I’ve been thinking about writing something along these lines for some time now, longer even than I’ve been involved in wrestling in any capacity beyond mark proprietor of a small-time blog, and I suppose I’ve held off for exactly that reason—even though I’m incredibly new to this business, one of the things I was told early on was that respect didn’t come easily to new guys who wrote often ill-informed musings on what goes on behind the curtain or before the crowd. That, more than anything, explains why a formerly prodigious stream of wrestling-related content on this blog slowed to a trickle, but I continued (and continue) to read plenty of other people’s opinions on wrestling—professional or not—and have found an impressive amount of digital ink spilled on the subject of announcers in pro-wrestling. The two desk-jockeys receiving the most attention are the two who anchor the most important weekly wrestling broadcast in the world, Michael Cole and Jerry “The King” Lawler of WWE’s Monday Night Raw. It’s a funny thing about wrestling: When you’re new, everything is intimidating and you take advice from everybody. At the tail end of my career as an MFA student at Bowling Green State University, everybody I knew told me that it’d be great if I wrote about what it was like to train in that particular field, but three sentences into training, my trainer told me not to. Your trainer’s word, during and often after training, is gospel, so I listened, even after training left me exposed as a fat, concussion-prone kid who wasn’t quite ready to chase his dream. But I’ve always had another dream when it came to wrestling, and it’s one that I’m currently living, and it’s one that I wouldn’t be chasing were it not for men like Jerry Lawler. It’s often the reality of wrestling that most shakes fans and performers, and I suppose that’s why I’m finally writing about this topic.