Bruce Prichard recently talked about the passing of Don West on his Something To Wrestle With podcast.
West, 59, lost his battle with lymphoma and passed away. West worked with fellow announcers Mike Tenay and Borash for many years in TNA Wrestling. Here is what Prichard had to say:
“Don worked in TNA and did color commentary there, but what Don really did was, Don was the guy behind, in many ways, making TNA money, making TNA profitable because Don did all of their merchandising and Don was able to put together packages.”
“When I first went to TNA and I went to a live event and I heard Don and Jeremy Borash on the microphone, if you’ve ever seen a Charlie Brown special whenever Charlie’s in the teacher’s office and the teacher is talking, it sounds like, wa, wa, wa. I would compare Don and Jeremy to that teacher because they never stopped talking the entire show. If there wasn’t a match going on, you heard one of those two voices and they went from one to the other to where they blended in. But the beauty of it, as much as I hated it, was Don knew how to make money.”
“I didn’t have a lot to do with Don at first and then as I started coming into the office and being around him, you talk about a genius and one of the most warm hearted, good guys for the right reasons, there was nothing phony about Don West. I hated it when people would say, ‘He’s just a phony shill.’ No man, There is nothing disingenuous about Don West. He worked as hard as the day was long. I don’t think you would find anybody that would say, oh that Don West was an a**hole. I don’t know one. He just was always there with a smile on his face. You never heard the word no out of him. He would figure out ways to make it happen. He would figure out ways to take it to the next level that nobody else had thought about, and just an absolute, absolute class act that I, very proud to have been able to spend time with him and get to know him, and unfortunately, I didn’t get to know him nearly as well as I wish I could have, but when I did, I learned an awful lot from him. In many ways, he taught me temperament, and that was a good thing. It’s something that I needed at that time in my life there at TNA. To his family, our condolences because we lost a great man and somebody that was near and dear in many people’s hearts.”
H/T to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription