According to a report by Prowrestling.net, former WWE ring announcer Lilian Garcia stated on “The Busted Open” radio show on Sirius satellite radio that her debut with WWE back on August 23, 1999 in Ames, Iowa was very nervous for her.
“Then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Okay, we want you to start.’ I show up at the show and at 3:30 that afternoon is when I found out I was ring announcing. They gave me Howard Finkel and Tony Chimmel. They both sat down with me. They were helping me. They were giving me the cue cards and what to say here and who had what titles. You have to understand that I knew the old wrestlers. I didn’t know this new breed of wrestlers.
They had me at ringside watching when they had Sunday Night Heat… I’m rewriting my note cards because I didn’t have time redo them and everything was happening so fast. As I’m rewriting it, Mark Yeaton, who sits next to me ringing the bell goes, ‘You know you can’t use these cue cards, right?’ I looked at him like, ‘Okay, bad joke, bad joke, seriously not now.’ He goes, ‘No, no, no, seriously, the producers, everybody, they hate cue cards and they will not allow it.
I’m like wait, ‘I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know their names, I don’t know their weights and their towns and what title they hold and what kind of match it is, I don’t know the rhythm of everything, nothing.’ Thank God for my photographic memory. I just would kind of stare at what I was supposed to say right before it and then I’d get up there and basically try to read it off my mind.
But I sounded horrible, and everybody was booing me. Well, of course, I just replaced Howard Finkel, a legend, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I sound horrible. I went home and I memorized everything. Everything started getting a little smoother. It’s live. You’re going to mess up. I was messing up even my last day.”
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