As many of you know by now, Excalibur is known for wearing a lucha-style mask while on commentary. He’s received a mixed reaction from veterans on the matter so far. One veteran that wasn’t originally onboard was Good Ole JR, Jim Ross. Excalibur discussed the situation on AEW Uncensored, hosted by Aubrey Edwards and Tony Schiavone. Ross was a bit unsure of what Excalibur’s endgame was.
“At first, he was very skeptical. He saw me in the mask, and he said, ‘what the hell is this? Why are you doing this? You know the announcers job is to put over the product in the ring and not themselves?’ And I said, ‘JR, I know, and I hope that I can earn your trust. I hope you could see the job that I do is all about promoting the in-ring product,’ and he said, ‘well, we’ll see.’ So we called a few hours of matches that were on tape. Initially, he said, ‘I’m going to do lead play-by-play. Excalibur, you do analysis. Marvez, you do, color like statistics,’ and he said, ‘OK.’ Then slowly, after we’d done a couple matches, things started shifting to me going into the more play-by-play role, JR doing some color and Marvez doing the analysis or statistics. Depending on the type of match, we would kind of shift rolls back and forth, and I think that’s ultimately the the formula that we’ve adopted for AEW is that on certain types of matches that are more traditional style pro wrestling, JR takes the lead, and on matches that are more fast-paced, I guess 2010’s or in this case, 2020’s professional wrestling style, I’ll take the lead on that,” Excalibur said on AEW’s commentary style. “It’s not something that, Tony, you can attest to this, that we’ve ever discussed. It’s just something that that’s kind of happened organically.
You can listen to the whole podcast episode here
.(Credit: WrestlingInc.com)