Wrestling manager Jim Cornette and I did a remarkable job of missing each other. It seemed his career swirled and slithered around my interest in wrestling, but we never stopped at the same place. While I was watching Georgia Championship Wrestling and early World Championship Wrestling in the early 1980’s, he was working in Mid-South Wrestling. My interests had mostly moved on by the time he arrived in the WCW. Then in the late 90’s whem my interest re-blossomed during the WCW/nWo era, he was working the WWF. It wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t my fault. It’s just the way it was.
But Jim Cornette does represent a certain throwback to the early 80’s, as even though I wasn’t watching him or following his career, he was showing up time and time again in the terrific wrestling magazines: Pro Wrestling Illustrated, The Wrestler, and Inside Wrestling. At the time, those magazines represented the ‘sport’ every bit as much as actually watching the ‘sport’. It was just a cold fact of life that there were some facets of the wrestling world that I didn’t get to see, because there was no internet, and I was limited to what we could get on TV. Yes, it’s turning into one of those ‘when I was a boy…’ stories.
But all that time Jim Cornette was managing some big names with whom I was quite familiar, fellows like Dick Murdoch, Barry Windham, Jeff Jarrett, Owen Hart, the British Bulldog, The Rock ‘n Roll Express, and The Midnight Express (seen at the top of the posting)… even if my familiarity with them came from those very same magazines.
Although Jim Cornette was certainly among the most hated of wrestling managers, carrying a tennis racket with him to the ring because he realized how obnoxious it was, just the opposite can be said for the real Jim Cornette, who was such a wrestling fan that at the age of 14, he erected an antenna on his roof so he could get more local wrestling on TV.
When I met him at the Scarefest in Lexington, Kentucky, on September 15, 2013, I found that not only was he one of the friendliest guys around, but his prices were just as much of a throwback as he was. Would you believe $5 for a signed picture and a photo op?
At those prices, I think I’d stick up for him if someone got hold of that racket and came after him… which is precisely what happened when my Dad and I finally got the chance to see him in real life action at the WrestleCade event in November of 2015.
This concludes the celebrities of the Lexington Scarefest 2013. Return to the original posting here…
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