Former WWE announcer and broadcast team member Sean Mooney recently appeared as a guest on the Our Vintage Point – Retro Wrestling Podcast for an in-depth interview. Below are some of the highlights.

On how he received his job with WWE: “I knew nothing about wrestling. I didn’t grow up with it, following it, or anything like that. I knew who Hulk Hogan was. A guy that I worked with happened to get a job up in Stamford and Vince [McMahon] saw the show. I got a phone call saying ‘Vince wants to meet you. They put me through this stupid audition. They give you a broom and have you do something with it. It’s just really ridiculous.”

On his first impressions working for WWE: “I remember Hulk came in, the fame had really started to set in with him. I remember the only thing he said to me was, ‘hey did you bring a bag?’ Yeah. ‘Don’t unpack’. That was it.

“They drove me up there and I remember walking into the backstage area. I remember it being Mr. Fuji and Ax & Smash [Demolition] in full costume playing cribbage. I said, ‘I have joined the circus.'”

On The Event Center: “Gene had started doing this and he wanted no part of it. We customized at one point probably 90+ markets a WEEK. You couldn’t put that into a teleprompter – it was just way too much material. I’d have to ad-lib these. It was a tremendous learning tool for me. It was brutal. Let’s say you get 20 markets in and then Howard [Finkel] would call me, ‘Hey uh, Berzeker hurt something, he’s gonna miss 12 cards’, and I’d already done 10 cities and would have to go back and re-do them all.

“I look back at this stuff and am like, ‘how in the world would they EVER put me on TV?’ Honest to God, if you look at early stuff, I liken in to the Loud Mouth Frog, because Howard kept telling me ‘you’ve gotta be bigger!’ And finally I said, ‘This is stupid, this is ridiculous. I’m going to do it my way. I can’t keep screaming like this.’ I don’t know why they ever put me on. I was bad.”

On doing play-by-play: “It was tough. Thank God for Lord Alfred Hayes. If it wasn’t for Alfred, there’s no way I would’ve been able to do it. But really it just came down to – they didn’t have anybody else. I certainly had no business doing it. I never considered myself a play-by-play guy.”

Check out the complete Sean Mooney interview at Soundcloud.com.