WWE has had its’ fair share of infamous stories over the years.
Here comes a few more.
During his appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, which dropped on Thursday, December 18, 2025, former WWE announcer turned boxing commentator Todd Grisham reflected on some of his most memorable and interesting stories from his run in World Wrestling Entertainment.
While on the popular pro wrestling podcast, Grisham looked back on the odd reason Vince McMahon went ‘insane’ on him, the most upset Vince ever got with him, being slapped by TNA Wrestling Hall of Famer and WWE women’s wrestling legend Mickie James and more.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts and memories. Also embedded below is a complete video archive of the discussion.
On his biggest WWE blunder: “Vince McMahon went insane on me one time because I said that John Morrison, who was a heel at the time, loved poetry. Normally, I wouldn’t say that, but there was a new WWE magazine. They just transformed it from being like a results-based boring magazine, like last week, Eddie Guerrero beat JBL by pinfall, here’s the description, to more of a Maxim-style lifestyle magazine. Get to know the superstars better. So they’re like, anytime you can incorporate stuff from the magazine, do it. It helps sell the magazine. It helps tell their story. It syncs everything up, great. So they did a whole thing on John Morrison; his finisher was called Starship Pain. So he wrote a poem called Starship Pain. So he’s in the ring and I go, ‘John Morrison, Starship Pain, he’s a big fan of poetry, and wrote a poem about the finisher Starship Pain.’ Vince goes insane in my ear. ‘Did you just say that our number one heel is an effing poet, you stupid F! What the f*ck! Shut up. Just shut up. Don’t say anything else! Jim Ross, you call the rest of this fight. I don’t wanna hear another effing word out of you.’ So literally, the match starts and I don’t say a single word for like five minutes, and then the match ends, and we gotta do a promo going to the next fight, and he goes, ‘Okay, you can talk now.’ I’m like, ‘Coming up next Shelton Benjamin goes one-on-one with The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels.’ But he was so angry at me over that.”
On what was the most upset Vince McMahon ever got with him: “Well, it started at WWE headquarters. I’m in the gym, working out. I’d only been there for like three months, just been hired, and I’m walking out of the gym, Vince is walking in, and he goes, ‘Hey, Todd, how you doing?’ I’m like, Vince knows my name. This is cool, right? So that was on a Thursday or Friday. So then Monday, I’m backstage about to do an interview with Edge and Christian, I believe. So we’re standing there waiting to do the interview, and Vince is walking by and he goes, ‘Oh, hey, there’s my boy.’ I’m like, he’s talking to me? He says, ‘I’m your boy, right?’ He starts walking a little closer, and he’s like, ‘I saw you going into the weight room the other day.’ I said, Yes, sir. He goes, ‘You were lifting those weights, weren’t you?’ I said, Yeah. He goes, ‘You put the weights on the bar, right?’ I said, Yeah. He goes, ‘But you forgot to take them off.’ I said, Oh. He goes, ‘No, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay. I did it for you, which [yells] makes me your f*cking boy!’ He’s like, this close to my face, screaming, I’ve only been there three months. Everyone’s like, backing up. I feel like I’m pissing my pants at this point, he’s turning beet red, and then he just stops and just walks away. And I look over and Edge looks at me, and he goes, ‘That’s pretty cool. Vince is your boy. ‘When I talk about micromanaging John Gaburick, they call him Big, he was one of the producers backstage. He would later tell me that he was in the gym. It wasn’t me, by the way, that left the weights on, there was someone else, but he just thought it was me. And he said that Vince thought about how to how to approach me about that all weekend. [Vince said] ‘I can’t call him the N word. I’m not his N word. What can I call him? I’ll call him boy, yeah, okay.’ He planned it. He looks psychotic. That’s the maddest he’s been. But to be fair, later that night, I did the show, walked backstage, and he gave me the nod, he’s on to the next subject. Almost I felt like, you know, every once in a while, the mafia boss himself has to kill somebody just to be like, Oh, he’s capable I was the guinea pig. Do not do anything to piss this man off.”
On getting slapped by Mickie James: “If you were an announcer and you got physicality, they would give you hazard pay. So I remember one time Mickie James slapped me. That was the worst thing ever. I’ll take 20 AAs before a slap, because they don’t trust you to sell the slap, because you’re not a worker. So they slap you, and she hit me right here.”
On if she slapped him for real: “As hard as she could. I get slapped, and I’m like [groans]. You got to sell for the camera for, I call it the TV novella shot, like your husband’s dead, you got to hold it for like, five seconds. So they go to commercial break, the camera is on my face, and people like, ‘Oh, you were you were selling pretty good.’ I was like, I was not selling. I felt like my face was gonna get ripped off. But, the hazard pay, so after she slapped me, they give you 500 bucks. Literally, they’d be like, and cut. Nice job, Todd. And someone walked over and goes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, here you go. Cash. So I’m like, beat the hell out of me. You want me to go in the ring and let her slap me again? But Max Brettos, who I believe was the shortest tenured employee of all time. I talk about they hire you just to see where you fit in. He was there for a cup of coffee, but they asked him, did he want to do it? And he was like, No, I don’t really want to do that. I was like, I’ll do it, okay, that’s how it went. I was like, yeah, and you’re gonna pay me 500 bucks? But people remember you more for the physicality moments than anything else.”
