Mike Rome Shares Lengthy Journey To Becoming WWE SmackDown Announcer

WWE SmackDown announcer Mike Rome has had a long journey to the promotion he now calls home.

Rome has been with WWE for seven years now and began with 2016’s Cruiserweight Classic and NXT, before moving to the main roster in 2019.

On the “Out of Character” podcast, Rome spoke about getting a foot in the door with WWE. He said,

“Greg Hamilton, who used to be the ring announcer for ‘SmackDown’ and ‘NXT’ before that, [he] and I used to work at [the theme park version of] ‘American Idol’ together.”

Rome added that Hamilton encouraged him to audition, and despite things looking promising at first, it seemed WWE wasn’t interested. He said,

“They were like, ‘We love you! It’s great! You’re in! It’s golden!’ And then I didn’t hear anything for months.”

It was after five months that Hamilton eventually got a call from WWE, a week after he was dropped from the Star Wars show at Disney World he was supposed to emcee. He said,

“Sure enough, a week later, I got the phone call. ‘Hey, just so you know, this is what’s going on. We’ve got this, we’re gonna go international, we’ve got WrestleMania, but let’s double back right after WrestleMania.’ And I was like [makes finger gun gesture] ‘PEW PEW!’”

Rome was moved to SmackDown as part of the recent WWE Draft while Samantha Irvin is now announcing on RAW.

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