Earlier this year, Adnan Virk was the play-by-play announcer for Monday Night RAW. While he was only in that role for slightly over a month, he was happy that he was able to have the experience.
On the latest episode of The Couch Potato Diary podcast with Peter Klein, Virk talked about what it was like to work for Vince McMahon and at WWE for the first time publicly. He enjoyed watching wrestling growing up, but had not watched much at all as an adult, and that was a problem.
“I think the biggest challenge for me was that it’s hard to be really well-versed in a sport when you are trying to catch a freight train that is going 100 mph,” Adnan Virk said. “I’m this guy running alongside the train trying to catch up. It’s hard to make up for that gap in time.”
Preparing to call professional wrestling doesn’t require the deep dive into a team or rivalry’s history that calling other sports does. Virk says that doesn’t mean that the job is easy.
“You are only looking at when I was broadcasting at RAW what happened the previous week or two weeks. That’s it. In that instance, you don’t need to know the history of wrestling, but as a play-by-play guy, you got to know the moves, the mechanics, the nomenclature. In all honesty and all candor, I kind of struggled to adapt to that and ultimately I wasn’t good enough for that position. Everyone there was awesome.”
Another aspect for the job that Adnan Virk did not like was the travel and being away from his family. It was something he felt he could not do every week over a long period of time since he would go from WWE to MLB Network immediately.
“I knew that I would not be able to do it for 52 weeks a year for 2 years. It was a really cool opportunity. They offered it to me, I did my best, I am grateful for the experience…I just wished I did a better job. Ultimately, I don’t have any regrets. I just didn’t have the facility to be a great wrestling play-by-play guy…It wasn’t as negative as some might think it was.”
