Bobby Cruise almost priced himself out of AEW/ROH.
Cruise is known by many fans for being one of the signature voices of Ring Of Honor, as he's been with the company in a ring announcing position for over two decades. When ROH was bought by AEW in 2022, Cruise began doing work for both companies. As of publish time, Bobby Cruise serves as the ring announcer for both ROH TV and AEW Collision.
While speaking to Aubrey Edwards and Will Washington on AEW Unrestricted, Cruise recalled a situation where a ROH wrestler asked him to be his personal ring announcer. A person came up to Cruise and told him that his price is really expensive, causing him to remember that he jacked up his rate to work the Supercard Of Honor pay-per-view in 2022, as he wasn't happy with ROH's former management.
“A former Ring Of Honor talent, I don’t know if he wants this known, who is now with AEW, had brought up the idea of me being their personal ring announcer. Kind of like the stuff I used to do with Steve Corino back in 2003 and 2004, without the language obviously. So I said yeah obviously. They ran it by a couple people and somebody came to me and said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s a great idea, but Bobby, you’re really expensive.’ I remember thinking to myself, I never really discussed any sort of financial thing. I did Supercard with the amount that was asked and I was very happy with that, very generous. So I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ When the previous owners of ROH were gonna run Supercard that year, I gave them a ridiculous price. People can say I’m Mr. ROH ring announcer, but the way things went down and the way the things had continued to go down for the first couple months of that year. I was concerned with some friends who had bought some new houses and I just wasn’t happy with the way they handled it basically, so I gave them a ridiculous price. Well, the people at AEW that I was dealing with thought that it was my price, my per night price. I said, ‘No, no, no.’ So I had to, that night in Boston, clear it up and say, okay, I’ll explain that up the chain kind of thing. I said, ‘Oh no no, that was the price for the old ownership. This is completely different.’ That was kind of funny but it was almost scary. If they wouldn’t have asked me, maybe they wouldn’t have continued to use me just thinking I had this ridiculous price in mind.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cruise talked about splitting announcing duties with Justin Roberts at All In 2018. Check out his full comments on the matter here.
If you missed anything from the October 30 edition of AEW Dynamite, catch up on the show by clicking here.
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