World Wrestling Entertainment re-shuffled its deck of commentators earlier this year. Longtime voice Michael Cole jumped to Raw where Pat McAfee later followed, while Corey Graves took over play-by-play duties on Smackdown alongside Wade Barrett. The odd man out of the equation was Kevin Patrick. But in a new interview, the former commentator didn’t cast any ill will toward his former employer.
Real name Kevin Egan, the former WWE voice joined the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch this week. Egan, who also calls Major League Soccer games for ATL United, felt that things reached a point where he felt an exit was coming.
“If I’m in Boise, Idaho, on a Friday night, for example, doing Smackdown, how am I going to be in the studio in New York at 1 p.m. on a Saturday?” Egan said via F4WOnline.com. “And this was coming. I also wasn’t their long-term guy. They need someone who’s all in,” he added.
Egan continued to stress that fans “deserve more” out of the person in the chair to Deitsch.
“That chair deserves more, you know? So for me, it was time. I wanted to leave,” Egan said before he recalled a conversation with Cole “weeks before” his exit. “I said, ‘Look, if there’s a thinking here that I move on, fine. I’m good. Let’s hug it out. Let’s be on our way.’
“It’s a chapter in your life. I wasn’t overly upset about it at all,” he said. “I don’t think they were. I think it worked out for the best for the product on TV and for me. I’m all in on what I’m doing now, and I love it. But when WWE’s in Atlanta, I’ll pop down and I’ll say hello to some friends.”
Egan joined WWE in 2021, eventually working his way up the ladder to voice both Raw and Smackdown.
[F4WOnline; Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch]
About Chris Novak
Chris Novak has been talking and writing about sports ever since he can remember. Previously, Novak wrote for and managed sites in the SB Nation network for nearly a decade from 2013-2022