7 Times Wrestlers Got Chewed Out LIVE ON-AIR
4. Renee Paquette
...Or "Renee Young", as she was then called. Not for much longer, though - after eight years, she had done everything she'd wanted to do there, and no longer wanted to hear the sound of a marble-mouthed lunatic screaming at her and her friends for reasons that couldn't remotely be justified.
Speaking to Ariel Helwani in 2022, she revealed that she'd actually asked for her release some time in 2017 and wasn't granted it, noting that it was before she'd gone on to do commentary and other things that added to her already-immense skillset. Her 2020 exit was different; she was able to see out the remainder of her contract and leave of her own volition, partly because she knew for sure she'd now done everything she wanted to, but also because of nights like one she had in 2019 on the other end of a verbal hammering from Vince McMahon.
As it turned out, hosting a pre-show panel was no different to commentary from a production standpoint, and it was a the familiar story of the former chairman taking a minor verbal misstep and turning it into an inciting incident. The crime? Using a Tyson Fury nickname. As she put it
"Tyson Fury was on the show. It was me, Samoa Joe, Booker T, and Beth Phoenix. I was throwing to a package, ‘Blah, blah, blah, something, something, ‘The Gypsy King’ Tyson Fury, throw to package.’ And he’s [Vince McMahon] in my ear, he goes, ‘You f*cking ruined it!’ Screaming at me, telling me that I ruined this segment because I did not refer to Tyson Fury as the Lineal Champion. That I referred to him as ‘The Gypsy King’ Tyson Fury through the package".
Without realising, Paquette was about to make her situation worse, thanks to McMahon's desire to have his supposed editorial brilliance acknowledged. She continued;
"So, he’s screaming at me...I’m looking down at my notes...he thinks I’m ignoring him. So, he yells at me again, ‘Do you hear me? Acknowledge that you hear me!’ And he wanted me to look into the camera and be like, ‘Yes sir. I hear you, I understand you, I apologize.’...I don’t even wanna say mistake because it’s not a mistake, I just didn’t call him the Lineal Champion. We had to come back and do an on-camera after that, and I literally wanted to pull off my headset and get in my car and drive home. At that point, I’d just had it.”
Proof the last straw doesn't always have to be the most dramatic one, she was able to see out the year or so she had left before finally calling it quits with WWE on the SummerSlam 2020 Kickoff.