for awhile longer but eventually found the perfect pair with real life friends Ross and Lawler, whose clashing styles (Ross a sincere good guy and Lawler a braggadocious bad guy) played perfectly off one another. They’re beloved by fans and fellow performers and widely remembered as the voices of The Attitude Era, in the same way Gorilla Monsoon is fondly remembered as the voice of The Golden Era in the 1980s and early 1990s, first with Jesse The Body Ventura and later with Bobby The Brain Heenan.
That’s why, even though the commentary mess was great for JR’s career, he clearly reflects on it with some sadness. It was the end of an era. He had a close relationship with Monsoon and still considers him to be one of the best commentators in pro wrestling history. So, he didn’t want to see him go through a bad night and felt especially bad knowing Monsoon knew a change was probably on the horizon.
It was a horrible show… I felt bad for Monsoon. He didn’t deserve that deal. I remember asking him, ‘Did you guys do a walkthrough of any sort?’ He said, ‘Hell no. You know we didn’t.’ It was challenging for those guys, and Savage was challenging to work with anyway. He was a perfectionist. And of course, Gorilla was Gorilla. He was as staple as anyone could ever be, the standard bearer of pro wrestling announcers… (But) he was dejected. He knew somewhere along the way, maybe sooner than later, there was going to be a change made there.
Transition periods in wrestling are always awkward, and the mid 90s are widely remembered as a transition period in wrestling between the over the top characters and big personalities of the 1980s and early 1990s and the grittier, borderline R-Rated Monday Night Wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Monsoon was the right commentator for the former, and Jim Ross was the right commentator for the latter. They’ve both rightly been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, even if they were part of the occasional trainwreck PPV where everything goes wrong on commentary.
