Thanks to Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia for passing along the following interview highlights with Renee Young:
Renee Young: WWE Commentary
Lilian Garcia (host):
“You said, if the chair comes open for commentary, I feel like I have earned it. I want it. I want that spot. And literally, the week later, boom, it got announced. You were the first female commentator. Amazing. Congratulations on that. You did make history but tell me about that journey.”
Renee: “A lot of times I felt like I didn’t belong there, and I wanted to be like, I belong here. I earned this spot, this should be my spot. But I kept feeling like you like hear the background chatter of like, should I be there? Why is this woman in here calling this mat? She’s never been in the ring. What’s she going to bring to the table?”
“I just think in general. Say in general terms of me just sort of feeling like, oh my God. But there was a ton of support, an immense amount of support from a lot of people, and that was really, really cool, but you tend to be like, I want to listen to what the negative people are saying because I’m feeling insecure and weird about it. So they’re probably right. Yeah, it’s hard not to feel weird out there. When I went out to do my very first Raw broadcast, when it was like my audition, my trial, I was like, I’ve got this. I was so confident. I felt so good about it. I didn’t feel like I stumbled. I was ready to own that spot. It really felt like it was like the time, the preparation, everything came together, and it was my moment to go out there and do it and I felt great about it.”
“Everyone was like, “Great job.” Vince is sending out a tweet, which never happens. I was like, oh my God, this is great. And then finding out that you have the job and then everything else starts to settle in, the nitpicking starts to happen. You start to lose focus of what your voice is supposed to be out there and you’re getting a lot of different feedback of like, Oh, we just want you to be you or we want to hear the fan’s perspective, but we also want you to just be a broadcaster. It was just a lot of different hats and I sort of lost what I was even trying to do or what my tone was supposed to be. You want to hear something different; you were trying to change the way … WWE is constantly evolving.”
Renee Young: How Renee Young & Jon Moxley got married
“As much as it was a win and we knew we just wanted to like randomly do it whenever, we did have our marriage license for six months prior, so we had thought out there like, well, we know we can’t just randomly get married. We have to like actually make it legal. So yeah, when we were in Reno one day, I was with him on a live event and we woke up and were hung over and just like, what are we doing? We walked over to the city hall and we got our marriage license then. But yeah. Anyways, it was burning all in my pocket. I’m like, “All right, let’s do this. I’m ready.”
“It’s great. Yeah, it’s great. Married life is great. I feel like that’s …”
When you’re married to the right one. Yeah. We got together when, gosh, we were like 28. We weren’t babies. We had life experiences had already achieved a lot of the success that we wanted to get. I think that sort of helped us prepare to be in a relationship as opposed to being like, I love you, but I gotta go do this other thing. We do still do that, but the core of our lives, it’s like we’re married and we’re together. The other stuff is like great extras. Where before, when I was like, so career focused, I was only focused on working. When I met him, it was so different that I was like, “Oh, I love you, let’s go live together.”
Renee: Cody Rhodes on Renee & Jon Moxley marriage
“You know what’s really funny is actually Cody Rhodes, I remember talking to him, it was when Jon and I first started dating and he was like, “Oh that’s cool. You guys are together. But it’ll be interesting to see like how you guys react when things aren’t maybe going so well for one of you.” Because things were going well for me. Things were going great for Jon when he’s in the Shield and doing X , Y and Z and WWE. That always kind of stuck in my head. I was like, oh, what does he mean by that? What does happen if something’s not going well or we have like a bit of a struggle or a bump in the road that always kind of stuck in my head. Obviously now, I mean we’ve been together six years, married for three of them.”
Renee: Jon Moxley AEW contract
“I was expecting, because at that time, I’m doing commentary, I’m sitting in production meetings and all the news breaks of him going to AEW, and I was bracing for that impact of like, what’s going to happen? And nothing changed for me. No one treated me differently.”
“It was easy for me. It sucked for me not having him on the road with me. My biggest issue was like, damn, we don’t get to travel together. You’re not in the hotel room when we finished the show. I miss having those moments, but …”
“He’s really happy. He has like a different energy to him. It’s crazy. Because I’ve only known WWE, Jon. Then once he was gone and now he’s like, oh my God, to the point that I’m like, “Can we stop talking about that?” Because he loves it. It’s his first love. He lives and breathes wrestling. He loves it. Yeah, he’s always making me watch Japanese wrestling or watching old school Terry funk stuff that I’m like, “All right, I get it. I love it.” Yeah, he’s so happy. It’s cool to see him just bopping around thinking of different ideas and things that he wants to execute. It’s really cool.”
Renee Young: Outlook on 2020 since first appearing on Chasing Glory 18 months ago
“I feel in like 2020, that’s something I’m trying to be more aware of is just owning who you are and putting it … not just having to slap a filter on a photo and come up with a quippy little caption or whatever. It’s nice to drop that guard and just be a human being and I think realizing that the platform that we have is often as we can do stuff like that and show that human side, I think makes a big difference.”
