Corey Graves on working with Byron Saxton and Jonathan Coachman

Corey Graves has found his calling in commentary. Since his unfortunate early retirement back in 2014, The Savior of Misbehavior has used his gift of gab to entertain the WWE Universe in a different way. Graves has knocked it out of the park since his transition, moving from NXT to the main roster in a year and a half.

 


 

One of the best parts of Graves’ commentary is the banter he brings to the table with his team. Whether it be Michael Cole, Byron Saxton, Tom Phillips or the Coach, Graves’ sharp tongue manages to keep the rest of the commentators on their toes.

Corey Graves was recently a guest on the Sam Roberts Wrestling Podcast where he discussed his career in FCW in NXT and working on commentary, among other things.

Below are some of the highlights of the podcast, transcribed by WrestlingInc:

If he dislikes The Coach and Byron Saxton

Usually if I am not into somebody, then I just won’t talk about them. I wouldn’t have anything to say. I have gotten to the point now where I am kind of tired at points. I still am on such a roll non-stop and I haven’t had a week off in any way shape or form in like 4 years. I love it though, that is what keeps me going, I am finally at a point now where I think to myself that I don’t have anything for this segment so I have to catch my breath, my throat hurts, which still hasn’t recovered from WrestleMania, and every once in a while I will tell Byron [Saxton] to take this segment, or Coach, help me out here.

Usually I am so take charge, it’s either Tom [Phillips] and I or [Michael] Cole and I. We have instant chemistry and we can read each other’s minds and finish each other’s thoughts, but a lot of times I tend to forget that there is a third guy there. It is nothing intentional but you get in the zone and you get excited and fired up, but every once in a while I remind myself to breathe. I get burned out sometimes.

Working with Coach instead of Booker T:

I don’t know Coach on a social level. I am cool with him and have hung out with him a handful of times socially, but I don’t know him, which is different because with Booker T, by the time we were doing Raw together, I had worked with him in the studio every single week for a year and a half and spent all day with him. We had a chemistry, where we would go to the hotel bar and just talk business and have fun so I had a rapport with him, but with Coach, he was the square peg in a round hole.

So in the first few weeks I told myself that I wasn’t going to come at him too hard because I wanted to have him get back into it. It’s not something you just pick back up overnight and say that you are doing Raw commentary. He and I are cool. My thing is that you can tell when he is live Tweeting on the air because he will literally repeat something or say something that means nothing, and then you will scroll through Twitter and then you see Coach sending a ‘Coach em Up’ Tweet, and then he’ll talk about how great the match is going to be, and I say something like, ‘thanks Coach.’ We just spent the last five minutes saying that. The longer we work together the better it is going to be.

You can check out the rest of the podcast here.

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