Last month, ring announcer Samantha Irvin confirmed she'd left WWE. While she seemingly parted ways with the company on good terms, there was immediate speculation online that her plan must be to join fiancé Ricochet in AEW.
Irvin has since revealed that she wanted to do much more in WWE - ultimately becoming a manager, for example - but believed the company didn't have the same vision for her. Now, Irvin is thought to be focusing on her music career.
Talking on Insight With Chris Van Vliet, Ricochet shared his thoughts on his fiancée's decision to also leave WWE.
"Because she’s an artist, she’s a musician, like that’s what she naturally does. She’s just not an announcer. And it’s like, it’s like, obviously, there’s no disrespect to any of that. It’s just because that’s not what you were born to do, and that’s not what you love to do. It’s just crazy," he explained. "I think traditionally, especially in WWE, they build off of like, I don’t want to say anything that’s going to get taken out of context. But, you know, everything does. Because, you know, they build it off, like, repetitiveness."
"They want it when you find something that works, yeah? Like, if you smell what The Rock is cooking, he’s going to say it every time because then the fans are going to say it like, why would he change it up? So, even when The Rock quit, everyone was so mad at him because he just stopped doing it and to do movies."
"It’s like she found, just like The Rock found, ‘This is great. I love this. I have so much respect for this. I put my heart, my soul, into this. I gave it literally everything that I have to make WWE better because of the love that I have for it. But at the end of the day, it’s just not what I was born to do.'"
Ricochet added, "I told her, if you feel even half the way that I feel like I feel like this isn’t what you know I want to do. This isn’t what I feel like I could. Feel like I could be doing more as well. And that’s kind of why I left. And she just feels like she could be doing more."
Asked for his thoughts on why there was such a great level of backlash to Irvin's decision to walk away from WWE, he put it down to her "[breaking] the tradition of wrestling."
"You know, again, you have people who are in it for ever again. Like I said, look at Rey Mysterio and AJ Styles because they’ve been doing it for so long, and they’re still in it, you know, they’re still doing that," Ricochet continued. "So I think especially when wrestling fans find something that makes them feel good and makes what they like watching better, they just wanted forever, of course."
"I understand again. I feel like she broke tradition, wrestling tradition, in a way, by just stepping away."
Ricochet makes a lot of sense here as it does feel like a lot of the backlash came as a result of fans simply being upset that Irvin has walked away at the top of her game. Her work is phenomenal on the mic and there's no one else in WWE as good (which likely explains why the company wasted no time in bringing Lilian Garcia back).
You can listen to the full interview by following the link above.