Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
Throughout the history of pro wrestling bookers and promoters have always tried to come up with new, creative and innovative ideas to generate interest in their product. Some ideas have not only succeeded…but flourished. Others were DOA from the get go. Then there are those ideas which initially were innovative…but for various reasons….faded away. Those are the focus of this latest series of posts titled ‘Great Ideas That Didn’t Last’.
In 1997, the WWF was right in the middle of the Monday Night Wars against their main rival WCW. With TV ratings popping and attendance figures growing, Vince McMahon was looking for ideas to continue to get fans to tune in each week. One of those ideas, came from the mouth of the very outspoken Jim Cornette. You see, at the time, Cornette was working behind the scenes in the company. Despite all the increase in ratings, attendance and interest in pro wrestling during this period, Cornette still had a very “old school’ wrestling philosophy that didn’t quite mesh with the way business was being done at that point.
At the time, the WWF had an online show called ‘Byte This’ on their website WWF.com. It was a show that basically did interviews and talked about the wrestling business unscripted. Since the internet was still in its infancy in 1997, Byte This wasn’t exactly the company’s top viewed show. The host of the program was Kevin Kelly and he had the idea to ask Cornette to be a call in guest on that show. Kelly told Cornette that he could speak about anything and everything he wanted to get off his chest. Mainly because, not many people were listening, especially Vince McMahon and all the corporate heads of the company. Cornette agreed to call in and with so much pent up anger and frustration that he had bottled up about the current state of the business…he ranted, raved and cussed his way through the entire segment. A powder keg went off!
The very next day, Vince McMahon called Cornette up and said that heard Cornette’s spew and the Byte This show never got so much attention before. McMahon came up with the idea to allow Cornette TV time on his flagship show Raw and could rant and give his personal opinions on any subject he wanted to talk about. The only caveat, was Cornette would first have to run his rant through the company’s lawyer Jerry McDevitt to avoid any legal hassles. Cornette agreed and debuted his first rant on Raw is War on October 6, 1997. In it, he went off on Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Sean Waltman, Eric Bischoff and the entire nWo angle. The rant proved to be a hit with fans in the arena and watching at home. It led to three more rants where he complained about NY Post columnist Phil Mushnick, Roddy Piper, Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart and the term Sports Entertainment. On Hulk Hogan Jim said….“Hulk Hogan is a household name, but so is garbage. And that stinks when it gets old too.”
The rants were only three minutes in length and had to be read from a teleprompter, which Cornette was not used to…but at the very least, they were written by him and were his own words. His final rant came at the end of 1997, where he complained about the state of wrestling as a whole. He complained about both WCW and WWF. The best line was when he said…“Wrestling fans watching a wrestling program want to see wrestlers wrestle.”
According to Cornette, his opinions were getting standing ovations from fans watching on the Titantron in the arenas. It apparently angered WWF head writer Vince Russo, who believed the rants would be booed and make Cornette a bitter old heel that was out of touch with today’s wrestling. He was receiving quite the opposite reaction. With many things that happened within the WWF at that time, corporate started interjecting themselves in what topics Cornette should cover and script ideas were starting to be pitched to him. Cornette said that the entire purpose and meaning of those rants were being lost and decided he no longer wanted to do them. When McMahon would approach Cornette and ask him if he had any ideas for a new rant segment, Cornette would simply say…“Nah, I’ve got nothing really good to talk about today.” Eventually, Vince McMahon stopped asking and the segment simply faded away.
That of course did not stop the WWF from making an angle out of his venomous rants. Jim Cornette was written back on television where he spearheaded an nWo style invasion of his own. Instead of it being the NWO, it was the NWA as in the National Wrestling Alliance invading the WWF. Cornette agreed to it largely because his good friend Dennis Coralluzzo was involved in the angle. That storyline didn’t go very far and eventually fizzled out. Getting back to those classic Jim Cornette rants, they were so few of them on TV, but were definitely worth their value in entertainment. Certainly a template for what Cornette does nowadays with his successful podcast. After all, he’s Jim Cornette and that is his opinion.