If 10-year-old me knew that someday I would meet Jim Cornette and not immediately punch him in the face, he would have been very disappointed. Certainly in my life there was no bigger villain in my childhood than the bespectacled, tennis-racket-wielding wrestling manager. I hated him. I hated every wrestler he managed. And I was not alone.
“I was especially unpopular with grandmothers,” Cornette told me a few weeks ago. “I hear people say, ‘I never heard my grandmother use that kind of language before and you came on TV and, Oh my God, Granny went crazy.’”
Such was the effect that Cornette, now 53, had on wrestling fandom back in the old NWA and early WCW days. I met Cornette, officially, on June 13 when he was a special guest, along with former Tennessee Vols basketball coach Donnie Tyndall, in Jeff Jarrett’s new Global Force Wrestling promotion. Cornette has been semi-retired since 2013, making just a handful of appearances, but with his racket back in hand, it seems he’s found a new home with GFW. GFW, in just its second month of operation, is already about to unveil its first TV taping next week in Las Vegas. The return to an old-school style of professional wrestling, and a move away from Vince McMahon’s “sports entertainment” is what really brought Cornette back full time.
“That’s one reason I don’t like it, that’s sports entertainment instead of wrestling,” Cornette said. “You know, I don’t find sports entertainment very entertaining. I like wrestling. That was another reason why I decided that I was going to pick my spots.”
Cornette grew up inside wrestling as a photographer when he was 14 years-old. After six years of that, traveling all over the southeast and getting to know all the wrestlers and promoters, Cornette was asked to join one as a heel manager by Jerry Jarrett, Jeff Jarrett’s father. Cornette made his TV debut in Memphis, Tenn. in 1982 and the rest is history.
Three years later he would be in the NWA, along with his tag team the Midnight Express, wreaking havoc across TV screens all over America. And God, I hated his guts.
I asked Cornette back in June after his meet-and-greet with fans how many people my age came up to him wanting to hug his neck that wanted to choke it when they were kids.
“All of them,” Cornett said. “It’s a compliment. That means I was good at what I did. I you ask my wife, she’ll tell you that to this day I’m good at pissing people off.”
Cornette and his stable of heels were a draw in the south at the lower wrestling promotions before making their jump to the NWA, then the No. 2 promotion behind only McMahon’s WWE (then the WWF). It was Dusty Rhodes who tapped Cornette to come aboard and not only that, wanted his Midnight Express team to become World Tag Team Champions.
“If it wasn’t for him (Rhodes), I wouldn’t be standing here,” Crocket said. “He put a lot of faith in me. Crocket Promotions was the only competition for the WWF and for him to bring me in at 24 years-old and say, ‘Cornett is going to manage the world tag team champions,’ I mean, jiminy.”
Rhodes death then was still fresh on everyone’s mind and I asked Cornette what the American Dream meant to him and the wrestling world.
“Dusty was one of those guys that you didn’t think was ever going to die until he actually died,” Cornett said. “Everybody was just shocked. There’s never going to be a star like that again. He was totally himself, totally the product of his own mind and his own energy. Wrestling is so controlled these days by the TV networks and the promotions. I don’t see how you can get another Dusty Rhodes. He was one of a kind.”
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And, of course, so is Cornette. Cornette was a cornerstone of the NWA’s brand in those days, offering a grittier, and frankly, more creative product than the WWF. The NWA was so successful in launching talent than when the WWF couldn’t outright steal the wrestlers, they’d still their gimmicks. The NWA brought the Rock-N-Roll Express and the Midnight Express to national prominence, so Vince McMahon brought in knockoffs; the Midnight Rockers.
When McMahon couldn’t steal away the Road Warriors, he came up with store-brand knockoffs Demolition.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism,” Cornette joked. “Anytime something is successful, in movies or television or anything, the other producers try to copy it. But that was pretty blatant. Midnight Rockers stole from both of us. They couldn’t just take from the Rock-N-Roll Express, they had to take our name too.”
In the first couple of GFW shows, Cornette has been a babyface. The old racket-swinging heel is gone because the fans just won’t accept it. The affection for Cornette and the old wrestlers, and the old NWA style of wrestling show, is just too strong and even in the silly world of pretend fighting, no one is going to let Cornette fake being a bad guy anymore. The line to meet Cornette, get a picture with him and an autograph stretched across the Smokies Stadium concourse in Kodak, Tenn. that night in June, outside the gates and into the parking lot. GFW might bring back old-style wrestling, but it’s going to have to be with a new-style Jim Cornette; the good guy manager. The fans just love him too much for it to be any other way.
