Jim Cornette is admittedly old school.
Jim Cornette was with the WWE from 1993-2005, managing the likes of Vader, Yokozuna, Owen Hart and The British Bulldog. Then in the latter half of his tenure, he went on to become the lead booker of Ohio Valley Wrestling, which at the time became the WWE's lead developmental's territory. The 2000 developmental class consisted of Brock Lesnar, Dave Bautista, John Cena and Randy Orton. All of them became WWE champions and some of the biggest stars in the history of the company.
Orton is a 12-time WWE champion. Lesnar is a four-time WWE champion, went onto become the UFC heavyweight champion and was one of the final cuts to make the Minnesota Vikings in 2004. The two main evented this year's Summerslam, with Lesnar winning the match by TKO after landing vicious elbows and punches and blood gushing from his head, which required ten staples.
For about the last decade, matches with blood have been scarce and to the point where there seems to be a no blood policy. Cornette laid into his former employer on the blood in the match.
“I don’t know what the f— they’re thinking, and I commented on that for my podcast that drops on Thursday,” Cornette said to Sports Illustrated. “The rule in the WWE is that there is no blood. Well, they just violated that rule, they had blood. They can say that it wasn’t self-inflicted blood, but no, this blood was inflicted by this big moose beating the f— out of Orton. If they’d have just said f— it, taken the blade, and done it the easy way, you couldn’t have proved different. This was worse than using a razor blade–a former UFC champion just elbowed a guy in the top of his f—— head and busted his head wide open. What problem do they think they’re getting out of by doing it that way? I don’t understand. Blood adds drama to wrestling, but the reason the blade was invented a hundred years ago is because it’s easier than going through sh– like that."
Cornette expanded on his old school mentality, and advocated the use of 'blading.'
“The hard way was used in the old days when there was doubt about wrestling’s credibility, and guys would do the hard way in a high profile match in an arena in front of a lot of people or on TV to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that wrestling was real. That horse has left the barn. Bret Hart, several times, got busted open during a blade ban but was creative about it and said, ‘No, I didn’t do it,’ and no one – not even Vince McMahon – could tell the difference. So it seems it would have been a lot easier to blade instead of opening up a crater the size of the Red River Gorge on Randy Orton’s head. If Randy had done a good blade job, no one would have known if Brock really opened him up.”
You can listen to Cornette's podcast, The Jim Cornette Experience every Thursday on ITunes or MLW.com.
