10 Times Jim Cornette Got It Absolutely Right
6. The Abomination Of Jim Herd's WCW
Cornette in his guest column for WhatCulture Wrestling Issue 2 laid the blame for the demise of pro wrestling squarely at the foot of one man's door...and it wasn't Vince Russo!
No, Cornette reserves a special hatred for Jim Herd - the former low-level Pizza Hut executive whose impossibly conceited mishandling of WCW did more damage to the diverse heart of wrestling than any other single individual.
Under Herd's stewardship, WCW would combine its breathless, critically-acclaimed in-ring action and superstar roster with a huge cash injection - and somehow contrive to turn into a sick joke. The suggestion that Ric Flair be repackaged as "Spartacus" is in itself an indictment of the man's disastrous reign.
The promotion would recover commercially and artistically in the mid nineties, but it never again felt like the old WCW - i.e. a genuine alternative to the WWF. Cornette's rage is sometimes hyperbolic - mostly for comic effect - but he was bang on with this insight.
In Eric Bischoff's attempts to resuscitate WCW, he turned it into WWF lite, handing the keys to the plane to the egotistical kamikaze pilot Hulk Hogan in the process. It was Hogan's penchant for self-preservation which ruined the best chance WCW had of emerging from the moribund nWo angle with its restored identity intact. But, at Starrcade 1997, Hogan's politicking curtailed Sting's would-be re-ascendence to the WCW mountaintop.
Cornette would, of course, rally against another man who stripped WCW of its identity...