On a recent edition of his Hall of Fame podcast, Booker T was informed that he was voted one of the worst commentators in all of professional wrestling by Wrestling Observer, coming in second behind only Corey Graves with 183 votes.
Though Booker didn’t quite understand how the voting works, as he assumed that Dave Meltzer alone picked who won each award – he doesn’t, by the way – his response was noteworthy nonetheless, as it illuminates a clear shift in perspective that the two-time Hall of Famer brings to the announcers’ booth that others may not be as familiar with.
“You know what? I normally wouldn’t go here, but Wrestling Observer, that’s Dave Meltzer, right?” Booker T said. “Dave Meltzer has probably never heard a black commentator before ever. He probably doesn’t even know what ‘Shucky Ducky Quack Quack’ means. He probably has never had a ‘hottie biscotti.’ Not once, you know what I mean? So when I hear some old white guy like Dave Meltzer vote me the worst, he probably never hung out with a brother. I’m serious, you know he probably has no friends like me, and the thing is, it’s hard to, you know, get a feel of something that you have no feel of. I get it. I get it 100 percent why The Observer would vote me the worst because they’ve never seen anything like me before. It’s always been somebody like them, okay? And that’s the difference, I think.”
After his co-host, Brad Gilmore, noted that being on Meltzer’s worst list is practically a compliment, Booker pointed out that it’s simply a different style than some fans are used to, specifically older fans who haven’t listened to as many black commentators’ work.
“No, you know, for me, like you’re saying, like most people like that, they’ve never been around people like myself,” Booker said. “They, you know, when they hear me say ‘Cholula green is about to get hot,’ that’s foreign to them, because I’m not saying that the normal way that they have heard it for the last how many years this business has been up, how many black commentators have we had? Other than Byron Saxton, and Byron, could be considered- no, but how many, Jonathan Coachman, myself, Byron Saxton, I mean, how many other black commentators?
“So I get it when someone like that would do something, uh, say something like that about me because they have no feel of soul, you know? They don’t know what that is about.”
To Booker T’s credit, he’s established a number of signature catchphrases over a very short period of time on commentary and has slowly but surely picked up a legion of fans with each passing month… assuming he doesn’t keep ordering DoorDash in the middle of matches.
Booker T almost got a huge money deal with WCW before it folded.
Turning the attention to the past instead of the present, Booker T disclosed that before WCW closed, he was offered an incredibly large contract to presumably get a big singles push.
“I had an agent in WCW,” Booker T said via Fightful. “In the beginning, he handled all of my contracts until I went singles. I handled my biggest contract, I negotiated my biggest contract. it was well above all the money that my agent had ever negotiated for me, sometimes twice as much, maybe three times. The way I did it was, I remember being asked how much was it going to take to keep me in WCW. I go, ‘How much am I worth?’ They came back with a number well above what I was thinking of. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’ I was like, Wow, they think of me that much. I can tell it, it was $750,000. My next contract, it was $1.3 million. If the company wouldn’t have folded, my next contract was $1.3 million. It was a great time back then, Eric Bischoff was making us all rich. He said he was going to do that. He said, ‘Book, I’m going to make you rich.’ His goal was to make all wrestlers to be paid like NFL players. I give him a lot of credit for that.”
Unfortunately for Booker, he did not get that contract, but he ended up doing just fine, having a long and fruitful career in WWE before establishing his own wrestling school and returning to the company as a commentator in developmental. Even if Booker never signed a contract with NFL players numbers, his total earnings likely dwarf that of many a pro athlete considering the longevity of his career.
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Courtesy : https://clutchpoints.com/wwe-booker-t-reacts-to-finishing-second-for-wrestling-observers-worst-commentator-award