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Jonathan Coachman: "Vince Screwed Me Over", Why He Would Never Return To WWE
Jonathan Coachman (@Thecoachrules) is a former WWE personality and commentator. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss his time in WWE, his new wrestling podcast "Behind The Turnbuckle", why he thinks he took one of the best Stone Cold Stunners of all time, competing in 30 televised matches against the likes of Shawn Michaels and Randy Orton, wrestling Ric Flair in Afghanistan, who he thinks John Cena's final opponent will be, how much he was yelled at by Vince McMahon while on commentary, falling off his chair when Kane's pyro went off and more!
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Quote I'm thinking about: “Kindness is magic."
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“When you and I last talked, it was a situation where Vince McMahon, who we openly talk about on our show. Because I think a lot of people with what happened with Vince, it continues to happen with Vince, it’s oh, we can’t talk about it, but we address it. As you know, I’m almost 15 years inside the WWE. My partner, Tommy Carlucci, 32 years inside the WWE. But when I started my sports betting show, Driving The Line, and we left CBS, and as you know, when you started to grind, the first year is just you never feel like you’re getting anywhere. I had somebody come to me and they said, Man, I watched that interview with Van Vliet, and you got so many good stories and so much history with the WWE. Why don’t you embrace it? And I was letting the fact that Vince screwed me over with money get in the way of what my future could be. The media landscape has changed so much now from you know where I live, I don’t have the ability to work for a network right now, I would have to move. I’ve got kids in high school, so you’ve got to look at what your life is and what you can do to earn a living and also set up your future. So when I thought about it, I said, Well, what can we do? Then my buddy Tommy Carlucci, and to tell you how far back me and him go, we call him Big Tommy C. He was the first adult to meet my daughter outside of the hospital, and she’s now 16 years old.”
“So Tommy was the head of the International TV department, and he worked hand in hand with Shane McMahon for years, his wife still works there. She’s been there 38 years at the company. So, like a lot of people, he was let go a few years ago. And when you’re in your early 60s, and I’m kind of like you, I look at everybody now and say, Man, how can I help? How can I pick people up? How can I be a positive influence? And we’ve been such good friends for a long time. I thought he’s got so many good stories and when he’s not on camera, he’s incredibly entertaining. So I thought, what if we did a show? Originally, I never thought it was gonna go anywhere. I was just like, let’s just have some fun. I had my producer from Driving The Line, let’s just make some shows. And he thought when I called him it was for him to be a producer, not to be on the air. I said, Let’s just try it. And so we tried it, eased him in, and he was a little bit stiff at first, but now, are you kidding me? Conrad calls him all the time for his shows. His storytelling is incredible. We have four or five different shows that we do every single week. We do a live Monday night show called The Last Word, which is kind of chopping up Monday nights. We do live Q & A’s. We do live watch alongs with the PLEs. We have a show called The War Room, where we chop up the five biggest topics. So we’ve developed all of those shows and realized that doing remote content, even though it’s different, and we also have an interview show that obviously you’re going to be a part of too. We’ve done DDP, we were interviewing DDP, and who walks into the interview? Cody Rhodes. We get 30 minutes with Cody Rhodes that we didn’t even plan on. The first thing Cody brought up when we were doing the interview was he goes Coach, I don’t know if you remember, but back when… It kind of hit me, I’ve been underestimating myself when it comes to my role in pro wrestling, my role in the WWE. When you spend 10-plus years, because sometimes these idiots online at home have nothing better to do than to insult you. ‘Oh, you’re an idiot. You got fired…’ I never got fired from WWE. In 2008, I left to go to ESPN. I was the first one to ever do that. How am I listening to this person tell me that after over 10 years, that leaving someplace is a failure, and so when I stopped listening to everybody and just said, what would I enjoy doing? This is what we’ve settled on, and it’s been a really fun ride. We just secured our first big partnership. You and I are together on that. It’s My Bookie. You can bet on who John Cena’s final opponent will be.”
“I mean, they haven’t called me yet, and much like a lot of big stars, it had to be the right number. We saw Stone Cold couldn’t work out his deal last year. So I’m a much, much bigger star than Stone Cold, I’m still on the list. I’m a +3500. Undertaker is a +10,000, which makes a lot of sense.”
“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, and I know that if you watch whether it was the two hours he sat down with you, whether the interview that he just did with Club Shay Shay, 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. And I believe that he’s got everything mapped out to the opponent for WrestleMania, and 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?”
“I think he wins at WrestleMania. Because I think, and this may be controversial to say as well, but the way Ric Flair has moved the last couple of years, people love him. I have a great affection for him. He has every so often. I’m going to retire. I’m going to retire. I’m going to retire. He’s now, what, nearly 80 years old, and he’s still out there, you know, Hawking weed and doing all these things. And I just don’t know if, at the end of the day, and this is very petty, if they do this. But I don’t know if the powers that be at WWE want Ric to be that name that’s always at the top of the mountain.”
“If you’re saying 1 to 10, it’s usually about a 4. The only time he would yell is if you didn’t say it when he wanted you to say it. So say, for example, Cody Rhodes is coming to the ring. He’d be like, Cody Rhodes big night this Saturday, stuff like that. Now I will say this, you can tell exactly when Vince got pushed out if you listen to Michael Cole, because imagine getting beaten down verbally for 20 years. Michael Cole, I don’t think has missed a show in the 25-plus years he’s been there. I know when I was there for my first 10 years, I missed one, and that was for my honeymoon. That was it. So they create that world in you, and Vince creates that world like this is your show. You got to be here. Can you imagine Jim Nance or Joe Buck? You’re going to work 52 weeks a year. Are you kidding me? So he’s much happier now because Triple H is like, I think after 25 years, if you don’t know how to call it, there’s nothing we can do for you. But yeah, he would be very calm. I do remember a time when I said something he didn’t like about Test, God, rest his soul. I said something to the effect of he was weak, [And Vince said] ‘You’re killing his character. What are you doing? What are you doing? You just killed his character. You killed him. You killed him!’ Oh, my God. Oh my god. And you’re still trying to call the match. The match is still going.”
“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.”
“I think I’m top three. I really do. Really do, because people don’t understand how to take it. People go to their knees and take it.”
“Woah, Scott Hall was way over the top. There is a happy medium that you gotta have. If you ask Stone Cold, he would say that I was right up there too. Rock was probably the best. When I started taking it, I learned from watching. By far, and it’s not close, Vince is the worst. Mick Foley is number two, [Linda McMahon’s pretty bad]. That was pretty bad too, yeah, and they never understood all you do is, because when you’re in the ring, and hopefully a lot of young talent listen to this, they think that you’re being watched all the time. You’re not. It’s the person that’s doing whatever it is that they’re doing that’s being watched. So you can fudge it a little bit. What you do is you go down on your feet and you launch yourself. All Stone Cold is doing is putting your head right there and going to his butt. Other people who take it off their knees, they go down. Stone Cold is not coming up with you. So naturally you’re both gonna fall like that. So if you notice Rock, I learned it from Rock. Then you bounce yourself, and then you take the bump and Stone Cold has nothing to do with it, nothing.”
“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.”
“Everybody thought that was supposed to happen. It was, I just didn’t know about it. So Vince He loved it when I would get at JR. He loved making fun of JR. And he goes, Hey, I want you to put your feet up on the desk and just lean back and just start talking. And JR would he was so put together, just like Michael Cole is, that he would have things written out for entrances, and he knew exactly when music was gonna hit. And if you threw him off a little bit, he hated that. He would grab me and be like, shut up, shut up. So that one, I was like, fantastic. I’ll be honest, sometimes they wouldn’t put things on the rundown so that talent didn’t know, or it didn’t get leaked to the online community or whatever. That was one of those times. So I just put my feet up, that Pyro is so hot and so loud. It’s probably my funniest moment I’ve ever had. But that’s true. I didn’t know that was coming.”
“Oh God. There have been certain times in my career where I’ve thought to myself, whatever I want to do moving forward, this will stop that. That was one of them, and big Vis what a sweet guy. What’s funny is, you asked me about him and Kane, and those were the two guys that threw me off in the famous SummerSlam commercial, threw me into the pool about five miles from where we’re sitting right now at a $9 million mansion in Hollywood. But having Vis kind of eviscerate me, I guess, in that way. And if people want to know, they can look it up. And I’ve said this many times, there are certain things I should have said no to that is definitely right at the top. It was 2 seconds too long.”
“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.”
“I felt like I got screwed over. And then also the five or six months that they put me on Raw and SmackDown, I didn’t like how I was treated and they can say what they want, but that’s that’s the truth. I would actively every week ask Michael Cole, can you talk to Corey about us working together? I have nothing against Corey Graves. I’ve known Michael Cole since 1999, but if they don’t want to work with you, there’s nothing you can do. And Corey never wanted to talk to me. I never had one conversation with Corey Graves, and I tried, and that’s okay, because that’s kind of how the business is. I call it boxing out your pension when you’re at ESPN, if you don’t want somebody to step in and take your spot. And I was never going to take his spot. He’s amazing doing Raw or Smackdown. It was about that’s what Vince wanted. I didn’t come in and go, I’m stepping into that spot. So it was really frustrating, because I felt like I could have really helped. But also now I’m much more vocal about knowing, and this is the other thing is, with the whole ESPN situation because I work for the PGA tour now too, so there’s not too many golf announcers that wear backward hats and sunglasses, but I do it. Because now they just had a tournament with YouTubers. PGA Tour is embracing YouTube. Everything has changed. And so now I realize that back in 2018 maybe that wasn’t the time, but in 2024 there is no more. Oh, he’s a wrestling guy, or he’s a YouTube guy. We’re all in the same bucket, and however you can get views, and however you can get people to watch and listen and be funny, entertaining and also credible, that’s what we’re trying to do. So that’s kind of the lane I’m in.”
“The opportunity to do things, to help people and family.”
