Jim Cornette recently spoke with Wrestlezone’s Kevin Kellam ahead of his upcoming appearance at C2E2 in Chicago. The legendary wrestling manager talked about inducting the Rock ‘N Roll Express into the WWE Hall Of Fame, his own chances at an induction, today’s wrestling business and more. You can read a few highlights below:
Cornette On His Longevity In The Wrestling Business:
“I’ve never had any other manner of employment besides professional wrestling, since I had a lemonade stand out in the front yard when I was 9. That’s why I always giggle at the people that are like, ‘Cornette’s the sh*ts. He doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ When you think about it, over the past 40 years, I am probably the only person in wrestling that has been steadily employed in a variety of functions and only basically took one year off one time because I wanted to.
Wrestling has always been fascinating to me, professional wrestling, and the world around it, the way that it’s sold and marketed, and performed, and the idea of being a fan of it, as well as being on the inside. It’s something I’ve studied and I’m not an expert on many things, but I’m an expert on wrestling. Not what some people call wrestling today, but I’m an expert on professional wrestling.”
On Wrestling Today, Two Camps Of Talent:
“You’ve got a couple of different camps, as far as the young talent. There are guys that take their profession seriously and want to succeed, and want to work hard to get ahead, and want it to be well thought of, and there’s the people who just think it’s something to be silly, and fun, and made fun of, and sh*t on, and etc.
Since they all call themselves professional wrestlers, we should have a distinguishing term. Instead of being a professional wrestler, the people who are really serious about their business should now say, ‘I wrestle professionally,’ because there’s a difference. Any jackleg can call himself a professional wrestler, but only guys with talent and the right frame of mind can say they wrestle professionally.
At this point, they’re getting more publicity from me than they deserve when I mention their names. People tweet me these things. I have a fan base that is fortunately larger than the modern wrestling fan base because I have a fan base of people that liked wrestling 20, 30, 40 years ago. That was a much larger number of people, I think we can all agree, because those are the facts, than actually follow and watch, and are devoted to wrestling now. All those people send me these links, and these tweets, and these clips because they’re as offended as I am. It’s kind of like with Trump. People are as offended as I am that this pig anus lipped, orange faced cretin is in the White House, but they can’t articulate it as well as I do, so they ask me to tag in and cut the promo on Donald Trump and his criminal administration, and his lying half-logical deception, and his arrogance, and his braggadocious egotistical blah, blah, blah. The same thing as they want me to talk about these idiots that throw people around with their genitalia, and saw each other with fake chainsaws, or take bumps with fake hand grenades, or wrestle the invisible man, or etc. It’s gotten to be a lot of these outlaw mudshow guys are getting over at my expense because when I talk about them – I have a large audience, we did a million downloads for my podcast in January. I got almost 150,000 people following me on Twitter, so they try to latch on, but my anger management issues prevent me from restraining myself and I have to tell people these idiots ought to be boiled in oil and their fat sold for soap. I have to express myself because they disgust me. Their existence on this planet is repulsive to me and I fart in their general direction.”
