Hours before any wrestling began, Michael Cole sat at the announcers’ table next to the ring. The stands in the Fairborn, Ohio, Nutter Center were empty. In the ring, wrestlers in street clothes worked through slow-motion rehearsals of their matches for that night.
Soon, wrestlers began to find their way to the play-by-play announcer that one of them respectfully called “Mr. Cole.” They wanted to talk to Cole about their characters. About their moves. One wrestler warned he would be hurled into the announcers’ table that night on Raw. Cole and his color analyst, Pat McAfee, would need to act like chefs recoiling from a grease fire.
Two bruisers named Shayna Baszler and Zoey Stark approached Cole as a tag team. Cole’s brain was filled with ideas about them. Cole knew Shayna and Zoey—now under the tutelage of the scheming Sonya Deville—would win that night. Cole had a note—from Paul Levesque, the WWE executive who wrestled as Triple H—that Shayna and Zoey would be seen as more evil if Cole described them as dangerous rather than good.
“We have to get Shayna and Zoey over,” said Cole. For wrestlers, “getting over” means earning the love or hatred of the crowd. Helping wrestlers get over is Cole’s most important job.
Michael Cole is the Joe Buck of professional wrestling, the biggest play-by-play announcer in a parallel TV universe. Cole has worked in wrestling since 1997. In January, when Raw moves from cable to Netflix as part of a 10-year, $5 billion deal, Cole will be the show’s play-by-play announcer.
Cole trained as a broadcaster at Syracuse alongside Mike Tirico and Ian Eagle. His work has certain similarities to theirs. But Cole prefers to think of himself as an actor. His role is that of the play-by-play announcer. “I’ve been playing a character every week for 27 years,” he said.
This summer, I spent a few nights in Cole’s world of sold-out arenas learning about his job. I came away thinking that he has a closer relationship with the athletes in his line of work than just about any other announcer has with the athletes in their sport. And though wrestling blends the pretend and the real, Cole’s work demands an emotional honesty that his network counterparts will never know.
Cole’s career arc could have been fashioned in Vince McMahon’s office—and was, for a time. Starting in 1997, Cole was a young announcer in a company dominated by Jim Ross, the voice of WWE’s second golden age. Shades of Buck and Pat Summerall! After McMahon gave Cole the top job, a lot of fans despised Cole. “I was one of the most hated men in sports entertainment,” he said.
Over the past few years, wrestling fans have begun to like Cole. They’ve come to think of him not as an announcer whose rise marked the end of their extended childhoods, but as one whose play-by-play can extend their childhoods forever.
After helping wrestlers like Shayna and Zoey win over the fans, Cole finally managed the tricky task himself. He may have started out as an actor playing an announcer, the authority figure of a pretend world, but he has become a trusted man of television. One night, before calling matches on Raw, McAfee told me, “Michael Cole is over.”
Wrestlers seek out Cole before Raw because he’s more than just the soundtrack to their matches. Cole is one of their most important creative partners. “Generally, announcers are not going to draw you a f*cking dime,” said Michael Hayes, a longtime WWE match producer. “But they can help enhance the people that can draw us money.”
Cole’s job sits at a crucial commercial juncture in the wrestling business. Patrick Mahomes hardly needs Jim Nantz to vouch for him. Because wrestlers compete in a fixed sport, they want Cole to convince the audience of their goodness or badness or inspired in-betweenness. If fans lose interest, the wrestlers’ careers will stagnate, and WWE will sell fewer tickets.
“Ninety-five percent of the people that have ever stepped foot in that ring,” said Cole, “haven’t gotten over without a commentator explaining their story to the fans.”
Cole is a wrestler’s broadcast tag team partner. “If their story isn’t completely evident in the physical,” said Levesque, “he can reinforce it in the verbal.” Cody Rhodes, who is currently WWE’s undisputed champion, told me: “Nobody can put you over like somebody else.”
Cole’s first job in wrestling was as a backstage interviewer. At 5-foot-9, Cole had the frame to make most wrestlers look hulking by comparison. When that failed—and the camera was shooting Cole from the waist up—he took off his shoes or did the splits to look smaller.
In 1997, WWE sent Cole into the ring to try to interview Levesque and Shawn Michaels, who were forming a group of merry pranksters called D-Generation X. When DX was ascendant, not every moment of a wrestling show was scripted. “He had no idea of all the stuff we were going to be doing to him,” Michaels told me. Levesque said: “Sometimes, we didn’t know.” One night, they gave Cole a wedgie.
Week after week, Cole showed up for his wedgie, literal or metaphorical. He was helping DX get over. He didn’t complain, at least outwardly, even when Michaels treated him poorly backstage. It wasn’t until years later, during a late-night drive between towns, that Cole told Michaels, “You were the biggest asshole on the planet.” Michaels apologized to him.
Cole has methods of talent enhancement that have been in use since Gorilla Monsoon donned a purple tuxedo. He makes sure the audience knows a wrestler’s full, trademarked name. The fireplug who has lately been chasing the Intercontinental title is neither “Bron” nor “Breakker.” He is “Bron Breakker.” Cole can give a wrestler a catchy nickname. He calls Bron Breakker “the unpredictable badass.”
In recent years, Cole started using more statistics. “Bron Breakker runs the ropes at 23 miles per hour.” Cole cites wrestlers’ real-life backstories. Breakker is the son of the ’80s and ’90s wrestling legend Rick Steiner.
Michaels told me: “As our business got more sophisticated, and there began to be more knowledge about behind-the-scenes aspects, Michael was able to blend those two worlds while not pulling back the curtain further than it needed to be pulled.”
WWE is a sprawling content universe, like the MCU. Cole is its narrator. With just about every wrestling hold he calls on Raw, he reminds you why the hold was applied in the first place. From June: “Wait a minute, from behind! Ludwig Kaiser! And Pat, notice how he went for the injured knee of Sheamus, with a chop block.”
An episode of Raw is a thicket of matches and backstage encounters and arena walk-ins. Cole’s job is to partially divulge several of these stories at once. “There have only been four people that have been in this chair for an extended amount of time,” said Cole. “Gorilla Monsoon, Vince McMahon, Jim Ross, and Michael Cole.”
Cole knows how matches will end. He knows the major moves or “spots.” But the last thing he wants to be is Tony Romo. “You have to be a step behind instead of a step ahead,” said John “Bradshaw” Layfield, a former wrestler who has called matches with Cole.
Say Cole spotted the Undertaker in the front row watching a match. Cole doesn’t want to say, “I bet the Undertaker is going to climb in the ring and clock somebody.”
“You want to be dumb,” said Layfield. “You want to say, ‘I wonder what the Undertaker is doing here.’ Or, ‘Who is that?’” Cole will maintain that state of ignorance until the moment the Undertaker slides between the ropes and clocks one of the combatants. Then, the audience will discover the latest twist in the story at the same time Cole does. “As an actor, I have to be as surprised as the fans are,” he said. Cole watches his monitor, rather than the ring, so he won’t tell viewers at home anything they haven’t seen for themselves.
Sometimes, Cole’s job hinges on a single word. In June, before a Raw episode in Corpus Christi, Texas, I went to the Gorilla Position—WWE’s backstage broadcast control center, named after Monsoon. There, I met Paul Heyman, a big, bald man who talks off camera in the same long and seductive paragraphs he uses as a wrestling manager.
In 2002, Heyman was the head writer of WWE’s show SmackDown, which taped on Tuesday nights. On Wednesday nights, at around 6 p.m., Heyman brought Cole and his color analyst at the time, a former wrestler named Taz, into a studio in Stamford, Connecticut. Their ostensible task was to rerecord any lines they’d bobbled before the show aired on TV the next night. Heyman wanted to edit the entire show.
Winding the tape back and forth, Heyman would seize on every stray word that came out of Cole’s mouth. Once, Cole called the wrestler Chris Jericho a “buzzard.” Heyman explained why “vulture” was more appropriate. “I’m going, What the hell is the difference?” said Cole. “They’re the same damn bird.”
“It was such a horror for Michael Cole,” said Heyman. “He probably remembers it as being two or three years. It wasn’t. It was only a few months. But those were the longest months of Michael Cole’s career.” Sometimes, Cole didn’t leave the studio until 6 a.m.
Heyman was a stickler about adjectives. Say Cole called an evil wrestler—a heel—“sad*stic.” Heyman told Cole he should never use that word to describe any other wrestler. If Cole did, he’d make WWE seem like it was full of indistinguishable sad*sts. The bad guys wouldn’t get over because they wouldn’t seem unique. If Cole called just one wrestler sad*stic, however, that adjective could produce a Pavlovian response in the audience’s mind.
Today, Cole prepares for Raw like he’s studying for the SAT. “I use the thesaurus a lot,” he said. Before the show at the Nutter Center this past July, he took a blue pen and wrote out a list of words he hoped described the wrestlers precisely. The words included: dynamic, compact, lightning-quick, no-nonsense, uncanny, unorthodox, brutal, resolute, and valiant.
“When I started with the company, I was in a no-win situation,” said Cole. “I was brought in to be the heir apparent of probably the greatest wrestling announcer of all time, Jim Ross.”
Ross was over with wrestling fans. Ask any ’90s kids who watched “Stone Cold” Steve Austin burst through the curtain while Ross yelled “the Texas rattlesnake!” As Ross told me recently, “They loved good ol’ J.R., for whatever crazy reason.” Ross and fans had a bond that seemed to come through the TV.
Ross, who is 15 years older than Cole, came up in wrestling in his native Oklahoma. He possessed a civic arena vocabulary that included expressions like “slobberknocker” and “good God almighty!” It was like the very best local college football announcer had become the voice of the national championship.
Cole was Ross’s opposite in almost every way. Growing up in Amenia, New York, Cole was a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. Cole has seen the Boss play 111 times, starting when he was 13 years old, and has the words “She’s the One” tattooed on his arm. After watching Hulk Hogan as a kid, Cole became a classic “lapsed” wrestling fan.
Cole called basketball and football as a student announcer at Syracuse. “He was among those that I really looked up to,” said Ian Eagle, who was two years behind him. “His descriptions were excellent in play-by-play. His voice quality was already at a professional level.” When Cole graduated in 1988, he couldn’t find a sportscasting job he wanted. So he went into news radio, taking jobs in Houston and New York.
In radio, Cole was a spot news reporter known as a “fireman” for his willingness to sprint out of the newsroom to cover a big story. In 1993, when David Koresh and the Branch Davidians got into a standoff with federal agents in Texas, Cole drove to the site and spent the entirety of the 51-day siege there. He embedded with Bill Clinton’s campaign and covered war in the Balkans.
Cole brought that newsman’s delivery to his new profession. Heyman told me: “He can call something that is ridiculous with such”—he rubbed his lips as he searched for the right word—“authenticity.” Cody Rhodes said Cole reminded him of Anderson Cooper.
In 1997, Cole applied for a job with WWE to get TV experience. He hoped his next stop would be at a network like CNN. For his tryout, Hayes gave Cole a baseball bat and told him to look into a camera and sell it. If Cole could help a bat get over, wrestlers would be easy.
Cole’s real name is Sean Michael Coulthard. On his first day of WWE employment, an executive told him to change it. Shawn Michaels’s star was burning so brightly that there could be only one Shawn—or Sean—in the company. Cole took his middle name and then cut his last name in half. Today, everybody in WWE calls him Michael Cole.
Cole joined WWE just as it was about to enter the Attitude Era, a period in which the company used blood and sexual innuendo and an inspired creative frenzy to fend off a challenge from Ted Turner’s WCW. WWE was still filled with veterans of wrestling’s territorial days who were reluctant to trust an outsider like Cole.
“We had a show in Milwaukee,” said Hayes. “So we went to the ball game, had some drinks afterward, and I think I may have accidentally urinated on him.” Hayes added fondly: “He was initiated after that.”
In 1998, Ross suffered an episode of Bell’s palsy, which weakened the muscles in one side of his face and caused it to sag. Cole “got shoved in my chair to take over while I was healing,” said Ross. Cole called Mick Foley’s title win on Raw a few months later.
“Jim and I have had a very, very strange relationship,” said Cole. He doesn’t remember them being friends, exactly. It would have been almost impossible for them to be friends. For though Cole calls Ross the best wrestling announcer ever, Cole was cast, like many young sports announcers before him, as the man who would one day get the top job.
In those years, Ross had one supreme advantage over Cole. Ross was a wrestling lifer. He knew Steve Austin as a guy named Steve Anderson, who’d bounced around the business into his 30s before he got the chance to rule the world. “The Texas rattlesnake!” carried Ross’s very real feelings about Austin’s professional frustration and elation.
That emotional core didn’t just help Ross get Austin over. Ross got over with the fans, too. Wrestling fans don’t trust announcers unless they can sense they care about the wrestlers as much as they do.
“I tried for years to do what he did,” Cole said of Ross. “But I just didn’t have it in me yet. I couldn’t feel it.”
Cole could act happy or outraged, as need be. But without knowing the wrestlers intimately, he wasn’t invested like the fans were.
“Our audience can feel that,” said Cole. “They know. They may not be able to articulate why they don’t like you as an announcer, but they can feel it.”
Vince McMahon, however, liked Cole’s sound. On June 23, 2008, WWE had a draft in which McMahon and the creative team assigned wrestlers to one of two shows: Raw (then the “A” show in the pecking order) or SmackDown (the “B” show). Without telling either man in advance, McMahon sent Cole to Raw and Ross to SmackDown.
Cole and Ross found out about their new assignments on the air. They took off their headsets and switched desks. They switched color partners; Cole was now paired with Jerry “The King” Lawler. “I was angry at how it was handled,” said Ross. “I wasn’t angry that it happened.” Cole was elated. “I was playing with house money,” he said. That night, the wrestlers made him buy drinks at the hotel bar because he had been promoted.
Every night during Raw, Cole had a voice in his headset. Until McMahon left WWE, he was the company’s chairman, its final arbiter on creative matters, and, for years, its play-by-play man.
Being the biggest wrestling announcer in the world meant letting McMahon guide your career in a way no network sports chief had ever attempted. In 2010, Cole walked to the front of the room during a WWE classroom session on the art of speaking into a mic—that is, cutting promos. Cole let it rip with a wrestler named R-Truth. “Vince looked at me like, My God, where did that come from?” said Cole.
Cole was already getting booed in arenas by hard-core fans. “People didn’t like him from the beginning because they thought he was taking my job,” said Ross. The year Cole got the Raw job, WWE, worried its ’90s excesses would limit the size of its fan base, moved from the Attitude Era to the so-called PG Era. “As much as J.R. was seen as the voice of the Attitude Era, they saw Michael Cole as the voice of this new era, but in a really bad way,” said Levesque. “They didn’t like it.”
McMahon turned this awkward act of succession into content. On TV, Cole would play an announcer. He would also play a jerk who took over for J.R.
Leading an on-screen double life turned out to be a lot of work. Cole would read sponsorship copy in his normal, non-villainous voice one minute, then try to piss off the audience the next. The evil Cole made fun of Ross’s weight. In 2011, he donned a singlet to wrestle Lawler in what Cole calls the “worst match in the history of WrestleMania.” It was Cole’s idea to wear Syracuse colors.
Occasionally, Evil Cole got the worst of it, too. During one match, he found himself in the ring in his boxers. He was forced to kiss Lawler’s bare feet. As part of another scripted encounter, Ross took a swing and accidentally chipped Cole’s tooth. Ross had to get a tetanus shot. Buck and Summerall never suffered for their art like this.
Cole calls his bad-guy period, which lasted for the better part of two years, an “awful experiment.” It didn’t help him with the fans, who saw a fictional, detestable version of the announcer they thought they knew. Cole let his ring persona absorb most of the awkwardness. “He’s able to separate Sean Coulthard from Michael Cole,” said Bruce Prichard, a longtime WWE executive. “That’s an important thing. It’s very tough for a lot of people.”
Over dinner at Hooters in Ohio, I asked Cole what it felt like to get booed on purpose. Cole said it was “awesome.” He had gotten over, in a sense. Cole’s days as a bad guy ended on September 10, 2012, when Lawler went into real cardiac arrest at the announcers’ table on Raw. “Michael, I’m sorry,” Lawler told him later. “I just ruined your gimmick.”
When McMahon wasn’t sending Cole to the ring to do evil deeds, he was speaking into Cole’s headset as he called matches. McMahon had every character and their in-ring psychology in his head. He’d tell announcers exactly how they should describe it on-air—immediately. “I’ve been cursed out on the headset many times,” said Ross.
He continued: “You say, ‘Well, that’s disconcerting.’ Of course it is. That’s the idea. The old man tries to rattle you, and he wants to see if you’re going to hold up.”
“I’ll be honest with you, I would tune the announcers out,” said Hayes. “Because they were telling Vince’s story. And they should—he’s the boss. But, sometimes, I don’t think they were telling the story that the people wanted to hear.”
Cole is like a lot of WWE employees in the post-McMahon era. He remains grateful to his former boss for a quarter century of employment, during which time Cole’s wife, Yolanda, had a kidney transplant. It was McMahon’s idea, when Cole wasn’t playing a heel, that he call matches right down the middle, like a sports announcer. Cole thought McMahon’s bark was a sign that McMahon knew Cole could handle it. “Vince could feed me a couple of words,” said Cole, “and I would be able to expand on that and make it paragraphs.”
Cole said the vast majority of McMahon’s dictates were what he called “constructive criticism.” McMahon’s explosions tended to come when a match or promo didn’t go the way he wanted it to. In the heat of the moment, the announcers had to right the ship.
“I’m not going to lie,” said Cole. “There have been times where he has said things to me that were inappropriate. I would go back to Gorilla after the show and get in his face and tell him, ‘That was bullsh*t.’ He respected that I did that.”
“Over the next few years,” Cole continued, “people still didn’t accept me because they looked at me as being a puppet for Vince. And I think some of that probably was true.
“Listen, I’m not a rebel. I’m here to make money and take care of my family and provide myself a good living. And when your boss asks you to do something, you do it.” He added: “I still think, at that time, I was a hell of a good announcer.”
In January, Janel Grant, a former WWE employee, filed a civil lawsuit against McMahon, saying he emotionally abused, sexually assaulted, and sex trafficked her. (McMahon has denied these accounts.) Two years earlier, McMahon temporarily stepped away from WWE after The Wall Street Journal reported he paid $12 million in hush payments to four women. In between those events, Levesque, who is McMahon’s son-in-law, took control of the creative side of WWE.
Levesque’s voice is now in Cole’s headset. “I let him do his job,” said Levesque. During two episodes of Raw, I wore an IFB earpiece so I could listen to what Levesque and Prichard, from their perch in the Gorilla Position, were telling Cole. In the course of six hours of TV, they gave him one note, reminding him to mention a feature of a wrestler’s costume. “Ever since Paul took over, he’s allowed me to have this freedom,” said Cole.
Levesque said that, in past years, he looked at the feed from the camera mounted on Cole’s table and saw Cole delivering letter-perfect play-by-play while leaning back in his chair.
“Watch him do what he does now,” said Levesque. “And how much fun he has. He’s on the front edge of his seat the whole time. He’s jumping up. He’s f*cking saying, ‘Oh my God!’” WWE started publishing desk-cam videos of Cole emoting like Kevin Harlan.
Hayes said: “If you go online, which I’ve done a lot, the commentary has gone from him essentially being Vince’s puppet to now speaking his mind and telling stories and making it fun. I think the audience recognized that. They recognized, in their opinion, that, Hey, maybe it wasn’t Michael Cole so much all the time. Maybe he was being held down.”
Minutes before Raw began at the Nutter Center, ring announcer Samantha Irvin introduced Cole as the “voice of the WWE.” It was a title Cole first gave himself during his heel days. As Cole walked down the aisle toward his table, the crowd cheered.
Cole knows wrestling fans have turned around on him. “I’ve heard so many people over the past couple of years [say] that they enjoy my commentary so much more now,” he said. Ross, who now calls matches for rival company All Elite Wrestling, told me: “He does his job today better than I did my job then.”
There are a couple of interesting reasons Cole got over. His heel days faded away. The PG Era now seems less like the end of a magical creative period than the rest stop on the way to another.
In 2021, Pat McAfee became Cole’s partner. McAfee was 10 years old when Cole joined WWE. “There’s never been a time of me being a fan of the product where he wasn’t involved in it,” McAfee told me. Cole has called play-by-play for 23 WrestleManias. A generation of fans knows him as the voice of the company.
On his ESPN show, McAfee calls Cole the greatest of all time. He gave Cole pep talks: The guy McAfee hung out with backstage should be the guy America saw on TV. In July, during a Raw commercial break, McAfee grabbed a microphone, told the fans it was Cole’s birthday, and led them in a touching rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Cole’s birthday was several months away.
Sports announcers often reach a point in their careers when they stop saying what they think announcers are supposed to say and start trying to channel their real selves. For Cole, this was a doubly impressive feat, since he is working under a pseudonym.
“The first 24 years, Michael Cole was out here,” he said. “I was playing a broadcaster. The last three years, Sean Coulthard, … that’s who you’re seeing.
“That personality I’m bringing out now is who I really am,” he said. “I’m bombastic. I’m sarcastic. I’m a prick. But I’m also a hell of a good broadcaster.” During commercials on Raw, Cole and McAfee taunt heels like Dominik Mysterio.
Cole was once seen as WWE’s unworthy heir, but fans have now watched the company try again and again to replicate him. WWE used several different secondary play-by-play announcers before announcing the hire of ESPN’s Joe Tessitore last month. This spring, Cole signed a new contract that will keep him as the voice of WWE for the foreseeable future.
The most important thing that happened between Cole and the fans was something they could perhaps only sense. In 2004, Cole called Eddie Guerrero’s title match against Brock Lesnar. He was still enough of a newbie that the creative department didn’t tell him Guerrero would win.
After the match, Cole’s voice was filled with love for a man he’d grown close to. “Everything that Eddie Guerrero has been through in his career! Everything Eddie’s been through in his life!” Cole said: “After that call, I was like, ‘Yeah, I get it now.’”
Cole has become a wrestling lifer. In 27 years in WWE, he has missed only three shows he was scheduled for, one of which was because of Yolanda’s kidney transplant. A generation of wrestlers—John Cena, Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes—became coworkers, traveling companions, and ringside visitors. Cole’s hyperbole now contains a core of emotional sincerity, unlike any “legit” announcer’s. By doing a better job of helping the wrestlers get over, Cole got over, too.
“Every wrestler who wants to climb the card wants to find their pairing on the headset,” Rhodes told me. Rhodes’s father, Dusty, had the late Gordon Solie. Stone Cold had J.R. “Michael Cole has been my guy,” said Rhodes.
Cole and Rhodes are creative partners. In 2022, Rhodes returned to WWE after quitting six years earlier due to creative frustration. Cole and Rhodes collaborated on Rhodes’s on-screen mantra: that he would “finish the story”—that is, win the title that eluded his father. Cole and Rhodes talked about what Rhodes would do in the ring and what story he would tell and how Cole would call his matches.
In April, after the referee raised Rhodes’s hand at WrestleMania, Cole told viewers, “Dammit, I love professional wrestling!” Rhodes hopped out of the ring and gave Cole a hug. “We went all the way together,” Rhodes told him. Then Cole—or Coulthard—began to cry.
Cole told this story as he watched wrestlers rehearse in the ring. “Now I can feel it,” he said. “I can also fake it sometimes, but now I can feel it.”
