WWE NXT announcer Mauro Ranallo recently appeared on Ariel Helwani’s “MMA Hour” and during the interview, Ranallo revealed the true reason he left WWE back when he was a Smackdown announcer.
“I was on the road every week. You add MMA and boxing and kickboxing to it. The road travel destroyed me. So, rumors and all this other stuff, what happened, honestly — and Ariel, you know how honest I’ve been in this thing — I had a breakdown in the Chicago O’Hare airport on my way to Pittsburgh to do SmackDown Live. And again, Frank Shamrock… God bless him … Bas Rutten, man. Guys who fought each other are my biggest supporters. But, I had to phone them and I said ‘I’m done. I cannot do this anymore. It’s going to kill me.’ And I thought I was done with the entire company.”
“As much as there’s two sides to every story, the actual truth from me was my mental health wasn’t going to allow me to maintain that schedule much longer.”