WWE Ring Announcer Justin Roberts just celebrated his 10-year anniversary with WWE, a huge accomplishment for the lifelong wrestling fan turned announcing professional. Said Roberts in a WWE.com feature story, “It’s really cool have accomplished 10 years of ring announcing with WWE … I was a wrestling fan who lived for WWE. I didn’t watch any other sports; WWE was all I wanted to watch.”
Roberts also said his tryout didn’t go well with WWE and that early on he was mistakenly trying too hard to be like Howard Finkel rather than himself: “When I started here, I had been listening to Howard Finkel. So when I previously announced at independent wrestling events, tough man contests, University of Arizona women’s softball games, basically anything I could announce … I was utilizing a bit of The Fink’s ‘cool announcer voice,’ … I didn’t even realize that I was doing it. One day, Stephanie McMahon came up to me and said not to go out there and be Howard, but to be me. I didn’t understand it at first, and then it hit me. I went back, watched some of my work, and thought, ‘That that isn’t my voice, that’s not how I sound.’ Once she said that to me, the light went on and I just became me. So every introduction that I do has its own flavor. I don’t go out and give the same introduction to everybody.”
CB’s Slant: Congratulations to Justin Roberts on a decade of consistency. Of course, who could forget when Roberts unexpectedly found himself in the middle of the Nexus debut / Daniel Bryan controversy, when Bryan decided to “go rogue” and do this to him?
Either way, it looks now like everything has certainly worked out for Bryan, and the same could be said for Roberts as both guys definitely have long WWE careers ahead of them.
