Ricardo Rodriguez Wasn't Happy To Become Alberto Del Rio's Personal Ring Announcer

Ricardo Rodriguez was a guest on John Alba's One on One podcast, where he spoke about training wrestlers.

“I’m living in Egypt. I’ve been there for a little over a year, 13 months. There’s a backstory to how it happened and it all stemmed from living in India. When I lived in India, I opened up an academy alongside The Great Khali. I think we had great success there, so much that WWE and Impact went after it. We saw the WWE/India spectacle show that they had and it’s all stemming from that. So after that, I came back to the U.S. I went to England and I went to a couple different countries. When Covid happened, it shut everything down. I know I’m not the only one that felt this way that I was without wrestling because that’s been my income for the last 12 years. When Covid happened, I was like, I don’t know what to do. After about a year of Covid, eventually I got a call from a guy in Egypt asking me if I want to go and redo what I did in India. That’s what led me to Egypt.”

On how difficult it was to transition into his announcer character in WWE.

“The hardest part wasn’t necessarily the actual part of doing it. The hardest part was accepting. That was the hardest part because I was a wrestler and I was a serious wrestler. I was brought in to be a talker in a comedic role. That was the hardest part to accept that, to say, ‘Well, this is my ticket, f**k it.’ I had these constant battles within myself. Even now I still have them because I know people know me as Ricardo. Believe me, that takes me, even now, a long time to get it whenever I get contacted by promoters. Even now, I still get, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you can be a wrestler.’ I’m like, f**k man, I trained your champion, or I wrestled your champion.”