Jim Cornette has done and seen it all. He has been a manager, promoter, commentator, booker and part-time WrestleMania battle royal participant. It comes as no real surprise that a man with that much experience and what seems like a photographic memory has some of the best stories to tell.
Alex Shane, WrestletalkTV and Stacy Cornette are obviously real life magicians to convince a man who is deathly afraid of flying to travel a great distance to share his stories with the British fans.
The six-date tour of the UK started in Glasgow and will end in Cardiff, stopping at all the usual spots along the way. Tuesday marked the tours arrival into Manchester.
The Comedy Store was dressed with odd pictures of Kevin Nash and Chyna, little did we know that they would quickly become part of the show with Jim berating them almost instantly upon getting to the stage. The venue wasn’t as full as I had expected but was probably handicapped by the huge football match taking place a few miles away.
The show got underway with Cornette giving his opinion on the Montreal Screwjob. He threw his hat into the ring on the subject and absolved himself of any involvement in what happened that night in Montreal. It seems like he got out of the building quicker than Earl Hebner that night.
Jim quickly moved onto TNA and pretty much summed them up with one of the lines of the night, “Bankruptcy, Ruin, divorce, incompetence, the only promotion he knows that where adult diapers because it keeps shitting itself.”
The name that comes up most often throughout the show is Vince Russo. Jim talks about how Russo managed to get into a position to book the two biggest promotions of all times, how TNA used entertainment lawyers to threaten him after his staged threat on Russo’s life and shockingly pays Russo a backhanded compliment.
The British Bulldog is mentioned towards the middle part of the show and it leads to one of the funniest moments of the night. Cornette recalls a promo he cut on Shawn Michaels in which he called him a “fornicator”. It only took a week before Owen Hart and Davey Boy came scuttling into the locker room with a supposed phone call from Stu Hart, I won’t spoil the punch line but I will say that it wasn’t the prank that Cornette had expected.
The show had points at which a claxon would sound and Jim would have to give his thoughts on notable names in the wrestling business. Names included Sable, Eric Bischoff and Batista. This created problems at times because it would cut him off halfway through one of his legendary rants, it was totally worth it to hear stories of how lazy and injury prone Batista was during his time in OVW though.
Some of the best moments of the night came when Cornette was discussing people he loved in the wrestling business. He goes into detail on why Jim Ross is the number one to ever call a wrestling match and why it’s incredibly hard for anyone else to come close.
Jim also lit up like a Christmas tree when someone mentioned Ray Traylor, better known as The Big Boss Man. Cornette told some incredible stories about Boss Man not being able to pull punches in his early career, Dusty Rhodes breaking a wooden chair over his head and proclaimed him one of the best big man to ever grace a wrestling ring.
Most of the stories are ones that most fans have probably heard before. The magic of Jim Cornette is that he can tell the same story multiple times and they will still be as interesting as the first time you heard them.
– By Michael Owen
Did you attend the Jim Cornette UK tour? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!