10 Meanest Backstage Wrestling Feuds

You might well wonder why former booker, manager and promoter Jim Cornette’s well-publicised enmity with pro wrestling pariah Vince Russo nudges the murder of Bruiser Brody off the top spot, considering that unlike Brody himself, both men remain alive to this day.

Well, this article is about the meanest backstage feuds in wrestling, and there’s no one who expresses unrepentant, seething, ranting hatred quite like Jim Cornette. In point of fact, there are Disney villains who sing songs with less venom, who vent less spleen than Cornette does on a weekly basis on his podcast.

To be perfectly fair to Vince Russo here, Jim Cornette hates a whole lot of people with a fiery, almost evangelical passion - from Russo’s erstwhile writing partner Ed Ferrara, to former WCW boss Jim Herd, to wrestling columnist and former WCW announcer Mark Madden, to WWF/E television boss Kevin Dunn, to independent wrestler Kenny King, to the Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels… and probably thirty or forty more, to varying degrees.

But Russo is the man he hates the most. Here, skip to the fifteen minute mark on the twenty minute tirade below, where Cornette addresses Russo directly, after Russo offered to debate the man on a Skype podcast for charity…

If you’re not in a position to watch the video, then ask yourself whether there might, just possibly, be true hatred behind casual insults like calling him “a sh*tstain on life”, or describing him as “an attention whore… like the kid who pulls his pants down and shakes his wee-wee at the other kids on the playground.”

What’s the source of the animosity? Well. At one point in time, around 1997, the pair of them pretty much formed the writing team of Monday Night RAW with Vince McMahon - and Russo made Cornette want to kill himself. To hear him tell it, Russo would pitch a hundred wild n’ wacky ideas to McMahon and McMahon would pick the two he liked… but Cornette would have to sit there, gobsmacked, as a man with no idea how or why a wrestling show worked tried to make a wrestling show work.

Those days with the two Vinces became living nightmares for the resolutely old school Cornette, as he listened to Russo ‘bro’ his way through outlandish idea after outlandish idea. It became clear to him that Russo might have grown up watching wrestling highlights shows - the ones with all the angles, and the promos, and the two minute clips of actual wrestling thrown in - because those were the ideas he kept pitching, just edited down chunks of wrestling shows.

By the time Russo persuaded McMahon that Cornette and he couldn’t coexist on the writing team, Cornette weighed 280lbs from grimly comfort eating his way through these meetings, and wanted out in the worst possible way. When McMahon removed him from the booking strategy team, it was a mercy killing.

Since then, Cornette’s dislike of Russo has developed into a mania. He hates his voice. He hates his face. He hates his attitude, his lack of respect for the business, his lack of knowledge of the history of the business and his utter disinterest in learning anything about it.

In 2016, Jim Cornette pulls out of attending wrestling events that Vince Russo will be attending because he’s promised his wife he won’t hire any more lawyers. In 2016, Jim Cornette dreams of ways in which he can hurt Vince Russo, both financially and physically. In 2016, Jim Cornette simply wants to set fire to Vince Russo just to watch him burn.

Russo himself continues to be nonplussed at the loathing he inspires - and if he doesn’t understand why your average wrestling fan despises him, he doesn’t have a hope in hell of understanding the deep wellspring of hate that boils over from the broken stove of Jim Cornette’s brain.

If hate was energy, Jim Cornette could power a city on what he feels for Vince Russo. It’s almost beautiful.