What do the worlds of professional hockey and professional wrestling have in common? Well, for starters, both are physical and at times, violent sports. But, for the sake of this feature, the answer we’re looking for is Jackie Redmond. The beloved Canadian Sports Broadcaster has built her career over the last decade-plus and while she is well-rounded in her sports coverage, hockey and wrestling are her two main areas of coverage.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Redmond’s work – not that any of you should be so unaware – you can catch her on The NHL on TNT, The NHL’s YouTube channel, and WWE’s Monday Night RAW.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive into her life, how she got involved in sports and so much more.
As Redmond tells it, she grew up playing a lot of sports and watching/listening to games on television/radio.
“When I was growing up, I was always super into sports,” Redmond said. “I was a pretty big tomboy. I played everything: hockey; baseball; basketball. I tried soccer and hated it. I played a lot of sports growing up and I was a diehard hockey fan for as long as I can remember. My dad and I actually used to listen to sports talk radio after Toronto Maple Leafs games; those call-in shows.”
Now, just because she was a “tomboy,” that doesn’t mean she was necessarily earmarked to become a sports broadcaster.
“For me, it really started becoming a career aspiration in High School, “Redmond began. “When they started asking, ‘What do you wanna do? What are you gonna take in college? What path are you going to choose?’ At that time, I was such a huge hockey fan and I also was someone who never really shut up in class.”
“One of my teachers made a deal with me,” Redmond continued. “If I didn’t talk during their lesson, then, at the end of the class, I could spend five minutes talking to the class about what happened in The Leafs game or what I wanted to happen in the next one. So, from there, I just started feeling like maybe it was something I could pursue as a career, but I never knew I was gonna be a reporter on-air. I went to school for journalism, with the goal of working in hockey specifically, but really in any capacity. I would’ve done PR. I would’ve done marketing. I just wanted to be around it.”
“I give my dad a lot of the credit too,” Redmond explained. “You don’t realize this in real-time, but, looking back, the conversations we had when I was a kid, we would listen to the radio and people would call in and be like, ‘Darcy Tucker shouldn’t be on the top line with Mats Sundin’ or whatever they would say. My dad would turn to me and start having that conversation with me, asking me what I thought as I got older and understood the game a little bit more through playing and watching it so much. Subconsciously, I don’t think he was aware that he was doing this, but, in a lot of ways, he was the first person who made me feel like my voice was relevant in the space.
“So, when I got to High School and I would be talking about hockey or baseball with my friends and peers, I would always get this reaction of, ‘How do you know so much about The Leafs? Or how do you know so much about The Blue Jays?’ It was because of my fandom. But it was my father who really gave me and instilled that confidence in me that I could have an opinion on this stuff. I could be part of that conversation. I could have a seat at that table. So, looking back on that, I often wonder, if we didn’t have those moments, like sitting on the deck listening to Blue Jays’ games or sitting in the living room after a Leafs game and talking about it, would I have had that built-in fearlessness? I don’t know if I would. So I credit him with a lot of that.”
Redmond’s “fearlessness” and confidence are evident to anyone who watches her NHL assignments. Her love for The Maple Leafs is also evident, but she doesn’t let that prevent her from being professional and providing unbiased opinions about all things related to The NHL. Although, as she admits, it wasn’t easy at the start of her career.
“It was a lot harder when I was first starting out; for a couple of reasons,” Redmond said. “When I was just starting out, I had no cache in the broadcast world. Also, when I started out in 2011, it was a different world for sports media. We didn’t have the Paul Bissonnette’s of the world, the Pat McAfee’s of the world. Those personalities didn’t quite exist yet. We were kind of on the cusp of having more sports personalities as opposed to sports journalists. I guess the closest comparison would probably be Don Cherry. But even Don Cherry was different from what we see today.
“When I first started, Twitter was just getting big. I would tweet about Leafs games and stuff and I had a few people reach out to me early on saying, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be doing this. You need to be objective if you wanna be taken seriously.’ So, when I first started, I never really liked it, only because I was never a reporter for a specific team, in which case I can understand you don’t wanna be biased. You wanna be objective because you’re actually reporting the news. I always looked at it like, ‘I’m not an insider. I’m not dedicated to one team.’ I’ve never really truly been a reporter until I joined TNT and started doing rink-side reporting for them. My thing was always, I wanna be as authentic as possible and I feel the best way to do that is to always be honest with your audience. I always have been and I got some slaps on the wrist early in my career for being open about the fact that I was a Leafs fan.”
“But now, we live in a bit of a different world where I don’t get quite as much blowback about it,” Redmond continued. “I used to do the equivalent to SportsCenter in Canada, a show called Sportsnet Central, which was our highlight show. I used to be an anchor on that show and I was very open on that show — on television — about not being a soccer girl, about not really knowing as much about soccer as I did other sports. I worked with Brendan Dunlop at the time, who is very much a soccer expert and I used to say to him all the time (that I didn’t really know much about soccer). People would say, ‘Don’t you worry that it’s gonna take away your credibility if you openly admit that you are not as knowledgeable about soccer?’
“I would always say, ‘I think it does the opposite.’ I think it reinforces to the audience that they can trust me to be open and honest with them. I am open about the fact that I don’t know a whole lot about soccer. I’ll do the highlights and this and that, but I’m not gonna go on television and fake it. I think that’s way more dishonest and inauthentic and it’s not real. So, I’ve always kind of approached my career that way by being open about who I am, what my passions are, and what I know.
“Being open about what you know is as important as being open about what you don’t know and it’s okay. You don’t have to be an expert at everything. You just have to do the work, be professional, and hope you will be judged for that and not for anything else. That’s kind of how I’ve always approached that. So, I’ve always been open about my rooting interests and I don’t let it get in the way of my job. Just because I’m a Leafs fan, that doesn’t mean I can’t be objective when I need to be. And I think that I’ve learned over the years how to walk that line.”
Now that she’s learned how to “walk that line,” Redmond has become one of the best in the business. However, even the best in the business unfortunately have to sometimes deal with the uglier side of sports. Ask any sports media person and they’ll tell you that fans, especially ones on social media, can be very cruel with their comments and actions. Sadly, this is an especially prevalent problem for female reporters.
“I would like to start by saying that I don’t think some of these issues are specific to hockey,” Redmond began. “I think you see them across all sports. I think that we’ve come a long way; I really do. Hockey has been really good to me. That being said, I think there’s still a long way to go. All you have to do is look at a female sports reporter’s mentions on Twitter if she posts an interview with an athlete. G-d forbid someone tells a joke and she laughs because half of her mentions will accuse that reporter of being flirtatious, even though she’s just being human. If a male was laughing in that exact same situation, no one would say anything about it. It would go completely uncommented on. I don’t think it’s a hockey thing. I think it’s a societal thing. I think that we have seen women in more prominent roles and it’s certainly grown a lot since I started out.”
“It’s a social thing,” Redmond continued. “I don’t think it’s an industry thing. Sometimes we get caught up in criticizing The Leagues and listen, sometimes it’s due. Sometimes The Leagues have earned that criticism and deserved it. But other times I think that it’s more of a social thing as a whole rather than it is anything else. Sports reflect. Art imitates life and life imitates art. For the most part, I’ve had a pretty good journey, and some of the things that I’ve gone through as a woman in sports have really been difficult in terms of social media, but the people I’ve worked with have been pretty great.”
As she pointed out, progress has been made, but not nearly enough. The only way to continue to take steps forward in correcting this is to speak out about it and to have those uncomfortable conversations. Hopefully, in time, Redmond and others won’t have to deal with those issues.
For now though, let’s continue with her journey because things are about to get a bit wacky. In 2021, Redmond joined The WWE – in addition to her NHL gigs – as an on-camera personality. And for as much as she loved hockey growing up, she also loved professional wrestling.
“I had a major phase as a kid where I was obsessed with WWE,” Redmond explains. “I grew up during the Attitude Era with Stone Cold, Triple H, The Rock, The Hardy Boys, Trish, and Lita. That whole era of WWE was one that I definitely got reeled into with my sister. We were obsessed. We had video games. We watched Monday Night Raw every single week. That definitely was an element of my childhood. Then, the other thing that happened was, when I got my first job at a sports network, one of the first opportunities I had to be a host was a show called ‘Aftermath’ and it was a wrestling show. It was a WWE show.
“We covered RAW and SmackDown every week. It was a show where we would come on and talk about whatever happened that week. We would give what we called our wins and fails of the week and cover the shows. When that opportunity came up, it was like, okay, I probably would’ve said yes to any opportunity at that point, because I really wanted to just get my shot and get my opportunity to show that I could be a host. But it also brought me back to my childhood a little bit. I’ll never forget my boss being like, ‘Do you think you can get back into WWE?’ And I said, ‘Why not? It’s basically a soap opera for grownups. I would love to.’”
“It was one of the first opportunities that I ever had in sports,” Redmond continued. “Then, over the course of the four- or five years that I did that, I really cut my teeth on that show. It’s part of the reason I was able to find my comfort in front of the camera; who I wanna be and who I don’t wanna be on camera. All of the awkward things you go through when you’re starting as an on-camera broadcaster, I went through all of that on Aftermath. So, Aftermath and WWE by association, really hold a very special place for me because it’s what I was covering when I was really given my true first shot to be on camera.
“In terms of what brought me to WWE, I had actually been talking to them in 2016, about a potential spot there and I ended up not really going through with that. I took the hockey job in The States shortly thereafter. Then, I’ll never forget, I was covering The Stanley Cup Final in Montreal, in 2021 and I got a call from Michael Cole. No joke, Michael Cole called me and asked me if I wanted to be a part of WWE and host some of their after-shows. My first question was, ‘Do I have to give up hockey?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Okay, great. Where do I sign up?’ I was in right away.
“It’s an amazing place, an amazing opportunity and it’s obviously worked out pretty well for me in the almost three years since I got that call. I guess they were familiar with me from my days covering it in Canada. When they called, it was like, ‘If I can still do hockey, then why not? Why not dip my toe into the crazy world of WWE and see what happens?’”
For those of you wondering how she balances working in live sports like hockey and handling the scripted nature of The WWE, Redmond has an interesting take on the matter.
“I try as hard as I can to be the same at both,” the dual-sport personality explained. “Part of the reason WWE was interested in me in the first place was because of my sports background. My goal is to do those interviews the same as I would do interviews in The NHL and for The NHL on TNT. That being said, of course, it was an adjustment, because these are larger than life superstars with amazing personalities. You don’t have to try very hard to get something interesting out of a WWE superstar, which is great. I think I do a pretty good job of just being Jackie.
“I was intimidated at first because it was a whole new world, that being said, I really do approach WWE and my job in it, as real life, because, to me, it is real. As much as people wanna talk about what’s happening in WWE, who’s the champion, how they got there, and this, that and the other thing. If you ask any WWE superstar, it’s real for them. These guys and girls are real athletes chasing real dreams to become champions. So I approach it all like it is real because it is. They’re still chasing goals and while the path to achieving those goals might look a little different, it’s really the same. So I treat it as real as I can because it is real to me. It is the reality of the WWE Universe. I treat Cody Rhodes, Jey Uso, Chelsea Green, and all of these superstars like the athletes who they are.”
Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Monday Night RAW or Friday Night Smackdown knows that nobody is off-limits when it comes to potential physical altercations. Redmond hasn’t yet found herself in one of those situations, but she welcomes it with open arms.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about wrestling in an actual match,” Redmond began, “but I would be lying if I said that I haven’t thought about how cool it would be to be involved in some sort of altercation or take a bump. To me, that stuff is bucket list material. It would be so cool to be a part of something like that. That being said, it’s not something that I’m pitching or asking for. I’m not saying, ‘Oh, Hunter, can you put me in a segment?’ But I’ll tell you one thing, if he ever came to me and said, ‘Hey, are you cool with Chelsea Green slapping you?’ It would be an immediate yes for me. I immediately would be like, ‘Put me at the front of the line.’”
“I definitely wanna do it,” she continued. “I am so in, it’s not even funny. Once you get a taste of that world, it’s hard not to want to experience those types of things and those moments. I remember watching Pat McAfee at Wrestlemania. I remember standing on the floor watching him and thinking to myself, ‘Wow, not only has this guy taken his career in football and turned himself into one of the biggest sports personalities in North American sports, but now he’s in Wrestlemania taking a Stone Cold Stunner from Steve Austin and we’re showing him lying on the mat with beer pouring in his mouth.’ Who would ever think that something like that is possible for a broadcaster? I watched that happen and it sounds ridiculous, but I honestly found it so inspiring. Anything is actually possible in this crazy world. Things like that inspire new dreams or new goals. So yeah, if I could have an altercation in WWE, that would be awesome. I would be so game.”
I wonder, should Redmond ever find herself in such a situation, what move(s) would she break out? Would she start spearing people? It’s a crazy thought, but one that she’d have to think about before putting herself in a position to get physical.
“My go-to move would have to be something easy,” Redmond explained. “I don’t think I could do anything like jumping off the top rope or something crazy like that. I don’t know what my go-to move would be. I feel like clotheslines are underrated. I would love to clothesline somebody, maybe do a People’s Elbow like Snoop Dogg at Wrestlemania. There is nothing they could pitch to me in this scenario, where I’m having a beef with someone that I would say ‘no’ to.”
Can you imagine the viral moment that would ensue if Redmond got into a physical altercation on Monday Night RAW? She might even get props from people in The NHL, who certainly know a thing or two about having to fight.
And that brings us to our last little bit of business. Since Redmond is so ingrained in both The NHL and The WWE if she had her pick, who would be two people, one from each sport, who she’d like to have dinner with?
“It would be interesting to have dinner with Wayne Gretzky, who can tell stories for years and who knows everyone, every celebrity, every athlete,” Redmond said. “You name it, Wayne Gretzky knows them. So he could hang with anyone and I think it would be a very interesting dinner, conversation-wise. So we’ll put The GOAT, Wayne Gretzky there and then, from the wrestling side, I would love to see Wayne Gretzky and Stone Cold Steve Austin interact. That could be really interesting. They both have amazing lives, amazing careers, and tons of stories. I can’t speak for Stone Cold, but I feel safe making the assumption that he enjoys a beer or two. And I know Wayne Gretzky likes an adult beverage or two as well. So I feel like they would mesh well on that front.
“Give me Wayne Gretzky and Stone Cold Steve Austin having dinner, drinking beers or Whiskey or whatever, and telling stories. I think those two could have a very interesting evening together and I would love to just see what would happen. What would we talk about? What questions would Stone Cold Steve Austin have for Wayne Gretzky? I don’t even know if Steve Austin even likes hockey. I have no idea. I feel like there are a lot of elements in hockey that would appeal to him. Then, for Wayne, what questions would he have for Stone Cold Steve Austin? Have they ever met before? I don’t know the answer to that question. I would love to know though.
“Maybe they could do a taste test exchange. Wayne can try Stone Cold’s beer and Stone Cold could try Wayne Gretzky’s wine or Whiskey. They could exchange their products and get ratings from each other on those products. This sounds like a segment that I need to pitch to Hunter. I feel like this needs to be something I do on WWE’s digital platform.”
Okay, a thought just occurred to me and maybe it’s because I’ve been hanging out with too many hockey reporters who are huge wrestling fans; but what would happen if, at that hypothetical dinner, Gretzky and Austin didn’t get along?
Would Stone Cold drop Wayne Gretzky with a Stunner? Would Marty McSorley come flying in from out of nowhere to throw hands with Steve Austin as retribution for hitting Gretzky? And, would that then lead to a Wrestlemania Main Event Mixed Tag Team Match with the teams being Wayne Gretzky and Jackie Redmond versus Stone Cold and Chelsea Green? Would McSorley be ringside and attempt to interfere? And lastly, would Redmond clothesline Green in the center of the ring before finishing her off with a People’s Elbow to break the internet?
Hey, Jackie, while you’re pitching that taste-testing segment to Hunter, maybe pitch that last part about the potential match as well. Okay, I’ve definitely been hanging out with those hockey reporters who are big wrestling fans way too much.
Let’s leave it at this, when you all get the chance, go check out Jackie Redmond’s work, because you’ll likely learn a thing or two.
