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Webster

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Tubby23 said:
Manager work fine, he's way over the hill now
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That's an understatement, per the Tropes...
Alternate Character Interpretation: Jim's conflicts with the current generation of indie wrestlers and fans make sense if you look at it as being a plain Culture Clash. Cornette spent his life with wrestling as a respected if "low brow" sport/occupation while modern wrestlers are more likely to view it as an "art". Cornette has seen the rise and fall of the wrestling industry from the territory days into a mere shadow with a handful of promotions actually making money and providing a life for their workers, and he despairs at what he sees now as a niche product for kids. As a result, for him, only promotions and wrestlers that do things in the "traditional" way are doing it in the "correct" way, while those trying something weird and different are foolishly undermining their long-term job prospects (and those of others) at best and doing the wrestling equivalent of a witless comedian doing fart jokes onstage for a cheap laugh because he's not good enough to write actual jokes at worst, while others (including a lot of modern wrestlers) view the latter as simply trying something new and pushing their medium forwards.

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Base-Breaking Character: Jim Cornette is respected by a good portion of wrestling fans for his honesty, his willingness to speak truth to power, and his overall entertaining rants. In his defense, Cornette has helped to discover and develop many wrestlers who would go on to become major players in the Attitude Era and the Ruthless Aggression/PG era. He's also willing to speak out for underutilized wrestlers whom management cast aside in favor of the "sports entertainers." And he's known to be (mostly) gracious to the many wrestlers who have worked with and under him. Of course, it also helps that he's genuinely one of the more charismatic and eloquent speakers in wrestling who will always give the audience the straight scoop.

On the other hand, many other fans feel that he's outdated and that he's nothing more than a bitter old man who just can't accept the fact that wrestling has changed. On this flip side, Cornette's stubbornness has led to him burning bridges with almost every wrestling organization he's worked with. He's also known to hold a bitter grudge for a long time even against people like Shawn Michaels who have, by almost all accounts, stopped being manipulative backstage politicians later in life (as opposed to the 90s, the period when Michaels interacted with Cornette). It also doesn't help that he has, for the record, physically slapped workers in the past like Santino Marella for making on-air mistakes. And, of course, he's gotten himself more and more hatred in recent years for trashing fan favorite wrestlers and organizations like Colt Cabana, Kevin Owens, El Generico, Joey Ryan, Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, Johnny Gargano, CHIKARA, Lucha Underground, and All Elite Wrestling, going so far as to end ongoing friendships with Brian Zane and Dave Meltzer over their defense of AEW and comedy wrestling. All these things combined have contributed to making him one of the most divisive figures in wrestling today.

Jim Cornette as a booker is also pretty divisive. His most notable success as a solo booker was Ohio Valley Wrestling, but Cornette's OVW is something of a Cult Classic, believed to have improved what was already a cult classic promotion, had respectable six figure gates over the course of three day events, gained multiple sponsors and provided much comedy as he managed to make the best of situations often entirely out of his control. OVW's ratings and attendance plummeted to their lowest after he broke loose from it too, leading Cornette to make a brief return to help "save" it and have some ROH guys put over some OVW wrestlers(with the OVW guys also putting over ROH wrestlers off of OVW shows of course). His most contentious joint projects are all in ROH, serving as an adviser to Adam Pearce and Delirious. While Pearce tended to get all of the blame for his run, Cornette got all of the blame for Delirious's until Cornette was visibly removed from an onscreen roll. Though Delirious continued to get attacked for his booking even after Cornette was out of the company entirely, it was never as vitriolic as Cornette got while he was visible. On the other hand, Cornette's booking collaborations in WWF/E proper, WCW and MLW were well liked, while they lasted. Smoky Mountain is something of a vindicated case, as though the territory failed and was often disparaged by many fans, the crowds it drew suggested the booking was working for someone, they just wouldn't come online to talk about it until well after the fact. Late adapters, if you will.
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Tubby23 said:
He's old man yells at clouds level now though
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No argument there, for what its' worth. That said, his two podcasts at the moment are the 1st (Cornette's Drive Thru) and 5th-ranked (the Cornette Experience) wrestling podcasts at the moment so for all the "old man yelling at the clouds" bit he still - to borrow Tony Schiavone's infamous comment of years ago - puts butts in seats (or in this case, ears to podcasts).
 
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Webster said:
No argument there, for what its' worth. That said, his two podcasts at the moment are the 1st (Cornette's Drive Thru) and 5th-ranked (the Cornette Experience) wrestling podcasts at the moment so for all the "old man yelling at the clouds" bit he still - to borrow Tony Schiavone's infamous comment of years ago - puts butts in seats (or in this case, ears to podcasts).
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And Kanye is still a popular musician....
 
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Tubby23 said:
My point remains, whatever superlative belongs to his managerial work can be applied and I will agree (I'm not old enough to have seen it all). He's old man yells at clouds level now though
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Go to Youtube and watch some of his managerial performances as manager of the Midnight Express; back in the day, he was one of the best managers in the business; that and his penchant for knowing pretty much everything about wrestling that one could know and to then use that knowledge to talk across the business of wrestling will always give him a seat at the table, past incidents of his notwithstanding.
 
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