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Fox News personality Tyrus has announced that he is retiring — calling it quits from his now-former primary profession as a professional wrestler.
And it was all his idea.
Tyrus, whose real name is George Murdoch, told SLAM Wrestling in an “exit” interview that the former National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) champion was ready to hang it up and get out of the ring for good after a 15-year career, which ended in a “Tyrus Must Retire” Bull Rope Match loss to Ethan Carter III—EC3—at the NWA’s 75th-anniversary show in St. Louis on August 27.
“I’m good,” he told SlamWrestling.net from his New York City office two days after the match. “We beat the hell out of each other. Everything is in slow motion.”
At 50, the now former pro wrestler said that the retirement match was his idea after talking to his children who said they wanted “daddy to be home more often” so he could go to their sporting events and take them fishing. “It was all my idea,” he said.
SLAM Wrestling added:
When Tyrus’s first book–Just Tyrus: A Memoir–was released, he said he wanted to wrestle for a year and a half or more. Just over a year later, success that was spawned largely because of the book, as well as his television gig as a commentator on Gutfeld!, the former Funkasaurus sped up that time frame. For many of those 289 days as the NWA’s Heavyweight Champion, Tyrus wore “Sweet Charlotte” on his shoulder during the almost-daily talk show broadcasts. And before that, he displayed the NWA TV Championship on his shoulder.
Tyrus defeated then-champion Trevor Murdoch and Matt Cardona in a Triple Threat Match on November 12, 2022, a match he called “a thrill.” He successfully defended the gold four times, and wrestled in several tag team matches during his reign.
“The NWA is exploding,” he told the outlet. “So, EC3 will be defending all over. I feel he has been overlooked a lot. Me and him, just seemed right.”
The six-foot-eight-inch Tyrus said he has another book coming out soon and a third in the pipeline. He also said that his “duties here at FOX are growing,” and he has been talking to moviemakers about film projects once the writer’s strike is over.
While noting that his “favorite thing is to wrestle,” he also acknowledged that previous big stars — big, as in notable and in physical size — sometimes stay in the business too long “and become a shell of themselves.”
“A lot stay too long. They don’t know anything else and become a shell of themselves,” he said, adding that pro wrestlers are “the greatest entertainers in the world.”
Meanwhile, Fox News saw its share of viewers dip significantly after executives decided to suddenly take its star, Tucker Carlson, off the air in late April, but the network appears to have rebounded nicely in the months since.
In the week ending on Friday, Aug. 25, the Fox News Channel garnered an average of 1.5 viewers during the day, compared to 1.42 million for far-left MSNBC and liberal-leaning CNN, with 1.28 million.
Fox also led in primetime, thanks, in large part, to a pair of hosts — Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld, the latter of which features Tyrus.
In the 8 p.m. EDT slot, Watters averaged around 2.16 million versus 860,000 for Anderson Cooper on CNN and 1.42 million for MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. In the 10 p.m. EDT slot, Gutfeld ran away from CNN’s “Primetime” and MSNBC’s “Last Word” featuring Lawrence O’Donnell with 1.8 million, 607,000, and 1.5 million viewers on average, respectively.
The network revamped its prime-time lineup, handing Carlson’s old slot to Watters while moving Laura Ingraham to an earlier slot along with Gutfeld and keeping Sean Hannity at 9 p.m. EDT where he’s been for decades.
According to the previous cable news TV ratings, the decisions appeared to be paying off: Both Watters and Gutfeld have been dominating their slots over rivals at MSNBC and CNN, and it’s not close as Fox begins to retake the offensive the cable news wars.
