Southern Comfort: Interview with Jim Cornette (Issue 51)

FSM: Jim, it was great to see that you didn't have to wait long to get back in the business following on from TNA - tell us about your current role with Ring Of Honor...
Jim Cornette: When I worked with Ring Of Honor between 2004-2006, I really enjoyed it because it's great people running the company and I liked the guys too. The only reason I didn't stay with them was because travelling from Louisville to Florida [for TNA] twice a month by car - since everybody knows I don't fly anymore - was as much wrestling as I could handle. But when [RoH owner] Cary Silkin called me after I left TNA and asked "What can we do?", I said "What do you want to do?". I had no interested in doing one-off independent shows just to get a pay-off, especially after The Wrestler, as it's almost like people think 'Oh look, he needs the money too.' But Cary said they had the TV shows that had started on HDNet, so we came up with the idea of me as Executive Producer of Television and I debuted in New York a week later.
In Hollywood, the Executive Producer can be anyone from the guy who wrote the cheque to the guy who has his hands in everything. I want to be somewhere in the middle. Having written thousands of hours of wrestling television, I think I can help with things like the format but I also want to be able to go to the house shows and help the guys, because a lot of them have tremendous talent.

Of course, RoH has a very hard-hitting style which people don't necessarily associate with Southern wrestling. Do you see a lot of similarities in the two styles?
Oh my god, there are incredible similarities! The Southern style of wrestling was more wild and woolly, but in some ways it was more credible than any other style of wrestling, just as RoH is. If there was a crazy-looking brawl of a match, there was always a reason for it and people believed in that reason, as well as the personalities involved. Southern wrestling was about believing in the personalities of the people in the ring and putting them in hard-hitting matches that were also believable; it wasn't guys going through eight-minute choreographed routines.

Watching today's WWE and TNA product though, it seems that Southern wrestling's great pacing and the timing of the babyface comeback has been forgotten. What else has been forgotten?
If you go back and watch footage from 30 or 40 years ago, you can see the guys do something that brings the people to their feet but today if you do the exact same thing, it means almost nothing because they've seen so much. Vince Russo has been the prime example of this type of booking, but some people have gone so out of their way to tell the fans that this is phony, they now won't even believe the stuff that's real.
I'll give you a British reference: John Steed of The Avengers, when he took the sword out of his umbrella, really didn't run through all of those enemy agents, but at the same time they didn't tell you that it was a fake sword. But that's what we've done in wrestling: a bunch of people who didn't respect our business, weren't fans and didn't know what the people wanted to see, took over. So now, we've conditioned the people so that even if somebody really gets hurt, people don't believe it. Even if somebody dies, there are people wondering if it's just the latest angle... [Imitates fan] "Oh, is this an angle?" No, the guy's f**king dead! Dutch Mantell said it best when he said, "I liked it better when the marks were out front." We've gone from a situation where we didn't really hurt each other but the people believed that we did, to a situation where we do hurt each other and they don't believe that we are. So who are the marks?

You've been very vocal about comedy writers and sketches in wrestling, but comedy has been a useful tool in wrestling for decades. Where does comedy fit in wrestling?
First off, there's a difference between funny and silly. And secondly, the good comedy in wrestling wasn't contrived, thinking that we're going to go out there and be funny, but rather because of the personalities involved. You don't force funny - funny just happens.
You know, I was the funniest guy in wrestling when hardly anybody in wrestling was funny. For one thing, I was different, and the other thing was that I was good at making people think that I was just this obnoxious, smart-alec asshole. You like hearing someone tell fat jokes about someone you don't know, but you don't like when people tell those jokes about your fat wife. So if they like the babyfaces and I'm saying these horrible things about them, it was to get heat rather to be funny. But some people were in on what I was doing, and they got the humour as an added bonus. Sometimes with the Midnight Express, it was stuff that we would just do on the spur of the moment and the people would get a laugh out of it at our expense. But then we would turn around and beat the piss out of the babyfaces, whom they loved. As Dennis Condrey used to say, we would get two different types of heat: we'd make them laugh, then we'd make them mad because we stopped them laughing, then we'd make them mad again by beating up the babyfaces they loved.

Do you think that bad comedy, amongst other things, has pushed wrestling fans into MMA's arms then?
I think a lot of people that are watching MMA now are people that never would've watched wrestling anyway, but I think a lot more people who used to watch wrestling see what they liked about wrestling in MMA. The fact that it's real is maybe fifth on the list of reasons why people like MMA. MMA isn't hokey and it's not silly; it's clearly defined personalities, believable situations, having fights that very often have disputed endings, Look at The Ultimate Fighter finale... what more could [Jon] Jones have done to [Matt] Hamill than shoot him and it never got stopped, but after the last blow that was accidental, he got disqualified. That's a wrestling finish!
I remember the double-knockout finish [Rob Emerson versus Gray Maynard at The Ultimate Fighter 5 finale], which was a complete pro wrestling finish because, as we've seen, it can legitimately happen. The problem is, all controversial pro wrestling finishes came from shit that can actually happen - once people saw it for the first time and liked it though, it was stolen and used so often that people said, 'This shit can't happen every week.' You only have to look at Brock Lesnar beating Frank Mir at UFC 100, the show that kicked WrestleMania's ass on pay-per-view. With the way the story played out in the fight and the promo afterwards... well, if that wasn't pro wrestling, I don't know what is. The thing is, if Vince Russo had've scripted that, the fight probably would've gone 20 minutes to make sure people got their money's worth, then Brock would have had to oversell something and someone would've ran in and hit Frank Mir with a chair behind the referee's back...

Several years ago, Bobby Heenan was quite categorical in stating that wrestling was 'finished' because people now know all the inside tricks. So can pro wrestling really thrive, especially with MMA taking away some of that fan base?
Well, I agree with Bobby in that respect. But if you think about David Copperfield or David Blaine, I know they aren't really making the Statue of Liberty disappear; I know they really didn't make the elephant fly. But at the same point, I don't know how the f**k they made it look like they did, so I'll continue to watch to try and figure it out. Plus, it's a hell of a show to see and it's a show that you can lose yourself in.
So Bobby was right in the sense that once people knew some of the secrets, pro wrestling as it existed was pretty much done. However, I believe that people always want to see two guys or four guys fight. There'll always be a way to sell to tickets to see some type of combat, whether it's choreographed, rehearsed, almost legitimate or totally real. Look at Kimbo Slice - the last guy he beat was probably on one of those internet videos. He can't fight! But he got over because he beat up people who thought they were tough on a local level, he looks good and he's got a name, so he still draws ratings. So no matter if it's real, fake or indifferent, if you find colourful, charismatic individuals, you match them up in some type of contest and you hype it the right way, people are always going to want to see it. What wrestling needs to admit is that it's gone too far, and that it needs to present a new style. It just remains to be seen if that new style is Ring Of Honor - as I believe it is - or whether it's something that nobody's done yet. One thing's for sure, it can't keep going like it has; wrestling's become a parody of itself.

But the consistent theme here is having colourful characters and interesting personalities that people are attracted to, even if they aren't among the best natural performers. It may seem an odd comparison, but that's exactly what's making reality TV shows so popular in today's society...
I'm glad you brought that up. The most talented person doesn't always win; if you could prove that [American Idol winner] Kris Allen was better than Adam Lambert, I'd kiss your ass on Broadway. But the thing is, you tell people stories, you get them interested in the personalities - if you want people to like someone, you tell them their likeable story or you get them sympathy to get the people behind them. Then you create a bad guy for them, a heel, a dragon for them to slay or a mountain for them to climb, and people will watch to see if they can succeed. That's the basis of promoting anything. But Simon Cowell always ends up as the biggest heel! And I love him! He's my favourite personality on the whole thing. He knows how the game's played better than anyone, we suppose... He's brilliant. But you don't see a wink or a nod on these shows or people being put in preposterous scenarios that no-one can believe, because then people can't make the emotional investment to see them slay the dragon. And that's what TNA does when it has 1.2 million people watching their television show every week, but only maybe 20,000 people buying the pay-per-views or just 500 people going to a live event. My god, in some instances Ring Of Honor is out-drawing TNA at the house shows in the US, even with TNA's national television! If I was Dixie Carter, I would be saying, "What the f**k?!" Hell, my Six Flags 'Kentucky Kingdom' outdoor shows - with wrestling school students who'd never been on television past a 100-mile radius of Louisville - attracted bigger crowds than TNA Wrestling is drawing to its live events!

It isn't as if we don't have excellent athletes in wrestling; you'd think that as we have more and more history to look back on, wrestlers would get better and better. We aren't seeing that though, so it seems to be the training of wrestlers today that's holding things up. Are good trainers having to sacrifice their principles to get wrestlers into WWE?
Oh, absolutely - I went through that and that's why I'm no longer involved with WWE. I wanted to train wrestlers to be good wrestlers, to be able to go out and have good matches of any length with anybody of any style, both safely and entertainingly... that process takes years. Remember, when guys went through the territories, for a couple of years they'd be involved in the preliminary matches to get beat like rugs, and then maybe a smaller territory might bring them in and put them in the middle for a while - it was five or ten years before some guys got a shot at the main event. In WWE, Jim Ross knew how to recruit athletes who were coachable, dedicate, and who had a passion for wrestling. He'd leave them alone and let them develop, because you can't teach everything in the gym - you've got have experience in front of people. That's what we did in OVW; we not only had classes in the gym, but we had live events in front of anywhere between 50 and 100 people, depending on the venue. But over a period of time you pick up that experience and you learn, you work with people that are more advanced than you are and they teach you things on the job. When John Laurinitis took over though, the first thing he did was stop recruiting American football players or independent wrestlers, and he started looking to bodybuilding competitions and lingerie catalogues. I'm not kidding when I say that either - we had a girl one time that ran the ropes three times and then passed out. Then they'll leave the talent alone for five to ten months instead of five to ten years, no matter what their age, even if they're just teenagers. [Imitates Laurinitis or similar figure] "What's the matter with so-and-so? He's not coming along?" [Imitates self] "He's only been here six months!" They want to train guys to work gimmicks; I wanted guys to learn to wrestle, and then use something about themselves about how to present them. They come up with gimmicks and find someone to fit the suit... if they don't work, they kick them aside and find someone else, only to repeat the same mistake.

Is Nick Dinsmore [WWE's Eugene] the best example of someone who showed great talent under you, but was then destroyed by WWE?
He's a good example. Jonny Jeter of the Spirit Squad was also a great kid who had tremendous potential - he was like a young Ricky Morton selling his ass off, and the girls and the young people really got behind him. Doug and Danny Basham were a great tag team who drew money for me in a wrestling school, main-eventing shows that were drawing a thousand people. When they brought them up to WWE though, they put them with Linda Miles - the worst wrestling school student I've ever seen - who hadn't a clue what she was doing, but was telling them what to do and beating them with a whip, making them the comedy flunky guys.
All of these people are pretty much out of the wrestling business now. I had guys who literally drove across the country just to learn to wrestle. Jeter was one of them, 19 years old when he put everything in the trunk of his car and drove to Louisville from San Diego, California - that's 2,500 miles. He waited tables at a restaurant to pay for his wrestling tuition, and after a 18 months was so good that he got a WWE developmental contract, was so good that he got a chance to go up there. The way they used him, it was like the St Valentine's Day Massacre of booking, putting five guys together in a group and shooting them against the wall at the same time. Now, he's quit the business, the Bashams are out of the business and the only way Nick Dinsmore can get booked is on these foreign tours where he does some portion of the Eugene gimmick. We used to have shows at the high school where Nick Dinsmore graduated in Southern Indiana - we'd have shows once a year and he would draw five, six, seven, maybe 800 people. When he went on WWE TV and became Eugene, he came back to the same place for us and drew 200 people. Why would anyone from that high school be proud that someone who was being presented as a retard on television graduated from their school? So we gave them wrestling school talent that drew money, they became WWE superstars, and came back and drew less what they did before they went there!

What about producers or agents in wrestling?
There are many talented people acting as producers, but so often their job is just to follow the script.

How are agents affecting wrestling, or how could they if used correctly?
It can be good and bad. Agents in the WWE, for example, with the likes of Fit Finlay, Ricky Steamboat and Arn Anderson... I remember joking that there was more talent behind the curtain than in the ring. These people know how to do these things, but at the same time there are writers who've graduated with a degree in creative writing, who've probably never seen a wrestling match before they answered an ad in Variety for a position with WWE. Those people are telling Arn Anderson and Ricky Steamboat what those matches should be like, and who should be wrestling each other? But if you say something, you're knocking the bosses' daughter, because she's in charge of the writers.
I was the head agent in TNA but other guys like D-Lo Brown, Scott D'Amore or BG James, they know this stuff is flawed. Still, it's hard for them to be able to go up to the wrestlers and apologise to them before saying that Vince Russo wants them to wear a dress, drop from the ceiling or whatever other preposterous situation it happens to be.
So the agents are handcuffed. Some of them might not be able to write good television, but many of them can - they just aren't given the opportunity because they aren't college-educated writers with television experience. What was it Ed Ferrara wrote... Duckman? Well, if I want a match between two ducks, I'll call Ed Ferrara. If I want a match between two human beings, I'll call Bill Watts.

So, what do you think it is going to take to turn around people's perception of wrestling?
When people think of wrestling now, they think of low-class sports entertainment and not the great athletes involved in the good stories... It's going to take more than just a breakout star or a lot of money. If you've got a breakout star that nobody's seeing, they aren't going to break out. That's being proven to me right now, because if people were seeing the matches with Tyler Black, the Briscoes and the American Wolves, I guarantee you we'd be selling more pay-per-views than TNA is. But the television on HDNet isn't as strong yet as it is on Spike TV or USA Network.
You can have all the talent in the world, as TNA does with Kurt Angle, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Chris Daniels, Beer Money and so on, with television that reaches 90 per cent of households these days. But if you aren't giving people a reason to buy tickets or buy pay-per-views, it's not going to work either. With WWE, back in Nineties there was Steve Austin and The Rock, and in the Eighties there was Hulk Hogan; now though, it's more about the brand. It's probably something that Vince has done by design, but the matches on the card have been subverted by more of a 'Come see the WWE' mentality. John Cena sells a lot of merchandise and with the exception of he and Randy Orton, all the WWE main-eventers like Shawn Michaels, Triple H and The Undertaker are north of 40, have had injuries and are closer to the end of their careers than the beginning. It takes television exposure so that people can see the product and know that they like it, it takes a product that they like, great talent in the product and it takes good promotion. It takes a little bit of everything coming together and when you have that, then you're in the ball game.