Jim Cornette shoots on his ROH run from 2009-2013

[Big Red Machine]

http://theindycorner.podomatic.com/entr ... 8_18-08_00

[Big Red Machine]

Here is a brief summary of what Cornette had to say, with some of my thoughts interspersed (my thoughts are in blue)


CABANA- “Funny don’t equal money.”
Also, it wasn’t worth it financially to either party for ROH to sign him to an exclusive contract because Cabana would have had to give up a lot of other products.
Also, Cornette hates $5 Wrestling and didn’t want someone who makes fun of the business in ROH.

GENERICO- we couldn’t have him not talk, he was resistant to talking, was a pain to deal with.

STEEN- weight was an issue, didn’t look like a wrestler, (who will believe he is the champ when Davey, Eddie, Roddy and guys who look like athlete are around?)

Wrestling isn’t just for guys who look like athletes. Part of wrestling is also being tough. Steen might not look like Chris Masters, but he definitely looks tough and comes across as such on TV.


“Right as he was losing the title, his body started to break down because he had gained even more weight… he’s been often times put in tag team matches where it’s not such a burden on him”


This part definitely isn’t true. From the time Steen returned in 2011 until the time he lost the belt, (a bit less than a year and a half), Steen only wrestled in seven tag matches, and never more than one in a month.
Cornette also says he hasn’t had anything to do with ROH for a year, so I’m not quite sure how he has this inside info on what was happening around the time Steen lost the belt (six months after Corny was fired)

“He’s not in the wrestling business to be in the big-time wrestling business. He’s in the wrestling business to be the champion in front of 500 people in a rec. center.”

He says that both Steen and Generico were a pain to deal with, and he does provide some examples. He says that when Gabe was fired, one of the pieces of advice he gave Adam Pearce was “you will spend most of your time dealing Steen & Generico’s problems and suggestions” and says that when Pearce was fired, Pearce gave Delirious the same advice.

He also says that their feud was way too over the top violent (too violent for a product they were trying to sell for broadcast TV) and that they would go nuts with weapons and that no one on the card would be able to follow them.
Looking back on their feud, though, this really wasn’t true. Most of the matches in which you could argue that they “did too much,” they were the main event. The only exception to this is their chain match at Glory By Honor IX, and that on right before intermission and ended in a super-hot angle

DAVEY RICHARDS- complained about having to lose to Steen.
Great in the ring, “flunked with a capital F outside of the ring”
You don’t crap on the company you work for (Cornette notes that he himself never said a bad word publicly about Vince Russo while they were working together in TNA)

iPPV PROBLEMS-
Other indies don’t have problems because their shows only get a few hundred buys and they don’t have graphics or replays and just have a hard camera (“no effort to make it an actual program”)
I don't think this is true at all. The only other company's iPPVs that I have ever bought were CHIKARA's and they always looked good and had graphics and video packages and multiple cameras and stuff.

He buries GoFightLive, saying that they were barely competent.

I bought every single ROH iPPV on GoFightLive aside from The Big Bang! and the 9th Anniversary Show, (a total of twelve iPPVs), and in that time, I only encountered major problems during the last two GFL iPPVs. I had some very minor problems for about three minutes during Death Before Dishonor VIII, but those are the only times I had ever encountered problems. All-told, that’s three times in out of twelve with problems. Not the best track record, but nowhere close to “incompetent”… especially when you compare it with ROH’s record when they tried to do things without GFL.

He blames the problems with the new website on the office manager, who he says gave the job of designing the website to him friends from college, and that the streaming technology wasn’t tested right.
Corny says that Delirious was the booker during all of late 2011 and 2012 and that Delirious is a great booker, but that things went wrong because no one ever listened to him even though he was supposed to be in charge.
He says that ROH was “rapidly becoming” the sort of promotion that would “work twice a month in a rec. center in front of 500 people.”

That is a ridiculous exaggeration

OTHER STUFF- Corny says that he was the one who came up with the idea to write himself out with the Jay Lethal angle because he realized he was unpopular and having an unpopular babyface authority figure was bad. He claims to have had final say in all booking decisions even though Delirious was the booker, but says that he rarely ever overruled Delirious. He says it worked because at the very next show people were saying “this is the best show ever… and Cornette wasn’t involved” even though the whole show had already been booked for six weeks and no changes were made in the week between when he was “replaced as head of creative” with Delirious and Glory By Honor XI.

I'm calling BS on the whole "Delirious was the booker and I rarely ever changed his ideas" thing. We know Delirious took over as booker before the Champions' Challenge in August 2010. Cornette (according to everyone but him) supposedly took over as of either Best in the World 2011 or the two shows the next month or the first TV tapings. We then got news that Delirious was the new "head of creative" after Killer Instinct. During the time that Cornette is supposedly the booker, the shows feel much different, as if almost every match but the main event is holding back, and the whole product feels like something out of a southern promotion in the 1980's (Cornette's heyday). Then, when Delirious takes over again, the undercard is allowed to shine more and more, and everyone notes that the promotion once against starts to feel like a late 2000's indy, which is what ROH had been. Hmm...



OTHERS-
Hero & Claudio in the WWE- They should be main eventing as a tag team, and he doesn’t get why they fired Hero.


Super Smash Brothers- “You need talent that the average fan will take seriously.” “Two guys wearing pajamas playing pro wrestler.”

Prince Devitt- Corny would have loved to bring him in, but paying to bring him in twice a month from Japan or Ireland was way too expensive.
Matt Hardy- He says that the Matt Hardy hate among the fans was BS, and that it was creating divisions among the fans between newer fans who were thrilled to see guys like Matt and Mike Mondo, and the hardcore fans who were upset that others were getting into their “private club.”

(BRM’s note- Okay… quick poll: Does ANYONE want really want to see Mike Mondo in any capacity at all? If so, please speak up.)


Cary Silkin- The nicest and most genuine promoter in wrestling.

Adam Pearce- was originally apparently fired because he didn’t get along with two top office guys. They were originally going to bring Pearce in to do color commentary when the TV show started, but one of the office guys (Ross Abrams, the head of merchandise… who apparently recently got fired for stealing from ROH) blocked it by threatening to file a human resources complaint (apparently Pearce threatened to knock him out at one point). They then tried to bring Pearce in again when Nigel became booker and the guy did the same thing.

JAPANESE TALENT- bringing Japanese talent in so often is what almost killed ROH in the first place. They did it too often so not only was it expensive, but it ceased to be a special attraction. They looked into a supershow with New Japan, but SBG wasn’t willing to pony up the money. They managed to bring in Anderson because he lives in Cincinnati. They were able to bring KUSHIDA to Toronto because Canada because it was much, much cheaper.

SINCLAIR BROADCASTING GROUP- Corny says when he wrote his original pitch for SBG to buy the company, SBG agreed to everything, but then only did about 10% of what they said they would do.

JAY LETHAL & EDDIE EDWARDS- awesome wrestlers, great guys out of the ring, very responsible and professional.

[cero2k]

all in all, i don't think that Cornette is exaggerating that much nor lying about anything, it really does sound like ROH, at the same time, it does really show he still has this mentality that wrestling sells best with dudes in tights mat wrestling. He should really consider talking to Gabe.

[Big Red Machine]

all in all, i don't think that Cornette is exaggerating that much nor lying about anything, it really does sound like ROH, at the same time, it does really show he still has this mentality that wrestling sells best with dudes in tights mat wrestling. He should really consider talking to Gabe.

It does sell best with dudes in tights mat wrestling (or brawling, or high-flying, or whatever). You just have to create compelling issues between them. Look at Dragon vs. Cena or Punk vs. Heyman's guys. WWE created a situation in which fans really wanted to see a certain outcome.

[cero2k]

[youtube][/youtube]

[Big Red Machine]

Cornette goes even more into depth on things.

[Big Red Machine]

As before, here is a summary of what Jim says, with my thoughts interspersed in the blue.

Cornette claims there was a deal to not knock each other, but ROH broke it when they released Hell Rising. Apparently Ross Abrams (the merch guy who got fired for embezzling last year) and Shane Hagadorn came up with the idea, filmed he interview with Steen, edited, ordered production of, and released Hell Rising without Joe Koff or Delirious having any knowledge of it whatsoever. And that once they found out about it, Joe Koff pulled the DVD from the store.
Jim says that his heat with Hagadorn stems from the fact that Cornette got Hagadorn working for Sinclair as the guy in charge of the ROH ring crew but just a few months into the job Hagadorn lost thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Cornette apparently told Hagadorn “I ought to punch you in the face” or something similar, so when SBG wanted to fire Hagadorn over this, Hagadorn threatened to go to human resources and sue, so they only demoted him instead.
Ross Abrams apparently hates Cornette because Cornette called him a pussy or something for running to human resources when Cornette and Delirious wanted to bring Adam Pearce in to do color commentary for the TV show because when Pearce was booker back in 2009 or 2010, he had threatened to punch Abrams over something.
He says that they fed Steen questions that they knew Steen would answer in ways that would bash Cornette while talking himself up. He also gets angry that Steen was talking about how the matches that accompanied the DVD were all fake and how he was just “having fun with all of his friends” on an official ROH DVD release.
This would be the same Jim Cornette who participated in (and was even the interviewer for) a good chunk of the ROH Straight Shootin’ series. Those were, as the name suggests, shoot interviews, and were all also official ROH releases.

Cornette says that the reason that Hagadorn and Abrams both got fired was that, after the DVD was pulled from the ROH website store, they stole a bunch of copies from the office and started selling them on E-Bay.
Cornette says that because everything Steen says sounds like things that people on the internet say, and that Steen is a mark for himself, therefore he thinks that Steen goes on the internet under fake names to talk himself up. He also starts referring to Steen as an “outlaw wrestler” instead of an “independent wrestler” because that is what they used to be called back in his day.

What Jim doesn’t say is that back in his day, there was a large collaboration of promoters called the NWA engaging in borderline unfair business practices by controlling and dividing up the market (and, for the record, Verne Gagne and Vince Sr. were equally guilty of this, because they played into the system), and that any non-NWA promotion (or Vince and Verne, who were too big to beat and weren’t encroaching anyone else’s turf anyway) would be considered an outlaw promotion. If we were to still use this term, both Jim’s beloved Smokey Mountain Wrestling, Ohio Valley Wrestling, and ROH (which Jim worked for) would be considered outlaw promotions… but he never brings the term up in that context. Only to try to bash Steen.

Anyway, because of all of this, he decided to change the nature of his latest Kayfabe Commentaries interview from talking about TNA to talking about ROH. He says that Joe Koff sent him an e-mail saying essentially “hey, I’m going to be in Kentucky for the holidays, do you want to get breakfast together or something?” and Cornette said that he didn’t because he didn’t want to start the year off with a “could’ve, would’ve, should’ve” discussion. Cornette says that either because of this or because Koff saw the Kayfabe Commentaries trailer, he ordered Hell Rising re-released.

He says that Generico is the best seller since Ricky Morton, but that his gimmick wasn’t something that mainstream fans would take seriously. Cornette says that Steen wasn’t dedicated enough to get in the gym, but still wanted to be a top guy. He also says that Steen looked like a bum and needed to cut his hair and trim his beard. He seems to not understand that, at this point in the angle, Steen was kind of going insane, and this was how he was showing it.

He says more of the same stuff about Steen’s return to the company that he said in the interview I recapped above. He says that Davey complained about having to lose to Steen because “Kevin’s not really a real athlete. (Davey’s words)” Cornette told them that they have to work together and that they needed to translate their shoot feelings into their work and cut some edgy promos on each other. He is pissed that after it was all over, they did a Highspots shoot where they made up and hugged on camera (what Cornette doesn’t mention was that this shoot came out almost A YEAR after their feud ended, so that wouldn’t have hurt business in an way at all… unless Jim thinks that shoot interviews hurt the business here in 2013)

“He’s a great promo. He’s a very good worker, athletically, despite being morbidly obese. He works his ass off. I find his psychology to be somewhat lacking sometimes, but he is talented. He’s also a pain in the ass to book. He’s a pain in the ass to produce because he can’t get out of his indy wrestler mindset. He refuses- absolutely refuses- to get in shape or improve his appearance, and personally, he is an ungrateful asshole. And that’s what I think about Kevin Steen.”

The original plan when Sinclair bought the company was, by Janaury 2012, to buy a building in Baltimore where they could tape TV, have house their merch, have their wrestling school, store their ring & TV equipment, etc. etc. To hold them over in the meantime, they made a deal with OVW to do the second and third tapings at the Davis Arena in Louisville (after doing the first in Chicago to reward it for having a big ROH fanbase). He says that the reason he used so much local OVW talent on those shows is because they were the ones who the fans were paying to see. He even goes so far as to claim that at The Battle of Richmond Team A-1 vs. Totally Awesome sold a majority of the tickets, and that the rest of the roster combined (the Briscoes, Davey, Eddie, Steen, WGTT, Cole, Roddy, Lethal, and Elgin just a scant month and a half after his five star match with Davey) sold less tickets. Unless Team A-1 and Totally Awesome have a combined total of 220 (that’s the number Cornette gives) family members, I am calling MAJOR bullsh*t on this one.
He says that ROH wanted to run a huge show in their Cincinnati debut because they were on TV there (and in Dayton and Columbus, which are both under two hours away) but that the office only limited them to six plane tickets, which is why he had to use lots of OVW talent on that show. The office also apparently told them that they couldn’t rent a truck for the ring because two trucks (one for the ring and one for the guardrails, camera’s etc.) would cost too much money, so they borrowed and OVW ring and got some OVW guys to both set it up and wrestle on that show.

This part makes a lot of sense. I can believe that the SBG-run office would do something stupid and crazy like that, and I remember thinking at the time how odd it was that almost none of ROH’s big names were on this show.

What Cornette says that doesn’t make sense is that fans on the internet were complaining that he was having OVW guys job to ROH guys because the internet fans didn’t want the OVW guys on the show at all. Looking at the card, though, there weren’t any ROH vs. OVW matches (unless you count Mondo as being on the ROH roster. I think he was just a Midwest shows guy at this point).
He says that the same thing happened with ROH’s first show back in Milwaukee, and that the fans kept complaining about the OVW guys. What Jim seems to miss is that on the Milwaukee show, the OVW guys were confined to one Six Man Mayhem match (with Tony Kozina thrown in there, too) on the undercard. With the Cincinnati show, it felt like the whole card was built around the “Rise and Prove” Tournament , which was a wimpy four team tournament in which the prize was just a Proving Ground match at one of the Wrestlemania weekend shows. In Milwaukee, we got a real ROH show. In Cincinnati, they gave us a lame tournament with four teams no one had ever heard of before competing for a lame prize that no one cared about, with some ROH guys thrown to fill out the card.

He says that he used the OVW guys instead of other guys that people wanted to see brought in because the OVW guys “had tights” and “looked like athletes” and could work and “didn’t have egos,” whereas the guys that the fans said they wanted to see brought in couldn’t do headlocks or weren’t tan enough or didn’t have tights that looked nice enough for Jim’s liking. Of course, it doesn’t help Jim’s argument that the OVW guys he puts over as being good talents like Mike Mondo and Chris Silvio came nowhere close to wowing anyone with their in-ring abilities or mic skills.